Before PCs and laptops, before the Internet and smartphones, before streaming apps and text messaging, writers would sit in coffee shops and cafes and do what they usually do: eat and drink, gossip, discuss burning issues of the day, and try to write. More than a place where one could get a plate of eggs and a bottomless cup of coffee, the coffee shop or cafe was a window on humanity, in all its wondrous variety. Joyce in Dublin, Sartre and de Beauvoir in Paris, Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg in New York City, Kerouac on the road -- for all of them (and many others) the coffee shop or cafe was a welcoming refuge where he or she could shoot the shit and aim for immortality.

     These days, when I grab a booth in a coffee shop or diner, writers are conspicuously absent. Around me, people still kibbitz and engage in lively conversation. But just as many are sitting alone hunched over a phone or laptop. Working? Sure, some. Amusing themselves to pass the time? No doubt: there are so many minutes in a day that need to be gotten through. Rarely, however, do I see someone with a book or magazine, let alone a pen poised over a notebook. It can be discomfiting, even for writers not shy about drawing attention to themselves. But consider: What is writing if not an activity designed to distract? Portugese writer Fernando Pessoa, an eccentric misanthrope with a penchant for cafes, captures the ambivalence that all writers who make a habit of writing in public experience from time to time: “[N]ow seated...I leisurely and distractedly record. I don’t know where I was going with my thoughts, nor where I would wish to go….I write these carelessly written lines not to say this and not to say anything, but to give my distraction something to do.” And so writers write, in coffee shops and cafes, at home at the kitchen table or at a desk in a windowless room, wherever they happen to be when the urge to escape the banality of their solitary lives becomes something they have to escape.