The Deception of the Thrush

In a recent book review in the New Yorker, I caught a citation of the journal Raritan that caught my eye: "Caffeine and the Coming of the Enlightenment", by a guy named Roger Schmidt. Now this is a cultural studies article after my own heart. While I can neither easily nor legally post the entire pdf here, I encourage you to seek it out in your own library collections, and I'll quote at least an excerpt:

That other world reached through the strange nocturnal journey of sleep turns out to be the world we have lost. We have as a culture become estranged from that fount of poetry and art so familiar to the old culture, and have distanced ourselves from one of the most elemental and ancient sources of spirituality we are ever likely to encounter. The causes of this estrangement are various, but one can reconstruct its history, starting around 1650 when, according to Anthony A Wood, "Jacob, a Jew, opened a coffey house at the Angel, in the parish of S. Peter in the East, Oxon, and there it was by some, who delighted in Noveltie, drank." Within a decade, caffeine had profoundly altered the feel of London life; coffee and tea (which soon followed) were at the center of London's transformation to a commercial power, with coffee shops and tea houses becoming important institutions for political, economic, and cultural transactions....

...Sleep deprivation is both a symptom of modernity, as well as one of its primary causes. At the very least, it seems worth inquiring whether that sense, common in the eighteenth century, of a newly widened gulf between the divine presence and human society, can be entirely dissociated from the chronic sleep loss the period's major thinkers and writers experienced...
I am not suggesting that no one slept badly before 1660 or so, but rather that the activity of sleep becomes increasingly problematic for large numbers of people after this date; attitudes become conflicted and morally urgent in ways previously unfelt. Discusssions of sleep in the late Renaissance, for example, focus almost exclusively on its hygenic aspects; immoderate sleep, or sleeping during the day or after a large meal, is to be avoided because it was thought by some to be injurious to one's health. By 1748 however, the year Benjamin Franklin voices the clearest expression of the commodification of time ("Remember, time is money"), immoderate sleep is not seen as unhealthy, but rather as a sinful waste of time-- an indication of a slothful and idle temperment...