Abstract
The title of my essay echoes that of one of late antiquity's most learned works: Martianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology. But whereas the fifth-century Neoplatonic philosopher was concerned with timeless nuptials of the intellect, allegorical nuptials joining the trivium to the quadrivium, eloquence to learning, I am interested instead in the convergence between two bodies in the accelerated time frame that corresponds to the advent of modernity. The first of these bodies is the active ingredient in coffee, isolated for the first time in 1820, a substance emblematic of the modern individual's striving for hyperproductivity and appetite for hyperstimulation. The second is the most important of the new metals embraced by twentieth-century industry: aluminum-a material discovered in 1854 but first produced on an industrial scale at the turn-of-thecentury mark. Viewed in hindsight, the coming together of coffee and aluminum seems inevitable. However divergent the time lines governing the rise to prominence of each substance, however different the uses to which each
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