… my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present.
– Ted Chiang, “The Story of Your Life”
Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.
– Martin Amis, Money
1. A lot of people hate their first, but I loved mine. Walking with friends at night, fifteen, the orange glow of embers like a gothic Tinkerbell, the ritual of standing still while others wait, lighter cupped in hand against the breeze.
2. My brand was B&H. They came in a crass gold box, high tar, decadent and deadly.
3. My parents didn’t know I smoked; perhaps they never knew. Before I went to bed, I would open up the window, leaning out over the sill into the garden where the cinders fell, exhaling fiercely. I would stub the cigarette out on the red brick wall.
4. Making out with a smoker is like licking an ashtray, so they say. But I enjoyed it: the aroma of dead campfires, charred taste of lips and tongue.
5. My college girlfriend smoked. We first kissed sitting on the steps of the cricket pavilion. We had walked away from the party but could still hear the music, smoking cigarettes. We put them out on the cold concrete and turned towards each other, eyes and teeth in the dark. She knew I was interested. I wondered what she would do.
6. In graduate school, I tried to quit and failed. Everybody smoked and wanted you to smoke. Cigarettes were free: friends gave them away. Every week or two, I’d be assailed by guilt and buy someone a pack. They’d react as if I’d found their long-lost child.
7. We would smoke after seminars under the arched door of Marx Hall, the space suffused with nicotine fog. They were the best of days: talking philosophy while we scowled at the parents on college tours whose kids would be taught by us, no matter what the tour guides said.
8. One of the department secretaries smoked. We would linger with her outside as she exhaled wisdom with the rasping voice of a lifetime’s habit. A few years after I left, she died of cancer.
9. I tried to quit again, this time with medical help. My doctor prescribed nicotine gum, paid for by my student medical plan. He had to warn me of the side effects, of which one was “increased powers of concentration.”
10. The experience was uncanny: like breathing without air.
11. By alternating gum with cigarettes, I got down to ten a day. But I did not want to stop. It wasn’t the pleasure but the rhythm, the awareness of myself in time. To smoke is to step outside all ordinary things, to pause the moving now. Who compares such ecstasy to a wad of gum?
12. After we had sex, my girlfriend would lie in bed and watch as I sat naked on the ledge, leaning through the window of the graduate school dorm, smoking a cigarette.
13. Beneath the window, twenty feet away, was the tarnished bronze of the floating woman, her mammoth thighs outstretched, calves crossed, palms turned up in supplication or surprise. Indifferent at first, I found her beautiful by year’s end, rising like a smoke ring in defiance of the ground.
14. The American Philosophical Association held its annual conference in December. By tradition, the evening reception is “the Smoker,” although you cannot smoke in hotel ballrooms now. One year, we did, a small crowd huddled behind a scrim on the margins of the room, laughing at our small audacity.
15. The year I got a job, I failed to quit more times than I recall. I’ll admit I was surprised. I thought I hadn’t really tried and when I did, it would be easy. It was not.
16. Temptation’s pull is mathematical: if you have access to your fix, you’re as weak as your weakest moment. You have to change the circumstance. When I felt the urge to smoke, I would buy cigarettes. But as my willpower surged, I’d crumple them into the trash. I raised the cost of a single cigarette to the price of an entire pack. I could no longer afford to smoke.
17. That was more than twenty years ago. Although I do not smoke, I am still a smoker. The desire is not stubbed out. I sense it when I need to clear my head or when I look for an oasis in the desert of the day. A few years back, I relapsed. Some grad students were smoking at a party and I asked to borrow a cigarette.
18. It’s an odd form of grief, to find you don’t enjoy something that you once loved. I laboured through a few drags, spitting in the grass.
19. We expect to be betrayed by cigarettes: we know they mean us harm. But not like this. I thought of cigarettes as being there, vicious but honest, their mere existence a gift, like the memory of a loved one. What kind of world do we inhabit, in which things that bring us consolation at intolerable cost might continue to cost but cease to console?
20. Even as I do not smoke, even as I do not want to smoke, even as I’m glad I don’t, I want to think that cigarettes would save me if I could.
I quit drinking back in 2020 after two and half decades of regularly imbibing. In 2021 I quit cigars. Then in 2022, I quit caffeine. Though I feel no pull from alcohol or caffeine, to this day I still think about how wonderful a cigar would be. I can imagine the setting, the feeling, the taste, the entire sensory experience. I don’t exactly want a cigar, and I’d reject it if given one. But everything a cigar once meant to me—sometimes meditative or readerly silence, other times conviviality; an hour apart, or an hour with friends—still resonates and moves me. It’s a strange sort of loss. I don’t want it, but I also miss it.
“What kind of world do we inhabit, in which things that bring us consolation at intolerable cost might continue to cost but cease to console?” Great question, not merely rhetorical. And great post (but as with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus I’m not quite sure what to make of the numbers.)
In a better world consolation would be on tap, without cost. That’s James’s “wishing-cap” world, utopia, literally nowhere.
So we have to work for our consolation, without guarantee of success. We have to be meliorists. The upside is that it becomes easier to identify the sources of false consolation, the “degrading poisons” of misleading allure, and renounce them. Smoking and drinking were relatively easy to give up, for me, compared to dreams of Utopia. But dreams of an incrementally better world are easier to believe in. Slightly.
I always look forward to your Saturday dispatches, Kieran. (And we’re reading Life is Hard in my classes again this semester.) Thanks for this. Carry on.