… 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.
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.
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.
Thanks for this, Phil! On the numbering: 20 cigarettes a pack.
Of course!
Save you from what?