This is kind of cute article by a guy who decided to start smoking at 46 years old for the first time as an experiment. Ah, he did learn a few things about smoking ... one being, he liked it.

Esquire Magazine

Regardless, of he likes it, he never actually learned the true enjoyment of sitting in comfortable chair, ash tray at arm's length, with a project and his cigarettes.

Smoking on the street is "not" pleasurable, as intended by the anti-smokers.

Smoking is an acquired pleasure, not a good brandy or cup of coffee. It needs to be done in comfortable surroundings.

Smoking in the great outdoors can be a pleasure, but during the winter it is like creating a baby thru artificial insemination.

This guy's essay seemed very nonsensical to me, but I don't feel too critical of him, really, because he's trying to do something that really can't be done, and much better have tried.

Smoking doesn't involve analysis of the act, or an articulation of the "whys" and "whys nots" or a close analysis of one's physical reactions to it. There really isn't a proper way to do it, or not do it. You're smoking some tobacco, not trying to hit a golfball onto the green at 300 yards.


I smoke almost unconsciously. I have an annoying tendency to think deeply, perhaps too deeply, about everything. But not the act of smoking.

The enjoyment of smoking is a very Zen kind of enjoyment; its very meaning is lack of intellectual meaning and, like Zen or The Tao, the more you try to understand and define it, the more it eludes you, and becomes something that it isn't. That's the enjoyment of smoking; it is what it is, and it doesn't leave any room, at all, for analytical interpretation.

I read a book called "Cigarettes are Sublime" that suffers from this same problem to a lesser degree, because the author acknowledges what I'm saying, but still tries in vain to find the meaning in an act that has no meaning, but is attractive for that very fact.

This is why smoking is so communal. You have a smoke with someone and you both know that you're sharing something in particular, but you don't have words for it. Very often, the conversations going on outside among the smokers take on the only social articulation they can find; either the injustice smokers face, or, thoughts regarding quitting smoking. The true conversation is something for metaphysical poets, but the folks on smoke break aren't usually in the mood for poetry recitations, so the conversation takes the familiar form.

Anti-smoking makes its arguments in the particular, and we try to follow suit and keep up. Smoking tobacco, though, as an ancient phenomena, may not be something that has its reasons in the particular. Anti-smoking itself takes place on a platform that wouldn't exist unless the human relationship with tobacco had created the platforms upon which it could grow. In short, industrialized, Western civilization simply doesn't exist without tobacco.

Smoking is smoking. People who are curious don't need an article in Esquire. If they're that curious, let them simply try it themselves. I assume that they're all grown-up now, and can make this decision. If they don't want to, that's fine, but trying to understand smoking from reading an article about it is like trying to eat a carrot for the first time by having someone describe it to you, and some people like carrots, while other people don't.

If they want to make pretend that it's some kind of aberrant trip to an unexplored, dark side of nowhere that's up to them. Give me a break.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: WinstonSmith,

Personally, I thought that article was a joke. I couldn't do more than scan it as it was so full of crap. My impression was this was a non-smoker trying to decide which side he should take and felt the experience was necessary.

Pathetic.

quote:

Originally posted by Bruce:
Regardless, of he likes it, he never actually learned the true enjoyment of sitting in comfortable chair, ash tray at arm's length, with a project and his cigarettes.

When I was in my teens, I dreamed of emigrating to the US someday.
This exact little pleasure makes me glad I eventually didn't.

Makes me appreciate the ashtray on my desk at work and the pack of Luckies next to it in ways I never thought possible.

If I didn't believe that your pleasure will be short lived it would sound like a destination.

I don't think our ashtrays will be going anywhere anytime soon.
This is the Balkans, there is a war and/or a major economic crisis every 30 years or so. The vast majority of people do have to think to survive, and common sense stays strong.