A habit. A comfort. An addiction. An indulgence. A nuisance. A crime. A vice. A sin. An error. A joy.
Surprising cigarette-smoking locations:
The dentist’s chair in Italy. The dentist was a friend of the family with whom I was staying. His name was Gigi and he could see me that afternoon. It was a gum abscess, quite painful. He was both quick and careful while fixing it.
Then I felt faint.
“Just stay there,” he said. “Don’t get up.” He brought me some water and put his hand on my arm. “Have a cigarette,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”
It did.
Driving lessons at the age of thirty-five. Driving made me nervous, which was why I’d put off learning for so long. I went for one jerky spin around the parking lot with my instructor. Then: “Pull over.”
I came to an abrupt stop.
“Lady,” he asked, “Do you smoke?”
“Yes.”
“So will you please have a cigarette. You’re too tense.”
“I don’t know if I can smoke and drive at the same time,” I said.
“You gotta learn. Might as well do it all at once.”
In Charles DeGaulle airport. Decades after smoking had been banned in the air and then almost everywhere else, I found a small, yellowed room on the floor below gate access with a sign on the door in three languages: SMOKING. Inside, several travelers were stoking up for their voyages. I joined them. I had four cigarettes in a row, enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. I was halfway across the Atlantic before I wanted another, and by then I thought I could make it. (...)
People do not hesitate to tell me to stop smoking and to inform me how dangerous it is, in case I haven’t heard about that. Some kinds of bad behavior are off-limits for comment: drinking too much, eating too much, spending time with idiots or losers. Doing those things may provoke disapproval, but almost nobody will criticize the person in public. Smoking is not like that. People often justify this by talking about secondhand smoke, but since I don’t smoke inside and they aren’t exposed to my secondhand smoke, this argument doesn’t have much weight.
At eight-thirty one morning I was walking to work at my proofreading job through an almost-deserted Harvard Square. Another woman was walking about fifteen feet in front of me. I lit a cigarette. She began waving her hands around her head and making little coughing sounds. After a block of this, she turned around.
“Would you put that cigarette out,” she said. She had a disdainful, pained expression.
“I think Harvard Square is big enough for both of us,” I said.
I crossed the street, but I kept smoking. (...)
What is smoking for? People who don’t smoke think it’s for feeding an addiction, and they’re right. Once you’ve started smoking, it’s hard to stop. But that’s a narrow definition. There’s a physical addiction and there’s also a spiritual addiction. Perhaps you could call it a metaphysical addiction.
To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with.
It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something. Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore. I’m grateful that I can’t smoke inside anymore. Now, about once an hour, I can stop whatever I’m doing without making an excuse for stopping it, and go outside. Then I am with birds and trees, or with skyscrapers and trucks, or with rain, or with the sunset that is beginning, pink and streaky, over in the west. The whole world is there and I am also there, but I have nothing to do except watch it or ignore it and smoke my cigarette.
Smoking is also a punctuation mark, probably a period, but sometimes an exclamation point. Dinner’s in the oven, time for a cigarette. Did all the errands on my list, cigarette! Finished reading that book, emptied the dishwasher, got through to that person who never answers the phone: cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.
And a clock. Smoking is both a marker of the passage of time and a way to elude time. I know how long an hour is because nicotine tells me. Then the cigarette gives me four or five minutes (I am not sure how many minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette) that are not exactly minutes. They are pure existence. (...)
Though it’s embarrassing to admit, I didn’t want to participate in the general wellness culture. I didn’t want to be one of the many people who were improving themselves by going on juice fasts, cutting out red meat, or meditating daily. Smoking was my meditation. I didn’t want to hear from people who’d been telling me or even begging me to stop smoking how wonderful it was that I had finally done so. I had (and still have) an adolescent kind of rebelliousness. I saw that, and I knew it was ridiculous and petulant and inappropriate (a terrible word used by people who were on juice fasts or who didn’t eat red meat) for a supposedly adult person. That was one reason.
The main reason, though, was that I enjoyed it.
Surprising cigarette-smoking locations:
The dentist’s chair in Italy. The dentist was a friend of the family with whom I was staying. His name was Gigi and he could see me that afternoon. It was a gum abscess, quite painful. He was both quick and careful while fixing it.
Then I felt faint.
“Just stay there,” he said. “Don’t get up.” He brought me some water and put his hand on my arm. “Have a cigarette,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”It did.
Driving lessons at the age of thirty-five. Driving made me nervous, which was why I’d put off learning for so long. I went for one jerky spin around the parking lot with my instructor. Then: “Pull over.”
I came to an abrupt stop.
“Lady,” he asked, “Do you smoke?”
“Yes.”
“So will you please have a cigarette. You’re too tense.”
“I don’t know if I can smoke and drive at the same time,” I said.
“You gotta learn. Might as well do it all at once.”
In Charles DeGaulle airport. Decades after smoking had been banned in the air and then almost everywhere else, I found a small, yellowed room on the floor below gate access with a sign on the door in three languages: SMOKING. Inside, several travelers were stoking up for their voyages. I joined them. I had four cigarettes in a row, enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. I was halfway across the Atlantic before I wanted another, and by then I thought I could make it. (...)
People do not hesitate to tell me to stop smoking and to inform me how dangerous it is, in case I haven’t heard about that. Some kinds of bad behavior are off-limits for comment: drinking too much, eating too much, spending time with idiots or losers. Doing those things may provoke disapproval, but almost nobody will criticize the person in public. Smoking is not like that. People often justify this by talking about secondhand smoke, but since I don’t smoke inside and they aren’t exposed to my secondhand smoke, this argument doesn’t have much weight.
At eight-thirty one morning I was walking to work at my proofreading job through an almost-deserted Harvard Square. Another woman was walking about fifteen feet in front of me. I lit a cigarette. She began waving her hands around her head and making little coughing sounds. After a block of this, she turned around.
“Would you put that cigarette out,” she said. She had a disdainful, pained expression.
“I think Harvard Square is big enough for both of us,” I said.
I crossed the street, but I kept smoking. (...)
What is smoking for? People who don’t smoke think it’s for feeding an addiction, and they’re right. Once you’ve started smoking, it’s hard to stop. But that’s a narrow definition. There’s a physical addiction and there’s also a spiritual addiction. Perhaps you could call it a metaphysical addiction.
To have a cigarette is to step out of day-to-day existence and into a private, solitary existence. It’s just you and your cigarette. Hello, says the cigarette, You’ve come to visit me. And you say, Yes, hello—but really, you know that you’ve come to visit yourself. The cigarette is a method of being alone and listening to yourself, of having nobody but yourself to listen to or to be with.
It’s also a way to stop time. Time spent smoking is not real time. Nothing else is happening. There is no progress. There is no trying to start something or complete something or even forget something. Since smokers have been excommunicated from indoor life, this contemplative aspect of smoking has come to the fore. I’m grateful that I can’t smoke inside anymore. Now, about once an hour, I can stop whatever I’m doing without making an excuse for stopping it, and go outside. Then I am with birds and trees, or with skyscrapers and trucks, or with rain, or with the sunset that is beginning, pink and streaky, over in the west. The whole world is there and I am also there, but I have nothing to do except watch it or ignore it and smoke my cigarette.
Smoking is also a punctuation mark, probably a period, but sometimes an exclamation point. Dinner’s in the oven, time for a cigarette. Did all the errands on my list, cigarette! Finished reading that book, emptied the dishwasher, got through to that person who never answers the phone: cigarette, cigarette, cigarette.
And a clock. Smoking is both a marker of the passage of time and a way to elude time. I know how long an hour is because nicotine tells me. Then the cigarette gives me four or five minutes (I am not sure how many minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette) that are not exactly minutes. They are pure existence. (...)
Though it’s embarrassing to admit, I didn’t want to participate in the general wellness culture. I didn’t want to be one of the many people who were improving themselves by going on juice fasts, cutting out red meat, or meditating daily. Smoking was my meditation. I didn’t want to hear from people who’d been telling me or even begging me to stop smoking how wonderful it was that I had finally done so. I had (and still have) an adolescent kind of rebelliousness. I saw that, and I knew it was ridiculous and petulant and inappropriate (a terrible word used by people who were on juice fasts or who didn’t eat red meat) for a supposedly adult person. That was one reason.
The main reason, though, was that I enjoyed it.
by Susanna Kaysen, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Federico Faruffini: 'La Lectora'. Wikimedia Commons.
