The conversation about butts here the other day made me one-click Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime (Duke U P, 1993). Here are the first few paragraphs of the intro. Doug ---- Introduction La vida es un cigarillo Hierno, ceniza y candela Unos la furnan de prisa Y algunos la saborean. -Manuel Machado, "Chants andalous" My aim in this book is to praise cigarettes, but certainly not to encourage smoking-not at all. But I am not trying to discourage it, either. If I had wanted to do that, I would not have come out and said so directly (i.e., have discouraged in a way so as to mention 1 was discouraging), on the principle, which is one of the conclusions of this book, that openly condemning cigarette smoking frequently fails to have the desired effectoften accomplishes the opposite of what it intends, sometimes inures the habit, and perhaps initiates it. For many, where cigarettes are concerned, discouraging is a form of ensuring their continuing to smoke. For some, it may cause them to start. A corollary of this conclusion asserts that it is not enough to know that cigarettes are bad for your health in order to decide not to smoke. The noxious effects of tobacco have been observed since the moment of its introduction into Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. Since the early nineteenth century, it has been recognized that the alkaloid of nicotine, administered to rats in pure form in minute doses, instantly produces death. No one who smokes fails eventually to get the signals that the body, with increasing urgency, sends as it ages; in fact, every smoker probably intuits the poison from the instant of experiencing the first violent effects of lighting up, and probably confirms this understanding every day with the first puffs of the first cigarette. But understanding the noxious effects of cigarettes is not usually sufficient reason to cause anyone to stop smoking or resist starting; rather, knowing it is bad seems an absolute precondition of acquiring and confirming the cigarette habit. Indeed, it could be argued that few people would smoke if cigarettes were actually good for you, assuming such a thing were possible; the corollary affirms that if cigarettes were good for you, they would not be sublime. Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call "a negative pleasure": a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the "bad" taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility. Warning smokers or neophytes of the dangers entices them more powerfully to the edge of the abyss, where, like travelers in a Swiss landscape, they can be thrilled by the subtle grandeur of the perspectives on mortality opened by the little terrors in every puff. Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good-not good, not beautiful, but sublime. Alcoholics Anonymous long ago discovered the limits of assuming that a simple act of will, performed in response to an imperious injunction issuing from the self or some external authority, would cause alcoholics to stop drinking. The suggestion that one can "Just say No" entertains the very illusion that motivates the habituated person. Any habit carries with it the endlessly repeated belief that one has sufficient self-control to stop, abruptly, at any moment: believing one can stop is the preeminent condition of continuing.' Just saying No, over and over again, while continuing to smoke, becomes the motivating aim, the consuming pleasure pain, of Italo Svevo's hero in the novel The Confessions of Zeno. His whole life is spent in enacting the illusory belief that he can smoke "The Last Cigarette." But the last one always turns out to be just one more cigarette, another in the series of last cigarettes; taken together, they form the narrative of Zeno's paradoxical existence, serving as milestones marking the passage of time and the progressive stages of his unheroic but strangely gallant life. Endlessly trying to stop smoking leads to a life of doing nothing but smoking (until, in the final chapter, as an old man, Zeno discovers the ingenious means to a cure).
