Until Your Time Is Up
On quitting, and not quitting, smoking
I am always wanting to quit smoking. I think about it every time I light a cigarette. Whenever I sit, smoking with others, on my patio, or in a park, or on a balcony, or behind a house, wanting to quit is a likely topic of conversation — all of us sharing how much we wish we could be not doing what we’re doing as we’re doing it. It seems as if wanting to stop is a necessary prerequisite for continuing—as if by a collective acknowledging of our sins and moral fallibility, we carve out a space for our sickly indulgence and perpetually deferred absolution.
There is a joke often falsely attributed to Mark Twain that goes “it’s easy to quit smoking; I’ve done it hundreds of times.” In the typical reading of the epigram, the second phrase negates the first, all of us getting a chuckle as we understand that to have to quit hundreds of times means it is not so simple to do so, nor is it truly quitting, per se. I feel it is more interesting, however, to read the contradiction as a unity of opposites rather than a simple oxymoron. That is to say, instead of both statements rendered false through their disagreement, we can think of them as both true in spite of one another (like the phrase, “I’m doing my best and will do better next time”). What we might learn, thus, from our non-Mark Twain, is that we embattled smokers easily imagine quitting — and it is in fact this easy act of imagination that defers its realization. If it were so challenging to quit smoking, I might take it seriously, signing up for groups or buying patches, but if I can stop any day now, what harm does another one do?
To be clear — I’m very aware of the harm. No smoker isn’t, when looking at the grimy filter and sensing their chest just a bit tighter, their throat a bit more raw. As Richard Klein argues, in his singular Cigarettes are Sublime, this too is part of our lived contradiction, not simply repressed, but rather incorporated into the daily (hourly?) ritual. Klein’s history of American tobacco culture convincingly demonstrates that cigarettes have well passed their day in the sun, and that no one still harbors any doubts as to the nature of their poison — and yet, we still smoke! Klein eloquently inverts our typical cultural understanding of smokers’ motivations:
[U]nderstanding 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.
Sublimity for Klein (borrowing from Kant) connotes a “negative pleasure” — a pleasure that is darkly beautiful for its distinct ugliness, and its small reminder of our mortality. To this end, pointing out the smoker’s peril as a culturally corrective tactic will not stop us, and might even intoxicate us more to the thrill of the void.
You may have seen this coming if you’ve lived in a city and heard the various slang terms for cigarettes. “Darts” was a favorite among high school friends, carrying the implication of stabbing holes (in the lungs?). “Nails” is another I’ve come across, gesturing grimly to fastening shut one’s coffin. Marlboro Reds, for their longstanding ties to Americana and classic masculinity, have come in some circles to be called “cowboy killers.” We gesture, with equal parts irony and love, towards the means of our collective and conscious undoing.
It is in this sense that smoking with friends feels an awful lot like planning a heist — bonding through wrongdoing. We are, by our mere presence, implicated in the crime, and thus find a certain solidarity in our shared misdeed. Perhaps it is for this reason that I less enjoy smoking alone, and often wait furtively for a housemate to begin rolling a cigarette before I will entertain rolling my own. The sublime reminder of mortality, as Kant suggests, can overwhelm the subject — the glimpse of an infinite abyss generating a terror of incomprehensibility by sheer scale. To have co-conspirators, by contrast, is soothing, as we walk towards the edge and make a celebration of our peril.
In keeping with the metaphor of criminality, one of the preeminent joys of smoking is feeling yourself inducted into a secret underworld. Packs of people standing backs outward, outside bars and concert venues, whom you previously avoided for their toxic clouds, suddenly open themselves to you as momentary comrades. The excitement of dragging a friend or two away from the action at a party to shiver together over a cigarette is not entirely dissimilar to the other semi-shameful youthful party proclivity of sneaking off to have sex. You’re not merely entering a social circle with a noxious affection, but granted access to a whole new world of illicit libidinal pleasures.
It is exciting to learn that your new unlawful friends are often those who you least expect! Recently, I pirated Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, wherein a secret agent type offers, in a moment of on-the-nose exposition: “what I have for you is a word and a gesture.” “Tenet,” he says, while interlacing his fingers like a child about to show you the church and steeple. “It will open up the right doors and some of the wrong ones too.” Our suave protagonist spends much of the rest of the film artfully slipping “tenet” into sentences and making casual movements to get his fingers in the right place, deftly making allies out of enemies and enmeshing himself in a secret international network. At risk of aligning myself unduly with silver-screen badasses, I get a bit of the rush of espionage when spotting a lighter in someone’s bag, and the slight thrill of a dangerous secret when sharing a cigarette with a tacit non-smoker. “Got a light?” is our password, reaching to the coat’s inner breast pocket for a pack our gesture. (Alternatively, my housemates and I have taken to merely pantomiming a puff as a means of proposition.) At the least, I enjoy imagining myself as a Bond girl — long drags on a skinny cigarette between cryptic sentences.
The built world, too, reorganizes itself around the smoker. Indulging for a moment longer in my filmic fantasies, I would propose that the smoker’s vision becomes like the Terminator’s when they’re fiending for a cigarette. Information cascades across their field of view, every corner and railing analyzed paranoically with possible pathways, exits highlighted in red. Otherwise unassuming spaces and objects take on radically different valences. A bare exterior wall becomes a possible rendezvous point; a fallen log by the creek becomes an oasis in a no-smoking campus. The cigarette, in its thanatos-laden insistence, reterritorializes the smoker and their environment, rearranging all their familiar signs to take on new signifieds.
It is these feelings of a self and world reconstructed into dangerous fantasy, above all else, that first enamored me with smoking — a teen eager for rebellion, wanting to look less like precisely what I was: the nervous sixteen year old at the punk show, begging to grow up quicker. Despite their broad successes, the cultural war which American antismoking campaigns will never win is the assertion that smoking isn’t cool. As before, these campaigns’ insistence otherwise on smoking’s physical ills (plus Hollywood’s help, for sure, in its penchant for screening sexy smokers) in fact reinforces its seductive ability. So long as cigarettes remain bad for you, they will never get less cool.
A year or two ago, I began doubling over on a daily basis, coughing the sort of ugly, wet cough that feels uncomfortably like something trying to make its way out of my body. I was spurred into a rapid attempt to recover my health (I’m too young for this!). At the same moment as I began to sketch out my cold-turkey dreams, however, I began simultaneously to assimilate this small apocalypse into my poetics of self destruction, reminding me of the Victorian notion of tuberculosis as the blossoming of the creative spirit: hacking up blood was a sure sign your writing would soon be at its best. Feeling very bad, perhaps expectedly, made me feel very cool, and I took a perverse pleasure in people’s horrified expressions at my grotesque barking, followed immediately by the absolving satisfaction of reassuring them that I was quitting. What a perfect formula! The prototypical scene of tragic bodily rebellion spurring a come-to-Jesus-esque revelation became extended indefinitely; I could take sublime gratification from the struggle of fighting to quit rather than the healthful joy of actually quitting.
With this humorous inversion in mind, Cigarettes are Sublime was in fact Klein’s attempt to approach quitting smoking differently, hoping that, insofar as cigarettes’ attractive power is predicated upon their essential badness, writing a 200-some-page book extolling their virtues might inversely allow him to finally move on. This is a compelling notion that I would be more convinced of had I not smoked three cigarettes while writing the previous paragraphs — shocked am I that my chemical dependence might require more than a profession of love. If neither hating cigarettes nor loving them allows me to leave them, what is left to me?
A housemate relayed to me his issues surrounding smoking and his mother. Every time he would visit home, after attempting to ward off his nicotine demon for a day or two, he would inevitably smoke and his mother would equally inevitably scold him. With enough repetition, tired of a fight she clearly couldn’t win, his mother eventually relented in favor of keeping the peace. Curiously, it was at this moment that my housemate began finding his cigarettes shockingly repulsive! Call it childish rebellion or Oedipal frustration, but I feel as if there’s something interesting to a habit that becomes shameful (genuinely shameful, that is, not secretly joyful as before) just as it is given space to breathe.
An ethos of sober proportion and nonchalance, neither spiteful catastrophe nor teary eyed elegy, seems the only way to confront the addiction that lovingly torments me. Documentary filmmaker John Wilson catches this perfectly in his film How to Keep Smoking, remarking that “without cigarettes, we’d all have a lot more time to kill,” synthesizing humorously and without drama their pleasures and perils. I hope to find myself capable of accounting for this grim mathematics—counting up and weighing gratification and longevity and pain—outside of my typical response to abstract my failure to do so into a tragic aesthetic posture. I hope I can quit. I hope I like cigarettes enough.
