Apologia Nicotiana

Before all else, let me say that I smoke a pipe far less than this article might imply and even less than I’d like. Had I the temperance to resist technological brain-drain, I like to believe that more of my nights would be spent on my front porch, poker pipe in hand as I ponder a book as old and yellowed as my would-be teeth. That would be the life. Perhaps not the life my mother would have wanted for me but a life I could live comfortably in a cave of modern heresy.

“Egads, tobacco!” Shrieks the modern world (though in a more technical tone), and for a while I agreed. That one would willingly engage in self destruction for pleasure was unfathomable to me, unfathomable as things like fasting, asceticism, and martyrdom. Long before I became conscious of the poor health effects, I had a distaste for the smell of Marlboro Reds, and to some extent I still feel that way, for I watched my grandmother smoke herself to death with them, unable to pull herself away for more than a week at a time. The sort of smoking that results in compulsive addiction and pseudo-necessity deserves no defense—it is an enslavement to the self, and for a long while it convinced me that any sort of tobacco was of satanic ilk.

Just as alcohol can destroy a man’s life, or, through the proper channels, bring life into him, tobacco can burn him up or keep his fire burning. The primary divide in these realities is a result of mindset. Rightly understood, tobacco is a cigarette-shaped civil disobedience, an inhaled incense, a mouthful of memento mori.

The world has an oxymoronic obsession with life as a kind of quantity or commodity. Life is sacred and health is holy. Mental health is superior in to physical health; that which negatively affects mental health is worse than that which negatively affects physical health—how terrible, then, is that which is addictive and causes physical malady? Under these parameters, tobacco is right out. We are told to ignore, though, the adverse health effects of the widely accepted marijuana and the increasingly common hallucinogens, both of which are endorsed by figures at the forefront of culture. Despite revering health and reviling sickness, the broader culture, out of its infinite mercy, can forgive anything if only it strikes enough people—or the right people—as fashionable. Fine is the line between the permissible and impermissible, but the arbitrary arbiters of culture will decide for you on which side you fall. What was perfectly acceptable in one moment can, “because of its effects on health,” become stigmatized the next and vice versa. In an environment like this, nicotine offers a unique opportunity to reject the moral mandates of a confused culture. Where Thoreau evaded taxes, I light my pipe; where Swift proposed modestly, I smoke earnestly. In a world where most everything is permissible, civil disobedience can only be achieved through an action that is socially deplorable yet morally acceptable.

And so I’ll light my censer with full knowledge that many, if not most, around me will find its scent displeasing—not, of course, because of the way fresh tobacco itself smells, but instead for a vague moral compulsion that has been instilled in them from a young age. For me, there is in tobacco smoking something which resists that compulsion, something “magnanimizing,” something which expands the house of my soul. I don’t need to smoke to live, I know that, but neither does a Catholic or Orthodox church need incense to have legitimate sacraments. I mean this: there are certain practices which are not necessary for the doing of a thing, but which enhance or fulfill the doing of that thing. Must I have a lit pipe to enjoy a classic text or the company of friends? No, but it certainly improves those things and enhances my enjoyment of them. By this “improvement” and “enhancement,” I do not mean to imply that something is missing without tobacco, but, as a father after the birth of his second child finds his love multiplied rather than divided, I mean that my capacity for enjoying those moments is increased.

An objection to all of this might be the cancer. That is a reasonable objection, and I will address it in two ways, one of which I am surer of and one of which I only have a tentative grasp on. The shoddier address first: I have known some that, despite long held abstinence from smoking for health reasons, have fallen victim to mouth, throat, lung, and other cancers just the same. Smoking most definitely puts you at an increased risk of such diseases, but I can think of few things more frustrating than to avoid a practice that one loves only to suffer that practice’s side effects anyways. I do not wish to be the former rock climber that falls down the stairs, the ex-Nascar driver that rolls his minivan. Perhaps this line of thinking is logically flawed, but in any case it appeals to me.

My more concrete defense of nicotine in the face of the statistics actually does not aim to defend very much at all. Instead, in an act of rhetorical judo, this argument meets the self-annihilative nature of smoking and redirects it. It listens when critics say, “smoking kills,” and it says, “yes… that’s the point.” The modern world makes it nearly impossible to ignore the deadly nature of nicotine products, and thus, if understood correctly, the act of smoking becomes a participatory reminder that Thanatos is there. Were actions all sentiment and no aesthetic, I might even smoke from a skull-shaped bowl, for to me tobacco is a statement that I am small and passing, so passing as to be subject to these, vapors of vapors. To me, tobacco has become a mortification of the flesh, a reflection on my fleeting life, an experienced sic transit gloria mundi. Aye, it’s killing me. Aye, that’s the point.

Death to the world.

Amen.

Image Credit: Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière, “Man Smoking a Pipe” (c. 1875) via Wikimedia.