The Gentle Art of Smoking

he sits alone by the coffee shop window. On her table is an espresso, a small beaker of milk and a clear glass of hot water that condenses around the rim. A cigarette in her right hand burns a silk scarf of smoke into the air. She exhibits the gentle art of smoking as her lips softly wrap a scarlet seal around the filter. She gently inhales facing a parade of sullen and determined pedestrians passing by. She exhales her latent apathy in a cloud of smoke. On every second drag she ashes into a handmade ceramic ashtray – one precise flick with her long manicured thumb nail before she ruminatively twirls the smouldering end against the inside shelf of the ashtray, sharpening it like a pencil point. Following this she pours an equal third of coffee, water and milk into a spare glass. She sips at it while staring through her cigarette at the world beyond the window like it’s the ocean. After a short time she will look down at the cigarette, like a man she forgot was still there, and draw it to her mouth again.

*****

SGANARELLE [snuff-box in hand]. Let Aristotle and the philosophers say what they like, there’s nothing to equal tobacco; It’s an honest man’s habit, and anyone who can get on without it doesn’t deserve to be living at all: it not only clears and enlivens the brain, it’s conductive to virtue: a fellow learns from taking it how to comport himself decently. Haven’t you noticed how, once a chap starts taking snuff, he behaves politely to everybody, and what a pleasure he takes in offering it right and left, wherever he happens to be? He doesn’t even wait to be asked for it or until folk know that they want it! Which just goes to show how it makes for honest and decent behaviour in all those who take it.

Moliére Don Juan
Translated by John Woods

4 Responses to The Gentle Art of Smoking

Altai September 23, 2013

really cool text!

David McNamara September 25, 2013

Thanks! I really appreciate the positive feedback

- Altai October 1, 2013
  
  Do you know Philippe Delerm? Your text reminded me a bit of Delerm, although the mood is different. http://dboucart.pagesperso-orange.fr/biere/textes/gorgee.htm Also, reminded me of "Coffee and Cigarettes"
  
Tony November 6, 2014

I travel into Perth CBD twice a week to lunch with my daughter. If I didn't smoke, I would get to talk to nobody else. But I do, and have a 5- or 10-minute chat or more usually two, each and every week, with a fellow-smoker. To my mind smokers are the most sociable people in Perth. The most anti-social people are those who deny me easy access to a safer form of smoking, e-cigarettes. I've been to Paris and London and further afield, where extensive researh has failed to find an adverse health implication, but has found positive health implications. Why not in Perth? The reason has to do, in my view, with a combination of kill-joy'ism and of paternalism (like stopping kids doing cart-wheels in the school playfields) neither of which speak of tolerance or of the notion of personal responsibility. As for the health budget, the life-long smoker has paid and paid again, through sky-high duty and tax, and through health insurance loadings.

The Gentle Art of Smoking

4 Responses to The Gentle Art of Smoking

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