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