Cigarettes Are Sublime

"Cigarettes, in fact, are never what they appear to be." Cigarettes are arguably hazardous to one's health, which is exactly what makes them such a sublime pleasure. They combine pleasure with an "intimation of mortality." As any smoker knows, smoking cigarettes is one of the most sensual experiences in life. Despite the the anti-smoking hysteria and worldwide bans on public smoking, more than one billion people in the world continue to smoke. It is the only new pleasure man has invented in the last 1,800 years. In Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein addresses the philosophical question: "Qu'est-ce que la Cigarette?" (What is a Cigarette?) (p. 28). For Klein, who wrote this book out of his desire to stop smoking, the allure of the cigarette is "a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity." Klein's equally eloquent and provocative treatise on the aesthetics of smoking draws from Sartre, Mallarm, Bizet's Carmen, and the "Humphrey Bogart cigarette" in Casablanca, to chronicle the 1,800-year evolution of the cigarette through history, culture, art, film, literature, music, and philosophy, from its religious inception (smoking as a form of prayer) to smoking as a part of the creative process for writers and artists. Klein believes the current anti-smoking campaign goes beyond health concerns and raises issues of personal freedom. He argues that it is not health concerns that motivate the current anti-smoking hysteria and public smoking bans, but a moralistic censorship of one's sexual and political freedom associated with cigarettes. (For further reading on this point, see Joe Jackson's well reasoned exercise in skepticism, "Smoke, Lies, and The Nanny State:" www.joejackson.com/pdf/5smokingpdf_jj_smoke_lies.pdf. Klein's erudite meditation on smoking offers fresh insights into what many of us do ten times a day. Highly recommended. G. Merritt

In this iconoclastic gem of a book, Klein manages to provide a wonderful tool to those of us readers who resonate with his wonderful voicing of one giant "in your face" to the new and stultifying "Nanny State". This statement summarizes the message of "Cigarettes are Sublime" ! Usually we who chafe at "Big Brother" telling us how to treat our bodies, resort to arguments like: "Well, I want to have the right to smoke on my balcony at work 'dammit'!" Such protest can sound a bit like an adolescent stamping one's foot. Klein however, in this so well-spun book, with its rich historical analysis spanning many cultures, gives us a unique and powerful tool to use, in voicing our protest. "Cigarettes are Sublime" manages to capture what is the CULTURALLY EMBEDDED power, and perhaps (if you agree with Klein) what is in fact the VALUE, as means of self-expression, of smoking, as a social symbol and act. As the Editorial reviews note, "vices" in general (drinking, playing poker, smoking, eating gloriously at sumptuous tables with friends) are all very powerful "games" or "props" in that very underappreciated arena of how we humans "play" with each other in private life--what mischief we toy with, what message we project to others about our "attitude"; to death, to sex, to an embrace vs rejection of the message (broadcast daily in ominous bulletins from our media),that our bodies are entities vulnerable and besieged by a barrage of "risks" that we must always vigilantly guard against, at any cost, including sacrifice of our bodies as instruments of pleasure and work. In this light, the puff on a cig is not JUST recklessness, but in fact, can give that same royal pleasure that one gets in reveling on one's roof to catch rays, as others , anxiously monitoring the daily published "cancer index" of the sun, huddle indoors. Seen from this very often ignored angle of pleasure and play and social intercourse, cigarettes--as are so many of our personal habits and messages to others in our myriad relationships--are a sublime pleasure in the playground of life, the very thing that those who cry for quantity of life, ignoring quality of the play, indeed need heed, if life is what they wish to "celebrate".

I can not remember the last time I read such a well written book. Klein is an amazing wordsmith & this book is a treasure in understanding the lure, beauty, and sublime charms which keep 1.4 billion people in the world smoking every day.

The only review was a downer. Whoever "reader" was, didn't really know anything about literature and philosophy. Some basic philosophy knowledge is needed to read this book. Kant (with the sublime theory), Nietzsche and quoted throughtout the book. Great reading. Specially if you smoke.