Possibly not so ‘Lenten’ in many people’s minds, but smoking a pipe — and I have a few readers who do — demands patience. Lots of it. Yet, once the art is mastered, what bliss.
In the Winter 2012 of the Reformed (Calvinist) Nicotine Theological Journal, the last page features one of the late John Updike’s character’s thoughts on switching from cigarettes to a pipe. The following passage is from Updike’s 1986 novel Roger’s Version, which the Nicotine Theological Journal‘s editors — no pietists they — remind us, took place in the Reagan era before tobacco became anathema.
This paragraph is a thing of beauty:
The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting: those first cheekhollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly, I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago, gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.
6 comments
February 18, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Amfortas
I sit here at the computor, pipe full, and look at my tobacco pouch. Three months ago the tobacco came in a tin that was easily identified. Now all tobacco comes ina pouch identical to all other tobacco. The maker’s name is in tiny print below huge print proclaiming, “SMOKING HARMS UNBORN BABIES”. There is a picture of a baby with an oxygen mask.
Our government demanded that. No advertising. No identification. Tobacco locked away in the shops. No display.
Meanwhile our anti-smoking government facilitates and approves the murder of 80,000 unborn babies every year through abortion.
February 18, 2013 at 11:00 pm
churchmouse
Exactly. Abortion v smoking. And all the graphics with slogans saying smoking causes infertility. Think back to the Baby Boom (if you were around then). We never had so many kids — or smokers!
I take it you are in Oz?
February 18, 2013 at 11:01 pm
churchmouse
Thanks for smoking a pipe. A man of distinction. Meant to say that in my original reply.
February 18, 2013 at 11:01 pm
Amfortas
Yes
February 19, 2013 at 8:02 pm
lleweton
‘ ….the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life’. I think it is this which the secular puritans resent. In the disciplined but tobacco friendly days of my RAF service more than 50 years ago I treasured the ‘smoke breaks’. Time for me… time over which I have control. That, I believe, is what troubles the zealots – that there is something in people’s lives that they cannot own or control. Why tobacco and not religion? Well, perhaps the secularists are having a go at that, by varying routes, but that’s another whole post. I often thought, years before the pubs ban, that the refuge and freedom they gave to people who wanted to smoke was an outrage and anathema to the craving to control. How dare these rebels evade it! They got their way, eventually. They’re still hungry of course and, whatever it is which drives them, it is still looking for things to devour. Happiness is an affront to their very sense of self.
February 19, 2013 at 10:48 pm
churchmouse
Well said, Llew — I was hoping you would comment.
It really is all about personal happiness, and I do mean personal. However, with the smoking ban, people using their relatives’ deaths in a pietistic Carry Nation way, we all have to suffer the slings and arrows of prohibitive legislation at all times and, let’s face it, in ALL places. I am fed up to the back teeth with it, so thank you for expressing it so eloquently.
Watch the rhetoric: 1) ‘my uncle/aunt/dog died because of smoking’, therefore no one should smoke; 2) ‘we live in a democratic collective now’ (there’s nothing democratic about a democracy or a collective — majority rules); 3) ‘your health, your health!’ (okay, is life any better as an Alzheimer’s patient?). People die of one thing or another. It’s part of the life cycle which used to be universally accepted until the 1980s.
I’m ending it there; I’ve had enough of these petty, pietistic tyrants. Yes, they are tyrants and they are pietists.