With all the bittersweet regret of a lover looking back on something lost, Klein wrote of cigarettes as a complicated pleasure with a certain philosophical dignity. Klein had quit smoking by the time he finished writing Cigarettes Are Sublime. But his book hints at why some people keep smoking beyond apparent reason: Taken as an object of reflection, cigarettes invite the return of the same, like smoke rings circling round before vanishing. The same comfortable warmth, over and over and over again
Tobacco and Americans (McGraw-Hill, 1960) online Hilton, Matthew, Smoking in British Popular Culture, 18002000 (Manchester University Press, 2000) Hirschfelder, Arlene B
In 1634, the Patriarch of Moscow forbade the sale of tobacco, and sentenced men and women who flouted the ban to have their nostrils slit and their backs flayed
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