The Gimlet Eye

‘Cigars . . . Cigarettes’

I SPEAK of tobacco with the wisdom of hindsight, through the clarifying distance of time, for it is now, as I write, nearly 36 hours since I quit smoking. Any smoker will tell you that 36 hours without tobacco is an eternity. And I am beginning myself to feel like Father Time, stooped and brittle-boned, slow-witted and dim. But I won’t bore you with that; quitting smoking and its attendant discomforts have become the lamest of clichés, fodder for any columnist with nothing else to write about. So not a word from me about the terrifying hell of an ex-smoker’s life, the scorched nervous system, the spastic insides, the irrefutable conviction that a small, hairless animal is clawing his way through one’s body cavity. About all this—about the night sweats, the trembling fingers, the generalized despair, the endlessly repeated foreshadowings of doom, the obsessive self-pity—I remain silent. Mum’s the word.

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‘Cigars . . . Cigarettes’

I SPEAK of tobacco with the wisdom of hindsight, through the clarifying distance of time, for it is now, as I write, nearly 36 hours since I quit smoking. Any smoker will tell you that 36 hours without tobacco is an eternity. And I am beginning myself to feel like Father Time, stooped and brittle-boned, slow-witted and dim. But I won’t bore you with that; quitting smoking and its attendant discomforts have become the lamest of clichés, fodder for any columnist with nothing else to write about. So not a word from me about the terrifying hell of an ex-smoker’s life, the scorched nervous system, the spastic insides, the irrefutable conviction that a small, hairless animal is clawing his way through one’s body cavity. About all this—about the night sweats, the trembling fingers, the generalized despair, the endlessly repeated foreshadowings of doom, the obsessive self-pity—I remain silent. Mum’s the word.