cigarette

A cylinder of tobacco, the food of the gods, in a delicate and flammable paper, which the adept lights, like Carmen in the opera, and blissfully inhales the fumes thereof. These fumes fill her or his sexy body with a godlike transformation in which the petty concerns of the bourgeois everyday are seen as through a mauve haze that anticipates in the dreary world of everyday, the pleasures of the souk. The cigarette attests one's morality and thereby one's defiance of that morality, and it is truly said of the antismoker, the tears of the Philistine are the Nectar of the Gods.

Give me a cigarette, said Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir in the Deux Magots. "You smoke too much", said de Beauvoir. Sartre said, you have contracted with me never to say a petty-bourgeois thing, nor to hold me to the dreary and suburban expectations of small minds. Are we not as gods, who must tragically, and in the absence of god, determine our lifespan by acting as committed members of a self-conscious vanguard? I know that Heidegger would call upon us to acknowledge the mystery of Being (Sein) in Time (Zeit) but we refuse the mysterious and peer into a desacrilized world in which sacrifice of short-term instinct must be examined, not for its utility to be sure, in a petty bourgeois spirit which again, I refuse, but for its worth as a gesture of defiance. Therefore give me a cigarette, ho.

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