Reading is Sublime

Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime offers such food for thought that, I imagine, as Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships, this book might launch a thousand essays. However, being someone with limited time, I would like to right now focus on just one item from this bountiful book: 

Banville recognizes how radically useless cigarette smoking must be: “This murderous pastime,” he says, demands “more qualities, aptitudes, and marvelous gifts than all that is required to enchant, to dominate, to govern men and women.” He acknowledges explicitly that to give oneself to cigarettes is “to put one’s unique concern into creating a desire that cannot be satisfied.” And yet he concludes his “little study” with a question that is inescapably rhetorical: “However, is it not a pretty dandyism,” he asks, “to give one’s life to a cruel, inextinguishable, and completely useless desire?” 

This description bears more than a few similarities to someone who has given their life over to the pursuit of reading. I’ll grant that reading is rarely a “murderous pastime,” but still, I imagine books could cigarettes a good run in terms of enchanting, dominating, and governing men and women. (I can’t compare them firsthand, however, as I am not a smoker.) Certainly reading, like smoking, creates a need that cannot be satisfied.

And as a lit-blogger, I’m afraid that I’m contributing to that need. The ballooning TBR stacks of myself and many other lit-blog-readers is a very clear testament to the fact that lit-blogs are an excellent way to place yourself even further under the power of books. On more than one occasion, readers of this blog have mentioned to me how CR, and many others, have turned a certain book from an anonymous pile of pulp to a bewitching must-read. I can report that very often I’ve also felt the same thing.

I don’t know if smokers look at a carton of cigarettes with an urge to fire up as many as possible at once, but when I look at my TBR stack I’m often quite taken with a wish that I could read them all right away. Of course, the difference is that each book in my TBR stack is different from the rest, whereas each cigarette in a carton is the same as all the others, so perhaps that can explain why a cigarette-lover is content to chain smoke while I’ll always wish I could do more than only chain-read.

There is at least one more thing that separates smoking from reading. Again, to quote Banville by way of Klein:

“The smoker of cigarettes must always, at each instant, have two hands free and lips also; he can therefore be neither ambitious, nor a worker, nor, with a very few exceptions, a poet or an artist; every task is forbidden him.”

Banville characterizes smoking as a “calm and virile resignation,” an “inalterable mystic joy.” This description seems more like a dream (or a movie) than a book because dreams drop down in bursts of inspiration and play themselves out before your eyes, even though you may be the principal actor. The book, even when it becomes an engrossing entertainment, always asks of the mind active participation. Books recruit the reader, make her into a collaborator as each bats the responsibility for constructing the narrative back and forth. Even at its more relaxed, reading is far more active than Banville’s ideal of smoking.

Perhaps, it is this that makes reading far more addictive than smoking. Smokers may grow attached to the nicotine, or the time-out from the world occasioned by smoking, or even the aesthetic performance that Banville says is characteristic of the best of the smokers, but it is still the same cigarette, the same act each time. With reading, however, we may say that each book is different, yet also linked by a web of connections. First we read Borges, then find out about Calvino, only to have someone recommend Auster, and the read a review of Murakami, and hear a mention of Mitchell, who, we learn, was influenced by Joyce, who then leads us on to Gaddis, who we find out Wallace is a fan of, and on and on. And soon the TBR stack is piled high and we wish we could read all of it, but we still haven’t yet finished our Borges.

Comments

[Nathalie Chicha]

I've been meaning to write a post about Cigarettes Are Sublime for ages ... Goddamn, it's good.

[clifford duffy]

it is a lovely book and so much in it is rich and worthy of recalling that I do think i am going to go and buy a copy of it. I first read it about 1998 and was dazzled by its elegance and furtive beauty. The passages about how smoking has been the ashen dream of millions during Was was especially moving. And so much in it as well. Chapeau!