On Writing, Smoking, and the Habit of Transcendence

Writers have long found rich fodder for their work in their leisure pursuits. John Updike, writing about golf in The New York Times in 1973, described the pastime as “a non-chemical hallucinogen” that “breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyper-consciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria.” Sketching out a particularly lucid paragraph about the act of preparing for a stroke, he confessed, “got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed.”

Updike’s experience of. It’s a slight and meandering work that essentially recounts the author’s life in cigarettes, but its most vital passages describe how smoking essentially shifted Hens’s reality, allowing him to access a meditative state in which he felt truly connected with himself and the world. Describing his very first cigarette, Hens writes, “I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. In that manner, I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.”