The best cigarette you will ever smoke, Gregor Hens writes in his new memoir, Nicotine, is the relapse cigarette. It tastes better, he adds, “the longer the prior abstinence.”
This is dangerous knowledge. More than a few smokers relapsed after September 11. Others did after the recent presidential election, as if heeding the poet James Dickey’s dictum that “guilt is magical.” Some of us barely keep the urge at bay. There’s a dark sliver in a former smoker’s mind that half-longs for dire events, so as to justify lighting up again. But it’s not as if we need large
This is dangerous knowledge. More than a few smokers relapsed after September 11. Others did after the recent presidential election, as if heeding the poet James Dickey’s dictum that “guilt is magical.” Some of us barely keep the urge at bay. There’s a dark sliver in a former smoker’s mind that half-longs for dire events, so as to justify lighting up again. But it’s not as if we need large
