Women Smoking Snapshots – Touching The Sublime

“Cigarettes are bad for you; that is why they are so good”
– Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime

 

 

Richard Klein, Professor of French at Cornell University and editor of Diacritics, quit smoking while writing Cigarettes Are Sublime and has been nicotine-free ever since. So do we learn to smoke?

As we wonder why, we’re delighted to share collector Ed Engel’s snapshots of smoking women.

 

 

 

“I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.”

― David Lynch

 

 

“In the forties, while my mother and I were visiting a relative in New York and my father was busy with students in Wellesley and butterflies in Cambridge, he collapsed with acute food poisoning after a meal at a Cambridge restaurant called the Wursthaus. He was hospitalized, and then shown a routine chest Xray that revealed a dark mass in one lung. He was told it was cancer. He stopped smoking cold turkey, started eating molasses candy as a surrogate, and gained some 30 pounds. It turned out later that the Xray had not been his at all.”

– Dmitry Nabokov on his father Vladimir

 

 

 

“…talking leads almost inevitably to smoking”

– C.S. Lewis on his daily routine

 

 

“I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.”

― Albert Camus, The Stranger

 

 

How is it that smokers can abandon smoking when they come among more moral conditions of life and again start smoking as soon as they fall among a depraved set? Why do gamblers almost all smoke? Why among women do those who lead a regular life smoke least? Why do prostitutes and madmen all smoke? Habit is habit, but evidently smoking stands in some definite connection with the craving to stifle conscience, and achieves the end required of it.

– Leo Tolstoy 

 

 

Tall
Low blood pressure
Need lots of sleep
Sudden craving for pure sugar (but dislike desserts — not a high enough concentration)
Intolerance for liquor
Heavy smoking
Tendency to anemia
Heavy protein craving
Asthma
Migraines
Very good stomach — no heartburn, constipation, etc.
Negligible menstrual cramps
Easily tired by standing
Like heights
Enjoy seeing deformed people (voyeuristic)
Nailbiting
Teeth grinding
Nearsighted, astigmatism
Frileuse (very sensitive to cold, like hot summers)
Not very sensitive to noise (high degree of selective auditory focus)

– Susan Sontag, diary entry, 1964