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Do I need to smoke?
Ellopos: Why do we smoke, really?
Introducing Allen Carr's, My experience of smoking
Page 3
It is true what Carr wrote, that to stop smoking is not to give up anything at all: you have only to win, nothing to lose. This is the most precious element in Carr's book, explaining clearly enough that stopping smoking is not some kind of ascetic abstinence! There is no pleasure whatever in smoking, there is no benefit for the taste or any other sense, there is no gain for any mental power. Most people fail to stop smoking because they think that without a cigarette their life becomes emptier, less worthy, as if they lost some pleasure and meaning. Even that famous after-the-meal cigarette is a pure illusion. Without food and / or drink smoking would become totally intolerable. Meals and drinks just give us a temporary power to suffer smoking, and we call this suffering a pleasure!
Carr shows that what we feel as sacrifice is just the abandonment of the addiction. Satisfying the addiction is not equal to satisfying our organism and senses, on the contrary. We have to learn how to damage our organism systematically, in order to satisfy our addiction. This is of course not a fulness of pleasure, but the opposite.If nicotine is a drug and smokers junkies, as it is true indeed, if what we call pleasure in smoking is just the relief of the junkie after the precious dose, if everyone’s first cigarette was disgusting, if everyone needed to force oneself to smoke, if there is no pleasure involved but only the brainwashing of a society that sometime saw or even now sees some benefit in smoking, and then the junkie’s relief through serving an addiction, - what can we say, at last, about these famous benefits of smoking?
It seems a paradox, but in my opinion a benefit can be recognized in the addiction as such! This is I think something that Carr missed, in an otherwise excellent book. The very addiction as an addiction may be useful to a person!
Cf. Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom | Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
