It saddens me to read, in the pages of this newspaper, that Syracuse University was considering a campus-wide ban on tobacco. Paraphrasing Nietzsche for my own purposes, I lament this unfortunate state of affairs: “The cause of every stupidity today… lies in the existence of a [ban-smoking] question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions.” The problem with anti-smokers is not that they are enemies of freedom, it is that they are enemies of culture. When it comes to freedom, I plead indifference. I am a supporter of the nanny-state and a ceaseless defender of those who aspire to impose virtue on callous beasts. But, the anti-smokers are reactionary toxins polluting our minds with their crass slogans and decimating our spirits with their obtuse morality. Let us cast out these hobgoblins and reaffirm what we have always known: the sublimity of smoking is irrebuttable.

Richard Klein, author of “Cigarettes are Sublime,” on the nature of the cigarette’s unusual beauty: “Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call ‘a negative pleasure’: a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity …The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and a time of heightened attention that gives rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives …and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.”

There is the health of one’s body, and there is the health of one’s spirit. These two different forms of health have little relation to one another, because the body is always decaying and is destined to perish, whereas the spirit suffers no such immutable constraints. When we choose the shell over the transcendent, we doom ourselves to exist on nothing more than a bed of sand.

Christopher White
Junior, College of Arts and Sciences