Book Report
RICHARD KLEIN remembers his first puff only vaguely: he was 12, and sneaked around the corner at school with some friends. His last is equally indistinct: It was a couple of years ago in a bar in Paris. He smoked about half of the single cigarette he had been carrying around, and decided not to finish the rest. The decades in between were filled with packs of Marlboros and Gitanes, too many to count. "You never smoke just one cigarette," says the 53-year-old professor of French at Cornell. "It's always connected to the one that came before and the one that will come after."</br></br>The decisive moment for Klein came in his mid-thirties, as he watched his body start to decline. "I was making efforts to exercise, and discovered the effects smoking had on that. I realized I had to do something about this habit, and for the next 10 years began to struggle manfully." He also began to read Kant, in particular The Critique of Judgment and his theories about the sublime.</br></br>The addiction, the struggle against it and the philosopher came together to produce Cigarettes Are Sublime, an elegant and erudite examination of the question: If cigarettes are so bad, why do so many people insist on smoking them? "There is nowhere in the world," the author notes, "where people do not smoke if they are allowed to do so."</br></br>A cigarette offers what Kant terms a "negative pleasure": an intimation of infinity, a safe glimpse into the void. "Warning smokers or neophytes of the dangers entices them more powerfully to the edge of the abyss, where, like travelers in a Swiss landscape, they can be thrilled by the subtle grandeur of the perspectives on mortality opened by the little terrors in every puff," Klein writes. "Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good - not good, not beautiful, but sublime."</br></br>Quoting the book out of context - cigarettes, according to one passage, are "one of America's proudest contributions to the world" - can make it seem like Klein is secretly employed by the tobacco companies. Actually, he makes clear upfront that he's stopped smoking, is glad of it, and isn't trying to encourage anyone else. After all, his whole point is that smokers don't need much encouragement.