Clinging to the Wreckage

[storeynicholas]

It's interesting how smoking seems to be one of those rare binary issues. 5 packs of Gauloises a day or nothing?

shredder -
It is certainly true that, for some people smoking means nearly constantly doing it or something close to it. This is where a pipe or cigar can have great advantages as they do not have to be lit and just having the materials to hand is enough. Churchill's cigars were not always lit and he, effectively, chewed them - making paper covers 'bellybandos' (as he called them) for the cigars to prevent them getting soggy. Some people,if they smoke cigarettes just have to chain smoke them but they are often people who can, alternatively, just go without them altogether or even give up smoking without a struggle. Fewer are they who can smoke just a couple of modern cigarettes a day but an elderly couple of Italians here have just started smoking (he is 72 and she is 69) because they are convinced that two cigarettes a day each is good for their brains. Apparently, their children would be outraged at the notion of their parents smoking - so it is a Big Secret. I have come across people who used to smoke a couple of the big, strong Turkish, Turkish-Balkan or Egyptian cigarettes a day until, as John Osborne the playwright (who was one of them), said - the EU dashed the tobacco from their lips. That was a Big Pity. It is also an act outside the liberal traditions of any civilization for any government to presume to impose protection for people against themselves. That is beyond inelegance - that is brutality. After all their history and contribution to civilization, the European nations in the EU really should know better. At least they have given up trying to regulate the shapes of fruit that may be sold. They need to learn even more abstemiousness in interference.

couch - I am not sure that we are that far apart, except, maybe, that I regard our (whimsically determined) leases of life here as having less importance than you do. Emily Bronte puts my feeling at its best and far better than I could put it; maybe even as well as it could be put:

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanish'd with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!'

Yea, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

and several of Edward FitGerald's verses from Omar Khayyam, especially this one:

Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears -
Tomorrow? - Why Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.

NJS

[storeynicholas]

I see that photographs of Catherine Deneuve have appeared in the Great Smokers' thread. I believe that her features represented Marianne for some years and, given that Marianne is, in some measure, the mother of the Statue of Liberty (the gift of France), presumably, there is some argument for saying that Liberty, herself, smokes.
:D__oooOOO
NJS

[sartorius]

Might it instead also be desirable or virtuous, not to live timidly merely to prolong existence, but to live actively to prolong one's span of vigorous life, and prolong the concomitant ability to drink deep of experience and contribute to the world through achievement?

Couch, you put your case most admirably. A thoroughly clear-headed (you have evidently not been on the sauce ) exposition.

It seems to me also that we have a positive duty to prolong the vigorous life, for the sake of our dependents.

I'm curious incidentally about your recently published paperback. Would you mind telling us (or, if not, perhaps I could ask you to PM me?) a little more about it?

[couch]

Thanks for the kind words, Sartorius. Good wine well used, and all that.

Excellent point about dependents. I can no longer claim that responsibility, but I try to think of future works as progeny, and to feel the same sort of duty to them and to the community to make good use of what gifts I may have received. I find it all too easy to be lazy!

(PM sent).

[storeynicholas]

Thanks for the kind words, Sartorius. Good wine well used, and all that.

Excellent point about dependents. I can no longer claim that responsibility, but I try to think of future works as progeny, and to feel the same sort of duty to them and to the community to make good use of what gifts I may have received. I find it all too easy to be lazy!

(PM sent).

I know of your excellent works and believe that they should be more widely known - the most well-known about quite a fascinating hard-liver, I should say. Going back to a point made, by both you and sartorius: if a man has dependents at 86 years of age (or even at 93), he has led a vigorous (if, not necessarily, virtuous) life - and I raise my glass of sauce to him! I feel that I ought to say that the title of this thread I pinched from an auto-biographical book by the late John Mortimer: reached a good age - champagne for breakfast; finished his acclaimed writing by luncheon and devoted the rest of the day (as did Kingley Amis; Ian Fleming; Scott Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway and a host of others), to seeing just how far they could take it... and that's before we get back to Thomas de Quincy and his laudanum-stained m/s for Confessions of an Opium Eater... . or Coleridge and Kubla Khan - some of the best things ever written have been written under the affluence of incohol or something...
NJS.

[couch]

Thanks, NJS, for your kind words. I neither practice nor advocate abstemiousness in drink, but a wise man knows his capacity. William Manchester in his biography of Churchill calculated that there was always some alcohol in his bloodstream as an adult; but then he worked standing up and was very active despite his bulk in later life, and was seldom impaired in a crisis. Hemingway's best work was done when he was too poor to eat lunch and spent his middays looking at pictures in the Louvre to forget his hunger. I myself have always looked forward to the income required to breakfast on champagne (or indeed to spend my mornings writing!) and spend my afternoons in good food, good company, and a country ramble, but so far it remains over the horizon. (Actually, as I'm not really a morning person, Lorca's routine of partying until one every morning and then going up to write would probably be more productive.)

Writers may enjoy their poisons without becoming enslaved by them, which I suppose is one definition of moderation. One might well ask what notable late works we would have from Fitzgerald or Dylan Thomas or Jack Kerouac or many others who didn't live long enough to produce late works, had they known their capacity. And in the case of Coleridge and laudanum, his accounts of its dreamy inspirations are treated with great skepticism by modern scholars (the advantages to reputation of romanticizing Romanticism were already felt by the time of "Kubla Khan"), and were it not for the repeated interventions over 18 years of Dr. Gillman we would not have his Biographia Literaria or other later works at all. As it is he died at 62 from the enlarged heart and respiratory impairment characteristic of opium abuse.

There have been plenty of alcoholic writers who believed that alcohol was essential to their creative process; plenty who disputed that, and plenty for whom the issue never came up. I suppose, if we're looking at patterns of life, there are the two models: hare and tortoise, enfant terrible and old master, Achilles and Odysseus. As one who was never in a position to be a prodigy, it may be the merest self-justification that I aspire to the second model. I don't believe one is inherently superior to the other in any moral sense, and great things have come of both. I'm no fan of serious self-denial--discipline in season, yes. But my speculations have all been in response to the question in your original post: "But is there any point" in careful living, other than simply adding years of meaningless and enfeebled existence? It seems to me that there clearly can be such a point; without it, why bother?

I'll certainly join you in a toast to John Mortimer, a man with a more than usually perspicacious view of the human condition!

[shredder]

As mentioned, a wise man knows his capacity. Therefore, there is a place between a teetotaller and an alchoholic.

A German chap once opined that intoxication is a prerequisite for the highest forms of creativity. What he did not prescribe is the source of intoxication. It may be alcohol. It may be drugs. It may be sex. It may be the landscape. It may be life itself. To live, rather than to exist. To live THIS life, rather than to ensure all is in order for the AFTERLIFE.

I am not so sure that there is a point to something just because one does it. Even if there were, I imagine that not all of them are valid or worthwhile.

[storeynicholas]

This is what can be achieved on a moderate amount of Diebolt-Vallois champagne:

http://www.amazon.com/Madwomen-mujeres- ... 262&sr=8-5

NJS

PS to the list of enfants terribles, please add Dorothy Parker - "Razors pain you, rivers are damp..."
NJS :D_oooOOO [these are supposed to be smoke rings, by the way].

[Costi]

A pleonastic, title, NJS
I like where this thread is going and I very much enjoyed reading couch's thoughts. I feel like he X-rayed my mind and put it into words.
Like a friend of mine says, we should enjoy the fact that we were born alive. This, of course, means we should take advantage of what life has to offer, but I think the past or the present are not our most valuable assets - the future is! When you have nothing to look forward to, no projects, no intentions, no plans and you can only concentrate on the present and draw your mental energy from the past, then you are a dead man already. Hedonism is good and enjoyable every now and then, but not as a ruling force in life. I know people in very difficult physical situations who have an incredible zest for life, much more than many of us who enjoy good health and take it for granted.

[storeynicholas]

Actually, the title derived from the shot fired over in the Great Smokers' Photographs thread - it just occurred to me that psychological props (if one must say it), such as drinking or smoking can be, for some, tabula in naufragio, at times of stress or crisis (hence the reference to the wreckage) - or mere solace in the world. Some say that happiness involves having something agreeable to do; someone to love and something to look forward to, all that I'm doing is adding a few drinks and smokes into the equation and, certainly, happy memories.
NJS _oooOOO

[Costi]

I meant the title of the Amazon book to which you provided the link above. But the explanation proved interesting nevertheless

[storeynicholas]

I meant the title of the Amazon book to which you provided the link above. But the explanation proved interesting nevertheless

Ah yes! I see! - well that is more than that - it is axiomatic!
NJS _oooOOO

[storeynicholas]

One might well ask what notable late works we would have from Fitzgerald or Dylan Thomas or Jack Kerouac or many others who didn't live long enough to produce late works, had they known their capacity.


"But is there any point" in careful living, other than simply adding years of meaningless and enfeebled existence? It seems to me that there clearly can be such a point; without it, why bother?

I have thought long and hard about these two points. On the first: the question must surely arise whether, but for their addictions, these men would ever have produced any works at all.

On the second: I put my own case badly. I meant: is there any point in just extending life, when it has become meaningless and enfeebled? - as it does for most; because few are they who leave behind more than descendants and dusty memories of noble - but out-worn - striving.

One final, interesting point on Coleridge is that the Gillmans' house in The Grove in Highgate is the unusual subject of two commemorative plaques - one in bronze to Coleridge (who is buried, across the way in St Michael's Church) and a 'blue plaque', to J B Priestley, who lived there later. The present owner of that house is a very successful man (it must have one of the greatest views in London; down across Fitzroy Park, Parliament Hill and the landscape of London beneath) and he was a student with me: in those days, he used to say that he was too poor to eat and to smoke, so he preferred to smoke as, at least, it took the edge off his hunger!! Moreover, after he was 'saved' by the Gillmans, name me a great poem by Coleridge - or a great poem by Swinburne, after he was 'saved' by Watts Dunton! There is nothing, even close, in rhapsody, in Swinburne's case, to compare with the opening lines:

"Maiden and mistress of the months and stars,
Now folded in the flowerless fields of Heaven..."

- sublime - and, probably written, running around naked, drunk as a skunk, on brandy, in his Great James Street lodgings.

NJS _oooOOO

[marcelo]

Kurt Loup recalls in his memoirs, in 1954, a visit he had paid along with Thomas Mann to Minister Werner Schütz. He writes how delightful it was to see the way Thomas Mann would enjoy over a good cup of tea; and he continues: “To see Thomas Mann smoking is a real pleasure; he really knows how to enjoy a cigarette und to be enlivened by it”

[“Thomas Mann rauchen zu sehen ist eine wahre Freude; er versteht es, eine Zigarette wirkilch zu genieβen und sich von ihr beleben zu lassen”.]