The only man I’ve ever known who habitually smoked a pipe was the abbot of a Benedictine monastery. This is hardly a coincidence. Pipe-smoking belongs to earlier temporal rhythms and so, by definition, do monks.
Smoking a pipe can take somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Contrast cigarettes—the form of tobacco consumption which practically wiped out all others, till the rise of the vape. A cigarette is smoked through in three to five minutes. As for vaping, it can be done in any number of fits and starts, so that the vape makes no specific demands on its user’s time. Cigarettes and vapes are thus suitable for a harried, driven life, where leisure comes in the form of “breaks”, rather than long daily stretches of free time. These are tobacco vehicles fitted to the world of “jobs”.
Cigarettess and vapes are tobacco vehicles fitted to the world of “jobs”.
Of course, the world of jobs is also that of the two-day weekend and the legally mandated vacation. We are not without leisure time. But we have learnt to make leisure itself frantic. It requires “activities”: sports, hobbies, travel. Alternatively, it is empty time, that must be filled with distraction and entertainment: radio has been succeeded by television, replaced in turn by the digital omni-device, so that one never needs to face a moment of empty time that cannot be filled with “content” at the press of a button.
Such forms of leisure have no need or room for pipes. Pipes belong with conversation, or with stretches of thoughtful quiet (think of Sherlock Holmes brooding and smoking). They belong to that most delightful set-piece of the nineteenth-century novel: the long stretch of time after dinner, when men and women spoke and read to each other and played the piano and sung. That was all quite ritualized, and often included stretches of time where men and women were separated: only the men smoked pipes, and often did so when the ladies were away. To be sure, the novels tell us these evenings were frequently dreary and foolish affairs. But, in their form, they always held the potential for grave or merry conversation, for fine, or at least touching, musical interludes, for falling in love. No such potential exists in an evening spent in front of the TV; still less when every member of a party is scrolling on their own device.
Pipes belong with conversation, or with stretches of thoughtful quiet.
Of course, pipe-smoking has also been crushed for the more direct reason that, because it take so long, it is by nature an indoor form of smoking, and smoking indoors is generally now about as offensive as public nudity. But the causal sequence here surely goes both ways: cigarettes lend themselves to furtive and grubby smoking, to taking the form of a quick, guilty pleasure. The cigarette-smoker is already almost on the run, and as such, is a promising target for the public health commissars to hunt down.
Today’s teenager, in his regimented moments of respite, may still work up enough naughtiness to furtively smoke a cigarette or take a few drags on a vape: at least it’s against the rules. But Huck Finn—far too free and ingenious a being to ever be called a “teenager”—smoked a pipe:
“I laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky; not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before”.
There’s little time to see such things when burning through a cigarette, and no way of doing so when glued to a screen. But remember—pipe-smoking is Bad For You.
