Read Online The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephen Fry
Ads: Link
the letters and diaries of those who had been present.
‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,’ says Lord Henry Wotton in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. ‘It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.’ It took me a long time, as with so many of Wilde’s remarks, to understandthat this was actually much more profound an insight than it at first glance appeared. The point is that a pleasure which leaves you satisfied stops being a pleasure the moment it has been enjoyed. You are now sated, there is nothing more to be got from it. Sex and food are pleasures of this kind. What follows? A touch of afterglow if you are that sort of person, but mostly guilt, flatulence and self-disgust. You don’t want any more of that kind of pleasure for some time to come. As for behaviour modifiers like alcohol and narcotics, one may want more and more, but they alter mood and manner, and the crash and the hangover that come after can be deeply unpleasant and lowering to the spirits. But a cigarette … a cigarette delivers the keen joy, the hug of gratification, and then – nothing more than the desire to experience it all over again. And so on. No moment of feeling engorged, full, unworthy and sick, nor hangover or mood crash. A cigarette is perfect because, like a highly evolved virus, it attaches itself to the brain of the user such that its only purpose is to induce them to have another. There is a reward for that in the form of pleasure, but the reward is too short-lived to be called satisfaction.
I had then Holmes and Wilde on my side. I had Wodehouse and Churchill, Bogart and Bette Davis, Noël Coward and Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray and Harold Pinter. And ranged against us? Bourgeois nose-wrinklers, sour health-mongers, Hitler, Goebbels and Bernard Shaw, cranks, puritans and interfering prigs. Smoking was a banner of bohemianism, a sign of the rejection of middle-class prudery and respectability, and I was a whale on that, despite being in my heart of hearts as middle class, unadventurous and respectable as anyone I knew. One has, after all, no one to convince in these matters but oneself.If I was to ally myself with outsiders, artists, radicals and revolutionaries then it was natural that I would smoke and smoke proudly. I know. Pathetic, isn’t it?
I have said nothing of death here. Nothing of the ravages to the complexion, throat, heart and lungs that cigarettes wreak. What Oscar did not know is that the most superb quality of all possessed by these beguiling little cylinders of joy is the
gradualness
of their toxicity, the imperceptibly nuanced encroachments of their poison. Their very benignity (after the clammy dizziness, reeling and nausea induced in virgin smokers to which I have already alluded), the excruciating slowness and delicacy with which they set about their business of killing, the irresistibly tempting credit period they offer that promises so seemingly unbridgeable a distance between present pleasure and future payment … such slow, unremitting and diabolical subtlety delivers what a true sadist and connoisseur of pain would surely consider the highest pitch of the exquisite.
I had been a most vocal apologist for smoking and a noisily belligerent enemy of the anti-smoking lobby. But as I sat toying with the Dunhill microphone pipe that day I realized that I had changed. Inasmuch as experiences are rarely to be regretted there was something pleasing to my mind now in considering life as a non-smoker. I had enjoyed well over thirty years of tobacco use and now I was to see what life would be like without it. I was almost looking forward to testing myself. So long as I pledged never ever to be intolerant of those fellow smokers I left behind.
Fight fire with fire, fight drugs with drugs. I had heard about a pill called Zyban, a proprietary name for amfebutamone, better known in America as Welbutrin,one of the most prescribed anti-depressants in the world. I had read somewhere that it also
‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,’ says Lord Henry Wotton in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. ‘It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.’ It took me a long time, as with so many of Wilde’s remarks, to understandthat this was actually much more profound an insight than it at first glance appeared. The point is that a pleasure which leaves you satisfied stops being a pleasure the moment it has been enjoyed. You are now sated, there is nothing more to be got from it. Sex and food are pleasures of this kind. What follows? A touch of afterglow if you are that sort of person, but mostly guilt, flatulence and self-disgust. You don’t want any more of that kind of pleasure for some time to come. As for behaviour modifiers like alcohol and narcotics, one may want more and more, but they alter mood and manner, and the crash and the hangover that come after can be deeply unpleasant and lowering to the spirits. But a cigarette … a cigarette delivers the keen joy, the hug of gratification, and then – nothing more than the desire to experience it all over again. And so on. No moment of feeling engorged, full, unworthy and sick, nor hangover or mood crash. A cigarette is perfect because, like a highly evolved virus, it attaches itself to the brain of the user such that its only purpose is to induce them to have another. There is a reward for that in the form of pleasure, but the reward is too short-lived to be called satisfaction.
I had then Holmes and Wilde on my side. I had Wodehouse and Churchill, Bogart and Bette Davis, Noël Coward and Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray and Harold Pinter. And ranged against us? Bourgeois nose-wrinklers, sour health-mongers, Hitler, Goebbels and Bernard Shaw, cranks, puritans and interfering prigs. Smoking was a banner of bohemianism, a sign of the rejection of middle-class prudery and respectability, and I was a whale on that, despite being in my heart of hearts as middle class, unadventurous and respectable as anyone I knew. One has, after all, no one to convince in these matters but oneself.If I was to ally myself with outsiders, artists, radicals and revolutionaries then it was natural that I would smoke and smoke proudly. I know. Pathetic, isn’t it?
I have said nothing of death here. Nothing of the ravages to the complexion, throat, heart and lungs that cigarettes wreak. What Oscar did not know is that the most superb quality of all possessed by these beguiling little cylinders of joy is the
gradualness
of their toxicity, the imperceptibly nuanced encroachments of their poison. Their very benignity (after the clammy dizziness, reeling and nausea induced in virgin smokers to which I have already alluded), the excruciating slowness and delicacy with which they set about their business of killing, the irresistibly tempting credit period they offer that promises so seemingly unbridgeable a distance between present pleasure and future payment … such slow, unremitting and diabolical subtlety delivers what a true sadist and connoisseur of pain would surely consider the highest pitch of the exquisite.
I had been a most vocal apologist for smoking and a noisily belligerent enemy of the anti-smoking lobby. But as I sat toying with the Dunhill microphone pipe that day I realized that I had changed. Inasmuch as experiences are rarely to be regretted there was something pleasing to my mind now in considering life as a non-smoker. I had enjoyed well over thirty years of tobacco use and now I was to see what life would be like without it. I was almost looking forward to testing myself. So long as I pledged never ever to be intolerant of those fellow smokers I left behind.
Fight fire with fire, fight drugs with drugs. I had heard about a pill called Zyban, a proprietary name for amfebutamone, better known in America as Welbutrin,one of the most prescribed anti-depressants in the world. I had read somewhere that it also
Similar Books
