On Smoking > IDEAS & IDEALS

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Everywhere smokers are losing their ground on which they have been standing so firmly and proudly for so long. "No Smoking" notices on the buses, on the trains, and on the walls of the public places and buildings, are no longer mere decorations as they used to be in our country just a few years ago. They mean it now. I saw the other day, in the waiting-room of Seoul Railway Station, for the first time in my life, a man, an elderly man, arguing in a foul temper with a young policeman, who caught the man smoking under the notice written in red on the wall. The policeman seemed determined to fine the man, while the man would not accept the penalty obediently. A large ring of crowd was instantly formed around the scene and watched the progress of the incident in silence with mixed feelings and divided interests. Although I am a non-smoker, I felt sympathy for the smoker for no particular reasons.

     Indeed, the general lot of the smokers have suddenly become a very sad and pathetic one. They can no longer exhale freely the glorious smoke from the deep of their lungs with the time-honored pomp and circumstance disregarding time and place. They have to watch around first before they light a cigarette. To their great vexation, they have found themselves in a position of being guilty or apologetic of their innocent habit, pleasure, and privilege. Smokers‘ superiority over the non-smokers has been replaced by the non-smokers' worry, suspicion, pity, scorn, and hatred towards them. Like the precarious fate of the illegal  aliens here and elsewhere in the world who should live in constant vigilance and fear of being found out and deported, smokers are becoming a minority group suffering from visible as well as invisible social pressure, harrassment and even discrimination.

     I feel just puzzled and embarrassed about how and why this sudden change of our attitude towards smoking came about. No one, even the incorrigible smokers including, has regarded the habit of smoking a good or a virtue, but it has not been a positive vice nor an evil either. All of us grew up being told at home by our fathers and taught at school by our teachers, usually heavy smokers themselves, not to smoke. And, some timid boys, like me, followed this advice faithfully, and some brave and daring ones ignored the prohibition and had their own way. This sacred interdict had been effective only until we were senior highschool students, and after graduation no one told anything about or against smoking, nor anyone called it a problem. For the adults at least smoking has been regarded and accepted as a universal human habit and custom, the harm of which, if there be any, could be tolerated and endured.

     But now smoking has become, all of a sudden, a positive evil, a matter of life and death. Smoking cannot be treated as lightly as it was, because it is not just a matter of annoyance to the non-smokers as it used to be. It can, they say, kill you and me. According to the doctors, it causes lung cancer, and the more horrible news is that not only the smokers who inhale and exhale the smoke with great pleasure and contentment, but also the grimacing non-smokers who happen to breathe in the same smoke-polluted air, are very or more likely to develop the deadly disease. This new scientific discovery, theory, knowledge, or whatever, is indeed a revelation terrifying enough to make us, the non-smokers, hate, curse, avoid all the smokers altogether as much and quickly as possible, as if they were messengers from hell spreading pestilence and leprosy.

     But I just wonder how this deadly and accursed thing of smoking, if it be so bad and so harmful to man, could have survived so long, spread so widely, thrived so vigorously, and more than anything else, been enjoyed and  loved so universally by man. There must be something in it beside facile explanation of harmful nicotine and its addictive trait in it. The first man who had the serendipity of finding out the  peculiar and funny art of burning some special kind of dried herb in the furnace of mouth and letting out the smoke through the two chimneys of nose must have found in it something very good for him. What is clear is the indisputable guess that smoking started as a medical cure or a treatment of some discomfort in our body or in mind. Since then smoking has been doing mankind definitely more good than harm, otherwise it must have ceased to be long, long before.

     Indeed, we cannot deny the great service smoking has done and is doing to mankind ever since it was first discovered and practiced. It has calmed down our excitement and anger, eased our heavy mind, comforted us when we were in sorrow, pain, and anxiety, and dispelled our boredom and fear. We have seen and felt in the diffusion of the exhaled smoke from the depth of our heart the evaporation of all the agonies into the air. What does a poet do, when he can not find a good word to use? He lights a cigarette and waits, puffing on it, for the arrival of the grace of muse. What a businessman do, when he finds himself in a big financial trouble? A deep and hard pull on the pipe will not solve his financial problem, but surely it will allow him time to think out an alternative to unthinkable steps that can be taken by a desperate man. For some lonely and poor people, smoking cannot be a matter of good or bad; it's the very thing that makes their life endurable, possible, and even meaningful.
  
     Imagine a world from which smoking has disappeared altogether. No one smokes, and consequently the disagreeable smoke and smell cannot be perceived anywhere. Dirty cigarette butts are nowhere to be found, and ash-trays are all gone. Now, do you expect the Garden of Eden will be restored with the disappearance of these evils? Will all of us be able to breathe in the purer air into our lung, and enjoy the longevity of more than a hundreds years? Will the millennium come? Maybe, but before all those blessings arrive, all the hospitals in the country will immediately be full of groans of innumerable new patients who complain of symptoms of illness such as headache, indigestion, uneasiness, and dizziness that would surely puzzle the best doctors in the country as to their causes and cures.

     Along with several human characteristics that distinguish man from the other lowly creatures on the face of the earth, smoking is unique to man. Man only smokes, and man only knows how to smoke. The smoking tigers mentioned in our old stories testify to the antiquity of smoking, not the verity of their existence. Once discovered by an unknown man, the practice has become more than just burning some dried herb at our mouth; it has become a human habit, custom, ritual, symbol, and culture. And above all, it has been a great friend to mankind ever since, and especially a friend in need.

     If smoking be an evil, as many more civilized non-smokers would like think it to be, it will be the one, as all the evils in the world, that cannot and must not be uprooted at a stroke. Evils, big or small, die hard, once they are born. And smoking is, I think, among all the evils, is a mild, tolerable, and even necessary one. I am afraid that people would resort to much more violent measures in order to resolve their daily psychological pressures when freedom of smoking is restricted or reduced too drastically.

     Personally I will miss it very much, even if I do not smoke, if all the smokers are really gone  from the earth,--the smoke, the smell, and the infinite variety of the beautifully-designed cigarette packs, pipes, and lighters,--a part of valuable human culture.
          (November 14, 1996)