Cultivating a Few Vices
Tobacco is under siege in America and that’s a bit ironic when you consider that much of what shaped this frontier into a new nation was the business of those golden leaves. Each new day brings a further tightening of the noose around the neck of those who partake.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the associated health risks and why it should be removed from the public arena, but many smokers are becoming alarmed that the day is soon coming when it will no longer be legal to smoke even in their own house or backyard.
And that would be a bad thing because frankly, I believe in cultivating a few vices.
I learned that from Mark Twain and there’s a story in his book, Following the Equator that supports my thesis:
Twain tells the story of a time when “I had been confined to my bed several days with lumbago. My case refused to improve.” Finally his doctor advised him to (to make a long story short) quit smoking, quit drinking coffee and tea, quit eating “all kinds of things that are dissatisfied with each other’s company” and quit drinking “two hot Scotches every night.” He took the doctor’s advice and “at the end of forty-eight hours the lumbago was discouraged and left me. I was a well man; so I gave thanks and took to those delicacies again.”
He continues:
It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended it to a lady. She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do.
So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again.
And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things.
So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn’t any. Now that they would have done some good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten the ship withal.
Why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper.
Righteousness and clean living are way overrated if you ask me, and human beings aren’t built for it anyway…
In: blog · Tagged with: tobacco, twain, vices