For Richard Klein, author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, a book written with an odd intellectual boosterism about all aspects of smoking, the cigarette transforms anxiety at the overwhelming sense of impending death—your own or someone else’s—into a manageable death by bits and pieces:

By smoking a cigarette, ingesting a certain quantity of nicotine, the organism is hastening its death, is producing in itself more noxious effects than if it endured the discomfort of anxiety. But the death it is hastening is its own death; it substitutes its own path toward death for the process over which it otherwise had no control. Using cigarettes to master anxiety may be understood as preferring a certain form of dying over an intolerable form of living.