Travelers, however, like the poor, are not people whose lives are “insufficiently structured,” as Franzen would have it. Their lives are structured from above. The poor are also time-poor. They own their time as little as they own anything else. They are waiting in line to cash checks, or in front of an employment office, or at soup kitchens. Much of their lives are spent waiting, not for handouts but for real opportunities commensurate with their potential. Cigarettes are there to offer consolation and a feeling of choice amid the monotony, to transform waiting into hanging out. For people lucky enough to have a job, the smoke break becomes a momentary transgression against the time clock. It’s a little protest against time management which those on the side of time management, the managerial classes, cannot really share. For such people, including writers like Franzen, smoking is either an affectation, a form of reverse snobbery, or done out of a deep sense of estrangement from one’s own regulatory impulses. It’s this alienation from self-discipline in the very discipline of smoking that makes it an antibourgeois drug, and while writers may be lower class financially, they are virtual aristocrats of time.