Our addictions are a part of our modernity and a response to modernity, a choice to surrender. Addictions are also attitudes; at first a fact of the body, they become a perspective on the world. We still don’t know why, when given the chance, a rat willingly doses itself to death with nicotine. But if I were a lab rat I would smoke too. If addiction or the oral-compulsive character were truly destiny, why not simply embrace it? “Enjoy your symptom!”—as the Lacanians say—with the hope that a particular object of desire will, some day, fail to satisfy the primal urge. On that day, we will be free, for an instant, to choose the next thing we wish to dominate our lives.

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.

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.

Paul Auster, a writer who has built a large work out of coincidence, catches this side of smoking perfectly in the script for the movie Smoke. A series of events and improbable friendships arise out of random meetings in the smoke shop, presided over by Harvey Keitel’s salesman, Augie.2 Black, white, rich, poor, man, woman, smokers have the smoker’s code and the smoker’s bond. It’s a basic form of solidarity and one of the few left. Someone asks you for a cigarette, you give it willingly: a light, no problem. From there anything can happen, or nothing else. It’s a rare moment of sharing among strangers, an almost ancient form of hospitality in the inhospitable culture of great modern cities.