Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 21 January 2016

Don’t give up the fags and the booze: longevity for its own sake is the least worthy of human aspirations

issue 23 January 2016

Here I go again. I have stopped smoking. Until recently I had been smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, but it is now two weeks since I last had one. Initially I used e-cigarettes and nicotine lozenges to help me give up, but now I already feel I can manage without them. I think I may have conquered my addiction. I feel I could be free at last. But I hesitate to say so, because it is a feeling I have often had before. Like Mark Twain, I have often stopped smoking, but always after a period of time, even one as long as five years, I have taken it up again.

If one wants to stop smoking, one really should try to avoid reading Mark Twain, because his enthusiasm for it is infectious. In his Sketches, New and Old, published in 1875, he attacked someone he called ‘the moral statistician’ for ‘always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes …in the fatal practice of smoking’, while at the same time being ‘blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time’.

This moral statistician, said Twain, had never tried to find out ‘how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime, nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from...

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