The best cigarette you will ever smoke, Gregor Hens writes in his new memoir, “Nicotine,” is the relapse cigarette. It tastes better, he adds, “the longer the prior abstinence.”
This is dangerous knowledge. More than a few smokers relapsed after Sept. 11. Others did after the recent presidential election, as if heeding the poet James Dickey's dictum that “guilt is magical.” Some of us barely keep the urge at bay. There's a dark sliver in a former smoker's mind that half-longs for dire events, so as to justify lighting up again. But it's not as if we need large cues, Mr. Hens writes, when small ones will do.
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