Cigarettes
A choice quote from the reason I was kept up from an ostensibly early bedtime (11:30) to 5:30 this morning
…I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”
“Do they ever think?” she asked involunterily, and stopped; the question was her one personal torture and she did not want to discuss it.
The old man looked as if he had noticed the sudden stop and understood it; but he did not start discussing it; he said, intead, “I don’t like the thing that’s happening to people….
Nor do I.