In December 2019, shortly after being diagnosed with rampant lung cancer, the American poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl published The Art of Dying , an essay in which, faced with the certainty of imminent death (the oncologist had given him six months of life) engaged in an intimate, funny and devastating conversation with himself. A smoker since the age of 16, he confessed with relief that he would have been embarrassed to die much younger because people would have mumbled things like “well, he smoked, you know”, but that at seventy-seven the best part was over. He knew what it was like to overcome a dependency (“I'm an alcoholic twenty-seven years sober”), although, he lamented, he lacked the ability to kick the tobacco habit and continue writing.
“Nicotine stimulates and relaxes. Overtake that". Schjeldahl died last week, already in his eighties and with a tumor-proof sense of humor ("I swatted a fly the other day and thought: I survived you"), without abdicating - at least publicly - his fondness for cigarettes. “Resign now? Sure, and may the rest of my life be a tragicomedy of nicotine withdrawal."
He wasn't proud, but he didn't want his life to be reduced to a gigantic ashtray full of ashes. What was killing the prestigious critic of The New Yorker was just one more actor, now macabre protagonist, of some urgent and not at all melancholic memoirs in which he walked through his existence with the same sincerity and humanity with which he had searched for the truth in the art. He had lived wild and was damaged. “I had a moment, while anticipating my diagnosis, where I felt special. But is there anything more common than dying?
Bodies break. I have seen loved ones die and yet as I write this I see how the first cigarette of the day is consumed in the ashtray. I would like to say that it is the last. Smoking is an idiotic act. It causes a slow effect of flushing and exhaustion, connecting you to both the fragility of your body and the humiliating terror of addiction. In my long life as a smoker I managed to kick it for fifteen years – I never missed it! -, until in the desert of a sentimental crisis the mirage reappeared in the form of a crossroads: "Either I smoke or I separate". I smoked and broke up. Surely no one better than the British artist Sarah Lucas has been able to capture the mixture of self-destruction and pleasure that smoking implies with works such as the devastating Is Suicide Genetic? : a motorcycle helmet completely covered in cigarettes resting on a charred armchair. Smoking is knowing that life can turn into smoke.
I better give the floor to Schjeldahl: “I always said that when my time came I wanted to go fast. But where's the fun in that?
