"All desires end in disillusion, all possessions are a disappointment, all pleasures are a mixed blessing. Love implies a partner (onanism is not love), alcohol leads to a hangover, war to death, gambling to ruin, greediness to obesity. There are no exceptions. In order to go sailing you need a boat; to hunt, a gun - or a horse and hounds. The pleasures of collecting are the most frustrating of all ( the devotee is always lacking a Titian or a Rothko). Making one's fortune is never-ending: the nearer you get to your goal, the further away it is.
Objects of pure sensual delight are rare in this world. Even the greatest wines - perish the thought - can serve to quench one's thirst, utilitarian infamy. But the only use of the cigar is for smoking, and smoking is a pleasure, cigar smoking the supreme pleasure.
Cigars favor isolation as much as contact. You light one up to escape the world and yourself as well as to bring it closer. Its smoke both isolates and brings closer; it is both a mask and a link. It is an instrument of separation as well as of sharing. One can only smoke in peace, but smoking also spreads peace. What statesman can claim as much without lying?
The invention of the cigar surpasses all the others because it is free. Its simplicity makes it the equal in nobility to the highest products of the human mind. Entirely natural, it involves no artifice. The four elements — earth, air, fire, and water — and the hand of man, without any intermediary apart from the cigar roller's guillotine, intervene alone in its development, then in the flourishing which is its finally burning. A natural product, the cigar is homogeneous and coherent: tobacco in tobacco, nothing but tobacco. Real cigars escape machinery. They come into contact only with the roller's hand, the wood of their boxes, the hand and lips of the smoker, before being transmuted into stimulating and consoling smoke.
Tobacco quickly conquered the world, but the expansion of the cigar was very slow; a difference which is even more troubling since the cigar was the first way of smoking tobacco. The pipe is dated, the cigarette quite recent, while the cigars goes back to the dawn of time. We do not know for how many thousands of years it helped its inventors, the American Indians, to overcomes the difficulties of life."
— Eric Deschodt & Philippe Morane.
The Cigar
How much we can learn from each other, between cigar and tea, and the finer things in life....
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