Friday, May 17, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Clive James

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After thirteen hours we arrived at Bangkok airport and I raced for the smoking room. Smoking room was a big name for a small Perspex cubicle that was opaque from the outside because of the grey pressure of the fumes within. I opened the door, saw all the other smokers sitting there face to face in two tight rows, and I realised that I would have to smoke in the standing position. Then I realised I didn’t have to light up. All I had to do was breathe in. It was the moment of truth.
--
'Smoking the Memory', on giving up smoking

 
Clive James

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There's smoke in here. There's the smokers over there. Look at you, cool as a f**king cucumber. How many smokers do we have here tonight? [only a few people cheer] Whew! Listen to all that energy they can pump out at will. [goes into coughing fit for about 20 seconds] Thanks smokers. Valiant effort on your parts. Next time just hock up a chunk of lung, just rear back and launch a phlegm-gem toward the stage. Get one of those raw oysters happening. [mock spits and mimics mucus growing legs and running away] Hey hey hey, phlegm shouldn't have legs. Now, I'm no doctor but I've seen one on T.V. You ready for this, smokers? Listen to this: how many non-smokers do we have here tonight? [loud applause] Bunch of whinin' maggots. [lights cigarette] Bunch of obnoxious, self-righteous slugs. Don't take that wrong. I'd quit smoking if I didn't think I'd become one of you. I'm willing to die seven years before my time just so I'll be cool each last f**kin' day.

 
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I had many doubts before. I was brought up in England amongst foreign ideas and an atmosphere entirely foreign. About many things in Hinduism I had once been inclined to believe that they were imaginations, that there was much of dream in it, much that was delusion and Maya. But now day after day I realised in the mind, I realised in the heart, I realised in the body the truths of the Hindu religion. They became living experiences to me, and things were opened to me which no material science could explain.

 
Sri Aurobindo
 

Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened — I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration — almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it. It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality.

 
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I've stopped smoking...I think the cost was a lot of it, and not being able to breathe. I first gave up smoking when I was eight.

 
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They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.
It could rain in a room this big.

 
Hugh Laurie
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