How's your relationship with death?

Only the french could mourn the passing of indoor smoking with quite such melodrama, in quite such romantic terms and to quite such an extent. And mourning it they are. I did however, find myself rather taken in by the contribution of a certain nameless reader in Liberation last week (and I'm not translating because I like the phrasing too much):

"Cette propagande-maladie met a nu le secret du fumeur, son intime souffrance, un aspect visible de son rapport a la mort... cette espece de paradoxe de devoir envers soi-meme, imposé de l'exterieur, moi ca me rend tres sombre, cette infantilisation... franchement, je ressens comme une tragédie qu'on essaie de s'opposer a mes pulsions de mort. La clope compulsive est toujours noire, du coté de l'incinération, des cendres, de la destruction par le feu."

Perhaps in one of my "wholesome" bouts of carrot-munching jogging teetotalism (infrequent as they are) I might be quick to dismiss the elegant prose & to condemn point blank the unsavoury and rationally indefensible practice of polluting others' & one's own lungs. Today however, and with the frame of mind I'm in for most of the time, I'm certainly far more disposed to accept the realities of what I've come to realise is the universal tendancy towards a kind of self-destruction. These "pulsions de mort" as our madame puts it, that are in no way pathological.

And I suppose it is rather offensive, not to mention futile, this paternalistic hounding of the smoker who knows exactly what they're doing, as if they were genuinely expected to be convinced by the incredibly naive suggestion that the practice of actively harming oneself in the name of some form of gratification were somehow novel, somehow deviant, or in any way exceptional.