I quit smoking almost exactly ten years ago, and let me tell you, I don’t recommend it. Quitting, I mean. Smoking I do recommend, for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to (a) look cool, (b) kill myself slowly, or (c) cause others around me to contract lung cancer secondhand. These are the only reasons the American Cancer Society can find to explain why anybody in his right mind would take up the habit.
But somewhere deep inside the secret archives of American medicine and science, there is — there must be — a thick report stamped with the words ” TOP SECRET. EYES ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE.” If you touch the report, you get a shock, and a dental assistant wearing foul-tasting rubber gloves will strap you in a chair and give you a serious periodontal examination as punishment. And in that report you can find the true, honest, actual cause of widespread smoking, which is this: Smoking makes you smarter.
I know this because I have gotten significantly dumber since the fabled day — November 11, 1986 — I threw a pack of Marlboros out of the window of my Ford Escort driving down a dark street in Rosslyn, Va. I had a phenomenal memory then. I could recite whole passages out of the books I loved word for word, and if I couldn’t get a passage quite right, I could remember that it was on a lefthand page about two-thirds of the way down somewhere near the end of the book’s first half. I made my living in part writing about movies, and I never took a note — I had total dialogue recall. There is not a popular number in the American songbook whose lyrics I did not know, and from only one or two listens.
I never kept an appointment book, or a Rolodex — a phone number, once dialed, was embedded forever in my brain. I was the managing editor of a weekly magazine that ran 25 articles a week and could remember the date, title, and author of every single piece we had ever published.
Now we flash forward to November 11, 1996. A colleague sticks his head in my office to ask me whether we have run an article on Topic X. It sounds vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. I try to summon up something — a title, an author — and what comes back is the mental version of white noise. A few minutes later, a phone call comes from the front desk. Writer Y is here for lunch. There is no notation of this appointment anywhere; I made the date and promptly forgot all about it . . . five days ago. And so it goes.
This is all normal, of course; I’m in my thirties now, and I have a lot on my mind. But how do I know that cigarettes boosted my memory and that quitting has punctured it? Because I could feel it happening just two or three months after my last Marlboro. Things just started slipping here and there: a message I forgot to deliver, a title I couldn’t quite recall. I’d begin to dial a phone number that had just been given to me and I would stop after five digits, completely stumped. From having a phenomenal memory, I slowly declined into a remarkable one, then to an excellent one, and finally to my present pretty good one.
But there’s a deeper problem. I did have the old phenomenal memory before I began smoking my first week in college, and I am convinced that smoking accelerated it. And all that memory remains: unbelievably arcane trivia about television, for example, like the fact that if a sitcom plot called for a gorilla in the ’60s and ’70s, a man named Janos Prohaska was invariably inside the gorilla suit. But everything after November 1986 is organized as things ought to be: I remember important things and forget trivial things.
And then there is my colleague Christopher Caldwell. He is a year younger than I, and had we met in college, we would have faced each other down in contests of useless knowledge that would have had us both lynched by others around us. Now he has me beat hands down; the other week I merely mentioned the title of a relatively minor T.S. Eliot poem and he declaimed the entire opening stanza without missing a beat. All I could summon up were the first two words — “Apeneck Sweeney” — and the last four — “Swells to maculate giraffe.” (I have no idea what Eliot is talking about either.)
Chris still smokes. Happily, contentedly. He is among the most productive writers in America, and on a dizzying array of topics. And every day, you can find him outside our office building with four of our colleagues, all sharing a smoke, all of them possessing a remarkable grasp of fact and detail. Sometimes I stand there too and marvel at the factoids that whip back and forth like tennis balls between Sampras and Agassi. I know it would only take one little puff, one inhale, to bring me back into the fold.
But then I would remember all the reasons I quit in the first place — all those reasons I have since forgotten — and I’d just have to start all over again.
JOHN PODHORETZ
