General Douglas MacArthur. I would love hear him duscuss his career while firing up a couple of cobs.
With Whom Would You Smoke?
- Thread starter huntertrw
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One of my passions is photography and one of my favorite photographs is Ansel Adams. I’ve seen images of him smoking cigarettes so I’m not certain if he enjoyed a pipe. However, I’d thoroughly enjoy sitting down with him, either smoking a pipe or cigarette, just to glean information from him about photography especially his techniques in the darkroom.
The late British author Kenneth Grahame (1859 - 1932) who penned The Wind in the Willows. With him I would discuss that very book, one of my favorites.
To me its best chapter is The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and, no, it is not about pipe-smoking. My last visit with it was in April of last year when I read it, aloud, to my mother who hung on its every beautiful word. She passed peacefully from this world three days later at the age of 94.
But he did write of the pipe. In fact, in an essay titled Of Smoking , he states:
"It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter,
or that first pipe of the evening which ``Hesperus, who bringeth all
good things,'' brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is
smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss
of one's first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of
merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to
the vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to
the latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that
arises at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although
with most of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and
swinkers, the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of
alarums and excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there
are certain halcyon periods sure to arrive -- Sundays, holidays, and
the like -- the whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one
beatific pipe after breakfast, smoked in a careless majesty like that
of the gods ``when they lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are
lightly curled.'' Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so
this particular pipe of the day always carries with it festal
reminiscences: memories of holidays past, hopes for holidays to come;
a suggestion of sunny lawns and flannels and the ungirt loin; a sense
withal of something free and stately, as of ``faint march-music in the
air,'' or the old Roman cry of ``Liberty, freedom, and
enfranchisement.''
How could you not want to share a pipe and a conversation with such a delightful author?
To me its best chapter is The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and, no, it is not about pipe-smoking. My last visit with it was in April of last year when I read it, aloud, to my mother who hung on its every beautiful word. She passed peacefully from this world three days later at the age of 94.
But he did write of the pipe. In fact, in an essay titled Of Smoking , he states:
"It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter,
or that first pipe of the evening which ``Hesperus, who bringeth all
good things,'' brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is
smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss
of one's first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of
merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to
the vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to
the latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that
arises at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although
with most of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and
swinkers, the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of
alarums and excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there
are certain halcyon periods sure to arrive -- Sundays, holidays, and
the like -- the whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one
beatific pipe after breakfast, smoked in a careless majesty like that
of the gods ``when they lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are
lightly curled.'' Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so
this particular pipe of the day always carries with it festal
reminiscences: memories of holidays past, hopes for holidays to come;
a suggestion of sunny lawns and flannels and the ungirt loin; a sense
withal of something free and stately, as of ``faint march-music in the
air,'' or the old Roman cry of ``Liberty, freedom, and
enfranchisement.''
How could you not want to share a pipe and a conversation with such a delightful author?
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