Smoking and this Mortal Coil

Jerry Weinberger has a poetic account of his life growing up a smoker, "On Smoking a Cigar" (City Journal, Winter 2011).

"Smoking a cigar reminds one of finitude, and life not so reminded is not whole—is no life at all."


It is interesting how unhealthy, essentially suicidal behavior can be romanticized and glorified. But any of you who take a nail from time to time will surely enjoy this short essay by a very fine scholar of Francis Bacon and Benjamin Franklin.
 
Weinberger edited The Great Instauration and New Atlantis for Croft Classics, two short works by Francis Bacon.
 
He has also written:
 
Science, Faith and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age (Cornell University Press, 1985).
 
“Politics and the Problem of Technology: An Essay on Heidegger and the Tradition of Political Philosophy” (American Political Science Review, March 1992).
 
“Technology and the Problem of Liberal Democracy” in The Problem of Technology in the Western Tradition, ed. Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman (Cornell University Press, 1993).
 
Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh: A New Edition and Interpretive Essay (Cornell University Press, 1996).
 
“Pious Princes and Red-Hot Lovers: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet” (The Journal of Politics, 2003).
 
Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought (The University Press of Kansas, 2005).