On Smoking a Cigar

(City Journal) ... I still remember my cigarettes on the job. The pleasure of the smoke was existential in the deep-night solitude of the shift. Caught between the rural night quiet and the danger of the highway trade, I could see myself as a subject—frozen in exhale behind the glass of the station building—in a painting by Edward Hopper. When I took in a breath of the Camel, my petty world became whole and my place in it somehow as it should be. Continued

Painting: Gas by Edward Hopper