Dear Editor:

It might not seem so, but cigarette smokers and genius have a predisposed consanguine relativity, and the recent decision by University Properties to prohibit the sale of tobacco products on its real estate certainly has taken the convenience out of certain stores for on-campus smokers. Cigarettes are now nowhere to be found, which might, as Rachel Kamins suggests, prove a problem for the smokers who pervade the paths around campus and cloud up the airspace around any benches that please them, even those right outside student rooms, if in fact those regiments existed ["University fails to protect nonsmokers' rights," YH, 9/21/01].

Stepping out of Commons into Beinecke Plaza, mine eye beholds a barren land and a white vapidity. Although I eternally endure the unquenchable, expanding desire for lambent truth, I cannot even satisfy my baser bodily craving. I have no cigarettes in my pocket, and nowhere descry a distant plume of smoke, the crest of a fellow pilgrim knight.

I am a peaceful knight. I carry no sword or battleaxe; I limp lamely under the weight of my armor and shield. There is no cause to fight over air; there is plenty of it, many benches, and few smokers. In a recent study I conducted this morning, on my way from the Sterling Chemistry Lab to Linsly-Chittenden, I counted four smokers out of 400 people.

Thus, it seems to me that the war against nicotine stems from somewhere deeper than an offended chest cavity. Just as a lily pad appears to float on water's surface while long roots descend into the unilluminated depths, non-smokers' aggression arises from a prevailing repressed passive-aggressive superegoism.

Kamins wrote, "When a smoker plops down on the bench outside my window and burns though half a pack, the prevailing sentiment is that I should not get mad at him. I should instead go away to some other room where I can sit undisturbed by air or light from the outside world. That's not what I really want." If, however, a smoker in front of the window were asked to stop, he might respectfully leave.

Anyhow, classrooms are entirely smoke-free; non-smoking dorm rooms are entirely smoke-free. It is impossible for a stream of smoke to invade either of these spaces. In order for me to blow my smoke into a room on campus, I would have to stand on my toes right under a window and aim high. Or infiltrate the air duct system and smoke cigarettes while crouching above a ceiling vent. And I wouldn't do that; someone got stuck in there last year.

It is ridiculous to say that smokers dominate the campus. It is almost as ridiculous as saying that Yale encourages smoking merely because I have, illegally and unbeknownst to anyone, dismantled the smoke detector in my room. But I will tell no more of this, for I had begun with something perfect that has descended into corruption.

My statement is a testament to the rare birth of genius, and its even rarer concentration here at Yale. Plebeians, remember this: nothing exists for our sake, yet we take everything for granted. Don't thoughtlessly accept that there is 99.99 percent fresh air at Yale. Entitle me to my 0.01, so that I may play the tune of my tiny pipe: Sing in me, Nicotine, and through tense veins surge in the man skilled in all ways of comprehension, the outsider, crushed for years on end, after he plunged deep into psyche and society of the proud people of Yale. Light, and truth is not so staggering. 

—Andrew Levine, SM '04

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