Lipton’s Journal/December 28, 1954/68

Over and over again, I discover these days that the big truths are to be found in the little things, and not the big things. So, with cigarette smoking. Dimly, it may be a spiritual experience. One has only to blow one’s smoke into a shaft of light, and a universe of space is revealed with gas nebulae meandering through the universe and iotas of dust swimming like stars and planets through the cosmos. Dreamily, it leads one to suspect that in the microcosm, if one could only enter it, there are universes within universes, and within the atom, within the electron, there are still infinite subdivisions, universes, what-have-you. Perhaps for little enormous reasons like this, we find it so difficult to give up our smoking.