We live in an age when, at least in the affluent West, there is something of an obsession with bodily health, with healthy lifestyles, healthy eating and drinking, and a constant cycle of new diets, regimens, vitamin supplements, and exercise fads. And of course, attendant on these, and fueling their consumer ratings, a rash of hypochondria, self-diagnosis, health scares based on spurious medical blogs, etc. The one thing all these trends, however helpful or harmful, have in common is an essentially mechanistic and reductive account of health or (in the current jargon) “wellness” itself.

It is assumed that the body is essentially a machine, a linked series of mechanical processes whose performance can be optimized by ensuring the best input, in terms of foods and supplements, and the best output in terms of exercise. There is analytic attention to food and drink in terms of nutrients, fiber, and alcohol content, but no consideration of the ambience, culture, atmosphere, nuance, gregarious and social aspects of eating and drinking, no consideration of their meaning or the part they play in the richness, depth, and happiness of human life considered as a whole integrated experience. Most of the advice we are given on how to live a healthy life ignores or even undermines the great intangibles, the unmeasurable qualities, as opposed to the measured quantities, which make that life worth living.

William Michael Harnett, His Mug and His Pipe, oil, 1880. Image from WikiArt (public domain).

On the mere input/output analysis, I should give up the convivial evenings in many-storied, oak-raftered pubs, where my friends and I, and often strangers who are welcomed into the circle of conversation, sit for a while and set the world to rights. I should give up the pipes I have collected and smoked over the years, each with its own beautiful pattern of grain, each with its own cluster of stories and memories of solitary musing or wonderful conversation. My body might be technically healthier for the loss, but I contend my whole being, my personhood, my sense of community, of participating in something immemorial, hallowed by the poets, endorsed by the sages, celebrated by almost all my favorite writers, my life, taken as a whole, would be poorer. And if I gave these things up as part of an obsession with my own health, then my attention would have been diverted from others to self, from community to individual, from soul to body, and I would be enclosed in a solipsistic cubicle, constantly taking my own pulse.

In saying this I do not mean to glide hastily over very real concerns about excessive smoking and drinking. There is consensus: smoking poses serious health risks. And many a family has been harmed or destroyed by the disease of alcoholism. If I thought my pipe or my pint posed a risk to my family’s happiness or wholeness, I would give it up in a moment. But I have chosen not to give up pipe and pint. And I have done so because of the sense that I would lose something of a broader health if I did. What would I lose in giving up the pint, the pipe, and the pub? I know no better way of answering this question than in my native tongue: poetry, both my own and that of others. So let me try.

Pub and Pint

In his Songs of Innocence and of Experience William Blake often gives voice to the poor and marginalized, the unnoticed and voiceless. In one such poem he speaks from the voice of someone who finds himself more welcome in the pub than the church:

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well …

He goes on later in the poem to say that if church were only as welcoming and nonjudgmental as the alehouse, then:

modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church,
Would not have bandy children nor fasting nor birch.

Surprising though it may be to some of my stricter Christian brothers and sisters, there is something of a history of thinking of the church in this way. When Christ tells the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), he cannot think of a better place to take the wounded man for healing, until he comes again, than an inn. The early church commentators say the inn in the parable is meant to be a type of the church.

What is it about an inn, what we in England would call “our local,” that is so beneficent? It is open, it is welcoming, it is in every sense a public house, which is where the term “pub” comes from. It is therefore a place where different people from the same community, with all their differences of background and politics and personality, can find a convivial space to meet one another. If it happens to be an old inn, then, like the old church building, it speaks of a continuity across the generations, a solidarity we have with our own past. I reflected on what the public house means to me personally in the unpublished ballade I wrote called “I’ll Have Another Pint of Porter Please”:

I love the mullioned snug, the brewers dray
And all the tapster’s tacit craft and lore.
To reach a village inn when skies are grey,
To step out of the rain and through the door,
To feel the warmth, to tread the stone-flagged floor,
And sit beside the fire and take our ease,
This is the bliss our little life is for,
I’ll have another pint of porter please.

Ballades (the form popularized by French medieval poet François Villon) traditionally end with an envoy addressed to the prince who is the poet’s patron. So, as a Christian, I ended this poem with an envoy to Christ:

Prince there’s an inn that you have kept in store,
And given to St. Peter both its keys,
I’m on my way, but tell him, well before,
I’ll have another pint of porter please.

Amid the pub’s conviviality, I remember my mortality and I look forward to the resurrection and the banquet of heaven. Now it could be argued, of course, that I could go to the inn and drink fizzy lemonade, but my counterargument would be both that such beverages might be worse for me in the long run than my modest pint, and also that the alcohol in the beer plays its part too, in relaxation, in a sense of ease, in loosening a little the rigid inhibitions which, at least in English culture, keep folk from talking to one another. Of course good drink can be abused with tragic results, but if teetotalism were enforced and all the pubs closed, individual bodies might be healthier in one respect but the unrelieved stress and the epidemic of isolation and loneliness that might ensue, as we found in lockdown when the pubs really did close down, might be far worse for our health than the pints in good company would have been.

Pipe

I turn now to my other forbidden, or at least widely frowned-on, pleasure: the pleasure of smoking my pipe. I concede that I am on shakier ground here. I don’t dispute the clear and consistent evidence that smoking is harmful in the long run and that it is linked to cancer. However, I would note that pipe smoking is distinct from cigarette smoking in that the pipe smoker does not inhale the smoke but merely tastes and savors it, then breathes it out again. There is then a risk for me, if a comparatively small one. Why do I take that risk? Again, it is because I set the physical aspect of my health in the context of my whole health and welfare, in the context of what it means to flourish.

Malcolm Guite, photograph by Betty Laura Zapata. Used by permission.

Like my pint, my pipe carries with it a whole penumbra of literary and personal associations, and smoking it always means that I am relaxing my tensions, letting go of my stresses, savoring life and the present moment in all its fullness. Given my high blood pressure and the general stresses of life, even my doctor might concede that this genial relaxation, this easing and letting go of tensions, is just the thing I need. Again, I can best express the experience of my risky behavior in the form of poetry, also in the ballade form:

Smoke Rings from My Pipe

All the long day’s weariness is done
I’m free at last to do just as I will,
Take out my pipe, admire the setting sun,
Practice the art of simply sitting still.
Thank God I have this briar bowl to fill,
I leave the world with all its hopeless hype,
Its pressures, and its ever-ringing till,
And let it go in smoke rings from my pipe.

The hustle and the bustle, these I shun,
The tasks that trouble and the cares that kill,
The false idea that there’s a race to run,
The pushing of that weary stone uphill,
The wretched iPhone’s all-insistent trill,
Whingers and whiners, each with their own gripe,
I pack them in tobacco leaves until
They’re blown away in smoke rings from my pipe.

And then at last my real work is begun:
My chance to chant, to exercise the skill
Of summoning the muses, one by one,
To meet me in their temple, touch my quill,
(I have a pen but quills are better still)
And when the soul is full, the time is ripe,
Kindle the fire of poetry that will
Breathe and expand like smoke rings from my pipe.

The Psalm says “Man is like a breath” (144:4), and as I watch the smoke from my pipe evaporate in the air, I am reminded of this reality. And perhaps this is the founding answer as to why I still smoke my pipe. Try as we may to optimize our bodies like machines, we cannot escape death except through resurrection. A good life is not merely one indefinitely extended through meticulous attention to bodily wellness, but one spent in community and with joy. For some this may mean giving up pipe and pint, if they pose a distraction or a risk to that conviviality with family and friends, or to their own holistically considered health. But for me, risks though there may be, pipes and pints have helped bring me back into that convivial circle of life, and given me moments of connection, of rest, of wonder in a world often fraught and disconnected. This is a choice I make, aware of risks, but without fear. And so I end again with an envoy addressed to Christ.

Prince, I have done with grinding at the mill,
These petty-pelting tyrants aren’t my type,
So lift me up and set me on a hill,
A free man blowing smoke rings from his pipe.