It's been a long time since my friends and family stopped sympathizing with my attempts to quit smoking. I don't blame them. I've been quitting on and off for two or three years now. When I first tried to break my cigarette habit, everyone was supportive. They regularly inquired about the success of my effort and seemed to be genuinely impressed with my determination. But then I would take it up again. With time, my failures multiplied and people noticed.

Before long, I found myself going out of my way to remind friends of my latest effort. "I've quit smoking," I would say, apropos of nothing. Sometimes, there would be a gleam of hope in their eyes. "For how long," they would ask. "Since this morning." This lame response usually elicited nothing more than a skeptical grunt. Eventually, I learned to stop talking about it altogether. Who needs them, I'd think, I'll be a non-smoker before they know it. For a day or two, I'd feel very Roman in my new pose, like one of those great stoics of antiquity who overcomes all temptation by the sheer force of a manly will. And then I'd start smoking again.

I had, in short, become a career quitter, one of those people who neither smokes nor doesn't smoke but rather does both, depending upon the day and hour. It was better, in its way, than what I had been before: someone with a pack a day habit and no intention of stopping. But it was worse, too. For before I tried to quit, I was at least satisfying my ever escalating need for tobacco. As a quitter, I wasn't even doing this. The need was as strong as ever, I just spent more time torturing myself by denying it. I began to regret, like Richard Tull in Martin Amis' novel The Information, that I had ever begun smoking in the first place. Not because smoking is bad (it is) and shouldn't be done (it shouldn't) but because, had I never begun smoking, I could start now. As Amis puts it, Tull "no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn't be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn't being met." Ten years of smoking had brought me to this impossible predicament. Clearly, something had to be done. It was time to get serious.

Oddly, I first chose to get serious about quitting during an extended stay in Paris, France, the world capital of tobacco abuse. Paris is of course notorious for turning Americans into heavy smokers. And this is precisely why I chose to quit there. In some perverse way, I conceived it as the ultimate quitter's test: if I could stop smoking while living in France, I told myself, then I really was the master of my habit just like I'd been saying all along. For a while, it worked. With the help of Nicorette (which is half as expensive in Europe -- the manufacturers apparently realized that nobody would buy their gum at inflated US prices in a culture which views smoking as a normal part of social life), I passed just over two months as a non-smoker, my longest period without a cigarette since turning 17.

But it wasn't easy and, as time passed, I fell off the wagon with increasing frequency. Worse yet, I found myself inventing ingenious ways of smoking while not seeming to do so. For instance, I'd search out and then frequent the smallest, most crowded cafés I could find. There, I'd spend hours, pretending to read. Of course, everyone in these cafés was always smoking and so I was putting myself directly in the way of temptation. I tried to see this as yet another test: sooner or later, I told myself, I'd have to get used to people smoking around me. But after a while, even I could not deny the obvious truth about my café haunting: I had become a parasite on other people's cigarette habits, spending hours a day in expensive and undesirable company just so I could have the pleasure of filling my lungs with second and third-hand smoke. When I realized this, I gave up.

Since returning from France, I have quit at least nine times. Every time, my Parisian experience was repeated. At first, there would be a week or two of physical withdrawal: I had trouble concentrating (an impossible situation when you have papers to write), was by turns anxious and fatigued, regularly lost my temper over imagined slights, found it hard to get to sleep, and, when sleeping, dreamt of smoking, apparently to make up for all the time spent not smoking during the day. When (and if) I made it to the third week, I found that these symptoms of withdrawal began to diminish. But another, even worse feeling took their place. In truth, this feeling had been around since the first morning without a cigarette -- it was just concealed by the cruder pangs of withdrawal. This feeling was a pervasive sense of absence.

It's something hard to explain to anyone who has never had the experience. Think about it this way: for the career smoker, the act of smoking is something he's grown up with, a gesture he's repeated at least 20 times a day since late adolescence, if not earlier. Over time, this simple gesture of raising a lit cigarette to the lips, inhaling and blowing out becomes written into the smoker's personality. It becomes, just as much as any other gesture of everyday life, a fundamental way of relating to the outside world. When one stops smoking, the change is abrupt. One becomes constantly, even obsessively aware of the cigarette's absence. The feeling which accompanies this awareness is very specific. It's the feeling you get trying to entertain yourself at a friend's house when he's away. You know you should make yourself at home but somehow you can't. You feel, in other words, as if you were housesitting your self. This is ultimately why my attempt to quit in Paris failed. No matter how much Nicorette I chewed or how many lungfulls of other people's smoke I inhaled, something was missing. That something was the act of smoking itself, which had long since become an integral part of my life.

The more I quit, the more I learned about how important cigarettes had become to me. I began to notice, for instance, some time after returning from Paris, that the feeling of absence was strongest at particular moments of the day. My morning coffee just wasn't the same without my morning cigarette and, as time passed, I drank ever less of the stuff. Lunch and dinner were less fulfilling when they weren't concluded with a smoke. And the act of going to bed seemed somehow less definite when it wasn't preceded by one final cigarette. Similarly with my emotional life. When I was smoking, moments of enthusiasm, disappointment, expectation and sadness were all marked by lighting up. With a cigarette, the enthusiasm seemed all the greater, the disappointment less bitter, the expectation richer and the sadness less insuperable. Without one, I couldn't be sure that I was feeling these things at all. Even my sense of beauty was impaired by quitting. Long ago, I went on a vacation with two friends, one of whom was a smoker. Every time we stopped to admire a beautiful vista or examine some site of historical interest, the two of us would reach for our cigarettes. And, every time this happened, we were mocked by our non-smoking friend. He was right to do so: without commemorating our aesthetic appreciation with a cigarette, we couldn't fully recognize the beauty and interest of what we were observing.

It is this absence, in the end -- and not the well-known phenomenon of withdrawal -- that's the real problem with quitting. Anybody can get through withdrawal, if they want to. Few, however, expect or are prepared for what comes next. It's only when you quit that you discover what your fascination with smoking has all along been about: the everyday development and maintenance of moral life. Through the filter of a cigarette, the smoker orients himself to the outside world. It's his very personal way of relating the outside world, the world of events, to the inside one, that of desire. And it is for this reason that, when the cigarette is taken away, the smoker's moral life seems impoverished. It might even be said that he has, in some vague way, become less human. At least for a while.

As for myself, I am once again quitting. I almost said "this time" but, after three months, I'm beginning to think it may be for good. I hope so: smoking is a dirty habit and, the more time passes, the more repulsive that habit seems. And yet, even now, I can't help but feel a little nostalgic for my smoking days. Every story in a smoker's life, after all, is or can be made into a story about cigarettes. Some of these stories, no doubt, are tales of ill-health, expense and inconvenience. But there are other stories as well: stories of adventure, discovery, romance. Looking back on one's career as a smoker, in other words, is sometimes like looking back on past loves and is just as hard to communicate to outsiders.

As Richard Klein writes (with some exaggeration, to be sure) in Cigarettes are Sublime, his study of the cultural meaning of cigarettes, "Stopping smoking, one must lament the loss to one's life of something -- or someone! -- immensely, intensely beautiful, must grieve for the passing of a star." For those of us who have quit, recognizing that that star was an illusion is a necessary first step. For those who have yet to begin, there are more authentic loves to be had.