I purchased my first pipe when I was 16 years old. I am almost 62 years old. Although math has never been my strong suite, I believe that comes to about 42 years. It has taken until the last few months until I finally understood that the point of smoking a pipe is the tobacco. This may seem a little unbelievable, believe me I was pretty surprised at this realization also, but the truth is that I bet many pipe smokers think the point of smoking a pipe is the pipe. that's what I always thought implicitly, though I had never quite articulated it. However, once articulated, its falsity is almost immediately apparent. Of course, this probably accounts for the fact that over those 42 years I had collected over 135 pipes, not counting the ones I'd lost or jettisoned along the way. But a few months ago, for no apparent conscious reason, when smoking began to go blah and my usual instinct would have been to buy an expensive pipe, I switched instead to a corncob, added only three more in the following weeks in order to give them a bit of rest, and have concentrated as never before on what I put in the pipe rather than on the pipe I put it in. I have recorded some, though not all, of my ongoing tobacco experimentation and I can say without doubt that concentrating on the tobacco rather than on the pipe has significantly heightened my pleasure.
Concentrating on the pipe is in a different category altogether. The pipe is, or can be, a work of consummate art or handiwork. I have several that are stunning and a lot more that are wonderfully serviceable and aesthetically pleasing. I've also discovered (and I know I'm not the first, but if after all these years the consequences of the discovery hadn't fully been assimilated for me then I assume others are in the same place) that briar pipes first, impact the taste of the tobacco without question, and second, carry the taste of one tobacco into another used in the same pipe. I have not found this to be true of corncobs and I'm told that it is not true of meerschaums, but I have an aesthetic allergy to meerschaums. And its not just types of tobacco that I am talking about, like Orientals, or Virginias or aromatics etc. Even, and perhaps especially, when one tends to smoke the same type of tobacco the nuances of difference between two or three tobaccos may be lost because of the pipe. Unquestionably, then, one should restrict each pipe to a particular tobacco! This is economically unfeasible. Except with pipes that are remarkably inexpensive like corncobs, where in any case the problem does not seem to be as significant since they don't retain the previous flavor. Thus, my solution of moving almost exclusively to corncobs while still collecting on a small scale and smoking on an occasional basis pipes that I love for their aesthetics.
This has resulted in my having sold off over sixty pipes in the last few months. I've purchased two pipes that I really love out of the cash I've garnered this way while making a sizable contribution to next summer's vacation fund. I've previously described the beautiful Peter Heeschen pipe and will in a next post describe the Rad Davis that I just purchased.
