Continuing my Museumkaart odyssey, I can now report that the Amsterdam Pipe Museum is a wonderful little museum. I had looked forward to it, and I wasn’t disappointed. Perhaps I had dreamed of a more philosophical exposition—with topics such as why people smoke tobacco, the colonial aspect of it, what it means to be a human being, and so on—but that is not what the pipe museum is about. It is simply about pipes.

The guys who run the museum seem to be smoking pals. One of them jokingly referred to the other as a part of the permanent exhibition, an old smoker. Another was just starting a guided tour for some Dutch guys. I came in a few minutes late and had to ask for English, which the guide spoke excellently. After word came out that I was from Sweden, I was briefly interviewed by two of the staff about snus. Questions from the guys often led to a lapse back into Dutch, that puzzling foreign tongue, and I was left to quietly ponder the pipes. Still, this guide was the real deal.

I pointed out a curious five-headed ceramic pipe in a display case among a hundred different pipes. “Ah, yes,” he chuckled, “quite an interesting one.” Apparently it was the focus of a certain British drinking game in the 19th century. I didn’t quite understand the rules, but it involved university students becoming too dizzy to stand. The guide seemed to know some interesting facts or stories about nearly every object in the collection, and relayed them enthusiastically, as if we were his friends.

Sherlock Holmes, Santa Claus, Stalin, Tolkien, Sartre: many men of stature have enjoyed the genteel art of pipe smoking. Einstein famously said:

“I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.”

And here’s Thackeray:

“The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent and unaffected.”

There’s something interesting about the idea that human speech is shaped by props and activities. For many native American tribes, a pipe was an absolute requirement for any important decision-making. The pipe has always been a tool of the patriarchy, as well: ever since tribal America, women used tobacco, but never pipes. Learning to smoke a pipe used to be an important rite of passage for middle-class bachelors.

Some stopped smoking after marriage, but most just confined it to a private room, which room was idealized as “that chamber of liberty, that sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple of refuge, thrice blessed in all its forms throughout the land.” The women would be dismissed after dinner, so the men could retire to the homosocial smoking chamber. If there’s one term that sums up the social function of pipe smoking, it’s “male bonding.”

As preparation, in case you’re curious, I’ve been looking into the history of tobacco, using Iain Gately’s breezy yet comprehensive Tobacco: A Cultural History. It’s a fascinating story that follows the broad strokes of colonial and postcolonial history—often playing a central role, too.

Basically, native Americans used to drink it as tea, chew it, smoke it, make offerings with it, pray with it, meditate with it, make love with it; they used it for healing, shamanic vision quests, and so on. It was a centerpiece of native American religion, and valued for its medicinal properties. For example, it was held to be a good treatment against cancerous tumours. Then the white men came. The name “tobacco” is believed to come from a misunderstanding of the old Cuban phrase dattukupa, which actually just means “we are smoking.” Some missionaries argued that the use of tobacco was an obvious display of Satanism. But some others had a different missionary strategy, involving adapting to the local customs, appropriating their rituals, symbols, and so on. They took up tobacco themselves and loved it. According to an enthusiastic Sevillean doctor, it cleansed and invigorated the human brain, and healed all kinds of child ailments. And so the “trade” began, with immense consequences.

The Dutch were the first big pipe smokers in Europe, and then the Brits; most other people snuffed. Smoking had a Protestant bias. It “assisted the Dutch in establishing an identity for their nation,” says Gately, and quotes an old saying: “A Dutchman without a pipe is a national impossibility. If a Dutchman were deprived of his pipe and tobacco, he would not even enter paradise with a glad heart.” This reputation was also perpetuated by the emerging style of Dutch painting, portraying ordinary people in everyday circumstances, peasants, workers, cities, and so on. Pipes show up everywhere in Dutch art, sometimes in the vanitas mode of depressing still-lifes, symbolizing vita fumus est, life is smoke, but often just as realistic props. The medicinal value of tobacco was known to a certain Isbard von Diemerbroek, who wrote from a plague-ridden Nijmegen in 1636: “As I have proved by long experience, tobacco is the most effective means of avoiding the plague, providing the leaf is in good condition.”

Here, all alone, I by myself have took,

An Emblem of myself, a Pipe of Smoke.

For, I am but a little piece of clay

Filled with smoke that quickly fumes away.

The plant was grown in royal courtyards all over Europe. King James of England hated it passoniately and tried to ban it: one reason for the North American colonies to seek liberty, for they came to make most of their money from tobacco. The Virginia herb grown by John Rolfe, husband of Pocahontas—or rather by his slaves—was very carefully cured, blended, “pleasant, sweete and strong,” and given one of the first PR brands of any product except wine and weaponry: it was christened Orinoco, foreshadowing the role of cigarettes in modern advertising. It was such an enormous and sorely needed success that it seems unlikely the U.S. colonies would have survived without it. Jefferson and Washington were both in the tobacco business, as were a majority of the signatories of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The ensuing war with Britain was won after Benjamin Franklin scored a loan from France against a security of five million pounds of tobacco. As Gately puts it, “tobacco supplied both the cause and the victory in the United States War of Independence.”

Tobacco spread from the extinguished native American civilizations to the entire world, becoming a near-universal human habit. In much of Europe it was attractive for health reasons. The Elizabethan English did it for pure arbitrary pleasure. Methods of consuming tobacco varied and keep varying, along with fashions, conjunctures, industrialization, wars. British soldiers in World War I required large rations of pipe tobacco; as a museum staff member put it, “they had a lot of time to kill.” General Pershing, the supreme U.S. commander, said of the need for Camels and Lucky Strikes:

“You ask me what we need to win this way, I answer tobacco, as much as bullets. Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.”

The pipe museum has objects of interest from many of the eras and lands of tobacco history, from 4000 year old Laotian pipes to artful Ecuadorian pipes from 550 B.C., British clay pipes, French briar pipes, Chinese opium pipes, German novelty ceramic pipes, Persian narghiles, chieftain pipes from Cameroon, plenty of Dutch pipes, some U.S. corncobs, and so on. A well-made online exhibition shows much of the collection with historical info. Many pipes, old and new, are for sale at reasonable prices in the downstairs store, which also has a good selection of tobacco. The store and reception is manned by Don Duco, once pipe smoker of the year, who’s helpful, witty, and knows everything. (Check out his publications.)

The organization is a nonprofit foundation, and the sales income goes to upkeep, salaries, and events. Once a month they host a kind of smoking school, for new pipe smokers who want to learn from some pros. There’s also a rather exclusive smoking society associated with the museum, explicitly “elitist” in its membership, and devoted to high-quality serious conversations about important stuff, along with the refined pleasure of smoking pipes together in elegant rooms. Maybe I’d join if I were old and educated enough.

“For many people the tobacco pipe has a magical quality. The smell and the taste both soothes and carries the partaker into an almost unparalleled quietude. Moreover, relaxing with a pipe allows one to sit back in one’s arm chair and contemplate transcendental and universal truths, as Schopenhauer would say.” (From the pipe club’s page.)

My favorite memory involving pipe tobacco takes place at what I believe is Sweden’s only residential Zen temple. It wasn’t long ago: last year’s unusually mild November. With friends from an associated Gothenburg temple, I go there now and then, mostly for short silent retreats. The place is rural, but not remote.

It was the evening after a retreat had ended, and freedom reigned for one casual day: freedom from the silence and the schedule and the sitting. We ate lasagna and chocolates; André made fresh-ground coffee in his moka pot; Anna and I made cookies. As often after retreat, I felt strangely happy. The temple is an old school house, and there’s sometimes a sense of harmless youthful liberty, like a big sleepover.

My friend Tobias had been at this retreat. He’s soft-spoken, like myself; also a scientist and a fan of Emacs and Haskell, powerful geek shibboleths. Unlike myself, his vices include a habitual use of nicotine. His case seems to be comparatively mild, since he voluntarily abstains during retreat, without even bringing emergency snus. It’s possible that he just suffers more than he complains. But it was still pretty obvious that Tobias was more or less jonesing for a smoke.

After sunset, I told him in a casual, deadpan way that could easily have come across as joking, teasing, though I’m not prone to pranks:

— Hey, Tobias, you know, I’ve got a briar pipe in my jacket pocket, and a tin of Rattray’s Red Rapparee, a strong Virginia and Latakia blend. You want to go outside and have a smoke?

I assured him that it was not a cruel joke; I had been trying out pipe smoking, and had brought my equipment. This may seem odd, but I had lots of knick-knacks with me: I was going to stay at the temple for a few weeks, and then go straight to Holland.

— Um, ha, yes. Obviously. Let’s go!

During the summer, I had realized that it would be nice to stand on my balcony while smoking a pipe and contemplating. I had my first real apartment, and was experimenting with new domestic habits.

I liked pipe smoking a lot, especially with a cup of Assam tea and a book. It’s not as toxic as smoking cigarettes, they say, since one seldom inhales. Also, smoking more than once a day is ruinous for a wooden pipe. Beyond that, the motives are just different. Though there is at least the placebo of a subtle mental boost, the main attractions are the deep, marinating campfire smells, and the mysterious beauty of the smoke itself. There is also something about the pipe that signifies sophistication and depth, or at least eccentricity. Now, please bear with me as I explain how my attraction to pipe smoking is also what you might call “spiritual.” I know I am on hokey territory, but hear me out.

Last spring, I read a book by David Abram called The Spell of the Sensuous, which I reviewed here. The author is a skilled sleight-of-hand magician, a field anthropologist, and a scholar of Navajo religion. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in the book, but here the relevant part is about peace pipe smoking, philosophically linked with the air and the mind. The last chapter of the book, “The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air,” starts with the translated words of a Navajo man named John Fire Lame Deer:

“Let’s sit down here […] let’s have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs. […] Let us be animals, think and feel like animals. Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya wakan—the holy air— which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all of that. Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as our relatives.”

Tobias and I walked to the nearest little stream and stood on the bridge. It was so dark you had to watch your step. Using matches with gloves on, in the wind, was hard. But the tobacco, once lit, kept an even glow. Tobias said that it all felt kind of magical: the glow, the smoke, the stars, the water, the quiet, the chilly night. And that sometimes it’s like there seems to be a little less magic around than one might like. “Yeah,” I said, with my customary eloquence. We took turns, smoking and talking.

Abrams describes the action of the sacred Navajo pipe:

“The pipe smoke makes the invisible breath visible, and as it rises from the pipe, it makes visible the flows and currents in the air itself, makes visible the unseen connections between those who smoke the pipe in offering and all other entities that dwell within the world: the winged peoples, the other walking and crawling peoples, and the multiple rooted beings—trees, grasses, shrubs, mosses.”

Now, this all has a vibe that I’ve seldom picked up on in modern European pipe smoking, which seems to be more of an ornery, individualistic affair, more hedonistic, more cruel. The prized materials for our wooden pipes are the hardened roots of the Mediterranean briar tree, the only wood that can resist the heat, intensively reshaped and polished to a sheen. The pipes look like the ankles of old bourgeois furniture. In fact, European pipe smoking is hardly even suited for the outdoors, sailors excepted; a cozy chamber is to prefer, even if the walls and ceilings shall darken. We have special snooty smoking jackets. Pipes and cigars are favorite accessories of old communists and capitalists; in some cartoons they literally symbolize evil, as in the notion of “powerful men with cigars.” This all presents a cultural conundrum for people who secretly sympathize with wizards but have to make do with seeming merely quaint and vaguely undemocratic.

Nor is pipe smoking in any way a traditional part of Zen culture. Tobacco is, unsurprisingly, frowned upon at the temple. In fact, many people become interested in meditation partly because they want to quit smoking, and therefore need practice in willpower. Tobias is indeed trying to quit. And I suppose I am trying not to start yet another bad habit. One useful fact to know in this situation is that in Japanese monasteries, younger monks sometimes disappoint their teachers by not taking liberties with the rules, sneaking out, and so on. Never once straying from the ethical codes is considered immoral. What is a young rebel to do?

We walked back to the house for some tea. Maybe we did some more zazen. Then we slept, and then Tobias went home to Gothenburg. I stayed a little longer, then moved to Amsterdam. Today I stuffed my briar pipe for the first time since, with the same Red Rapparee, and the scent took me right back to Sweden and summer. I miss a lot of people, and my apartment, and Hisingen island. Longing, like tobacco smoke, is bittersweet. But I like it here, too.