Paul Auster's film "Smoke" opens with a parable of time, action, and memory: the writer Paul Benjamin enters a Brooklyn tobacco shop and while buying his tins of Schimmelpennicks cuts through the banter of the loitering regulars with the story of Sir Walter Raleigh introduction of smoking to the court of Queen Elizabeth; finishing with Raleigh's proof that he could tell the weight of smoke:


Dennis
You mean, weigh smoke?

Paul Benjamin
Exactly. Weigh smoke.

Tommy
You can't do that. It's like weighing air.

Paul
I admit it's strange. Almost like weighing someone's soul. But Sir Walter was a clever guy. First, he took an unsmoked cigar and put it on a balance and weighed it. Then he lit up and smoked the cigar, carefully tapping the ashes into the balance pan. When he was finished, he put the butt into the pan with the ashes and weighed what was there. Then he subtracted that number from the original weight of the unsmoked cigar. The difference . . . was the weight of the smoke.

^ killjoy