The sad, but not unexpected news of the death of Christopher Hitchens reached me late last night.
Though it felt a clichéd gesture, I couldn’t help but pour a little single malt scotch into a rocks glass in his honor before turning in.1 Today, the obituaries and personal eulogies begin to try to explain just who Hitchens really was — just as the remembrances of Steve Jobs attempted to do only a few short months ago. Hitchens sometimes took positions that felt strange or even hypocritical to me, but almost everyone I know would at least offer a toast to the style and aplomb with which he expressed himself.
As one of my friends put it — You didn’t always like him, but you always read him.
Shortly before he died, Hitchens wrote an essay which challenged the notion of “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. At any point in his career, he could make short work of platitudes like these but, when accompanied by a photograph taken of him in the final stages of the esophageal cancer which ultimately claimed his life, his words took on an added weight which all but obliterated any possible counter-argument.
Now if you’ve ever had a front row seat to “The Cancer Show”, you knew that this was exactly the kind of falsely-sentimental thing about the disease that Hitch would enjoy laying waste to — and lay waste he did. But after I had finished reading it, I found myself considering a reformulation of the very idea that Hitch had just destroyed:
Who are we once we’ve been stripped of everything we call “us”?
- It may have been more than a little [↩]
