He had once said to me, on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright, that he did not wish to be immortal. This was a most wonderful thought. The reason he gave was that he was very well in this state of being, and that the chances were very much against his being so well in another state; and he would rather not be more than be worse.posted by holgate at 11:01 PM on December 15, 2011 [4 favorites]
It was—I think—February and the smoking ban had gone into effect. Christopher suggested that they eat outside, on the terrace. David Bradley is a game soul, but even he expressed trepidation about dining al fresco in forty-degree weather. Christopher merrily countered, “Why not? It will be bracing.”posted by grouse at 11:18 PM on December 15, 2011 [29 favorites]
Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was. One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
So I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the "transcendent" and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
I choose to draw a distinction between men in power who use that power to fuck with the minds of the weak and men, like Hitch, who defend the weak and go after the Falwell's of the world.You must be fucking kidding me.
December 16, 2011Dammit. Far too young. Far, far too young. Loved the man's writing. Had such respect for his ability to look inward and keep an open mind, but also his passion, willingness to fight for his beliefs and depth. Such depth.
Christopher Hitchens: A Reading List
Posted by Alex Koppelman
Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday at sixty-two, was one of the most prolific essayists and authors of his time, writing regularly for Vanity Fair, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Slate, among others, and producing a long shelf books, including “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” and his memoir, “Hitch-22.” It would be nearly impossible to collect a truly representative sample of his work, in part, because of the political transformation he made in recent years—a journey from left to right that Ian Parker chronicled in this magazine in 2006—and in part because of the sheer volume, which he managed despite a legendary drinking habit. The pieces selected below are, at least, a taste of some of his notable articles from the past decade.
“Trial of the Will": In this, his last article for Vanity Fair, Hitchens wrote of the toll that the treatment for his cancer had taken on his body, but concluded, “So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline.”
“Unspoken Truths”: In this article, which he wrote earlier this year for Vanity Fair, Hitchens discussed his cancer, the possibility that it would take his voice from him, and the way in which the ability to speak is connected with the ability to write.
“How To Make a Decent Cup of Tea”: Hitchens could turn something as simple as preparing tea into a screed—but, as always, he wrote it well. It may have helped that in this case he was following in the footsteps of one of his heroes, George Orwell.
“How Can Anyone Defend Kissinger Now?”: After the Nixon Library released tapes of conversations between then-President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in which Kissinger had said, “[I]f they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” Hitchens launched another attack on one of his favorite targets. (In his 2001 book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Hitchens had argued that Kissinger should be tried for war crimes.)
“The Commander: My Father, Eric Hitchens”: The writer discusses his father and looks back at his childhood in this excerpt from his memoir.
“Believe Me, It’s Torture”: Though in his later years he generally aligned himself with the right on issues like the invasion of Iraq, after he chose to be waterboarded in order to determine for himself whether it was truly torture, Hitchens concluded, “I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”
“On Becoming American”: Two years before he officially became a U.S. citizen, Hitchens wrote about his feeling that he already was an American, and what it means to be one.
“Mommie Dearest”: Not many people would be willing to take on Mother Theresa, much less spend years doing so. But Hitchens never shied away from such things; in this 2003 piece for Slate, he railed against Pope John Paul II’s decision to beatify the late nun.
“The Honorable Schoolboy”: As Christopher Buckley wrote in his obituary for his friend Hitchens, P. G. Wodehouse was “the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others.” In this 2004 book review for The Atlantic, Hitchens wrote of Wodehouse, “His attention to language, his near faultless ability to come up with names that are at once ludicrous and credible, and the intricacy of his plotting are imperishable.”
“Stranger in a Strange Land”: In this piece that The Atlantic published two months after the attacks of 9/11, Hitchens summed up his break from the establishment left over the attacks and the war on terror that was then only beginning.
Pointed threats, they bluff with scornIncidentally, I wish his obituaries weren't referring to him solely as an atheist, as though that negative quality solely defined his intellectual outlook. He was a humanist materialist and at least tried to live by the skepticism necessary for that worldview.
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying.
—Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
For Hitchens, this established that Dean was a “pathological liar.”Sometimes the point of arguing is just to understand what one's beliefs and standards are, and once that's established, they speak for itself. Continuing the discussion is pointless.
“All politicians lie!” the women said.
“He’s a doctor,” Hitchens said.
“But he’s a politician.”
“No, excuse me,” Hitchens said. His tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick; the Hitchens face can, at moments of dialectical urgency, or when seen in an unkindly lit Fox News studio, transform from roguish to sour. (Hitchens’s friend Martin Amis, the novelist, has chided Hitchens for “doing that horrible thing with your lips.”) “Fine,” Hitchens said. “Now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I’m telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There’s nothing you wouldn’t make an excuse for.”
“That’s wrong!” they said.
“You know what? I wouldn’t want you on my side.” His tone was businesslike; the laughing protests died away. “I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ Fuck off. You think a doctor can lie in front of an audience of women on a major question, and claim to have suppressed evidence on rape and incest and then to have said he made it up?”
“But Christopher …”
“Save it, sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that’s all the difference—I hope—in the world.”
Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it. ...
I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today . People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to. My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.
...Regrettably, I never met Hitchens. But two moments stand out for me. First, reading Letters To A Young Contrarian, which really was an eye-opener for me. I think I'm actually going to have my son read it in the next year or two. And, oddly enough, this encounter with Ralph Reed on the death of Jerry Falwell, where Hitchens refused to shrink into the tempting embrace of false compassion. Again, when you have that clarity of purpose, this sort of necessary incivility comes a little easier.posted by MCMikeNamara at 9:33 AM on December 16, 2011 [1 favorite]
With that in mind, it would be disrespectful for us to resort to pieties. When I think of Hitchens I also think of this outstanding piece from The New Yorker by Ian Parker and particularly this moment:Such performances of masculinity don't appear exclusively on the page. Not long ago, in Baltimore, I saw Hitchens challenge a man--perhaps homeless and a little unglued mentally--who had started walking in step with his wife and a woman friend of hers while Hitchens walked some way ahead. Hitchens dropped back to form a flank between the women and the man, then said, "This is the polite version. Go away." The man ambled off. Hitchens pressed home the victory. "Go away faster," he said.
What you get in that piece is a Hitchens generally spoiling for fights, but rarely discriminating among them--and that ugly scene you get a bully. I suspect it wasn't first (or last) offense.) Is that what it takes to make a theory of the solar system tell? Can you have one without the other?
Probably not. But I remain grateful for having studied at Hitchens virtual foot. I would salute his ascent into Valhalla. But I think that just be defiling a warrior's grave...
The bargaining stage, though. Maybe there’s a loophole here. The oncology bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.posted by homunculus at 11:27 AM on December 16, 2011 [12 favorites]
Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.
The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled "credulous idiot…" The evil that he did will live after him… In his dingy racist past, Falwell attacked those churchmen who mixed the two worlds of faith and politics and called for civil rights… It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it's extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the "faith-based."Mother Theresa:
MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction… Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.Ronald Reagan:
Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.posted by grouse at 1:18 PM on December 16, 2011 [9 favorites]
to step into an obit thread and announce that you won't miss the guy because his writings, which, oh by the way, just coincidentally don't match up to your political opinions, caused countless deaths around the world is fucking grotesque.That strikes me as a little funny.
As a result of all this, we were thrown together in a number of situations. One time we shared a panel in Dallas, and I told the crowd there that if Christopher and I were not careful, we were in danger of becoming friends. During the time we spent together, he never said an unkind thing to me—except on stage, up in front of everybody. After doing this, he didn't wink at me, but he might as well have.
So we got on well with each other, because each of us knew where the other one stood. Eugene Genovese, before he became a believer, once commented on the tendency that some have to try to garner respect by giving away portions, big or small, of what they profess to believe. "If other religions offer equally valid ways to salvation and if Christianity itself may be understood solely as a code of morals and ethics, then we may as well all become Buddhists or, better, atheists. I intend no offense, but it takes one to know one. And when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow unbelievers" (The Southern Front, pp. 9–10). Ironically, the branch of the faith most interested in getting the "cultured despisers" to pay us some respect is really not that effective, and this is a strategy that can frequently be found on the pointed end of its own petard. Respectability depends on not caring too much about respectability. Unbelievers can smell accommodation, and when someone like Christopher meets someone who actually believes all the articles in the Creed, including that part about Jesus coming back from the dead, it delights him. Here is someone actually willing to defend what is being attacked. Militant atheists are often exasperated with opponents whose strategy appears to be "surrender slowly."
G. K. Chesterton once pointed to the salutary effect that the great agnostics had on him—that effect being that of "arousing doubts deeper than their own." Christopher was an heir of the Enlightenment tradition, and would have felt right at home in the 18th-century salons of Paris. He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it.
Christopher Hitchens, a journalist and essayist who commented on politics and culture at large with searing insight and rakish verve, threw his acid wit in the face of tyranny and stupidity, wrote freely (and successfully) about his distaste for religion, and remained frustratingly, dazzlingly engaging even when he was given to contrarian provocation or just deliberately being an asshole, died last night at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, according to a statement from Vanity Fair. Hitchens was 62.posted by Rhaomi at 8:31 PM on December 16, 2011 [4 favorites]
So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking…posted by grouse at 12:56 PM on December 19, 2011 [6 favorites]
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.
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posted by knave at 8:55 PM on December 15, 2011