I had been thinking of Hitchins the past few days because I read recently something he wrote about the expression: Whatever doesn't kill you, will only make you stronger.
It's not true, he said,
usually it makes you weaker. His style of argument was to say something inflammatory (i.e. Women aren't as funny as men; God doesn't exist) and then convince you he was right. Not many people can do this and keep your attention, but he could. Like a great dancer, he just made you want to watch (or in his case, listen). He was graceful, brilliant and always one step ahead. Do yourself a favor and read something he wrote today:
start here.
Though I did not always agree with him, I was and remain a fierce fan. His writing was always brilliant and provocative, oft-times as important as anything one could read. He challenged his audience to keep pace with his quick and sometimes cutting mind, but he never took the easy way out as an observer and analyst of life and its maddening quirks.
ReplyDeleteI had just picked up the latest Vanity Fair last night and was shocked to see the photograph that accompanied his story there...a gaunt, dying man who was still, and foremost, a writer of great candor and clarity. His passing is a frustrating testament to the folly of younger choices, some (smoking) he belligerently espoused and defended in his earlier writing. In a profound and epic betrayal, that one, in particular, had a hand in doing him in at an age far too early for death.
I am an agnostic, a more hopeful version of his "antitheist" stance, which allows me to hope there IS, indeed, a continuation of the entity that is Christopher Hitchens, one whose brilliance, wit and merciless truth will sustain, wherever such things might. Until there's evidence of that, however, he shall be missed.