Mortality

Haven‰ЫЄt read any of Hitchens‰ЫЄs books before, but I might want to now. It made me feel like there is a whole world of non-fiction that I am totally missing out on. I very rarely feel that way; I stick to fiction and feel bad because maybe I‰ЫЄm dumber than I could be, but not because I think there is non-fiction that I would really enjoy. Annie Dillard excluded. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Anatole Broyard‰ЫЄs Intoxicated by My Illness, but this was even slighter (if that‰ЫЄs possible). The fragments at the end should have been left out.

This is a brief book. An unfinished one too. A book of manifold pain and dolour. This is his only book I've read. Fortunately it is somewhat autobiographical and by the help of the internet I've learnt quite a deal about him. He was a great debater, a writer, critic and columnist, to whom writing and talking was everything. Esophageal cancer almost took away his voice, put him in a condition where he was too feeble to write. From his own writing:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it's true.

controlling and throttling philosophies

hitch-22

“Illness made Hitchens a symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism”