There’s a new book out called Mortality
Now so many tributes that it also seems that rumors of my LIFE have also been greatly exaggerated. Lived to see most of what’s going to be written about me: this too is exhilarating but hits diminishing returns when I realize how soon it, too, will be “background.”
This is not the only instance in which he appears to want to take himself down off the pedestal, a place that clearly made him uncomfortable:
Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.
And this, which betrays his unending restlessness:
Lost fourteen pounds without trying. Thin at last. But don’t feel lighter because walking to the fridge is like a forced march. Then again, the vicious psoriasis/excema pustules that no doctor could treat have gone, too. This must be some impressive toxin I’m taking. And a mercy for sleep purposes…but all the sleep-aids and blissful dozes seem somehow a waste of life—there’s plenty of future time in which to be unconscious.
Looking forward to reading this whole book.
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sc_770d159609e0f8deaa72849e3731a29d
September 1, 2012 at 10:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
According to one report, Hitchens’s doctor, a christian, prayed for him. He thought his prayers would have more effect on the cancer than on Hitchens’s atheism though.
Marcus Ranum
September 1, 2012 at 4:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I do so miss Hitchens’ beautiful voice.
caseloweraz
September 1, 2012 at 7:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t mean to try and demean Hitchens’s atheist stance. I’m an atheist myself. But the Bible is also literature, and his statement sounds a lot like a verse from Ecclesiastes:
“That which thy hand finds to do, do it with thy might; for there is neither might, nor hands, nor [labor], in the grave, wither thou goest.”
That’s from memory; I probably garbled it. But you get the gist.
lancifer
September 1, 2012 at 7:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I remember when the first person that I truly loved died. It was my grandmother. There was the shock of her passing, though she was not young. Then there was a period of remembrance, often triggered by small things like sounds or scents.
The worst and most unexpected part was the slow emotional realization that her death wasn’t just some event marked in time, but a never ending state. She was dead and was always going to be so.
I’m starting to hit that phase with Christopher Hitchens and it is very depressing indeed.