In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

Reading is an exacting activity. That’s why so many of us reserve it for bedtime.

Read, become tired and fall into repose.

This is the case because almost all writers deplete rather than generate the human energy contained within their readers.

Christopher Hitchens was one of those rare exceptions to that rule. One didn’t read Hitchens at bedtime, unless insomnia was the goal. His high-energy, confrontational writing style quickened the pulse, sharpened one’s thoughts and filled the brain with kaleidoscopic imagery. His books, reviews, essays and screeds came from points all around the globe, from the exotic to the mundane, the idyllic to the squalid.

A dazzling writer and polemicist, I never heard the man lose an argument, even in the many cases I strenuously disagreed with him. He played atheist to my theist, conservative to my liberal.

Hitchens was a hard drinking and smoking big mouth. And he was my favorite journalist, a journalist in the purist sense of the term, committing to the written word everything he experienced, including his losing battle against esophageal cancer, and his arguments against those who were wrongly convinced he would have a deathbed conversion to belief in Jesus or some other deity.

The dying process never softened Hitchens one iota. His atheism remained as rock-ribbed as a champion prize fighter. His commitment to conservative politics (after having abandoning socialism then liberalism) as immovable as Mt. Rushmore. His book reviews for the New York Times were as acerbic as ever. Check out the opening sentence of his June 17 review of the David Mamet book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.

“This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.”

Right to the end the British-born Hitchens kept a fist in the face of an enemy, which was anyone he could goad into a disagreement.

As he said during a Charlie Rose interview: “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me.”

In one of his many memorable verbal jousts, Hitchens argued against the very desirability of the existence of God during a contentious interview with Fox News bully Sean Hannity, by putting the notion of an all-seeing, all-knowing Supreme Being into terms Hannity would find most odious. “It would be like living in North Korea,” Hitchens said.

A mind this big, quick and pugnacious doesn’t come along very often.

Now Christopher Hitchens is dead, and somebody else is going to have to keep us up at night.

 

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