الرئيسية
Cancer weakened, but did not soften Christopher Hitchens. He did not
repent or forgive or ask for pity. As if granted diplomatic immunity,
his mind's eye looked plainly upon the attack and counterattack of
disease and treatments that robbed him of his hair, his stamina, his
speaking voice and eventually his life.
"I love the imagery of
struggle," he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity
Fair. "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."
Hitchens, a Washington, D.C.-based author, essayist and
polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of
causes left and right, died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer,
according to a statement from Vanity Fair magazine. He was 62.
"There
will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect,
who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar," said Vanity Fair
editor Graydon Carter. "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those
who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
He had enjoyed his
drink (enough to "to kill or stun the average mule") and cigarettes,
until he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of
the esophagus.
He was a most engaged, prolific and public
intellectual who wrote numerous books, was a frequent television
commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other
publications. He became a popular author in 2007 thanks to "God is Not
Great," a manifesto for atheists.
Long after his diagnosis, his
columns and essays appeared regularly, savaging the royal family,
reveling in the death of Osama bin Laden, or pondering the letters of
poet Philip Larkin. He was intolerant of nonsense, including about his
own health. In a piece which appeared in the January 2012 issue of
Vanity Fair, he dismissed the old saying that what doesn't kill you
makes you stronger.
"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. I repeat, this is no more than what a
healthy person has to do in slower motion," he wrote. "It is our common
fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that
don't live up to their apparent billing."
Eloquent and
intemperate, bawdy and urbane, Hitchens was an acknowledged contrarian
and contradiction — half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing;
a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who
backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. But his passions
remained constant and targets of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to
Mother Teresa, remained hated.
repent or forgive or ask for pity. As if granted diplomatic immunity,
his mind's eye looked plainly upon the attack and counterattack of
disease and treatments that robbed him of his hair, his stamina, his
speaking voice and eventually his life.
"I love the imagery of
struggle," he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity
Fair. "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."
Hitchens, a Washington, D.C.-based author, essayist and
polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of
causes left and right, died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer,
according to a statement from Vanity Fair magazine. He was 62.
"There
will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect,
who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar," said Vanity Fair
editor Graydon Carter. "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those
who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."
He had enjoyed his
drink (enough to "to kill or stun the average mule") and cigarettes,
until he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of
the esophagus.
He was a most engaged, prolific and public
intellectual who wrote numerous books, was a frequent television
commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other
publications. He became a popular author in 2007 thanks to "God is Not
Great," a manifesto for atheists.
Long after his diagnosis, his
columns and essays appeared regularly, savaging the royal family,
reveling in the death of Osama bin Laden, or pondering the letters of
poet Philip Larkin. He was intolerant of nonsense, including about his
own health. In a piece which appeared in the January 2012 issue of
Vanity Fair, he dismissed the old saying that what doesn't kill you
makes you stronger.
"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. I repeat, this is no more than what a
healthy person has to do in slower motion," he wrote. "It is our common
fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that
don't live up to their apparent billing."
Eloquent and
intemperate, bawdy and urbane, Hitchens was an acknowledged contrarian
and contradiction — half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing;
a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who
backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. But his passions
remained constant and targets of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to
Mother Teresa, remained hated.