The Fading of the Hitch
"Concerning love, I had best be brief and say that when I read Bertrand Russell on this matter as an adolescent, and understood him to write with perfect gravity that a moment of such emotion was worth the whole of the rest of life, I devoutly hoped that this would be true in my own case. And so it has proved, and so to that extent I can regard the death I otherwise resent as laughable and impotent."
- Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty and War
You will have read that the inimitible – I might say, as I have said of Orwell, the indispensible – Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Here he is for nearly an hour on the Charlie Rose show – every minute of it worth watching.
Unspeakably sadly, he looks like he's aged 20 years in the last month. But his wit, his erudition, his deep and abiding moral sense, his hypertrophiedly muscular intellectualism, are all unimpaired and on display. Here he gives us the good stuff on illness and death, love and friendship, totalitarianism and resistance against it, politics and poetry and letters and life.
God bless you, Mr Hitchens. And please get well – we need you.
