Christopher Hitchens has cancer.
In his piece in this month's Vanity Fair, he treats the subject with his typical rapier wit and no-nonsense lack of sentimentality:
The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through
bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t
so far had much application in my case.
In one way, I suppose, I have
been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both
ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely
that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear
myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the
Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed
to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would
be beside the point for the same reason.
Instead, I am badly oppressed
by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and
felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my
children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To
read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry
Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of
non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.
Of course my
book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of
news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a
healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book
Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a
lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business
and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get
cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office
turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the
tarmac?
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
Why not, indeed?
Hitchens is an interesting cat. I first became aware of him around 9/11 and I pretty much disagreed every word he said at that time but I always found myself intrigued by his intellect and his very precise use of words. He's a really smart guy and I wished I could agree with him but when he was defending the invasion of Iraq as a viable post-9/11 strategy... well, that made it tough for me.
Then, dude became, along with Richard Dawkins, one of the leading voices in the anti-theist movement and Oh Boy! could I get on board with that!
In any case, it sounds like his oesophageal cancer is very serious and that he has some difficult times ahead. Here's hoping he believes in karma because I'd like to send him some of the good kind.
His writing on this subject is beyond words. He has so much grace and courage, he surprises me every time I read something else he was written or watch another interview. And I detested his post 9/11 words. Although I did admire the way he used them
Posted by: Anj | August 12, 2010 at 11:26 PM