ThinkingBlue: Without Christopher Hitchens, We (mankind) Are Less.

Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

PREFACE – HITCH 22

Instead of attending “prayer breakfasts” in my own honor on what was actually designated on the Web as “Pray for Hitchens Day.” I have spent much of the past year registering myself as an experimental subject for various clinical trials and “protocols,” mainly genome-based and aimed at enlarging human knowledge and at shrinking the area of darkness and terror where cancer holds dominion. My aim here is obviously not quite disinterested, but many of the experiments are at a stage where any result will be too far in the future to be of help to me. In this book I cite Horace Mann’s injunction: “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” So this is a modest and slight response to his challenge, to be sure, but my own. The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason.

Not all my views have been vindicated, even to me. I see that I write that, “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive, and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.” I cannot quite sustain this jauntiness in the light of what I now know. Should the best efforts of my physician friends be unavailing, I possess a fairly clear idea of how Stage Four esophageal cancer harvests its victims. The terminal process doesn’t allow for much in the way of “activity” or even of composed farewells, let alone Stoic or Socratic departures. This is why I am so grateful to have had, already, a lucid interval of some length, and to have filled it with the same elements, of friendship and love, and literature and the dialectic, with which I hope some of this book is also animated. I wasn’t born to do any of the things I set down here, but I was born to die and this code must be my attempt to assimilate the narrative to its conclusion.

Christopher Hitchens

Washington, D.C.,

January 20, 2011

Without Christopher Hitchens, we (mankind) are less. thinkingblue

“[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
- Christopher Hitchens