On the Passing of Christopher Hitchens
In one of his later essays, ‘Unspoken Truths’, Hitchens wrote:
The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed.
If it was Hitchens’ biting arguments and effortless writing that drew me to him, then it was the sense that he writing to me that fiercely held my attention. His writing placed that weird curse we sometimes find ourselves under where we feel as if a complete stranger is the closest of friends. I suppose this magic was his honesty.
His voice was a glass of ice water in Hell.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly. - Vanity Fair
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After a hangover out of Lucky Jim, I learned better than to try to drink like the Hitch. But his example was in every other way an inspiring one. Like all of us, he was often wrong, but never in the way everyone else was wrong. His originality was a constant, his independence an unstoppable engine. He loved to argue and debate, not because he was a bully but because he thought it pointed in the direction of truth. - Slate
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“I don’t quite see Christopher as a ‘man of action,’ ” the writer Ian Buruma told The New Yorker in 2006, “but he’s always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy.” - New York Time
