THE HITCH
A few days ago a package arrived from Amazon containing a huge doorstop of a book, ‘Arguably,’ by Christopher Hitchens. Any new book by Hitchens is a treat, but this, meaty doesn’t quite do it justice, tome surpassed expectations, though I confess I received it with strong feelings of sadness, for ‘the Hitch’ is dying.
News of his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer last year hit me as a form of personal tragedy, made all the more poignant by the timing of the news, just as I was finishing his autobiography Hitch 22. We needed the Hitch.
I have tried to write about Christopher Hitchens before but gave up on every occasion, somehow I could never get the tone right, either too fawning or too coldly detached. Christopher Hitchens is not only the public intellectual for whom I have the greatest admiration but also someone who has time and time again warmed my spirit with his passion, commitment, pugnacity and his life affirming engagement with the enemies of free speech, democracy and the legacy of the enlightenment.
Hitchens almost single handed changed my mind on the Iraq war and bolstered my growing sense that there was something gravely wrong with so much of the so called ‘left.’ It was the greatest of all our satirists Jonathan Swift who observed that, ‘when a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him,’ and Hitchens can be best judged by the quality of his enemies. Few things have caused such a swell of inner celebration as watching the Hitch demolish the squalid little George Galloway in debate. Hitch has many enemies, some former allies, I wont say friends, but as he has observed there ‘loss’ has been more than compensated for by the quality of his comrades in, amongst other places, the Kurdish socialist movement.
At the start of Hitch 22 with almost hair tingling prescience he observed that for a long time he had put off writing his autobiography out of anxiety that it was too soon, however more recently he had become concerned that soon it might become ‘too late.’ So let me say before, as they say, he departs the stage, his presence in public life has served to make the intellectual air just that bit more breathable.
News of his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer last year hit me as a form of personal tragedy, made all the more poignant by the timing of the news, just as I was finishing his autobiography Hitch 22. We needed the Hitch.
I have tried to write about Christopher Hitchens before but gave up on every occasion, somehow I could never get the tone right, either too fawning or too coldly detached. Christopher Hitchens is not only the public intellectual for whom I have the greatest admiration but also someone who has time and time again warmed my spirit with his passion, commitment, pugnacity and his life affirming engagement with the enemies of free speech, democracy and the legacy of the enlightenment.
Hitchens almost single handed changed my mind on the Iraq war and bolstered my growing sense that there was something gravely wrong with so much of the so called ‘left.’ It was the greatest of all our satirists Jonathan Swift who observed that, ‘when a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him,’ and Hitchens can be best judged by the quality of his enemies. Few things have caused such a swell of inner celebration as watching the Hitch demolish the squalid little George Galloway in debate. Hitch has many enemies, some former allies, I wont say friends, but as he has observed there ‘loss’ has been more than compensated for by the quality of his comrades in, amongst other places, the Kurdish socialist movement.
At the start of Hitch 22 with almost hair tingling prescience he observed that for a long time he had put off writing his autobiography out of anxiety that it was too soon, however more recently he had become concerned that soon it might become ‘too late.’ So let me say before, as they say, he departs the stage, his presence in public life has served to make the intellectual air just that bit more breathable.
