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Mortality
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Memoir & Autobiography (2012)On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for "Vanity Fair," he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.
Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this account of his affliction, he describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of mortality.
Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this account of his affliction, he describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of mortality.
104 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2012
About the author
Christopher Hitchens
157 books7,307 followersChristopher Eric Hitchens was an English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books — the most famous being God Is Not Great — made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist."
The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.
Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christop...
Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist."
The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.
Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christop...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,450 reviews
November 15, 2019
3.75 stars really, but I gave it 5 because Christopher Hitchens wrote it whilst dying of cancer and because of the concept of cancer being another country foreign to the one that we live in.
My mother died of cancer and it really was a different world. The hospice. A world shrunk to a single room and that was defined by a wall of bitterness to one side, pain to another, a slow crumbling of the third wall, and the fourth was windows onto a beautiful garden she could only look at but not enter. A world without hope, a world where nothing beckoned. A world where joy was defined as seeing a loved one and desperate sadness at knowing it was for the last time. This is the world of cancer.
But both of them are free now, ashes to ashes and dust to dust and none of that 'reunited with loved ones just waiting in the world beyond'. (Although I'm not sure about my mother, she wavered...)
This isn't a review, just an acknowledgement I've read the book. What do I say for a review? It isn't strong compared to Hitchens' other books. It is his final contribution to the world of letters, written as the bell knelled time away.
My mother died of cancer and it really was a different world. The hospice. A world shrunk to a single room and that was defined by a wall of bitterness to one side, pain to another, a slow crumbling of the third wall, and the fourth was windows onto a beautiful garden she could only look at but not enter. A world without hope, a world where nothing beckoned. A world where joy was defined as seeing a loved one and desperate sadness at knowing it was for the last time. This is the world of cancer.
But both of them are free now, ashes to ashes and dust to dust and none of that 'reunited with loved ones just waiting in the world beyond'. (Although I'm not sure about my mother, she wavered...)
This isn't a review, just an acknowledgement I've read the book. What do I say for a review? It isn't strong compared to Hitchens' other books. It is his final contribution to the world of letters, written as the bell knelled time away.
October 21, 2020
The End of Reason
For those of us on the downward slide of dermal deterioration and progressive organ failure, Mortality is just the ticket: a sort of how-to about dying. No sugary, maudlin advice about the correct attitude toward the inevitable. No encouraging tales of the will to live. And no suggestions about mitigating the distress involved. Just a number of handy things to keep in mind about the roadblocks we’re all likely to meet on the road to peaceful non-existence.
Here’s the scoop: Barring accidents, and disclaiming by the insurance company, most of is are going to end up as drug addicts. We’ll be looking forward expectantly not to a cure for whatever terminal bug or virus or faulty organ we might contain, but for the next fix of Codeine, or OxyContin, or Morphine (for me it’s Gabapentanine, which provides blissful spinal pain relief and is, of course, highly addictive). The prospect of a remedy in the offing for what ails us isn’t nearly as significant as the supertanker of pain bearing down on us in a very narrow channel elderly existence.
This is where the human species has a maladaptation which is probably necessary for the continuation of the species. Memory can conjure up the events, emotions, and significance of the distant past, but it has no clue about the toothache repaired last week. Until, of course, it returns and we recognise once again another major design flaw in the human body.
If women could remember the pain of childbirth, I doubt that the fertility rate would exceed one. I also doubt that many people would submit to multiple chemo or radiation treatments, or the dozens of other medical solutions that require us to starve, vomit, excrete, secrete, and otherwise suffer intensely. No one tells you how bad it’s going to be - either because they’ve forgotten, or more likely because they presume the trade off between pain and an extra day of life is always stacked in favour of life.
This is, of course, nonsense. It is the selfishness of the living who are, for the moment, without pain and who want to avoid it by forestalling death at any cost. The terminal patient can be a victim of both the disease and the relatives who think their encouragement is justified by the extension of life. The medical profession will experiment endlessly, or at least as long as it is profitable, with one’s body. But it’s the family who think they own the soul, and they ain’t giving it up. Pain is an unfortunate side effect and really isn’t important in their moral calculus.
The point is that the medical treatments for the kinds of conditions from which most of us die today are forms of torture. I don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t even want to suffer ‘significant discomfort’ for any extended period of time. I would like to remain conscious and intellectually active for as long as possible but not if such activity is inhibited by the threat 0f constant pain. I would like to experience the presence of my loved ones but in the knowledge that I can consider them, and they me, without pain even if this involves a certain trippiness.
In short, I far prefer sleep to suffering. I think Hitchens did as well. This seems to me quite reasonable.
For those of us on the downward slide of dermal deterioration and progressive organ failure, Mortality is just the ticket: a sort of how-to about dying. No sugary, maudlin advice about the correct attitude toward the inevitable. No encouraging tales of the will to live. And no suggestions about mitigating the distress involved. Just a number of handy things to keep in mind about the roadblocks we’re all likely to meet on the road to peaceful non-existence.
Here’s the scoop: Barring accidents, and disclaiming by the insurance company, most of is are going to end up as drug addicts. We’ll be looking forward expectantly not to a cure for whatever terminal bug or virus or faulty organ we might contain, but for the next fix of Codeine, or OxyContin, or Morphine (for me it’s Gabapentanine, which provides blissful spinal pain relief and is, of course, highly addictive). The prospect of a remedy in the offing for what ails us isn’t nearly as significant as the supertanker of pain bearing down on us in a very narrow channel elderly existence.
This is where the human species has a maladaptation which is probably necessary for the continuation of the species. Memory can conjure up the events, emotions, and significance of the distant past, but it has no clue about the toothache repaired last week. Until, of course, it returns and we recognise once again another major design flaw in the human body.
If women could remember the pain of childbirth, I doubt that the fertility rate would exceed one. I also doubt that many people would submit to multiple chemo or radiation treatments, or the dozens of other medical solutions that require us to starve, vomit, excrete, secrete, and otherwise suffer intensely. No one tells you how bad it’s going to be - either because they’ve forgotten, or more likely because they presume the trade off between pain and an extra day of life is always stacked in favour of life.
This is, of course, nonsense. It is the selfishness of the living who are, for the moment, without pain and who want to avoid it by forestalling death at any cost. The terminal patient can be a victim of both the disease and the relatives who think their encouragement is justified by the extension of life. The medical profession will experiment endlessly, or at least as long as it is profitable, with one’s body. But it’s the family who think they own the soul, and they ain’t giving it up. Pain is an unfortunate side effect and really isn’t important in their moral calculus.
The point is that the medical treatments for the kinds of conditions from which most of us die today are forms of torture. I don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t even want to suffer ‘significant discomfort’ for any extended period of time. I would like to remain conscious and intellectually active for as long as possible but not if such activity is inhibited by the threat 0f constant pain. I would like to experience the presence of my loved ones but in the knowledge that I can consider them, and they me, without pain even if this involves a certain trippiness.
In short, I far prefer sleep to suffering. I think Hitchens did as well. This seems to me quite reasonable.
September 22, 2012
Wow. He did it. He did dying just as he did living.
He faced his mortality with a steadfast gaze, as well as his trademark wit, humour, and incessant curiosity. His real most deep-seated fear was of losing his ability to express himself, of not being able to talk or to write.
He does still get the last word. I love that this book comes out posthumously. It's as if he is talking to us right now: "And another thing!"
His wife Carol Blue wrote a moving afterword in which she described their 'new world', that world which lasted for nineteen months until the end. Of the day of his 'presentation', in which the tumour declared itself, she describes their transition: "We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived." This reminds me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's terrific book Cancer Ward, in which Time and Memory were classed as "before cancer" and "after cancer".
What I admire most is his perseverance to his craft. Writing really was his reason for living. The way he did his last 19 months, and this book, was about as good a goodbye as anyone could ever hope for for themselves.
A toast to a life well lived and well written, and to this most fitting finale.
He faced his mortality with a steadfast gaze, as well as his trademark wit, humour, and incessant curiosity. His real most deep-seated fear was of losing his ability to express himself, of not being able to talk or to write.
He does still get the last word. I love that this book comes out posthumously. It's as if he is talking to us right now: "And another thing!"
His wife Carol Blue wrote a moving afterword in which she described their 'new world', that world which lasted for nineteen months until the end. Of the day of his 'presentation', in which the tumour declared itself, she describes their transition: "We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived." This reminds me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's terrific book Cancer Ward, in which Time and Memory were classed as "before cancer" and "after cancer".
What I admire most is his perseverance to his craft. Writing really was his reason for living. The way he did his last 19 months, and this book, was about as good a goodbye as anyone could ever hope for for themselves.
A toast to a life well lived and well written, and to this most fitting finale.
February 10, 2016
“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
This short collection of writings done by Christopher Hitchens detailing his experience with cancer, dying and mortality reminds me in no little way of a 21st century Montaigne. While I was expecting Hitchen's stoic materialism to jump off the page, I was also surprised by his gentleness. This is a man who loved life. He loved his family. He loved his friends. He loved to think, to write and to speak. Is there any greater testament to a life well-lived than to read or listen to a man's final words and walk away from that experience made better by his spirit and his strength? If "death is", to re-use Bellow's phrase, "the dark backing a mirror needs before it can give off a reflection," then Hitch's life and words were that same mirror's silver.
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
This short collection of writings done by Christopher Hitchens detailing his experience with cancer, dying and mortality reminds me in no little way of a 21st century Montaigne. While I was expecting Hitchen's stoic materialism to jump off the page, I was also surprised by his gentleness. This is a man who loved life. He loved his family. He loved his friends. He loved to think, to write and to speak. Is there any greater testament to a life well-lived than to read or listen to a man's final words and walk away from that experience made better by his spirit and his strength? If "death is", to re-use Bellow's phrase, "the dark backing a mirror needs before it can give off a reflection," then Hitch's life and words were that same mirror's silver.
March 31, 2013
A book on the dark subject of death that lightens the load with straight shots of clarity, honesty, and a form of wisdom. For those who loved the cultural critic Hitchens as a voice of truth that perfectly balanced logic and wit, fear not the potentials for emotional devastation in this discourse on his own process of death from esophageal cancer. It’s short enough to be read in one sitting and contains no self-pity. He gave me some courage about my own mortality.
The book contains several essays inspired by his condition published in his usual venue of “Vanity Fair”. At first, he surprises himself by a relatively unemotional outlook:
I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me. ... To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
He brilliantly delves into the language of cancer, such as the metaphors of the patient being seen as fighting a battle or subject to an alien invasion. He fights back effectively against those who publicly proclaim he was being punished for blasphemy (he published the book: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). He explores the paradoxes of prayer with riffs along the lines of Ambrose Bierce’s definition in The Devil’s Dictionary: “A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.” He moves toward some rules of etiquette for personal communications with someone who is dying, which is challenged by finding a pathway between throwing out lines of false hope and excessive advice and the overstepping bounds to claim exact knowledge of what one’s friend is going through. In one essay, he renders an outstanding analysis of the quicksand in the Nietsche precept of “that which does not kill you makes you stronger.”
Despite the poor prognosis, Hitchens took the route of chemo and radiation, which he likens to torture. His drive to live is uplifting, but far from Rausch’s path in his “The Last Lecture”, which he felt “should bear its own health warning: so sugary you may need an insulin shot to withstand it”. The inexorable progress of his disease and side effects of treatment are not dwelled upon, but are covered enough to highlight the wisdom of his conclusion: “I do not have a body, I am my body.” To me, his dread of losing his voice is his most poignant expression of his fears, as his explanation of why his sense of self resides so much in that sphere of expression, even in his writings, is exactly what we fans most mourn.
Short though this book is, it should be a lasting testament to what it means to be human. Some of the themes he touches on can be explored more fully in books such as Sontag’s examination of blaming the victim in Illness as Metaphor and Ehrenheit’s attack on the cult of positive thinking in Smile or Die. Instead, this book for me feels like listening to a friend, and the art of that, when properly recognized, makes good on Hitchen's effort to defeat the erasing power of mortality. Talking to his readers well seems to be a core of what he's after, suggested by his comment on a most favored response from a reader: "The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed."
The book contains several essays inspired by his condition published in his usual venue of “Vanity Fair”. At first, he surprises himself by a relatively unemotional outlook:
I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me. ... To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
He brilliantly delves into the language of cancer, such as the metaphors of the patient being seen as fighting a battle or subject to an alien invasion. He fights back effectively against those who publicly proclaim he was being punished for blasphemy (he published the book: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). He explores the paradoxes of prayer with riffs along the lines of Ambrose Bierce’s definition in The Devil’s Dictionary: “A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.” He moves toward some rules of etiquette for personal communications with someone who is dying, which is challenged by finding a pathway between throwing out lines of false hope and excessive advice and the overstepping bounds to claim exact knowledge of what one’s friend is going through. In one essay, he renders an outstanding analysis of the quicksand in the Nietsche precept of “that which does not kill you makes you stronger.”
Despite the poor prognosis, Hitchens took the route of chemo and radiation, which he likens to torture. His drive to live is uplifting, but far from Rausch’s path in his “The Last Lecture”, which he felt “should bear its own health warning: so sugary you may need an insulin shot to withstand it”. The inexorable progress of his disease and side effects of treatment are not dwelled upon, but are covered enough to highlight the wisdom of his conclusion: “I do not have a body, I am my body.” To me, his dread of losing his voice is his most poignant expression of his fears, as his explanation of why his sense of self resides so much in that sphere of expression, even in his writings, is exactly what we fans most mourn.
Short though this book is, it should be a lasting testament to what it means to be human. Some of the themes he touches on can be explored more fully in books such as Sontag’s examination of blaming the victim in Illness as Metaphor and Ehrenheit’s attack on the cult of positive thinking in Smile or Die. Instead, this book for me feels like listening to a friend, and the art of that, when properly recognized, makes good on Hitchen's effort to defeat the erasing power of mortality. Talking to his readers well seems to be a core of what he's after, suggested by his comment on a most favored response from a reader: "The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed."
September 15, 2021
This was an excellent collection of writings from Hitchens on the subject of death. After a rather abrupt diagnosis with esophageal cancer, he chose to write about his experience with illness, and with death on the horizon, his experiences that he endured with cancer treatment. He does this with his usual classic wit, and Hitch style. I felt that Hitchens never had pity for himself and his situation, it was what it was.
He openly discusses those that condemned him and who believed that esophageal cancer was his punishment from God for apparently"blackening his name". I actually never knew about that until reading this book. It's pretty shocking how far people will be lead down the garden path. Nobody gets to choose, cancer does that all on it's own.
There is a rather touching chapter written by his wife in the afterword, and that gave the reader an idea of what Hitchens was like along his cancer journey.
Although this is a short book, it was worth reading. There was no sugar-coating here, and if anything, it made me consider death at a different angle. It appears that he looked death straight in the face until the very end. No cutesy remarks, no pity and no prayers. Just Hitchens, and his exit from this world.
He openly discusses those that condemned him and who believed that esophageal cancer was his punishment from God for apparently"blackening his name". I actually never knew about that until reading this book. It's pretty shocking how far people will be lead down the garden path. Nobody gets to choose, cancer does that all on it's own.
There is a rather touching chapter written by his wife in the afterword, and that gave the reader an idea of what Hitchens was like along his cancer journey.
Although this is a short book, it was worth reading. There was no sugar-coating here, and if anything, it made me consider death at a different angle. It appears that he looked death straight in the face until the very end. No cutesy remarks, no pity and no prayers. Just Hitchens, and his exit from this world.
July 22, 2014
I didn’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens (war with Iraq, for instance) but I always admired his brilliant mind and I enjoyed his feisty, combative personality. Because Hitchens was an outspoken atheist, I was most curious to read his observations on mortality. These moving and brave final essays were so much more than what I expected. I found them to be deeply thought-provoking and sometimes difficult but compelling to read.
The author died of esophageal cancer in 2011, which was as ironic as was his own caustic wit because he was most famous for his public debates and lectures. He faced his battle with cancer and the torturous cancer treatments with the same fierce courage of conviction that he expressed in his many written essays and public dialogues. As an atheist, he remained true to his beliefs even as he once noted, “If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”
His wife, Carol Blue, wrote the touching afterword. Her compassionate tribute included both her personal reflections and a chronicle of his life with cancer. Upon receiving the initial diagnosis, she stated, “Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn't. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived.”
Poignant, unflinching and often humorous. After listening to this book, I watched a few of his many interviews on the internet and afterwards felt a deep sense of loss for his silenced voice. We’re all in the same boat…eventually; and I can only hope to face my mortality with as much courage and grace as Christopher Hitchens. He will be missed.
The author died of esophageal cancer in 2011, which was as ironic as was his own caustic wit because he was most famous for his public debates and lectures. He faced his battle with cancer and the torturous cancer treatments with the same fierce courage of conviction that he expressed in his many written essays and public dialogues. As an atheist, he remained true to his beliefs even as he once noted, “If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.”
His wife, Carol Blue, wrote the touching afterword. Her compassionate tribute included both her personal reflections and a chronicle of his life with cancer. Upon receiving the initial diagnosis, she stated, “Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn't. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived.”
Poignant, unflinching and often humorous. After listening to this book, I watched a few of his many interviews on the internet and afterwards felt a deep sense of loss for his silenced voice. We’re all in the same boat…eventually; and I can only hope to face my mortality with as much courage and grace as Christopher Hitchens. He will be missed.
November 18, 2014
"The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death. Nonetheless, there are a few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discreet, inaccessible rooms, even the way they are concealed, with their own lifts and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve. The uncovered bodies could be wheeled along the hospital corridors, for example, and thence be transported in an ordinary taxi without posing a particular risk to anyone. The elderly man who dies during a cinema performance might just as well remain in his seat until the film is over, and during the next too for that matter. The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by leaving him where he is until the caretaker has time to attend to him, even though that might not be until some time in the late afternoon or evening. What difference would it make if a bird were to alight on him and take a peck? Would what awaits him in the grave be any better just because it is hidden? As long as the dead are not in the way there is no need for any rush, they cannot die a second time. Cold snaps in the winter should be particularly propitious in such circumstances. The homeless who freeze to death on benches and in doorways, the suicidal who jump off high buildings and bridges, elderly women who fall down staircases, traffic victims trapped in wrecked cars, the young man who, in a drunken stupor, falls into the lake after a night on the town, the small girl who ends up under the wheel of a bus, why all this haste to remove them from the public eye? Decency? What could be more decent than to allow the girl's mother and father to see her an hour or two later, lying in the snow at the site of the accident, in full view, her crushed head and the rest of her body, her blood-spattered hair and the spotless padded jacket? Visible to the whole world, no secrets, the way she was. But even this one hour in the snow is unthinkable. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead."
Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family (My Struggle Book One)
There is no tinted glass here, no windowless room. Christopher Hitchens faces death and his own mortality with the same clear-eyed attentiveness, truthfulness and razor-sharp intelligence that he applied to any other subject throughout his life. No self-pity, no sentimentality, no avoiding the pain and suffering, no swerving away from the ultimate absence of "higher meaning". He looks death in the face every step of the way.
Harrowing and life-affirming at the same time, this slim little volume is packed with more grittiness and wisdom and heart than most books you will read this year.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family (My Struggle Book One)
There is no tinted glass here, no windowless room. Christopher Hitchens faces death and his own mortality with the same clear-eyed attentiveness, truthfulness and razor-sharp intelligence that he applied to any other subject throughout his life. No self-pity, no sentimentality, no avoiding the pain and suffering, no swerving away from the ultimate absence of "higher meaning". He looks death in the face every step of the way.
Harrowing and life-affirming at the same time, this slim little volume is packed with more grittiness and wisdom and heart than most books you will read this year.
December 11, 2018
***NO SPOILERS***
Christopher Hitchens wrote this when he was dying, a book about his dying, so I expected some strong emotion, even anguish in these pages. Not so. He comes across as coolly removed from the esophageal cancer consuming him.
The dust jacket promises a “riveting account of his affliction,” yet the book is as much a snoozy discussion of Nietzsche, religion, and medical advancements as it is about Hitchens’s cancer. He’s at his best when he gets personal, describing his medical procedures and physical...not discomfort, but torture; however, in stolid prose, he glosses over his feelings, intellectualizing rather than ever fully letting down his guard. Who cares about Nietzsche when Hitchens could be baring his soul?
Add to this wordiness and excessive use of the passive voice, and Mortality is mostly an emotionless drag. A book about dying doesn’t need to read like The Last Lecture, but to have any kind of emotional punch, it shouldn’t be stiff. The best part is the afterword, and that’s by his wife. Writing about her husband, she wrote it straightforwardly and with the kind of down-to-earth sincerity and warmth that makes Hitchens sound like a real, feeling human being. Unfortunately, she wrote it after he died; she could have taught him something.
Christopher Hitchens wrote this when he was dying, a book about his dying, so I expected some strong emotion, even anguish in these pages. Not so. He comes across as coolly removed from the esophageal cancer consuming him.
The dust jacket promises a “riveting account of his affliction,” yet the book is as much a snoozy discussion of Nietzsche, religion, and medical advancements as it is about Hitchens’s cancer. He’s at his best when he gets personal, describing his medical procedures and physical...not discomfort, but torture; however, in stolid prose, he glosses over his feelings, intellectualizing rather than ever fully letting down his guard. Who cares about Nietzsche when Hitchens could be baring his soul?
Add to this wordiness and excessive use of the passive voice, and Mortality is mostly an emotionless drag. A book about dying doesn’t need to read like The Last Lecture, but to have any kind of emotional punch, it shouldn’t be stiff. The best part is the afterword, and that’s by his wife. Writing about her husband, she wrote it straightforwardly and with the kind of down-to-earth sincerity and warmth that makes Hitchens sound like a real, feeling human being. Unfortunately, she wrote it after he died; she could have taught him something.
December 21, 2022
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: “why not?”
…
“For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”
Mortality is an interesting read. A series of short essays covering his experience of being diagnosed with and dying of cancer, it’s only about 100 pages. But it’s powerful and moving. No sugar-coating, but full of wry observations, the book reads like Mr. Hitchens wrote and spoke in the years before he got sick. Recommended.
June 27, 2019
As an advanced prostate cancer patient myself, still undergoing treatment - Hitchens doesn't waste one word, he nails every aspect of the experience of existing in Tumour Town.
Some memorable moments for me was the way he said cancer gives us a wager, if we stick around for a bit, it expects our taste buds, ability to concentrate amongst other things. The encouraging statements we receive from well-wishers such as "we know you can vanquish this" - there are too many to mention.
I laughed out loud at his suggestion - and a very worthwhile one at that - for a Cancer Etiquette handbook. For residents of Cancer Town and those across the border. This in my view was hilarious.
His list of euphemisms was very funny too - words such as 'discomfort' used by others when asking about ones excruciating pain.
His reminders for is fellow sisters and brothers not to be self-centred or self-pitying is so well made, yes this is a trap for us - cancer by its very nature is an inward looking disease. "Self" is a very natural trap to fall into.
His short notes towards his end are worth reading over and over again. One that sticks is + there is nothing to be gained from infinite life apart from relatives - my words not his - was a magic piece of thought.
I don't feel sorry for Christopher as I am sure that's what he wouldn't want, but I truly believe he would want us to miss him. I know I do, how can we not? His mind was massive, his voice was perfect, his humour spot on and his debating and writing skills second to none. RIP Mr Hitchins.
Some memorable moments for me was the way he said cancer gives us a wager, if we stick around for a bit, it expects our taste buds, ability to concentrate amongst other things. The encouraging statements we receive from well-wishers such as "we know you can vanquish this" - there are too many to mention.
I laughed out loud at his suggestion - and a very worthwhile one at that - for a Cancer Etiquette handbook. For residents of Cancer Town and those across the border. This in my view was hilarious.
His list of euphemisms was very funny too - words such as 'discomfort' used by others when asking about ones excruciating pain.
His reminders for is fellow sisters and brothers not to be self-centred or self-pitying is so well made, yes this is a trap for us - cancer by its very nature is an inward looking disease. "Self" is a very natural trap to fall into.
His short notes towards his end are worth reading over and over again. One that sticks is + there is nothing to be gained from infinite life apart from relatives - my words not his - was a magic piece of thought.
I don't feel sorry for Christopher as I am sure that's what he wouldn't want, but I truly believe he would want us to miss him. I know I do, how can we not? His mind was massive, his voice was perfect, his humour spot on and his debating and writing skills second to none. RIP Mr Hitchins.
February 8, 2019
"Dying is an art, like everything else." ~Sylvia Plath
Christopher Hitchens had a much longer book in mind when he started writing Mortality. His chronicle of living, and dying, with stage four esophageal cancer is a testament to his tenacity, and it seems fitting that he died as he lived: brilliant, irreverent and completely cognizant of inevitability.
"...the thing about stage four is that there is no stage five"
Christopher Hitchens had a much longer book in mind when he started writing Mortality. His chronicle of living, and dying, with stage four esophageal cancer is a testament to his tenacity, and it seems fitting that he died as he lived: brilliant, irreverent and completely cognizant of inevitability.
"...the thing about stage four is that there is no stage five"
February 27, 2017
Foreword, by Graydon Carter
--Mortality
Afterword, by Carol Blue
--Mortality
Afterword, by Carol Blue
June 9, 2016
The day I found out that Christopher Hitchens had died was the day I felt as if someone from my own family had perished.
Christopher Hitchens is, by far, the world's greatest orator, thinker, debater... and I say "is", because, despite his death his words continue to reverberate. He is alive. He will always be alive.
And just as his wife put it in the afterword, "Christopher always has the last word".
"Mortality" is Hitchens' journey through what must have been some of the most painful time in his life. Quite literally. I wish that every single asshole who has said that he will "find god and repent" before his death would read this book. Yes, even in his deathbed he stood by his firm conviction that there is no god, and there never was a god. In fact, he even said that "if I convert, it's because it's better that a believer dies than an atheist". He was an anti-theist until the very end.
"Mortality" is a big middle finger to all the bigots out there who jumped for joy upon finding out of Hitchens' illness and eventual death. Even with his "chemo" brain, he managed to write down thoughts that leave us breathless, leave us pondering for hours.
His death is our great loss. I keep checking Slate and Vanity Fair in hopes I will find just one more article he wrote....maybe some lost scribble found in his book stacks that has been published. And while I am sad that I will never read another book of his, I am thankful we have his words and his thoughts to move us forward.
Thank you, Mr. Hitchens, for such a great contribution to humanity. You are surely missed.
Christopher Hitchens is, by far, the world's greatest orator, thinker, debater... and I say "is", because, despite his death his words continue to reverberate. He is alive. He will always be alive.
And just as his wife put it in the afterword, "Christopher always has the last word".
"Mortality" is Hitchens' journey through what must have been some of the most painful time in his life. Quite literally. I wish that every single asshole who has said that he will "find god and repent" before his death would read this book. Yes, even in his deathbed he stood by his firm conviction that there is no god, and there never was a god. In fact, he even said that "if I convert, it's because it's better that a believer dies than an atheist". He was an anti-theist until the very end.
"Mortality" is a big middle finger to all the bigots out there who jumped for joy upon finding out of Hitchens' illness and eventual death. Even with his "chemo" brain, he managed to write down thoughts that leave us breathless, leave us pondering for hours.
His death is our great loss. I keep checking Slate and Vanity Fair in hopes I will find just one more article he wrote....maybe some lost scribble found in his book stacks that has been published. And while I am sad that I will never read another book of his, I am thankful we have his words and his thoughts to move us forward.
Thank you, Mr. Hitchens, for such a great contribution to humanity. You are surely missed.
September 4, 2018
Why read a book or see a movie about death? I told my mother-in-law that I was reading a number of graphic memoirs about cancer, surviving it or not, and she asked me, "Why would you even do that?" I answered her that I thought it was interesting how people faced this all-too-common terrible disease, and even death. My wife says, "I'm not sure why you would want to read something so sad," but she does read dystopian books all the time, which she says are sci fi and not the same thing, and maybe I'd agree, in a sense.
The argument may in a sense be about real vs. cartoon violence, though I am sure the writers of dystopian novels would want readers to dismiss their work as mere fantasy or escapism. I guess as a life long English major/teacher, I am inclined as is all English studies to reading more tragedy vs. comedy, to reading about, as Woody Allen noted in his film: Love and Death, that one might find more "significance" or "meaning" there. So I like to read about death, it interests me. My parents are dead, I'm 60, most of my 20 sets of uncles and aunts are now dead, but I don't think it's just psychoanalytic; I think I was always interested in it; it's a serious subject, and I like to see how a great writer deals with it. In the fall I read Anna Karenina and I found powerful how Tolstoy describes the death of Levin's brother. But I was equally impressed in my late teens or early twenties reading Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illych" on the same subject. I liked John Green's The Fault in Our Stars with a similar theme.... I liked Warren Zevon's last album, done while he was dying of cancer, and Johnny Cash's last album, accomplished under the same conditions, though neither were their best works. Just: facing that, as artists, because that's what they do, they use their art, and language, to help us see what that was like for them. As we will have to do. I think of Beckett, Waiting for Godot and all his work, making meaning in the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: "I can't go on: I'll go on."
So I don't always agree with Hitchens (I don't know him well enough to call him Hitch, his nickname and the title of his memoir), but I think he is one of the best writers I have read; always provocative, a stylist who knows how to use language, sardonic, politically left (one exception, on Iraq!), funny, insightful, hard to ignore. I always read him when I could in op ed pieces or journals because he had something fresh to say, something to push my thinking. He wrote a provocative book that ticked off a lot of believers, particularly Christians, God is NOT Great: Why Religions Poison Everything, that was so good it was nominated for a National Book Award. And then he dies of esophageal cancer (ha ha, some of the "Christians" said: how ironic and telling that a guy who used his voice to denounce God has his VOICE taken away by Him...).
I am also a person who lives by his voice, as teacher and writer, so I was curious how a man who also lives by his voice deals with The End, how he uses language to work through the passage to death, and I was not disappointed, he is "alive" and fresh and provocative and insightful in his prose as ever he was in public debates or his writing, until the very last words he pens, which are in fact here, even just excerpts, notes he makes on books or quotes he wants to work into an insight, right up to the very end, trying to make sense, to keep using language, to connect.
"I can't go on; I'll go on," right to the end. A really great writer. I learn always from him how to respond non-clichedly to the world, to think of ideas and situations in new ways, to be unique and not just parrot what everyone else is saying on a topic. I learn here something about how to live, even in the bleakest conditions, as he does, right to the end. Regardless of whether you agree with him on any topic, you have to admit that passion and commitment. He's funny in surprising ways, in the book, and not sappy or sentimental, ever.
The argument may in a sense be about real vs. cartoon violence, though I am sure the writers of dystopian novels would want readers to dismiss their work as mere fantasy or escapism. I guess as a life long English major/teacher, I am inclined as is all English studies to reading more tragedy vs. comedy, to reading about, as Woody Allen noted in his film: Love and Death, that one might find more "significance" or "meaning" there. So I like to read about death, it interests me. My parents are dead, I'm 60, most of my 20 sets of uncles and aunts are now dead, but I don't think it's just psychoanalytic; I think I was always interested in it; it's a serious subject, and I like to see how a great writer deals with it. In the fall I read Anna Karenina and I found powerful how Tolstoy describes the death of Levin's brother. But I was equally impressed in my late teens or early twenties reading Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illych" on the same subject. I liked John Green's The Fault in Our Stars with a similar theme.... I liked Warren Zevon's last album, done while he was dying of cancer, and Johnny Cash's last album, accomplished under the same conditions, though neither were their best works. Just: facing that, as artists, because that's what they do, they use their art, and language, to help us see what that was like for them. As we will have to do. I think of Beckett, Waiting for Godot and all his work, making meaning in the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: "I can't go on: I'll go on."
So I don't always agree with Hitchens (I don't know him well enough to call him Hitch, his nickname and the title of his memoir), but I think he is one of the best writers I have read; always provocative, a stylist who knows how to use language, sardonic, politically left (one exception, on Iraq!), funny, insightful, hard to ignore. I always read him when I could in op ed pieces or journals because he had something fresh to say, something to push my thinking. He wrote a provocative book that ticked off a lot of believers, particularly Christians, God is NOT Great: Why Religions Poison Everything, that was so good it was nominated for a National Book Award. And then he dies of esophageal cancer (ha ha, some of the "Christians" said: how ironic and telling that a guy who used his voice to denounce God has his VOICE taken away by Him...).
I am also a person who lives by his voice, as teacher and writer, so I was curious how a man who also lives by his voice deals with The End, how he uses language to work through the passage to death, and I was not disappointed, he is "alive" and fresh and provocative and insightful in his prose as ever he was in public debates or his writing, until the very last words he pens, which are in fact here, even just excerpts, notes he makes on books or quotes he wants to work into an insight, right up to the very end, trying to make sense, to keep using language, to connect.
"I can't go on; I'll go on," right to the end. A really great writer. I learn always from him how to respond non-clichedly to the world, to think of ideas and situations in new ways, to be unique and not just parrot what everyone else is saying on a topic. I learn here something about how to live, even in the bleakest conditions, as he does, right to the end. Regardless of whether you agree with him on any topic, you have to admit that passion and commitment. He's funny in surprising ways, in the book, and not sappy or sentimental, ever.
August 11, 2019
A great book to read if you think you're having a bad day. Suddenly you're not.
We won't see the likes of the exceptional Hitch ever again. But he was here, and stamped his mark on the literary world. For that we should be forever grateful.
We won't see the likes of the exceptional Hitch ever again. But he was here, and stamped his mark on the literary world. For that we should be forever grateful.
December 29, 2014
Transcendent and universal, yet without a happy ending: there could be no other title. And it's not like Christopher Hitchens would have authored yet another celebrity cancer memoir, is it?
He writes from "Tumortown" but beyond, there is a vast less-explored interior, where the likes of me hang out, those with the thousands, millions of different more-or-less sickly Cinderella illnesses. Though they comprehend the city's size and very serious troubles, they are sometimes resentful and bewildered at all the attention and money the metropolis receives. Mortality, though, is affecting wherever you are.
"He didn't want to be defined by it. He wanted to think and write in a sphere apart from sickness." Me too. And perhaps because of this, because I don't spend much time looking at such things, I've never read an account of illness which captured anywhere near so many of my own feelings. Whether a condition is acute and much funded like his, or chronic / intermittent with-recent-worsening and obscure as is mine, his personal account resonates with the general struggle to have some life, against a significant medical problem.
Sometimes I highlighted whole pages. I have an (even-more) EP version of this review in which I recount long paragraphs of personal experience, much of it using his words.
This book is about the battle of the sense of self against something eating it up from inside; about the sharpening that occurs when you've no idea how long will be left to do what you want to do (whether that's because of likely physical death or the living death in debility)... and the frustration that you are already too unwell to do some of it; about being someone who has so much life in them that some friends say they can't comprehend how anything could really beat you down - yet you know that's not always how it works, for some illnesses are no respector of personality.
He still has the strength to hang, draw and quarter the bloody nonsense "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger", whilst comprehensively dissing its parental origins. It deserves it. The illogic of this statement if globally applied - and the cruel lack of empathy inherent in so many of its utterances - should be apparent to everyone, yet still it has persisted this long.
Hitchens was known as a loudmouth, and of course the vicious irony of his particular cancer does not escape him. But as I read more of his work this past month, his compassion - a fierce, knight-errant compassion - became evident. This time, on the subject of how we talk to people who are unwell, he is fighting for himself at least as much as for others: the fear, vulnerability and weariness show. "...nor do I walk around sporting a huge lapel button that says ASK ME ABOUT [STAGE FOUR METASTASIZED OESOPHEGEAL CANCER], AND ONLY ABOUT THAT" Insert disease name as applicable. If everyone who reads this book remembers that in conversations with those they don't know well, the world will be a bit more tolerable for a lot of people who already have more than enough to tolerate.
How ironically well he articulates the loss of power and personality in being unable to speak (and at a time when this was actually, hideously permanent for him), the dark dread of "the loss of transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking" - and, unexpectedly, how careful medical staff should be in their communication so as not to induce psychological trauma. It is astounding that one so bullish is an ally in this.
Though he gives it a lesser name, Hitchens appears to have been afflicted by PTSD after his investigation into waterboarding. "I have the ... right, if not duty, to be ... ashamed of the official policy of torture adoped by a government whose citizenship papers I had only recently taken out", he wisely concedes.
"The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay me is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed." Not only addressed, but strengthened and given voice. Job done. Have ten stars, Mr H.
He writes from "Tumortown" but beyond, there is a vast less-explored interior, where the likes of me hang out, those with the thousands, millions of different more-or-less sickly Cinderella illnesses. Though they comprehend the city's size and very serious troubles, they are sometimes resentful and bewildered at all the attention and money the metropolis receives. Mortality, though, is affecting wherever you are.
"He didn't want to be defined by it. He wanted to think and write in a sphere apart from sickness." Me too. And perhaps because of this, because I don't spend much time looking at such things, I've never read an account of illness which captured anywhere near so many of my own feelings. Whether a condition is acute and much funded like his, or chronic / intermittent with-recent-worsening and obscure as is mine, his personal account resonates with the general struggle to have some life, against a significant medical problem.
Sometimes I highlighted whole pages. I have an (even-more) EP version of this review in which I recount long paragraphs of personal experience, much of it using his words.
This book is about the battle of the sense of self against something eating it up from inside; about the sharpening that occurs when you've no idea how long will be left to do what you want to do (whether that's because of likely physical death or the living death in debility)... and the frustration that you are already too unwell to do some of it; about being someone who has so much life in them that some friends say they can't comprehend how anything could really beat you down - yet you know that's not always how it works, for some illnesses are no respector of personality.
He still has the strength to hang, draw and quarter the bloody nonsense "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger", whilst comprehensively dissing its parental origins. It deserves it. The illogic of this statement if globally applied - and the cruel lack of empathy inherent in so many of its utterances - should be apparent to everyone, yet still it has persisted this long.
Hitchens was known as a loudmouth, and of course the vicious irony of his particular cancer does not escape him. But as I read more of his work this past month, his compassion - a fierce, knight-errant compassion - became evident. This time, on the subject of how we talk to people who are unwell, he is fighting for himself at least as much as for others: the fear, vulnerability and weariness show. "...nor do I walk around sporting a huge lapel button that says ASK ME ABOUT [STAGE FOUR METASTASIZED OESOPHEGEAL CANCER], AND ONLY ABOUT THAT" Insert disease name as applicable. If everyone who reads this book remembers that in conversations with those they don't know well, the world will be a bit more tolerable for a lot of people who already have more than enough to tolerate.
How ironically well he articulates the loss of power and personality in being unable to speak (and at a time when this was actually, hideously permanent for him), the dark dread of "the loss of transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking" - and, unexpectedly, how careful medical staff should be in their communication so as not to induce psychological trauma. It is astounding that one so bullish is an ally in this.
Though he gives it a lesser name, Hitchens appears to have been afflicted by PTSD after his investigation into waterboarding. "I have the ... right, if not duty, to be ... ashamed of the official policy of torture adoped by a government whose citizenship papers I had only recently taken out", he wisely concedes.
"The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay me is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed." Not only addressed, but strengthened and given voice. Job done. Have ten stars, Mr H.
December 10, 2012
Whatever one's opinion on Christopher Hitchens' religious views, it's indisputable that the man can write. This collection of essays was penned after his diagnosis of terminal esophageal cancer and before his untimely death.
The focus of this book is more about his experience of dying of cancer than anything else, but his chapter on the varying responses of Christians to his diagnosis is among the richest in the book. The contrast between those who gleefully indulged in their belief that this was God's revenge against a blasphemer and the patient and generous assistance noted Christian Francis Collins gave to Hitchens as he navigated the complexities of his treatment offers a striking lesson in true humanity.
Primarily, though, this is a guidebook through a land nobody really wants to visit. Hitchens looks at many facets of the cancer landscape, from the difficulty of communication between those with and those without, the struggle with conscious loss of taken-for-granted faculties, and an eloquent piece pointing out that, in cancer land, there are plenty of things that do not kill you, but absolutely do not make you stronger.
Though Hitchens retains his trademark dry wit throughout the book, I found my reading of it shadowed with sadness. The last chapter in particular, which consists of a number of idea fragments he'd written but had not yet fleshed out before an unexpected turn for the worse silenced his keyboard forever, was a particularly poignant reminder of how terribly tenuous a grip we all have on this miracle called life.
The focus of this book is more about his experience of dying of cancer than anything else, but his chapter on the varying responses of Christians to his diagnosis is among the richest in the book. The contrast between those who gleefully indulged in their belief that this was God's revenge against a blasphemer and the patient and generous assistance noted Christian Francis Collins gave to Hitchens as he navigated the complexities of his treatment offers a striking lesson in true humanity.
Primarily, though, this is a guidebook through a land nobody really wants to visit. Hitchens looks at many facets of the cancer landscape, from the difficulty of communication between those with and those without, the struggle with conscious loss of taken-for-granted faculties, and an eloquent piece pointing out that, in cancer land, there are plenty of things that do not kill you, but absolutely do not make you stronger.
Though Hitchens retains his trademark dry wit throughout the book, I found my reading of it shadowed with sadness. The last chapter in particular, which consists of a number of idea fragments he'd written but had not yet fleshed out before an unexpected turn for the worse silenced his keyboard forever, was a particularly poignant reminder of how terribly tenuous a grip we all have on this miracle called life.
April 7, 2019
I had never read anything by Christopher Hitchens except maybe a brief excerpt by or about him when he was dying, and although I'd heard snippets of his debates over religion they didn't capture my full interest. So I was surprised at the quality of this short book of essays published after he was diagnosed. Even more surprising is that he could still keep his wits about him and create while he was so ill. I can't think straight or necessarily even think about thinking if my back has gone out or if I have a stomach virus, as I did not long ago. This is a brief book, so maybe he wrote the essays in periods of relative calm and comfort. Relative is the key word here.
It's in the first essay that he comes up with the picture of the emergency medical assistants deporting him from the land of health to the land of illness. And then he talks about that foreign country, which has the worst food of anywhere he's ever visited.
He retained his access to humor, and he somehow steered clear of self-pity, his situation notwithstanding.
His essay about what it means to a writer to lose his voice is included in this book. His malady was esophageal cancer.
For me, his humanistic writing outshines his reasoning, judging from his brief foray in this book into debate over religion and his argument that what doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger. He ignored rather than integrated information or circumstances that didn't support his conclusions.
During Hitchens' lifetime, I wouldn't have been very likely to come across his writings since he didn't publish in magazines I took--unlike the present, when one samples essays and articles from all over. In fact, I just picked up another collection by him.
It's in the first essay that he comes up with the picture of the emergency medical assistants deporting him from the land of health to the land of illness. And then he talks about that foreign country, which has the worst food of anywhere he's ever visited.
He retained his access to humor, and he somehow steered clear of self-pity, his situation notwithstanding.
His essay about what it means to a writer to lose his voice is included in this book. His malady was esophageal cancer.
For me, his humanistic writing outshines his reasoning, judging from his brief foray in this book into debate over religion and his argument that what doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger. He ignored rather than integrated information or circumstances that didn't support his conclusions.
During Hitchens' lifetime, I wouldn't have been very likely to come across his writings since he didn't publish in magazines I took--unlike the present, when one samples essays and articles from all over. In fact, I just picked up another collection by him.
May 24, 2016
It is extraordinary to read the inner life of anybody grappling with oncoming death, and Hitch being Hitch he has done it differently and memorably.
Two ideas particularly stand out for me, both connecting me to thoughts of dear friends.
The first is the phrase perhaps best know from Hitchens' writing of his life after diagnosis with cancer as 'living dyingly'. I think of the three people I know in similar situations who chose to die livingly. There is a difference in emphasis that is too hard for me to put into words here, but I know it emotionally.
The second is: I'm not fighting or battling cancer - it's fighting me.
My dear friend J., who died of cancer last year, said that there was no such thing as battling cancer. There is no chance of winning; it's a one sided war.
So I like Hitchens' formulation. I wonder if she had read this book. Quite possibly.
And then there is the relentless Hitchens eye translating the euphemisms of inflicting pain (you may experience some discomfort)and enduring it; reporting the gross insensitivity of autograph hunters (you can't consider them as well wishers) and the sheer vindictiveness of the so-called Christians who tell him God has visited cancer upon him as a just punishment for unbelief.
It's a book I won't forget.
Two ideas particularly stand out for me, both connecting me to thoughts of dear friends.
The first is the phrase perhaps best know from Hitchens' writing of his life after diagnosis with cancer as 'living dyingly'. I think of the three people I know in similar situations who chose to die livingly. There is a difference in emphasis that is too hard for me to put into words here, but I know it emotionally.
The second is: I'm not fighting or battling cancer - it's fighting me.
My dear friend J., who died of cancer last year, said that there was no such thing as battling cancer. There is no chance of winning; it's a one sided war.
So I like Hitchens' formulation. I wonder if she had read this book. Quite possibly.
And then there is the relentless Hitchens eye translating the euphemisms of inflicting pain (you may experience some discomfort)and enduring it; reporting the gross insensitivity of autograph hunters (you can't consider them as well wishers) and the sheer vindictiveness of the so-called Christians who tell him God has visited cancer upon him as a just punishment for unbelief.
It's a book I won't forget.
June 16, 2021
Fabulous essay by Christopher Hitchens about Nietzsche...
https://archive.vanityfair.com/articl...
==========
Hitchens describes cancer as being another country, foreign to the one that we live in. Consciously or not, he may have been invoking Susan Sontag's distinction between the Kingdom of the Sick and the Kingdom of the Well. People can move between the two, but if a chronic condition or terminal sickness takes over, one becomes a permanent resident of the Kingdom of the Sick.
===========
Classic Hitchens style even in the midst of such physical and emotional distress. The well-written afterword by his widow included some good insights, especially her perspective on the treatment Hitchens pursued and endured, including why.
This account got me to thinking again if I would submit to chemo and radiation in this situation, given the kind of harm those treatments do and the additional suffering they inflict.
My father practiced medicine for 40 years, as a medical officer during WW II, then in a small town, and in the last 20 years of his career at a group practice in Palo Alto, CA. Something he told me about another doctor in CA has stayed with me. His colleague was an oncologist who contracted harsh cancer (I don't recall what form). But my dad said that his fellow doctor: "decided to sit in the backyard in the sun and enjoy as much time as he had left with his family."
Assuredly an oncologist knows the score better than any lay person. So I found it striking that he chose this course of action, or no-action, as it were. Quality time over quantity, apparently.
------------
For more practical considerations than the Hitchens book, let me recommend "Being Mortal" by Dr. Atul Gawande....
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Brilliant book on cancer. You can look up the stats; it touches numerous lives. Both my parents died of cancer, so did my mother in law, and my wife is a cancer survivor.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
https://archive.vanityfair.com/articl...
==========
Hitchens describes cancer as being another country, foreign to the one that we live in. Consciously or not, he may have been invoking Susan Sontag's distinction between the Kingdom of the Sick and the Kingdom of the Well. People can move between the two, but if a chronic condition or terminal sickness takes over, one becomes a permanent resident of the Kingdom of the Sick.
===========
Classic Hitchens style even in the midst of such physical and emotional distress. The well-written afterword by his widow included some good insights, especially her perspective on the treatment Hitchens pursued and endured, including why.
This account got me to thinking again if I would submit to chemo and radiation in this situation, given the kind of harm those treatments do and the additional suffering they inflict.
My father practiced medicine for 40 years, as a medical officer during WW II, then in a small town, and in the last 20 years of his career at a group practice in Palo Alto, CA. Something he told me about another doctor in CA has stayed with me. His colleague was an oncologist who contracted harsh cancer (I don't recall what form). But my dad said that his fellow doctor: "decided to sit in the backyard in the sun and enjoy as much time as he had left with his family."
Assuredly an oncologist knows the score better than any lay person. So I found it striking that he chose this course of action, or no-action, as it were. Quality time over quantity, apparently.
------------
For more practical considerations than the Hitchens book, let me recommend "Being Mortal" by Dr. Atul Gawande....
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Brilliant book on cancer. You can look up the stats; it touches numerous lives. Both my parents died of cancer, so did my mother in law, and my wife is a cancer survivor.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...
July 17, 2013
This was like walking in on the final act of some grand production. Walking in on Romeo dooming himself as Juliet awakes. The last cries of ‘Jack! Rose!’ as the Leocicle drops into the icy Atlantic...hearing the last notes of ‘Hiding All Away’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Yeah. Like that.
By now you know that I’m not the deepest well in the field. I spent my twenties reading Weetzie Bat and bopping around to King Missile. I know, I should have been studying the NYTBR or listening to Ira Glass wax poetic. It was misspent youth. I get it.
So, walking in on Dorothy pointing to her farmer friends saying ‘and you were there and you and you’… Yes, that is how I felt reading this book. I knew the name Christopher Hitchens… vaguely. (yes, you can drop me as a friend, I totally understand.) I am sure that I have read SOMETHING by him, right? I mean, I did have that subscription to the Atlantic in my thirties and I remember my husband buying this Vanity Fair so maybe there was something there… (besides sad substitutes for Lohan porn). But, I don’t KNOW Christopher Hitchens and I feel lesser because of that.
Maybe I wouldn’t like him. Maybe I would think he was another blowhard. I don’t know.. but when you are writing on your death bed and you can sound this eloquent… well, slap my knee and call me sally, I’m on board. Okay, Okay… writing about the Big C, suicide, AIDS... the death of a loved one tends to get props just on subject alone. The endurance, the courage, the tragedy of it all. It sells, I know this. It is especially jarring when you have experienced the loss of someone . You relate and you feel like you are in the know. It’s actually sort of selfish though, I mean.. YOU didn’t go through this.. you weren’t the one having toxins pumped into you, having your body, your mind, become your enemy. You just stood by and watched it happen, rubber-necking, gawking, throwing out clichés by the dozen (ha!).
Hitchens is full frontal here, he is witty and he is honest and clever and his whole take on ‘living dyingly’ makes the journey more personal. He is a master at his craft, of including you in the story, you are not bored or even sympathetic in that false sense that you think you know what he is going through. He makes you laugh as he talks about reading reactions to his illness, how the zealots actually relish:
“Who else feels that Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer (sic) was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” (that) out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists,. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.”
And his first response?
Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?
(I do apologize for the use of gifs...there's no real excuse...carpe diem, folks.)
I really like this guy. I wish I had known him pre posthumously. Mortality is not long. (Yes, I get it.) But, it packs that punch. He is eloquent and it feels authentic, not dramatic. I believe this struggle.
“worst of all is chemo-brain. Dull stuporous. What if the protracted, lavish torture is only prelude to a gruesome execution.”
“Also ordinary expressions like ‘expiration date’.. will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license?”
“Nose-hairs gone: runny nostrils. Constipation and diarrhea alternating.”
“ Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.”
“Banality of cancer. Entire pest-house of side-effects. Special of the day.”
I appreciate this because it knocked me on my ass. Death made me an orphan, a widow---what I might have thought a victim, but death was not kind to my loved ones and I need to see that and I need to see the struggles that they made to make sure that I didn’t see it then.
If that makes sense.
Yeah. Like that.
By now you know that I’m not the deepest well in the field. I spent my twenties reading Weetzie Bat and bopping around to King Missile. I know, I should have been studying the NYTBR or listening to Ira Glass wax poetic. It was misspent youth. I get it.
So, walking in on Dorothy pointing to her farmer friends saying ‘and you were there and you and you’… Yes, that is how I felt reading this book. I knew the name Christopher Hitchens… vaguely. (yes, you can drop me as a friend, I totally understand.) I am sure that I have read SOMETHING by him, right? I mean, I did have that subscription to the Atlantic in my thirties and I remember my husband buying this Vanity Fair so maybe there was something there… (besides sad substitutes for Lohan porn). But, I don’t KNOW Christopher Hitchens and I feel lesser because of that.
Maybe I wouldn’t like him. Maybe I would think he was another blowhard. I don’t know.. but when you are writing on your death bed and you can sound this eloquent… well, slap my knee and call me sally, I’m on board. Okay, Okay… writing about the Big C, suicide, AIDS... the death of a loved one tends to get props just on subject alone. The endurance, the courage, the tragedy of it all. It sells, I know this. It is especially jarring when you have experienced the loss of someone . You relate and you feel like you are in the know. It’s actually sort of selfish though, I mean.. YOU didn’t go through this.. you weren’t the one having toxins pumped into you, having your body, your mind, become your enemy. You just stood by and watched it happen, rubber-necking, gawking, throwing out clichés by the dozen (ha!).
Hitchens is full frontal here, he is witty and he is honest and clever and his whole take on ‘living dyingly’ makes the journey more personal. He is a master at his craft, of including you in the story, you are not bored or even sympathetic in that false sense that you think you know what he is going through. He makes you laugh as he talks about reading reactions to his illness, how the zealots actually relish:
“Who else feels that Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer (sic) was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” (that) out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists,. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.”
And his first response?
Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?
(I do apologize for the use of gifs...there's no real excuse...carpe diem, folks.)
I really like this guy. I wish I had known him pre posthumously. Mortality is not long. (Yes, I get it.) But, it packs that punch. He is eloquent and it feels authentic, not dramatic. I believe this struggle.
“worst of all is chemo-brain. Dull stuporous. What if the protracted, lavish torture is only prelude to a gruesome execution.”
“Also ordinary expressions like ‘expiration date’.. will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license?”
“Nose-hairs gone: runny nostrils. Constipation and diarrhea alternating.”
“ Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.”
“Banality of cancer. Entire pest-house of side-effects. Special of the day.”
I appreciate this because it knocked me on my ass. Death made me an orphan, a widow---what I might have thought a victim, but death was not kind to my loved ones and I need to see that and I need to see the struggles that they made to make sure that I didn’t see it then.
If that makes sense.
April 13, 2013
Hitchens writes: "If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does." -pg. 91.
There's no denying the integrity in his life, nor the intellect and wit in his speaking and writing.
But what can I make of this book? It was an easy enough read, but the fact that we're approaching the topic from two diametrically opposed worldviews made it challenging. Is it enough that we respect one another, or give some semblance of respect?
I've watched Hitchens debate religion and politics a number of times. (On youtube, mind you.) Here he debates his brother or here he debates Dinesh D'Souza - and there are many others worth watching... He's very good, and I believe it's a good idea for Christians to engage with other ideologies - and not for the sake of proselytization, but because we can hardly call ourselves "truth-seekers" if we refuse to acknowledge or investigate criticisms of our beliefs.
Mortality is a book about death, cancer, and God. In it, Hitchens is at once provocative, inquisitive, irreverent, and stubborn. (Perhaps he would choose the word "stead-fast.")
And (from my own world-view) is it wrong that I found it both admirable and tragic that he maintained his beliefs through his death? I'm sure many in my theological camp would be appalled by the remark - perhaps likening it to an unrepentant child rapist who refuses to admit he was wrong. There's nothing admirable about that.
But as a Christian, I also believe in a just God - an incomprehensible God. And I hope that when my atheist friends contemplate my beliefs - beliefs that seem completely inconsistent with their view of the world - well, I hope they make allowances for me as well.
There's no denying the integrity in his life, nor the intellect and wit in his speaking and writing.
But what can I make of this book? It was an easy enough read, but the fact that we're approaching the topic from two diametrically opposed worldviews made it challenging. Is it enough that we respect one another, or give some semblance of respect?
I've watched Hitchens debate religion and politics a number of times. (On youtube, mind you.) Here he debates his brother or here he debates Dinesh D'Souza - and there are many others worth watching... He's very good, and I believe it's a good idea for Christians to engage with other ideologies - and not for the sake of proselytization, but because we can hardly call ourselves "truth-seekers" if we refuse to acknowledge or investigate criticisms of our beliefs.
Mortality is a book about death, cancer, and God. In it, Hitchens is at once provocative, inquisitive, irreverent, and stubborn. (Perhaps he would choose the word "stead-fast.")
And (from my own world-view) is it wrong that I found it both admirable and tragic that he maintained his beliefs through his death? I'm sure many in my theological camp would be appalled by the remark - perhaps likening it to an unrepentant child rapist who refuses to admit he was wrong. There's nothing admirable about that.
But as a Christian, I also believe in a just God - an incomprehensible God. And I hope that when my atheist friends contemplate my beliefs - beliefs that seem completely inconsistent with their view of the world - well, I hope they make allowances for me as well.
December 10, 2015
Time after time I read Hitchens and I shudder at the thought of his mind. He is a giant of thought of any kind, political, religious, economic, you name it, he's researched, questioned and written about it. This personal account of his last days is haunting, to say the least. To be able to concentrate your intelect on such a high point as to look down from it to cancer is a feat that I doubt many of us could ever achieve. The sharpness of his tongue and the broadness of his thought managed to stave fear enough for him to write such true things about what it feels to, as he brilliantly calls it, "live dyingly". It touched me profoundly, and I feel, as ever when I read him, that he personally spoke to me, even if he spoke to all his readers. That is Hitchens' magic.
Want to read
August 27, 2012*sob* this will break your heart:
"The following is Carol Blue’s afterword to her husband Christopher Hitchens’ book Mortality, out in September from Twelve.
Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.
If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkins’ assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time,” but you will know what I mean—or at least you won’t think, She would say that, she’s his wife.
Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.
At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting, where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, college students, and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find the space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny 20 minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes. “How good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice.
My husband is an impossible act to follow.
And yet, now I must follow him. I have been forced to have the last word." more
"The following is Carol Blue’s afterword to her husband Christopher Hitchens’ book Mortality, out in September from Twelve.
Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.
If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkins’ assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time,” but you will know what I mean—or at least you won’t think, She would say that, she’s his wife.
Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.
At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting, where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, college students, and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find the space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny 20 minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes. “How good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice.
My husband is an impossible act to follow.
And yet, now I must follow him. I have been forced to have the last word." more
August 6, 2015
I've been on a Hitch kick for the past little bit. And, I wish I had paid more attention to this individual while he was still with us. The man is brilliant, without a doubt. But, this one was very special because of the subject matter, and the fact that these were his last little tidbits as he faced the reaper head-on.
Goes without saying, that the journey is very sad. Especially, reading his widow's speech she made at his funeral.
Like I said, wish I had discovered him sooner. However, this means I get to look at all his material with fresh eyes. Hitch writes as he speaks, which is rough and poetic at the same time.
Recommended? You betcha.
4-1/2 brightly lit stars.
Goes without saying, that the journey is very sad. Especially, reading his widow's speech she made at his funeral.
Like I said, wish I had discovered him sooner. However, this means I get to look at all his material with fresh eyes. Hitch writes as he speaks, which is rough and poetic at the same time.
Recommended? You betcha.
4-1/2 brightly lit stars.
October 17, 2018
Christopher Hitchens only produced five-star writing, and this is more of the same. This is a compilation of his Vanity Fair articles chronicling his descent into the black nothingness of death. It is moving and poignant, but is full of Hitch slaps and jokes. This short work should be on everybody's shelves next to When Breath Becomes Air.
September 7, 2017
"To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?"
September 12, 2016
02:11:00Read by Simon Prebble. Afterword spoken by Carole Blue
Description: On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.
CD1 Track 5: Imagine being told that the cancer had taken hold because he voiced his aetheist blasphemies. **eye roll**The one thing Hitchens does perfectly is to conflate all those ideas superstitious humans put up on pedestals through awe or dread. Cutting through euphemism, cliche, torturer speke like good old Flash liquid Hitchens never succumbs to marshmallow-esque comforts to ease the terror, and his cold feet were just that, physical actualities not mental waverings.
Incredible rational stoicism right there!
04:12:2015 ETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-PcR...
TR God is Not Great
4* The Portable Aetheist
4* Mortality
4* Arguably
3* Letters to a Young Contrarian
4* The Missionary Position
TR The Monarchy
The New York Times Book Review: The first seven chapters are, like virtually everything [Hitchens] wrote over his long, distinguished career, diamond-hard and brilliant. An eighth and final chapter consists of unfinished "fragmentary jottings" that he wrote in his terminal days in the critical-care unit of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They're vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine, struggles to keep his engines going. Being in Christopher's company was rarely sobering, but always exhilarating. It is, however, sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his "year of living dyingly" in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down. (Christopher Buckley)
Publishers Weekly:
Diagnosed with the esophageal cancer to which he eventually succumbed in
December 2011, cultural critic Hitchens found himself a finalist in the race of life, and in his typically unflinching and bold manner, he candidly shares his thoughts about his suffering, the etiquette of illness and wellness, and religion in this stark and powerful memoir. Commenting on the persistent metaphor of battle that doctors and friends use to describe his life with cancer (most of this book was published in Vanity Fair), Hitchens mightily challenges this image, for when you sit in a room... and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don,t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier is the very last one that will occur to you. As a result of his various treatments, Hitchens begins to lose his voice, which, given his life as public gadfly through writing and speeches, devastates him. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech. Hitchen's powerful voice compels us to consider carefully the small measures by which we live every day and to cherish them.
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