MORTALITY

Book Review
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

Mortality

It is be fitting that thoughts of mortality should crop up at the end of 2012, an eventful year that seemed to have run off too fast.

On New Year’s Day, 2013, I read Christopher Hitchens’ ‘Mortality’ that focused on the last 18 months of Christopher Hitchens’ life of cancer, a time when he lived ‘dyingly’. His father had died at the age of 79 with a similar cancer. A 61 Hitchens felt he could possibly outdo that, live longer than this father. He would live ‘to read – if indeed not to write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger.’

‘Mortality’ begins with an introduction by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair Editor, and ends with a touching afterword by Carol Blue, Hitchen’s widow. This last book, written while ill with cancer, mostly during the time in the hospital, is both awe-inspiring and sad. It gives a candid insight into the anger, grief and pain of a brilliant thinker, speaker and writer. He writes graphically. Stark, frank descriptions of the evil of his illness – cancer of the esophagus. His speech was often affected and he ended up unable to read and write. This is the worst tragedy that could befall a writer, reader and debater.

He denounced and convincingly discredited Nietzsche’s famous maxim that ‘whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’.

It was while he was busy promoting his memoir Hitch22 that he learned of his illness. In Carol Blue’s words, he ‘insisted ferociously on living’ and carried on with his public-speaking engagements even when it meant vomiting ‘with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion’ before going on stage’.

Hitchens writes ‘I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June (2010) when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.’

‘All of life is a wager.’

Throughout his illness he remained objective, not fatalistic but recognizing the certainty. Many new treatments were tried. If they did not work on him he hoped they would be ready and available soon for future suffers.

The day 21 September 2011 was set aside as Hitchens prayer day by both well-wishers and not so well-wishers. Everyone would pray for Hitchens. People prayed for him to suffer and die as punishment for his disbelief in a god; others prayed for him to get well so he might repent, know the mercy of a good god; and yet others prayed he would convert before it was too late.

He remained true to the ideas that animated his life. He never gave up his principles, his beliefs, his honesty and convictions. He was not going to become an abject creature and throw himself before a god he knew did not exist. An ethical life is possible without religion.

When giving an interview to Anderson Cooper on CNN 360 in August 2010, he stressed his beliefs, saying he was not about to give up and find religion in the last days. When promoting his book ‘God Is Not Great’ he did not go seeking like-minded people but went to the American Bible Belt to debate.

Hitchens continued to burn the candle at both ends. He kept up book tours, speaking events and debates. He did not think it proper to cancel bookings, arrangements that involved much preparation on the part of a great number of organizers.

Skull Collection

In the first part of his memoir Hitch22, he wrote about death:
‘One always knows there is a term-limit to lifespan, just as one always knows that illness or accident or incapacity, physical and mental, are never more than a single breath away’. A premonition?

He continued to write for Vanity Fair and, as he said, it was not as parade of his illness but the narrative of his life.

Hitchens’ great sense of humour was evident at all times. Once when debating with him on ‘Freedoms of Speech’, Shashi Tharoor, in the midst of the debate, burst out laughing and declared he could debate Hitchens as he enjoyed him too much.

At the BBC Munk event in Canada, on Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 2011, a short time before his death, Hitchens debated Tony Blair on the subject of ‘Religion: a Force for Good in the World’. The debate lasted for one and a half hours of lucid and intelligent talk. His pain and discomfort, and the deteriorating effects of his illness, were clearly evident.

‘Practise staying alive but prepare for death.’ He wrote with dignity, heroically accepting his situation and refusing to let it stop him writing an inspiring book. In the last few pages of this short book he only managed to scribble notes to his editor.

Hitchens, a brilliant thinker, writer, speaker, debater and humourist remained all that to the last and then we lost him on 15 December 2011.

Many friends, writers and celebrities attended his memorial. Here is a link to Vanity Fair‘s memorial for Christopher Hitchens. I found the readings of his essay The Vietnam Syndrome by Sean Penn quite powerful and Salman Rushdie chose to read a humorous one ‘Porcophobia’.

Hitchens left us many messages but one stands prominent for me:

‘Think For Yourself’

Leela Panikar