Christopher Hitchens: Ten Years of an Education
To say that I come to this essay with a heavy heart is quite an understatement. Christopher Hitchens was first introduced to me on the day of his death, by way of another atheist of whom I was a regular viewer. I had what is, I think, a unique experience, an immediate visceral reaction: I cried. I shed tears at the passing of someone whom I had never known, had not been familiar with prior to his passing, and whose words I was only hearing for the first time that day. As I understand from Graydon Carter, Hitch’s boss at Vanity Fair, written in his foreword to our author’s final book Mortality, this was not rare.
“At a dinner in Los Angeles this spring, a young actor named Emile Hirsch came up to me in a state of high excitement. He know I had worked with Christopher Hitchens for many years, and he just wanted to talk about Christopher with someone who knew him. He’d read Hitch-22 and was well into the Kissinger book, and he said that Christopher’s writing had affected him in a way that almost no one else’s had. In the months following Christopher’s death, I had similar encounters with young people who felt compelled to talk about how his writing had touched them. It’s no exaggeration to say that Christopher had few equals in the sphere of spirited commentary. But there was something in his saucy fearlessness, in his great turbine of a mind, and in his sociable but unpredictable brand of anarchy that seriously touched kids in their twenties and early thirties in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson had a generation before.”
How is that? How could someone have such an affect on another human in, in my case, what amounted to a few mere clips in memoriam?
The answer is, of course, that Hitchens was one of a kind; not exactly the voice of a generation, but the kind of voice that only comes round once every several generations. A singular writer, orator, arguer, logician, moralist, and thinker, the legacy of the Hitch is hard to sum up in anything as paltry as one mere essay, written with far too much nostalgia (and indeed, scotch) to do my subject the justice he deserves. Hitchens lived his life in ways we can all aspire to; Jeffersonian in scale and interest, though without nearly as many of the moral contradictions. He was willing to go anywhere and try anything if it would prove his point on a matter of principle. Rather than attempt to neatly tie together the many disparate and brilliant aspects of Hitchens’s life, I’ve decided instead to spend a short time talking about some of the portions of him that I’ve found most admirable from both a human and intellectual perspective. (This, along with a fair bit of nostalgic sentimentalism – what can I say? I’m a flawed mammal.)
An impossibly funny man, I often find myself laughing at various Hitchens jokes – whether lodged in the context of a debate, or in a truly humourous context. His stand up routines are well known, as are his word games with his dear friend Salman Rushdie. Perhaps my favourite – at times standup, lecture, and Q&A – is his performance at the London Hay Festival in 2003. Though the link to the original recording no longer exists, someone has uploaded an awkward but worthwhile compilation, pulling mostly from Hay, with some intercut video of other engagements during the standup section. (Once one makes it past that, the whole Q&A exists from Hay, and is pristine Hitch.)
His command of literature is so far beyond reproach, I’m not even quite sure where to begin. The essays about any manner of author, from Orwell to Mencken, Wodehouse to Waugh, Twain to Bellow to Nabokov to Vidal…to even list the authors would be to test my reader’s patience. As such, let me simply say: pick up an essay collection or two of Hitchens’s – particularly Arguably and For the Sake of Argument – and you’ll have plenty to dig through.
The Hitch’s relationship with music was a mildly parochial one, but I can’t help thinking of him when I hear the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto in F Major. The long-time theme for Firing Line with William Buckley, nothing quite sets the tone for me as this. It’s an incredibly simplistic choice – and I’m no great fan of Bach – but there you have it.
Hitchens’s willingness to engage in debate with anyone, on any topic, is a principle and character attribute from which I’ve gleaned much (if perhaps already having quite a tendency toward this behavior long before knowing he existed). As you’ll read below: “seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” Sure enough.
I also must credit him with another relatively superficial change in attitude, that being toward alcohol. I’d had my share of disgust with drunks and had been of the attitude that I would never let a drop of alcohol touch my lips. Not only was this incredibly closed-minded – so much for the principle of “try anything once” – but it was also an attitude built largely out of fear and defiance. Though I hated to have to tip my hat to the “ahhh, you’ll do it when you’re older” crowd, I had to admit that there was nothing quite like the taste and atmosphere of a good glass of Johnnie Walker Black. I have a distinct memory of my first time enjoying a bottle of this with my dearest friend, Cole, while trading quotes of Hitch’s from a compendium, The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, in his grandmother’s kitchen the summer before we left for college at our respective universities. (It’s with this admission that I can ever-so-slightly lay claim to teenage drinking, as I graduated high school and began university at the age of seventeen.) All this the night before a jazz brunch gig at our favourite restaurant in town, and simultaneously (though unknowingly) the night of my great-grandmother’s passing. Could one possibly tie any more coincidences into what was, at the outset, a fairly ordinary occasion?
Hitchens won my heart with his defenses of free speech, best exemplified in his opening statement of a debate in Canada around “hate” speech. I will simply let this speak for itself, with a hearty “hear hear!”
A friend like no other, Hitchens was viciously protective of those close to him. The paramount example is his friend Salman Rushdie – whose theocratic misfortune and Hitch’s defense of whom I’ve written about here previously. His near-homosexual relationship with his friend Martin Amis is truly touching and repays at least partial modeling in relationships with one’s friends – a dedication often only found in romantic relationships. The best, the absolute best, of friends. (Here they are discussing Judaism and anti-Semitism, as Hitch had discovered his Jewish ancestry late in life.)
There is so much I’ve had to leave out here – absolutely everything on the great topics of his career (religion, Kissinger, the Clintons, Cyprus, Jefferson, Mother Teresa, patriotism, socialism/capitalism, Orwell, America…). As I said at the outset, no single essay could attempt to cover even a healthy portion of Hitchens’s life and career. I beg the reader’s forgiveness, and that of the memory of Hitch.
At the risk of seeming overly fawning or unable to construct my own proper remembrances, I’ve opted to select two quotes from Hitchens – one in print and one verbal – that convey, to me, the best of what he had to offer in short form. The first is an oft-quoted series of principles from his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian; the second is a transcript of his closing argument in a debate on religion, very near the end of his life, which has often served as a moral guidepost for me – the closing line of which has been something I carry with me on a daily basis. (I encourage the reader to view the clip of this first, rather than read my textual rendering – Hitchens’s delivery is an impossible act to follow.)
From Letters:
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
From the debate closing argument (starting at 4:26 of the video, linked again here):
“I’ll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier: ‘why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?’ I mean, I don’t know if you really think that, when you die, you can be corporally reassembled and have conversation with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say it sounds like a complete fairytale to me. The only reason I want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, it because I can meet him any time; because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.
But when Socrates was sentenced to death, for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy – for challenging the gods of the city – and he accepted his death, he did say ‘well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters, too.’ In other words, that the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know; but I do know it’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive.
Which means that, to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always, hungrily, operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I’d urge you to look at those of you who tell you, those people who tell you – at your age – that you’re dead ’til you believe as they do. What a terrible thing to be telling to children! And that you can only live…and that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift, think of it as a poison chalice – push it aside, however tempting it is; take the risk of thinking for yourself – much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.”
Finally, I feel that I must repost a clip I’ve already shared in recent days, from just two months before Christopher Hitchens passed, when he was in quite poor health, after just receiving the Richard Dawkins Award from Dawkins himself. In this short clip from a local news station, Hitchens is in conversation with a young girl – only eight years of age! – imploring her to read (he’s blown away at what she had already gotten through), and learn, and love. “Remember the love bit.” My heart breaks.
I feel as though I’ve known you personally, though I can’t claim the privilege. While I won’t presume to speak for anyone else, though I suspect there are many who feel the same: I deeply miss your presence, your intellect, your mind, your humour, and your humanity. I wish, very much, that you were still here.
Ten years. I can’t believe it.
A very brief aside: Christopher Hitchens lived in Washington D.C., on the cusp of Adams Morgan (a neighborhood I’ve frequented in my trips) and Kalorama. As I simply adore D.C. and have been lucky to make the journey annually or bi-, I’ve had the good fortune to pass by his former condo a number of times. Here is a picture of me, from quite some time ago, posing across the street with my copy of “Letters to a Young Contrarian.”
12/15/2021
