Death's echo - Christopher Hitchens' Mortality

16-09-12

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night.

But ah my foes, and oh my friends -

It gives a lovely light.

Christopher Hitchens' final book ‘Mortality’, a collection of essays and notes which he wrote after the diagnosis of his oesophageal cancer, arrived on a Wednesday. I started reading it on Thursday morning and finished it that same night. A slender volume, even including the introduction by his Vanity Fair editor and afterword by his wife Carol Blue, but one of the most profound I've read.

I have read most of the essays the Hitch has written after his cancer diagnosis as they were serialised and appeared with regularity in Vanity Fair. However, perusing through them in a single setting brings it all into focus in a whole new way. 

While not quite as visceral as when I knew I was reading it prior to his death, in ‘real time’ as it were, knowing that I was reading words written by a dying man as he ‘battled’ cancer and looked at death in the face, reading it after his death somehow underscored the sad inevitability of his decline. 

His adamantly unsentimental (and for that reason, more gut wrenching) ‘power of facing’, to borrow a favourite phrase of his from Orwell, and at the same time, a fragile, painful and almost naïve optimism for more time and even fleeting thoughts about a cure (which he quickly suppresses, batting it aside as solipsism) was intimately human and very moving. In the immanent shadow of death, his love and thirst for life, what has permeated all his works and life, is magnified and focused like never before.

As usual, his materialistic, no nonsense, staunch, humorous and ironic language, enriched by his free-flowing associations of poetry, literature, observations and anecdotes, makes it a delight to read. Prompted by death, with his fount of memory unlocked and emotions unbridled, this collection touches most of the things that mattered to him and for which he has fought for and defended throughout his career. The beauty of the pursuit of knowledge, the vitality given by freedom and humour, the absurdities of religion and the healthy hatred for the profane, the autocratic, the hucksterish profiteers of ignorance – fundamentally, the argument for a considered, ironic life free of delusions. In his own words:

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come you way.

This, among his last written words, prove his life-long conviction that real consolation comes from intellectual honesty, a sense of irony, humour, knowledge of literature and, importantly, discarding one’s solipsism, which is followed by an acceptance of one’s mortality and the achievement of real dignity. 

In his final work, Hitchens proved to the world one last time, in an irrefutable fashion, the courage and grace of his convictions. To use his own words, which he would deliver with a fox-like grin, though he ‘burnt the candle at both ends, it often produced a lovely light’. Through his reflections on mortality, he has ensured his immortality.

"Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."