Mortality - Christopher Hitchens
Dying is serious business and writers, like all other people, die too. Some live long enough to write about their experience of ‘living dying-ly’ as Christopher Hitchens does here in his last book Mortality before he succumbed to esophageal cancer in 2011. In terms of categories, to find this book you need to look under ‘memoir/essays’ >> ‘sickness’ >> ‘cancer’ and it’s still a crowded space - this genre of ‘cancer-lit’. Among the Susan Sontags, Gilda Radners, John Diamonds and Katherine Russell-Richs is a new addition to this sub-sub-genre. What separates this book from the rest? the unique, out-sized, and outspoken personality of provocateur extraordinaire - Christopher Hitchens.
In the introduction Graydon Carter writes:
The Great Debater discovers in the middle of a successful book tour that he has late-stage cancer. The Cart of Life that seemed to be merrily rolling along may soon come to an abrupt stop. How does one cope? According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stage theory, responses to such a terminal illness progress from: denial to rage to bargaining to depression to finally ‘acceptance’. In his lovely ironic style he writes: “After knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.” Hitchens was actually disappointed. Having goaded the Grim Reaper to “scythe him down” for years for all his excesses, to have to die of esophageal cancer was too banal a death, a death “that even bores me”. For all those reasons, Hitch writes, that it would be silly to indulge in denial or rage at this point. Cancer treatments (he does take the best of available treatments) is a form, he writes of bargaining. He isn’t depressed either. He takes the moment to reflect. To reflect on the nature of illness, on things that might have been, and things that have irrevocably changed. The book is about ‘acceptance’ and how hard it is to come to terms with, and is also made harder by those who live, and by those who are dying as well.
The question, “How must one live?” seems to have no answers, multiple answers, or unsatisfactory half-answers. The corresponding anti-question that seems to occupy us less, but is just as inevitable is “How must one die?” Those with a slow progressing disease have time to ponder over their biological death-sentence. My father was diagnosed with Primary Muscular Dystrophy(PmD), a rare neurological disease that has no known pathology or cure. He met it with a lot of calm. It was very tough to see his body slowly wasting away. Every day was worse than the previous - the march was slow, but all the steps led downwards. He kept himself busy with what he could still do. As those activities got limited, he took comfort in those that remained - writing poems, going online even if it meant typing with one and a half fingers, making people laugh and laughing at himself. He wasn't particularly religious, but very spiritual. He endlessly and tirelessly studied the Geeta which is the guide to ‘living in the world’. He had followed it while living and also as he lay dying. That gave him comfort and that allowed him to ‘make the most sense’ of his life. A swift death may be less painful but allows no opportunity for sense-making, or taking graceful leave of friends, family and life itself. I am glad that Dad was able to do that.
What do atheists and non-believers do? Hitchens is unrepentant. He writes about a comment on a website that ‘celebrates’ his cancer as divine punishment for his blasphemous views. By giving him esophageal cancer God had decided to kill the root from where his evil ideas arose. Hitch’s argument is: “How do you know His Will?” He refuses to use the ‘crutch’ of faith and the illogic of all the prayers that are being offered on his behalf. He hedges his bets with modern science and their tortuous and torturous cancer treatments. In passing he does say mischievously,
The book is not all filled with literalist rants. When he was a young writer, he received advice that he should “write as he spoke”, and that changed his writing forever. Writing was about finding your 'voice'. And voice carried him across two continents, to be the toast of the news-world and 'life of the party' after hours. He often had eight-hour dinners with impromptu recitations of poetry and narration of anecdotes. With cancer, his imminent hair loss was assumed, but what was really hard was to accept was the loss of his voice. It is by far the best essay in the book and the best valediction to the human voice that I have read (Hitchens knows how to serve up his brand of nostalgia when the time seems right).
All considered, he concludes that mortality is a good thing.
Dying is serious business and writers, like all other people, die too. Some live long enough to write about their experience of ‘living dying-ly’ as Christopher Hitchens does here in his last book Mortality before he succumbed to esophageal cancer in 2011. In terms of categories, to find this book you need to look under ‘memoir/essays’ >> ‘sickness’ >> ‘cancer’ and it’s still a crowded space - this genre of ‘cancer-lit’. Among the Susan Sontags, Gilda Radners, John Diamonds and Katherine Russell-Richs is a new addition to this sub-sub-genre. What separates this book from the rest? the unique, out-sized, and outspoken personality of provocateur extraordinaire - Christopher Hitchens.
In the introduction Graydon Carter writes:
For the fact is that Christopher was one of life's singular characters - a wit, a charmer, a troublemaker, and a dear and devoted friend. He was a man of insatiable appetites- for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and above all, for conversation.What Carter missed out was Hitch’s appetite not just for debate, but for controversy. The targets of Hitchens’s pugnacious pen have ranged from the Dalai Lama to Mother Teresa to the Clintons to Henry Kissinger. Less famously - women (for their lack of humour), the British royal family (they are just a British fetish), Philip Larkin (for his racism). Whether you agree with his interpretations or not, Hitchens makes trenchant and accurate observations and always, always entertains with his acerbic humour. He was a formidable debating opponent in word and in print who could artfully turn a word or a phrase and maul his opponents with weapons of their own making.
The Great Debater discovers in the middle of a successful book tour that he has late-stage cancer. The Cart of Life that seemed to be merrily rolling along may soon come to an abrupt stop. How does one cope? According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stage theory, responses to such a terminal illness progress from: denial to rage to bargaining to depression to finally ‘acceptance’. In his lovely ironic style he writes: “After knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.” Hitchens was actually disappointed. Having goaded the Grim Reaper to “scythe him down” for years for all his excesses, to have to die of esophageal cancer was too banal a death, a death “that even bores me”. For all those reasons, Hitch writes, that it would be silly to indulge in denial or rage at this point. Cancer treatments (he does take the best of available treatments) is a form, he writes of bargaining. He isn’t depressed either. He takes the moment to reflect. To reflect on the nature of illness, on things that might have been, and things that have irrevocably changed. The book is about ‘acceptance’ and how hard it is to come to terms with, and is also made harder by those who live, and by those who are dying as well.
The question, “How must one live?” seems to have no answers, multiple answers, or unsatisfactory half-answers. The corresponding anti-question that seems to occupy us less, but is just as inevitable is “How must one die?” Those with a slow progressing disease have time to ponder over their biological death-sentence. My father was diagnosed with Primary Muscular Dystrophy(PmD), a rare neurological disease that has no known pathology or cure. He met it with a lot of calm. It was very tough to see his body slowly wasting away. Every day was worse than the previous - the march was slow, but all the steps led downwards. He kept himself busy with what he could still do. As those activities got limited, he took comfort in those that remained - writing poems, going online even if it meant typing with one and a half fingers, making people laugh and laughing at himself. He wasn't particularly religious, but very spiritual. He endlessly and tirelessly studied the Geeta which is the guide to ‘living in the world’. He had followed it while living and also as he lay dying. That gave him comfort and that allowed him to ‘make the most sense’ of his life. A swift death may be less painful but allows no opportunity for sense-making, or taking graceful leave of friends, family and life itself. I am glad that Dad was able to do that.
What do atheists and non-believers do? Hitchens is unrepentant. He writes about a comment on a website that ‘celebrates’ his cancer as divine punishment for his blasphemous views. By giving him esophageal cancer God had decided to kill the root from where his evil ideas arose. Hitch’s argument is: “How do you know His Will?” He refuses to use the ‘crutch’ of faith and the illogic of all the prayers that are being offered on his behalf. He hedges his bets with modern science and their tortuous and torturous cancer treatments. In passing he does say mischievously,
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.Dying of cancer is not a time for mawkish sentimentality and that drives him to strike another cancer victim - Prof. Randy Pausch and his Last Lecture. He found it too Disney-fied with his push-ups and other antics. The main point of the lecture seems to have been lost on Hitchens, but I concede that forcing black humor on a captive audience is inauthentic and cruel to others who may not share your sunny outlook (for good reason).
It ought to be an offense to be excruciatingly unfunny in circumstances in which your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse... There should be ground rules to stop us inflicting ourselves on each other.Hitchens is against Stoicism as well. There is nothing to be stoic about when you seem to be “dissolving like a sugar lump”. In the same vein, he takes offense to the much-quoted, “What does not kill you makes you stronger”. He devotes an entire essay on debunking the statement and adding the interesting detail that Nietzsche himself succumbed to injuries sustained after trying to save a horse from being flogged in the town square. Those injuries did not make him stronger. He was more Man than Superman.
The book is not all filled with literalist rants. When he was a young writer, he received advice that he should “write as he spoke”, and that changed his writing forever. Writing was about finding your 'voice'. And voice carried him across two continents, to be the toast of the news-world and 'life of the party' after hours. He often had eight-hour dinners with impromptu recitations of poetry and narration of anecdotes. With cancer, his imminent hair loss was assumed, but what was really hard was to accept was the loss of his voice. It is by far the best essay in the book and the best valediction to the human voice that I have read (Hitchens knows how to serve up his brand of nostalgia when the time seems right).
Without our corresponding feeling for the ideolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of it’s minor key pleasure such as mimicry and parody.... (and he mourns the loss of) The most beautiful apposition of the two simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.In the end, Hitchens seems to have also accepted the many big and mundane things that will come to pass: that he may never see England again, not see his daughters marry, or that his AMEX card and driver’s license may survive him.
All considered, he concludes that mortality is a good thing.
With an infinite life comes an infinite set of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts, ... and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their father. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own... such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
- Alan Lightman, Einstein’s DreamsWith eyes wide open, uncomplainingly and unsentimentaly Christopher Hitchen’s passed away on December 15th, 2011 on what would have been my Dad’s 62nd birthday.
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