Unlike Carver or even Updike, he reveled in his status as a larger-than-life figure, a character in his own drama, so to speak.Ī prodigious smoker and drinker (“In one way, I suppose,” he acknowledges, “I have been ‘in denial’ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light”), Hitchens was also an outspoken contrarian who would not willingly walk away from a fight. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.” For Hitchens, this felt very much like a “deportation … from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady,” a sensation made more pronounced by the fact that he was stricken while on tour for his memoir “Hitch-22.” He was 61.Īll that makes for a peculiar set of tensions, which have as much to do with Hitchens as they do with death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. Hitchens, who died of esophageal cancer in December 2011, sets the scene in the first sentences: “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. That’s because “Mortality” is not so much reflection as reportage, a set of dispatches from “Tumortown,” where the author found himself exiled in mid-2010. Those lines of Eliot’s appear in Christopher Hitchens’ “Mortality,” the latest addition to the library of the dying - although to read it on such terms exclusively is to miss the point.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |