The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism--The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens by Windsor Mann

Author:Windsor Mann [Mann, Windsor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, American, General, Essays, Reference, Quotations
ISBN: 9780306819834
Google: BG6Rc80E8toC
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-05-15T11:37:48.617000+00:00

“Is nothing sacred?” he asks. “Of course not.” And no Westerner, as Ronald Dworkin pointed out, “has the right not to be offended.” We accept Christopher’s errancies, his recklessnesses, because they are inseparable from his courage; and true valor, axiomatically, fails to recognize discretion. As the world knows, Christopher has recently made the passage from the land of the well to the land of the ill. One can say that he has done so without a visible flinch; and he has written about the process with unparalleled honesty and eloquence, and with the highest decorum. His many friends, and his innumerable admirers, have come to dread the tone of the “living obituary.” But if the story has to end too early, then its coda will contain a triumph.

Christopher’s personal devil is God, or rather organized religion, or rather the human “desire to worship and obey.” He comprehensively understands that the desire to worship, and all the rest of it, is a direct reaction to the unmanageability of the idea of death. “Religion,” wrote Larkin:That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die. . .

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