Mortality

by Christopher Hitchens

love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Either they assured me that they wouldn’t offend me by offering prayers or they tenderly insisted that they would pray anyway.

September 20, 2010, has already been designated “Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day.”)

wrote to say that their assemblies were praying for me. And it was to them that it first occurred to me to write back, asking: Praying for what?

‘For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his own soul?’ [Matthew 16:26].”

Omar Khayyam, supreme poet of Persian freethinkers.

Cat Stevens who as “Yusuf Islam” once endorsed the hysterical Iranian theocratic call to murder my friend Salman Rushdie.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

“If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this.” On bad days, and even on better ones, such exhortations can have a vaguely depressing effect. If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down. A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.

(This small volume contains an admirably terse chapter informing fundamentalists that the argument about evolution is over, mainly because there is no argument.)

Blaise Pascal, reduced the essentials to a wager as far back as the seventeenth century. Put your faith in the almighty, he proposed, and you stand to gain everything. Decline the heavenly offer and you lose everything if the coin falls the other way. (Some philosophers also call this Pascal’s Gambit.)

he was one of the founders of probability theory—Pascal assumes both a cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being.

Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is among the many gods in which (whom?) I do not believe.

Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment.

the Calvinists having in some ways replaced Rome as the most exorbitant holy fund-raisers.

In January 1971, Senators Kennedy and Javits sponsored the “Conquest of Cancer Act,” and by December of that year Richard Nixon had signed something like it into law, along with huge federal appropriations. The talk was all of a “War on Cancer.”

(When I failed to reply to this, I got a second missive, suggesting that I freeze at least my brain so that its cortex could be appreciated by posterity. Well, I mean to say, gosh, thanks awfully.)

I did get a kind note from a Cheyenne-Arapaho friend of mine, saying that everyone she knew who had resorted to tribal remedies had died almost immediately, and suggesting that if I was offered any Native American medicines I should “move as fast as possible in the opposite direction.” Some advice can actually be taken.

“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”

I am going to try to have my entire DNA “sequenced,” along with the genome of my tumor.

SHE: Of course, he was a lifelong homosexual. ME: [Not quite finding the words, and not wishing to sound stupid by echoing “of course”] …

LOL

“My grandmother was diagnosed with terminal melanoma of the G-spot and they just about gave up on her. But she hung in there and took huge doses of chemotherapy and radiation at the same time, and the last postcard we had was from her at the top of Mount Everest.”

the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils,

It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.

the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. —T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen.

vast debt to Simon Hoggart of the Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about thirty-five years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way you talk.”

my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence.

“How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend.

this above all: Find your own voice.

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed.

poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder.

I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either.

German-Jewish future Nobelist Nelly Sachs found that the apparition of Hitler had caused her to become literally speechless: robbed of her very voice by the stark negation of all values.

For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

the resonant vibration that can stir memory, produce music, evoke love, bring tears, move crowds to pity and mobs to passion. We may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech.

I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk.

That he not busy being born is busy dying. —Bob Dylan,

when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense.

Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger.

Eventually, and in miserable circumstances in the Italian city of Turin, Nietzsche was overwhelmed at the sight of a horse being cruelly beaten in the street. Rushing to throw his arms around the animal’s neck, he suffered some terrible seizure and seems for the rest of his pain-racked and haunted life to have been under the care of his mother and sister.

The most he could have meant, I now think, is that he made the most of his few intervals from pain and madness to set down his collections of penetrating aphorism and paradox.

But the stoic philosopher, from the vantage point of continued life, still insisted that he wished he had been permitted to expire.

a potent phrase to describe the position of others who suffer like this, referring to them as lying on “mattress graves.”

Oh, and the regular painkiller. How happily I measured off my day as I saw the injection being readied. It counted as a real event. With some analgesics, if you are lucky, you can actually feel the hit as it goes in: a sort of warming tingle with an idiotic bliss to it. To have come to this—like the sad goons who raid pharmacies for OxyContin. But it was an alleviation of boredom, and a guilty pleasure (not many of those in Tumortown), and not least a relief from pain.

I have come to know that feeling all right: the sensation and conviction that the pain will never go away and that the wait for the next fix is unjustly long. Then a sudden fit of breathlessness, followed by some pointless coughing and then—if it’s a lousy day—by more expectoration than I can handle.