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Journalism of Courage
Two fierce battles are being waged this summerone against esophageal cancer,by the irreverent columnist,commentator and critic Christopher Hitchens and the other for his soul,by those who hope to persuade him to convert to Christianity in extremis. Its a paradox that Hitchens,a confirmed atheist and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,can appreciate,if not relish. The countrys best-known scoffer has spurred one of the most heated discussions of belief,religion and immortality in years.
Hitchens has made no secret of his illness. On June 30,on VanityFair.com,he revealed his diagnosis and announced the abrupt end of the book tour for his memoir,Hitch-22. In a September Vanity Fair essay,he movingly describes his journey from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.
Startlingly,these updates have elicited hundreds of responses from well-wishers (and some foes),who urge Hitchens in online comments (and in their prayers,many write) to accept salvation. One wrote: Your conversion could do for modern-day Christianity much what Pauls did in the early days of Christianity. Still another implored,Mr Hitchens,before you die give your life to Christ. Why not.
On August 6,The Atlantic posted a video interview with Hitchens at his home in Washington. In it,the writer Jeffrey Goldberg asked Hitchens how he was doing.
Im dying, he said. I would be a very lucky person to live another five years.
When asked,Do you find it insulting for people to pray for you? Hitchens responded: No,no. I take it kindly,under the assumption that they are praying for my recovery.
Hitchens dismissed the notion that his cancer would lead him to make a tardy profession of faith. No one recognisable as myself would ever make such a remark.
This subject is one Hitchens has mulled over since childhood when he decided,as he wrote in God Is Not Great,that it was contemptible to rely on religion just for comfort if it might not be true. As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect he concluded,Literature,not scripture,sustains the mind andsince there is no other metaphoralso the soul.
That idea was echoed by Hitchenss closest friend,the novelist Martin Amis,in an interview last week on the Charlie Rose show about his new book,The Pregnant Widow (in which a main character is inspired by Hitchens). Amis said his friend believed that after death,not all of you will die, because the printed words they leave behind constitute a kind of immortality.
On August 6,the fearless historian Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,the progressive neurodegenerative disease. Throughout this year,Judt published essays in The New York Review of Books about memory,history,politics and his struggle with A.L.S.
In one of his last pieces,which he dictated,unable to control a pen,he wrote: Talking,it seemed to me,was the point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense.
I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past, he added,In the grip of a neurological disorder,I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
Christopher Hitchens,thank God,or thank whomever,does not yet need an epitaph. He is still doing words: talking,writing and perpetuating the belief that he has upheld throughout his life: the belief,as he wrote in God Is Not Great,in free inquiry,open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
