Thursday, November 1, 2012

MORTALITY by Christopher Hitchens - Last Year's November Links

Above are the headlines to last year's November blogs.  Christopher Hitchens was still very much alive when I wrote a bit on his debate with Chris Hedges.  He died a month later, on December 15th.


His last memoir, Mortality, published this year, strikes me as an incomplete work.  The text is a quick read, with a foreword by Graydon Carter and a redemptive afterword by his widow, Carol Blue.  Redemptive is the right word.
Carol Blue and Christopher Hitchens

Redemptive is the right word because the text has Hitchens, as usual, railing against fundamentalist evangelical ideas on life, illness, and death, and it is at times humorous and logical, but it lacks love and gratitude.  His widow says that his death, when it came, was unexpected.  That they did not believe that the end was so close.  And she speaks of the man in ways not revealed in the text.  For instance, she says that his favorite holiday was Thanksgiving.

If that's a telling detail, then I'd like to believe that Christopher Hitchens might have yet written about his love for his wife, or indeed, about those things for which he was grateful, even if that included only his friends and family.
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