Christopher Hitchens (Credit: Wikipedia)
Today would’ve been Christopher Hitchens’s birthday, and inevitably I get a little sad. I admire Christopher Hitchens enormously. And I say it in the present tense because, as it is the case with so many prolific, eloquent, superhumanly lucid writers, it feels as if their words are still among us. Or it feels like they were so loud and annoying and so unnignorable that when they leave we almost feel lonely. I still love Hitchens though.
The New Yorker has a beautiful eulogy commemorating his birthday, on the last of the services in his name.
The most reknowned writers and poets of the English language were there, like Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Stephen Fry, and the New Yorker piece sprinkles their gems here and there. It almost functions as a sad introduction to modern poetry. And that’s a great tribute and gift to the dead that Hitchens himself would’ve loved.
Read it, it’s really quite amazing.
- Hitchens’ Last Words: ‘Capitalism, Downfall’ (newser.com)
- Hitchens’s memorial: a reader (newstatesman.com)
- Penn, Rushdie, Fry attend Christopher Hitchens memorial (dawn.com)
