Christopher Hitchens is unwell. In fact he is dying. Let alone the details. You may google them. CH is the finest polemicist and essay-writing journalist operating during the last 20 years of my own sporadic career in reporting. I have often admired but never envied him. His screeds, diatribes and quips, not to mention his various books including The Missionary Postion in which he evicerates the saccharin memory of Mother Theresa along with God is Not Great in which he takes on the Boss (not Bruce Springsteen) himself, are as remarkable for their erudition as they are for their readability. No easy task. Along with William F. Buckley, Ch has been my favorite public speaker for as long as I can remember. They even appeared together at least once (see youtube) and though remarkably different in many aspects-- Buckley being a devout Catholic and avowed anti-Marxist-- they found civilized common ground on which to converse, not least of all because CH has long been, since at least the time of the fatwa imposed on Salman Rushdie, an indefatigable opponent of Islamis fascism. They also saw common sense in the need to legalise drugs . . . In short Hitchens is a mensch, whether or not you agree with him. And now the ceaseless baritone, has lost his voice to cancer. At least for now. No one knows if there is a God or not. Even Mother Teresa the saint of saints doubted like Thomas in his diaries. Nevertheless, a strange force are at work. Call them intuition, the sensory connection that separates humans from animals, if you will. Pehaps empathy or perhaps anima the empathy between men and women. When you think hard and true about something, examples will begin to appear before your eyes and coincidences will begin to happen. For after all as E M Forster the great English novelist wrote, our job is to Only Connect. I have a specific case in mind. It happened the other night when sitting with a table full of friends in the outside garden of a popular bistro in Warsaw of all places. I was explaining to the table about CH and his cancer his loss of speech and the dreadful enforced baldness of chemotherapy, when I looked to my left and saw through the window, standing a lone a friend of mine, Kasia, whom I had not seen for some time. I had recently learned she had cancer at the age of 38, breast cancer to be exact. There she was. She was bald from her treatments, looking so much like Hitchens in recent photos or my aunt when she lay dying, that my mouth dropped open. The key here is that she appeared at exactly the moment when I was talking about Hitch and his predicament--the same one we all come to eventually on different paths. I have seen the long goodbye up close half a dozen times now and it is never pretty. I immediately excused myself and went to embrace Kasia with tears welling in my eyes. To survive. This is our job. And to do it well and as best we can for as long as we can take it without giving up. I felt the urge to shake each of my friends and explain to them the urgency of what I was witnessing. Of course that would be ridiculous. Failure to connect in each of us is perhaps our greatest failing. My point is as John Donne said so simply: Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It toll for thee. We are all in this together. Kasia will survive. Her cancer is only Stage 1. Hitch is not so lucky in this respect. He has Stage 4 and as he says, "There is no Stage 5." Life allows the brilliant contrarians like Hitch. Death is not so kind, but on the other hand, as Donne also wrote, Death should not be so proud. You would have to be the meanest fundamental millenianarian to wish Hitch ill at this particular moment. The world ends. The world begins. A species which, on the edge of extinction, lucked its way out of Africa 100,000 years ago, ought to be proud of its achievements. There is plenty of evidence on offer everyday to suggest what a miracle it is that we didn't beat each other to death with clubs way back when. Yet here we are. Some of us are more highly evolved and Christopher Hitchens is one. I am willing to claim guilt by association on this one.
