Christopher Hitchens is a passionate man. He is passionate about his philosophy, politics, anti-theism and defense of reason. And like all passionate people, he likes to smoke and drink whiskey. As much as his stinging wit and satire got the best of other people with which he disagreed, scotch and cigarettes are trying to get the best of him. Earlier this year he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer forcing him to stop his book tour in support of his memoirs, Hitch 22, in order to undergo treatment. An event he announced in a terse but elegant fashion:

I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me.

But no matter what you think of his views about politics or religion, you have to admire a man who can write like this when faced with his own possible demise (from his column in Vanity Fair, h/t:Why Evolution is True):

In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.  Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

Here’s another excerpt where Hitchens is talking about going from, “the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady”:

The new land  is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

(I strongly suggest reading it in its entirety here)

My thoughts continue to be with you Hitch. Here is Hitchens on Q with Jian Gomeshi. He lit quite the flame under CBC listeners who voiced both their admiration and disgust on the Q comment boards: