The death of Christopher Hitchens has hit me hard today; he was something of a hero of mine. Mr. Hitchens was everything I admire in a writer: a master of language, with incomparable style and wit, and a restless and erudite scholar — but unlike so many in possession of similar (but almost invariably lesser) gifts he was also a man of real passion, fully engaged in the life of the world all around him, and always willing to be persuaded by the truth, even when it necessitated a painful public apostasy. He lived.
If all that weren’t enough, he possessed another gift I envied: that rich, beautifully accented, sonorous baritone Voice. How it ensorcelled and enchanted! Could he have woven that Hitchens spell with the pipes of, say, Gilbert Gottfried?
Ah, me. Well, now he’s gone, and we’ll just have to carry on. His obituary in our newspaper of record is here, though of course everyone who had even the slightest acquaintance with the man now seems to have gone to press with a detailed memoir of their happy time together, even if it consisted of nothing more than a pizza delivery, or a one-off dry-cleaning transaction.
I, on the other hand, shared something truly meaningful with Hitch, I’ll have you know. We had the same birthday.