writer, public intellectual, and iconoclast christopher hitchens has passed away, from esophogeal cancer.
up to the end, he was an avowed, unrepentant atheist who previously wrote a book called ‘god is not great, how religion poisons everything’ this is perhaps why someone wrote that the cancer was god’s punishment for his blasphemy and hoped he rotted in hell. with typical wry humor, hitchens wonders why not a lightning bolt? he does note. though, that when physicist neils bohr hung a horseshoe over his door, he explained to his friends shocked by this pathetic superstition: “apparently it works whether you believe in it or not”.
In a Vanity Fair piece that was published only days before he died, Hitchens reaffirmed that he hoped to be fully conscious and awake as he passed away, “in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense… I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span,”
i admire the strength of character to not opt for an easy conversion, even at the end, and hitchens in the past empathized with voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies
