Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Christopher Hitchens

The news of Christopher Hitchens' death hit me harder than I thought it would. Not because it was unexpected; Hitchens fought a very public battle with esophageal cancer, and in recent weeks I noticed a slight lull in his usual prolific output of essays. But it was still difficult to believe that he had passed. Somehow, I always felt that he was immortal- a force of nature that couldn't be stopped. Even stricken with cancer, Hitchens wrote more cogently and brilliantly than most of the healthy could.

Many of the comments I've read on Twitter and elsewhere begin with a qualified "I didn't always agree with him, but.." Well, of course you didn't always agree with him. That was the beauty of Hitchens. In the years I followed his work, he never wrote a single craven, cynical word. Everything he wrote was with a clarity and passion that few writers have, and no opinion would lay undefended by reason and persuasion. Contrary to his popular image, Hitchens was not a contrarian for its own sake. A brilliantly idiosyncratic thinker, Hitchens' ideas were often at odds with whatever conventional wisdom had to say about a subject, yet few writers seemed to care less what that conventional wisdom was. He was nothing if not true to his own beliefs and ideals, and he wrote with a voice so inimitable that within two sentences, without needing to glance at the byline, it was clear exactly whose words were on the page. As a writer myself, I can think of no higher praise.

Many writers are solitary, unsociable creatures- so much so that those two qualities are often described as professional requirements. Yet in reading the many fine remembrances of Hitchens this morning, I was struck by how many spoke of his generosity. For a man whose famous friends ranged far and wide, Hitchens found time to counsel and advise young journalists, interns, and students just beginning their own intellectual journeys. He was clearly a man who relished conversation and comradeship, a man for whom late night sessions around a bottle was a part of his education rather than a distraction from it.

To read the man was to feel, for just a moment, that you too were among the guests at one of his parties or functions. His essays were erudite and engaging and most importantly humorous; unlike with many writers, his many references and allusions felt unforced and appropriate. Even when I disagreed with him, which I did often on the subject of the Iraq War, I regarded Hitchens' arguments as challenging and thought-provoking and never boring. I respected his opinion because I trusted, deep down, that his was genuine. In an war whose greatest defenders displayed a terrifying aversion to honesty and reason, Hitchens' arguments were refreshing. He was no thoughtless neo-conservative, gleeful at the prospect of a violent struggle. He was simply a man whose hatred of totalitarianism blinded him to the tragic reality that violent chaos was sometimes worse. I suppose, in a sad way, the fact that the war officially ended the morning of his death will remain an memorable trivial footnote to his life.

But Hitchens was so much more than a political commentator. He wrote about an astonishing range of subjects with the same wit and clarity. In a given week you'd encounter an essay on current events in Slate, a literary review for The Atlantic, and a long polemical essay in Vanity Fair- none of which held the slightest relation to one another except that their author found them worth mentioning. In a world where we're told to specialize, to focus, to dig deep- Hitchens was a true Renaissance man. In the midst of the regular writing assignments cited above, Hitchens found time to write books about atheism, George Orwell, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Theresa. His memoir, a wonderful jumble of memory and commentary, revealed that the man could have written twice as many if given the time. That was the extent of the breadth and depth of his knowledge and passion.

Mourning the death of a person you've never met is a strange phenomenon. But as I watch old videos of George Carlin, or read little snippets of Kurt Vonnegut, I feel an acute wish that they could be here today, if only to tell us what they were thinking. I suspect I will feel the same way about Christopher Hitchens.

And in that way, he will remain immortal.