Christopher Hitchens-critical incomparable, brilliant rhetorician, strong and courageous spirit bon vivant, died today at age 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, shortly after the publication of his memoirs, Hitch-22, and began shortly after chemotherapy.
His incomparable prose appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was appointed editor.
"Victim of cancer has a permanent temptation, self-centered and even solipsistic," Hitchens wrote almost a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own past work was anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for the part Pakistani-American magazine in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, a portrait of Joan Didion, a retrospective essay on Private Eye at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin and a series of Frank, graceful and exquisitely written essays in which he recounts the physical and mental effects of his illness.
In the end, Hitchens was more committed, relentless, hilarious, caring and intelligent, that just about everyone, as it appears in the last four decades.
"My main consolation to live dyingly this year was the presence of friends," he wrote in the 2011 June
He died in their presence, even at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. His life for 62 years, well, if the console life of most of us is missing, it's expensive.
