Irreplaceable

Well, there's nothing much I can say.  Everyone, from close friends to fans to enemies are talking about this event which we knew was imminent.  I came home Thursday evening after a works night out full of red wine and good food , turned on the radio and there it was, the news that the writer Christopher Hitchens had died.  The tributes are pouring in, the reminiscences, the summings ups, the paying off of old scores. The famous, the obscure, the mandarin and the meanest of spirits are all having their say. I've read a few of their pieces and liked David Frum's best of all for its warmth and this final paragraph from Jacob Weisberg. 

Here's what I learned from Christopher Hitchens in the 25 years I knew him. Don't let anyone else do your thinking for you. Follow your principles to the end. Don't flinch from the truth. Repeat until the last ounce of strength drains from your body.

Though cut short by today's standards, Hitchens had a full life - full of combativeness, friends, drink, cigarettes, reading, politicking, travel, lecturing and most of all writing.  However hangovered he was Hitchens would write.  Even in his last days with his veins running morphine and tubes stuck in him at every point, he would be carried from his bed to a chair to continue writing.  

The world does seem drabber and emptier. This is a definite diminishment. The brilliance, the wit, the love of language are gone.  Even those who loathed him for political reasons would have liked to have had him on their side. 

I've tried to find some fitting words from the poets eg W H Auden's lament for the death of Yeats. 

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day . .

 . ..  .

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

There's another tribute to an English writer, as untidy and as argumentative and as loved by his friends as Hitchens was.  

"He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. -Johnson is dead.- Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; -no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."

If there is a next best, please send me his or her name. 

Comments

[Resistor]

Irreplaceable? Good. We don't need another.