By Stephen Fry
Almost as many words have been written about Christopher Hitchens since he died as he would write in a typical working week. He was one of very, very few people on earth whom I would have missed just as much had I never had the pleasure and fortune of knowing him. He lit fires in people’s minds. He was an educator.
Read more (The Daily Beast)
What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
Join the discussion
Yahoo! News
Wikipedia
Search results
Recent Comments
Popular Posts
-
Mr Steve Wasserman, Christopher Hitchens' literary agent, kindly replied to my query about a possible memorial. Posted with permission. ...
-
Vanity Fair | January 2012 By Christopher Hitchens When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fal... -
Carol Blue, the widow of author Christopher Hitchens, answered viewer questions submitted via Twitter, Facebook. Watch it here (c-spanvid... -
Vanity Fair December 2011 By Christopher Hitchens I f you were to set a competition for the headline most unlikely to appear in an Americ... -
Time has come to publish the last post on this site. I've been posting links and articles for three years, and it's been great. I a...
-
Vanity Fair | August 2012 By Christopher Hitchens George Orwell’s best-known work (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four) emerged from pain... -
The iconoclast Christopher Hitchens loved life and delighted in "doing and thinking and writing all the things that he had always don... -
In The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 best-seller, Joan Didion dissected the trauma of losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne. With Blue... -
FREE INQUIRY February / March 2012 By Christopher Hitchens If you haven’t read it, you will almost certainly have seen it: the critique ... -
Christopher Hitchens and John Rodden discuss George Orwell on Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
Baruch Spinoza
George Orwell
Bertrand Russell
Leon Trotsky
Rosa Luxemburg
Socrates
6 comments:
Mr. Fry, I agree wholeheartedly with your admiration of Mr. Hitchen's power of persuasion and his courage in saying what he thought was true, just like one of his heroes, Thomas Paine. Although I didn't agree with everything he espoused, he certainly "enlightened" me with just about everything he expressed.
My Fry, that was so eloquently put. I currently face put downs and derision simply because I am so very upset at his passing - and yet had never met the man. It's awful to be kicked when you're already down. Christopher left such a void. What a beautiful man he was.
I am embarrassed for feeling this bereft at the loss of someone I never met.
Stop all the clocks...
It seems a lot of us are feeling seriously mopey.
I think it has to do with how sad his final year was, how little we know about his last days, our regret that we couldn't stop him from lifestyle habits that did him in, our powerlessness to do anything for him who brought so much sanity into this insane planet and into our lives, our regret that we will never meet him in person and will never be able to tell him how much he meant to us.
If I, a complete stranger, am so choked up, I can imagine how devastated his family must be.
Well put, I thought that after his 3 near death experiences during his illness, I thought I was prepared for his eventual passing. But I was not. And yes, I cannot imagine the grief of his wife, and children.
Hitchens' "brilliance" and "mastery of language" pop up with predictable frequency, as of course they (or words to the same effect) do in Fry's hagiography.
Less, I think, than 10 years ago, I wrote down a Hitchens quotation, no doubt because I thought it good at the time:
He called (French President) Jacques Chirac a "balding Joan of Arc in drag".
And this on account of a political difference of mind!
Is such language (it does abound in Hitchens) really what Fry applauds as "style and wit"?
Oh, how I pity all sycophants!
Post a Comment