University Diaries

My friend cloudminder tells me that Christopher Hitchens has died (here’s one of hundreds of appreciations that have already appeared).

I suppose, in line with the post just below this one, one could call Christopher Hitchens the anti-Gingrich. His was perhaps the most human soul of our time. His humanity was so soulful that – like Blake, and Lawrence, and Hitchens’ hero Orwell – he became positively prophetic about it, about rooting into your flesh and mind and heart and being a human being and no other thing.

He liked human beings. He even liked disliking them. He was intensely social.

His spiritual practice was the reading of Auden and Larkin; he sought in them the intensest praise of our beauty and the beauty of the world. He never said, like the woman in Stevens’ Sunday Morning, But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. He sought bliss, and imperishability be damned.

His bliss, above all, was writing. Writing, as Seamus Heaney says in his most famous poem, creates beauty by digging deeply into the meaning of human life: Through living roots awaken in my head. The writer lives intensely, kicks up the deep-lying truths of who we are, and then reaches down and hauls the truths up into prose.

And all of this is blissful: life, mental fight, writing.

Blissful even when your boot suddenly turns over the dirt of the grave.

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Gabe Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 5:01AM

I’m not sure if this has been linked to before, but his most candid and truthful voice – as well as that bliss he found in writing – comes out here: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009

Margaret Soltan Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 5:39AM

Thanks, Gabe. I hadn’t linked to it, but I should have. It’s wonderful.

dmf Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 8:02AM

RIP

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Margaret Soltan Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 8:52AM

dmf: I should learn to look at an empty sky… Such a perfect choice. Thanks.

tony grafton Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 12:15PM

Love the Blake reference: mental fight is just right for Hitchens.

Alan Allport Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 12:20PM

Let’s not get carried away.

Hitchens himself saw no point in tempering his remarks about the recently deceased. So perhaps it’s worth noting that for all his undoubted talents he was, in many respects, a terrible model for young writers.

CH seems to have taken pride in the fact that he rarely bothered to edit his own work before submitting it. The result was a body of writing which beneath its veneer of sophisticationcould be embarrassingly sloppy. And Hitchens rarely showed much grace in acknowledging the errors that his rushed approach to his work had introduced.

Margaret Soltan Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 12:27PM

Thanks, tony.

Margaret Soltan Says:
December 16th, 2011 at 12:40PM

Alan: I don’t think Hitchens is a very good model for young professors – far too wide-ranging, free-lancy… And, as you say, and the review of his Paine book goes to pains to point out, Hitchens wrote fast and sometimes sloppily.

He’s a fantastic model for young intellectuals, though.

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