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Monday, July 11, 2005
HITCHENS, NEW YORK "What he loves most is the idea of America, and particularly of New York, 'the magnetic compass point of my life.'" This is a reviewer in the New Statesman -- [http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/300000099667] -- writing about and quoting Christopher Hitchens. UD's admiration for Hitchens began as pure stylistics -- he just writes better than everyone else. Like his model, Orwell, he's emotional without being manipulative and self-indulgent; erudite without being snobbish; broad in subject matter without ever being vague, and committed to important moral and political battles without being self-righteous. UD's admiration for him gradually widened out into a steady interest in his content. Hitchens is a person capable of significant ideological change, a change that seems to have come about for him as a result of eagerly seized immediate engagement with world conflict -- again, like Orwell, who went to Spain; or like Michael Kelly, who died in Iraq. Everything Hitchens writes is interesting, not because one agrees with everything, but because everything he writes is imbued with humanity. By which I mean -- well, look at New York, his magnetic compass point, and current location of UD. Here humanity's on stage; here there's a public and vivid tableau of people engaging the world with intensity. UD walks onto this stage - New York City - only occasionally, but when she does, she recognizes that, like Paris, this city is thrillingly open and free. Personalities are accessible to the eye here; there's a palpable sense of personal and political lives being lived fully. But this isn't where the humanity UD has in mind comes in. It comes in with the full acceptance of the vulnerability that this freedom carries with it. To live an authentic life in the polis, as writers as different as Gillian Rose and Allan Bloom knew, means doing what Rose called "love's work" at the risk of annihilation. Lately the stakes for all of us in the city are higher, but here we all are; and the great value of people like Hitchens is that he reminds us why. |