Mortality

Christopher Hitchens “Mortality”  Twelve, 2012, 106 pp.

Hitchen’s summarized his life-view: “My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority anywhere, any place, anytime.  And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”

And now he’s dead and the line is dwindling and I feel that I’ve lost a friend.  His method of writing led you to believe he was talking just to you. This, his last book, originally seven dispatches sent to Vanity Fair magazine from “Tumorville,” is mostly a chronicle of his journey to oblivion from June 8, 2010, age 61, when the cancer was discovered until his death on December 15, 2011.  Probably not one of his better subjects, but you can count on it being sincere, and funny, and courageous. He clearly describes the torments of his illness, but, more importantly, affirms the dignity of man, alone.  For instance: “Ordinary expressions like ‘expiration date’ . . . will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license? People say — I’m in town on Friday: will you be around? what a question!”  “To the dumb question ‘Why me?,’ ” he writes, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”  (I had this saying tacked to my office wall after our company declared chapter 11).  There is no “frank terror of oblivion” in “Mortality,” but there is great regret at his having to leave the party early.

How about:

“The novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.”

Or when he quoted Nadine Gordimer to the effect that “a serious person should try to write posthumously.” By that he took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints — of fashion, commerce, self-­censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion — did not operate.” 

In her afterword, his wife Carol relates an anecdote about their daughter, then 2 years old, one day coming across a dead bumblebee on the ground. She frantically begged her parents to “make it start.” On reaching the end of her father’s book “Mortality”, the reader is likely to identify with his daughter’s sentiment.

My Notes:

Pg. 14:  The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival.  This is a distinctly bizarre way of “living”—lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon—and means that one has to exist even more than usual in a double frame of mind. 

Pg. 17:  The Danish physicist and Nobelist Niels Bohr once hung a horseshoe over his doorway.  Appalled friends exclaimed that surely he didn’t put any trust in such pathetic superstition.  “No, I don’t” he replied, “but apparently it works whether you believe in it or not”.  The most comprehensive investigation of the subject ever conducted—the “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer,” (LINK) of 2006, could find no correlation at all between the number and regularity of prayers offered and the likelihood that the person being prayed for would have improved chances.  But it did find a small but interesting negative correlation, in that some patients suffered slight additional woe when they failed to manifest any improvement

Pg. 59:  One thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings.  And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have stopped issuing the announcement that “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”  In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound.  It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.  In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier.