Christopher Hitchens Passes Away at 62

[HugeFanOfBadReligion]

I really don't know what to say right now, I just found out. He was a huge inspiration for me, and I'm quite shocked; I'm at a loss for words. I'll have more to say later, but I have nothing to say at the moment.

[Fat Man]

I really don't know what to say right now, I just found out. He was a huge inspiration for me, and I'm quite shocked; I'm at a loss for words. I'll have more to say later, but I have nothing to say at the moment.

I got the news last night in my E-mails.

I'm going to miss him very much. I have favored many of his lecture videos to my Playlists on my YouTube channel.

Rest in peace Christopher Hitchens.

And, by the way Safety, if you have come here into this topic to post one of your retarded comments about being in Hell, I know what you're going to say, so again, I need to remind you, don't say it, and don't even think it!

OK?

[Lewis]

RIP Christopher Hitchens.

Peter Hitchens statement:

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
How odd it is to hear of your own brotherâ??s death on an early morning radio bulletin. How odd it is for a private loss to be a public event. I wouldnâ??t normally dream of writing about such a thing here, and I doubt if many people would expect me to. It is made even odder by the fact that I am a minor celebrity myself. And that the , ah, complex relationship between me and my brother has been public property. I have this morning turned down three invitations to talk on the radio about my brother. I had a powerful feeling that it would be wrong to do so, not immediately explicable but strong enough to persuade me to say a polite â??no thank youâ??. And I have spent most of the day so far responding, with regrettable brevity, to the many kind and thoughtful expressions of sympathy that I have received, some from complete strangers. Many more such messages are arriving as comments here. My thanks for all of them. They are much appreciated not only by me but by my brotherâ??s family. Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable less, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldnâ??t be properly human.



So, odd as it would be if this were a wholly private matter, I think it would be strange if I did not post something here, partly to thank the many who have sent their kind wishes and expressed their sympathy, and partly to provide my first raw attempt at a eulogy for my closest living relative, someone who in many ways I have known better â?? and certainly longer - than anyone else alive.



It is certainly raw. Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. We both knew it was the last time we would see each other, though being Englishmen of a certain generation, neither of us would have dreamed of actually saying so. We parted on good terms, though our conversation had been (as had our e-mail correspondence for some months) cautious and confined to subjects that would not easily lead to conflict. In this I think we were a little like chess-players, working out many possible moves in advance, neither of us wanting any more quarrels of any kind.



At one stage â?? and I am so sad this never happened â?? he wrote to me saying he hoped for a â??soft landingâ??( code, I think for abandoning any further attempts to combat his disease) and to go home to his beautiful apartment in Washington DC. There, he suggested, we could go through his bookshelves, as there were some books and other possessions he wanted me to have. I couldnâ??t have cared less about these things, but I had greatly hoped to have that conversation, which would have been a particularly good way of saying farewell. But alas, it never happened. He never went home and now never will. Never, there it is, that inflexible word that trails close behind that other non-negotiable syllable, death. Even so, we did what we could in Houston, as the doctors, the nurses, the cleaners, and who knows who else, bustled in and out. I forgot, till I left, that I was wearing a ludicrous surgical mask and gown, and surgical gloves ( I am still not sure whose benefit this was for, but it was obligatory) all the time I was sitting there, and â?? this is extraordinary â?? time seemed to me to pass incredibly swiftly in that room. I was shocked when the moment came to leave for the airport, that it had come so soon.



Hereâ??s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is â??courageâ??. By this I donâ??t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.



I donâ??t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been. A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldnâ??t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could. Iâ??d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess.



He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.



This explains plenty. I offer it because the word â??courageâ?? is often misused today . People sometimes tell me that I have been â??courageousâ?? to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to. My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. Iâ??ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewisâ??s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing Iâ??d most wish to remember.



We got on surprisingly well in the past few months, better than for about 50 years as it happens. At such times one tends to remember childhood more clearly than at others, though I have always had a remarkably clear memory of much of mine. I am still baffled by how far we both came, in our different ways, from the small, quiet, shabby world of chilly, sombre rented houses and austere boarding schools, of battered and declining naval seaports, not specially cultured, not book-lined or literary or showy but plain, dutiful and unassuming. How unlikely it would have seemed in those irrecoverable suburban afternoons that we would take the courses we did take.



Two pieces of verse come to mind, one from Hilaire Bellocâ??s â??Dedicatory Odeâ??



â??From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, thereâ??s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friendsâ??



I have always found this passage unexpectedly moving because of something that lies beneath the words, good and largely true though they are. When I hear it, I see in my mindâ??s eye a narrow, half-lit entrance hall with a slowly-ticking clock in it, and a half-open door beyond which somebody is waiting for news of a child who long ago left home.



And T.S.Eliotâ??s â??Little Giddingâ?? (one of the Four Quartets)



â??We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first timeâ??



These words I love because I have found them to be increasingly and powerfully true. In my beginning, as Eliot wrote elsewhere in the Quartets, is my end. Alpha et Omega.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/ ... -2011.html

[HugeFanOfBadReligion]

I said a while ago that I'd have more to say on the topic after a while, and I do, although I don't have as much to say as I thought I would. I think that everything that could be said has already either been said by others (not necessarily on this site, but elsewhere too), or can simply be seen by reading his works or listening to any of his speeches/interviews/debates. But I'll still say that he was an enormous inspiration to me, and the world has lost a great person. With his vast amount of knowledge and his incredible ability to articulate his points of view and his arguments, there were few people that could express intelligent ideas as well as he could. The morning I found out he died, I could tell it was one of those days that are simply bad from the start; it was quite a sad day for me. Normally, when someone who I don't know personally dies, I may be fairly disappointed and may recognize the significance of the loss of that person if I look up to that person in some way, but with Christopher Hitchens, it was unlike the death of any other person who I do not know. Because he was such a big inspiration to me, and also after reading so many of his works and watching/listening to so many interviews, debates and speeches from him, it was like losing someone who actually was part of my life. He will be greatly missed, by myself and countless others.

Rest in peace Christopher Hitchens.

[Fat Man]

I feel like I had lost an older brother.

When Carl Sagan died back in 1996, I actually broke down and cried right there in the public library when I read the news on the Internet.

Then Isaac Asimov died sometime later that year. I miss him too because there won't be any more new books written by him anymore. I have read almost every book he has written.

I've only known Christopher Hitchens for this past year since I discovered his lecture videos on YouTube, and I have favored many of those videos to my Playlists on my channel. I'm still searching for more videos to favor.

So, I have only known him for a short time, but I have come to love him like a brother.

Yeah, I never heard of him on TV. That's why I'm disgusted with TV now, because all your ever hear about is sports celebrities or Hollywood celebrities.

TV actually keeps us in the dark.

I have learned far more from YouTube, and got to know Christopher Hitchens through YouTube, and also Richard Dawkins, and Dr. Eugene Scott.

You never hear of them on TV. The more you watch TV, the more stupid you become.

Thank goodness for YouTube.

I'm really going to miss Christopher Hitchens.

I especially enjoyed watching him HITCH-SLAP those moronic Creationists during his debates with them.

He still lives on through those videos.

Rest in peace, Christopher Hitchens.

[Fat Man]

Although Christopher Hitchens is gone now, I still think he should have the last word in this topic.



Christopher Hitchens "I'd say no Fuck You"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV1ixg1qDs0&feature