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Christopher Hitchens

Essayist, critic and journalist

United Kingdom · 1949–2011

British-American essayist, literary critic and polemicist, a columnist for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Slate and the author of God Is Not Great. Diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer in June 2010 while on tour for his memoir Hitch-22, he wrote a sequence of essays about his own dying for Vanity Fair until shortly before his death in December 2011; they were collected as Mortality.

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Question What single thing would improve the quality of your life? Daily life read 51 other answers →

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

Recorded Vanity Fair, 9 May 2011 source ↗

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