“I have sometimes noticed in other people that a clear-eyed sense of impending extinction can have a paradoxically liberating effect, as in: at least I don’t have to do that anymore.” This is the elder Hitchens, reflecting on his onetime friend, the late Edward Said, who finally resigned from the Palestine National Council upon the diagnosis of his ultimately terminal illness, a move Hitchens thought long overdue.
There are many who wish that, with his own mortality in play, Christopher Hitchens would be moved to discard his own belligerent atheism, which alone among his rhetorical skirmishes reveals a peevishness and intolerance that he lethally coaxes out of opponents in other battles.
“He has bricked himself up high in his atheist tower,” writes his brother Peter, “with slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful, and he would find it rather hard to climb down out of it.”
