Christopher Hitchens, Locked In Stasis

I know what it means to watch those you love suffer from cancer, to see their hair fall out, and not to know what the future will bring.

It locks you in a kind stasis unsure of what to do. It makes a conservative in your hopes, but it makes a libertarian in your practices. We are always dying. There is no everlasting life. The question is how we live.

And what a life Christopher Hitchens has lived. That life is on display in a Charlie Rose hour long interview. I highly recommend it.

Bryce Gerard CMC '11 and I went to see him a few years ago at Pitzer College. It ranks as one of my favorite talks -- and I have been to many -- and I have been turning it over and over again in my mind. Fortunately, Bryce wrote a good summation of the arguments and of the events. At once educated and entertained, I knew then and there that I could never hope to achieve what he had, but that I had to try. Here was the most rebel of rebels, who had journeyed from the left to the right and belonged to neither. He belongs to himself and to his work.

The work, ah yes, the work. That's where we atheists go when we shuffle off. We seek a different immortality and to be kept alive in the minds of men and pages of libraries. Perhaps to be neglected, perhaps with too many typos, but always to be striving for the things of this earth.