My Cultural Highlights: MORTALITY by Christopher Hitchens

There are books which can never stay on the shelf. They could be obscenely slim and there could be a War and Peace sized gap in my bookcase, but they would not fit in. I may try on occasion to pick them up and push them into one of those perfect rows in the depths of my shelf but in a week or two they will start panting and heaving, awkwardly falling off onto my desk. 

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens is one such book. It is a book I first read one year ago, just after New Year, and ever since then I have been under its morbid and oddly uplifting incantation. After Hitch-22, after God is not Great, after Arguably and everything else, this short chronicle of Hitchens's dying days was the one book that would hit me the hardest. The reason for that, I believe, is that it is the one Christopher Hitchens book that should have never been written. 

After all, who among those who admired Hitchens during his lifetime does not keep placing him in the modern context, wondering desperately how he would treat this and what he would have made of that? Trump, #MeToo, Jordan Peterson, etc. Who among us would not give a lot to hear him size it all up in one brilliant English sentence? It is, in fact, unbearable to watch one of his last interviews where he expressed his regret at going so soon and not seeing so many things happen (one of them being, of course, the passing of Henry Kissinger). 

Mortality is a long essay in which he gives a brutally honest account of what it takes to live with cancer, this gluttonous alien that consumes you from within. The book is eloquently written, like everything he ever said. In fact, you are left wondering whether a book like that had any right to be so well-written. It pulls no punches (did he ever?), too, from physical pains to praying for his health to the tricky issue of Pascal's gambit that seemed to be weighing heavily on his mind (not that you ever doubted him). 

More unbearable still are the closing pages of Mortality that feature fragmentary thoughts, ideas and quotations that, somehow, only highlight the serenity and the power of that enormous wit that never failed him until the end. If ever there was a reason for the word 'awe-inspiring' to exist... 

One of the main points that Christopher Hitchens makes in this book is that you do not battle cancer. It is the cancer that battles you. Fights you, shackles you, eats you alive. And yet, years after his death, the book prevails. His words, his writings, everything he stood for. In fact, every time that I feel depressed and life is either catching up or slipping away, I open this book. Somehow, it is there on my desk, right next to me, waiting to be picked up or at the very least acknowledged.