nomadic

I had known something of Hitchens because of his adamant atheism and his connection with Richard Dawkins. When I saw that his memoirs were available on Kindle Books, I took a chance and bought a copy. I loved every word of it. He is a powerful personality and writes the same way. For me, very wonderfully with interesting stories and anecdotes throughout. Everything from English Boarding School travails, the discovery his mother was Jewish after her suicide, his fondness for P.G. Wodehouse (which I now share), his strong affection for the United States and his evolution away from Socialism to outright support for the war in Iraq. His prose really made me reevaluate my own thinking on the subject. I also love it when I need a dictionary to make it through every other page.

Anyway, I was not quite finished with the book when the news arrived that he is being treated for esophageal cancer. With the timing, I felt a bit as if I had lost a friend.

From his memoir to, “God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything”, I there find reference to one of my favorite, albeit arcane, books by the late SJ Gould, “Wonderful Life”. Hitchens weaves Gould’s evolutionary ideas in with his own and, again, leaves me blinking at the page with the feeling that I would really like to hang out with this guy.

So, this post is in lieu of an email to him (which would just end up in the “Anonymous In-Box”), describing my appreciation for his mastery of the English language and his reference to a book that I had thought perhaps another 12 people had read. Topping it off is that I work for a company that is refining a product for the early detection of esophageal cancer. I know the odds.

I wish him the best during his course of treatment.