Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets' - Guardian.uk interview

[Bozita]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/christopher-hitchens-cancer-interview

Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'
In June Christopher Hitchens, the hard-drinking polemicist and atheist, met his toughest opponent yet when he was diagnosed with cancer. The question on many lips was: would his illness alter his beliefs – on Iraq, on Islam, on God? At home in Washington, with a large glass of Johnnie Walker to hand, he responds with characteristic combativeness

Andrew Anthony
The Observer, Sunday 14 November 2010
Article history


I wasn't sure what, or perhaps whom, to expect as the door opened at Christopher Hitchens's top-floor apartment in downtown Washington. The last time I had interviewed the renowned polemicist, author, literary critic and new resident in the medical state he's called "Tumortown" was in 2005. On that occasion, after a 5am finish to our extravagantly lubricated conversation, it was I who had felt the pressing need of hospital attention.

Since then there have been two dramatic changes in his circumstances. The first was the international bestselling success of his 2007 anti-theist tome God is Not Great. After decades of acclaimed but essentially confined labour, Hitchens suddenly broke out to a mass audience, becoming arguably the global figurehead of the so-called New Atheists. Almost overnight he was upgraded from intellectual notoriety, as an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq, to the business end of mainstream fame. In America, in particular, he has reached that rare position for a journalist of becoming a news story himself.

Unfortunately the news, which provided the second personal transformation, was that in June he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, a malignancy whose survival ratings do not make soothing bedtime reading. As restraint is a quality for which neither Hitchens nor his critics are known, the ironies proved irresistible to many commentators. For the religiously zealous, the arch atheist suffering a mortal illness spoke of divine retribution – the unacknowledged irony being that belief in such a vindictive god served only to endorse Hitchens's thesis.

For more secular moralists, a different kind of cosmic accountancy was at work. The celebrated drinker and smoker who once claimed that "booze and fags are happiness" had succumbed to a cancer most often associated with drinking and smoking. Having previously gone so far as to promote the benefits of teenage smoking, he offered a public recantation of sorts. "I might as well say to anyone watching," he announced in a TV interview, "if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so."

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[NoPasaran]

1. Thanks for posting this

Over the decades I've agreed with Hitchens on some things, disagreed on others. I don't think anyone can seriously deny that he is a real thinker, not a shill for any political faction.

[MisterP]

2. yes, but you can't choose the most important regret in your life, Hitch:

being Christopher Hitchens

[UpInArms]

3. +1

eom

[localroger]

6. I seriously doubt Hitch regrets creating himself

He's had plenty of time to become someone different if he didn't want to be who he is. As the linked article makes plain, Hitchens loves a good argument, and he's had plenty of them. I have to admire his willingness to accept a conclusion he doesn't like if the arguments lead inexorably toward it, and to admit he was wrong when the arguments lead inexorably to that. He is a contrarian, an attitude which maximizes the number of delightful arguments to be had and also the number of people who just plain don't like him. But the latter do not bother Hitchens, the former please him, and the idea that he might regret being who he is is just plain ridiculous.

[Smarmie Doofus]

4. Rec .... kick....n/t

[LawnKorn]

5. K&R