Christopher Hitchens Defeats Stage IV

Thanks to C-Span and "hitchwatch" on YouTube for this extraordinary treat.

Whatever one's position on divinity and metaphysics, one's enthusiasm for the life of the mind, lively writing, and passionate opinion cannot help but find the frame of the heroic in Christopher Hitchens' sprawling and spritely from Left-to-Right-of-Center odyssey and, well illustrated in the above hour-long interview, a vigorous near end to which he might yet give the slip,the spirit, or perhaps one should call it "mentality", that fights the many good fights it may however battered and reduced the body.

Death's a cheat that artists and writers frequently cheat right back by the not going gently and by leaving the residue of their existence--i.e., their artifacts, a term as applicable to the 19th Century as it is particularly appropriate to the 21st--in cultural memory and institutional facility. 

Past tense or present, we'll be reading "Hitch" and looking over his appearances in public for a fair while yet.

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