On this recent afternoon, Hitchens said he was not having a terribly good day.
"Chemotherapy isn't good for you," he says. "So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.' "
So what is a good day for Hitchens?
"A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it," he says. "Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular."
On Beliefs
In his writings about his diagnosis, Hitchens has asserted: "To the dumb question, why me? The cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: 'Why not.' " Hitchens concedes that the dumb question "is bound to occur" — but not for long. He says he decided on his beliefs a long time ago, well before he became ill.
"I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply," he says. "I mean, most human beings who've ever been born would have been dead long before they reached my age. And I would think in most the rest of the world — well, I know it — is still true. So to be relatively healthy at 62 is to be dealt a pretty good hand by the cosmos, which doesn't know I'm here — and won't notice when I'm gone. So that seemed probably the only stoic attitude to take."
On The Rest Of His Life
Hitchens says that as he thinks about the rest of his life, he thinks about the books he'd still like to write, time with his three children — and how he should spend it. And he thinks of the obituaries he'd like to write, listing Robert Mugabe. Joseph Ratzinger. Henry Kissinger.
"It does gash me to think that people like that would outlive me, I have to say," he says. "It really does."
And he mentions other things he'd like to live to see: the end of the Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea, Osama bin Laden on trial, the World Trade Center rebuilt. Hitchens measures his own time, against the world.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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