Unless they know something we don't, the hacks at the Guardian appear to have run Martin Amis's obituary of Christopher Hitchens a little ahead of time. It's an interesting read, sort of, pervaded more by praise than burial, and with a delightful final paragraph that mixes one part Arabian Knights with five parts Carl Sagan, and with just a dash of Bladerunner in there for the real cognoscenti.
Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.
Or, as Joni Mitchell, a true artist, once put it:
We are stardust Billion year old carbon We are golden Caught in the devil's bargain And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden
“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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