Christopher Hitchens, whom I interviewed earlier this year for the NS, has given his first TV interview since he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in June. It’s encouraging to see that, despite his grave condition, he’s lost none of his lucidity and wit.
In the interview, with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he responds to those who are hoping (and praying) for a “deathbed conversion”:
If that comes it’ll be when I’m very ill, when I’m half-demented either by drugs or by pain and I won’t have control over what I say. I mention this in case you hear a rumour later on . . . I can’t say that the entity that by then wouldn’t be me, wouldn’t do such a pathetic thing. But I can tell you: not while I’m lucid, no.
Elsewhere, he acknowledges that he had been, as puts it, “taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction”.
“If you smoke, which I did for many years, very heavily . . . and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it,” he says.
He adds: “If you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you may be well advised to do so.”
I’d also recommend reading Hitchens’s remarkable essay for this month’s Vanity Fair, “Topic of cancer“. It’s an extraordinarily controlled and moving piece of writing. Here’s one of a series of memorable lines:
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
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