In the Face of Death

By now you've no doubt ascertained my love of Christopher Hitchens and his writing. At the risk of boring you once more, I wanted to share this new article he wrote for January 2012 issue Vanity Fair. In it, he deconstructs the saying "Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger," by analyzing its source (likely Nietzche, who Hitchens largely dislikes, it seems) while framing the whole thing within the context of his own battle with esophageal cancer and the necessary radiation and chemo treatments. The entire article is fascinating, but it was this paragraph near the end that struck me as particularly poignant:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

I hope to never find myself in the painful situation that Hitchens now does, save for the desperate need to write and speak in order to properly live.