Over the last dozen years or so, Christopher Hitchens became an unlikely kind of hero to me.
On Friday, a debate on whether religion was a force of good in the world, took place between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto. As the 2,800- seat venue was sold out, and tickets were being scalped for $500 a piece, a bunch of us went to the Toronto Reference Library to watch the live broadcast instead.
It was an event that radiated charisma, even history, fueled in part by the sad fact that Christopher Hitchens is dying of cancer.
When the September 11th attacks took place in 2001, I had recently had a stem cell transplant to treat Hodgkin’s Disease. At the time I had never been to New York City and the destruction of the Twin Towers had a really visceral and profound effect on me. Something incredible, never experienced in my life, was gone.
I remembered watching the Three Tenors performing at an outdoor concert on TV, and behind them, across the river, stood the Twin Towers glittering in the sun. And as I was experiencing this I felt a sense of awe, realizing that we, as a species, have come crawling out of caves to create this, and I vowed that when I was well, I would go to New York City and see these monuments to human ambition and capacity.
And then they were gone.
And I was furious at all that was so vividly lost.
Hitchens, whom I hadn’t read too much of leading up to 9/11, was able to bring a moral and intellectual clarity to the primal rage so many of us were feeling after the event. His staggering erudition, eloquence and ability to cut to the pure heart of matters is nothing short of intimidating.
Never backing down from a fight, he always chose a side.
I admired this, recalling all my dark nights of the soul, sick with cancer and adrift in questions of whether the life I might leave had been a good one or not, or potentially worse, whether I had even committed to one.
Hitchens, on the other hand, had lived as a man of action. Speaking brilliantly from behind clouds of cigarette smoke– the ice in his glass of Scotch rattling as he made a vigorous point– he fearlessly traveled the world, provoking enemies everywhere he went. People all over the place wanted to kill him. Constructed of whisky and steel, he seemed a victory of will over nature, and then the dreary ash cloud of cancer settled upon him.
It was an immensely sad thing for me to hear.
When Hitchens was introduced at the debate and his cancer mentioned, it seemed as if something had passed through him. Pale and bald, he nervously shuffled his feet, licking his lips and swallowing, as if trying to gather the saliva his chemotherapy had drained, or just not cry. He wasn’t quite himself, either physically or emotionally.
But then he stepped up and performed brilliantly.
Fucking brilliantly.
In moments when he lost himself to the light of his mind, he would reflexively reach back to run his hand through the insouciant mane of hair that was no longer there, and at one point he asked for one more question, as if to extend this life that he had so mastered, just a little bit longer.
Filing out of the library everybody was talking.
“Oh, Hitchens won easily!”
“I thought he’d be in better shape.”
“I was disappointed in Blair’s debate skills!”
Earlier in the night, while waiting in the foyer for my friends before the debate, I had been watching a teen who looked a little bit like a young Bob Dylan. He was reading an important looking book. Like me, he was obviously waiting for somebody, and when the girl finally arrived they hugged awkwardly, as if neither one of them had a clue how their date was going to turn out, or even who they might turn out to be in this world.
And as the crowd flooded out into the city after the debate, I spotted them, now holding hands, and for some reason this almost made me cry.