I was very saddened to learn this morning of the death of the great writer Christopher Hitchens. For over a year, I had paid close attention to his battle with cancer, knowing all along that it was going to be a fight which he would ultimately lose. The end came yesterday for the 62 year old Hitchens. In this day and age, that seems young. He had hundreds of thousands more words left to be written, but it was not meant to be.
He was a brilliant man and a wonderful writer. I certainly didn’t agree with everything Hitchens said (most notably, his outspoken atheism), but I respected his mind. Even when I disagreed with what he said, Hitchens forced you to evaluate your beliefs, a gift that so few writers have.
In the chasm created by the death of Hitchens, the world has one less intellectual giant, but his writing will live on forever. While he did not have the benefit of long life, the prolific volume of his work was that which the average person could not have produced in several lifetimes.
jrb
