I can literally remember the first time I saw Christopher Hitchens speak on television. It was 2003, just before the start of the Iraq invasion. I was watching CSPAN for some reason (I was a fairly odd kid) and it was a debate on the merits/legality of the invasion of Iraq and Hitchens was on the side of the invasion, of course. I was, at the time, a knee-jerk liberal teenager and ready to hate anyone who spoke for it. The anti-intervention speaker was kind of bland and generic. Then Hitchens came on and instantly made me angry. I hated everything he said and stood for. But as I kept listening, I realized something else was happening at the same time. Bit by bit, he was convincing me. I had this deep, emotional, gut feeling about the coming war and then using nothing other than his own words he was convincing me to ignore my gut. That onto itself felt like a magic trick.
I still didn't like a man who spoke so eloquently and, most damning of all, so persuasively about something I would go blue in the face shouting against. So I didn't intend to follow him but as he continued to show up on television or write columns in Slate or Salon or Vanity Fair, I took notice. Until at some point, for his second magic trick, he made me into not only a fan but into someone who considers him a mentor and a model for living one's life. All this even though I never got the chance to see him speak in person.
I think few people can claim to have had as rich and full of a life as Christopher Hitchens. To quote one of the loveliest lines from Tony Kuschner, he was "a whole kind of person." From chasing after mujhadeen for an article to hosting a cocktail party in his own home and "popping off" for 30 minutes to write a full Slate article in the time it would take most of us to think of the title. More importantly, to me, he did it all with a Roger Williams-esque zeal and devotion to the truth. He enjoyed grandstanding and he enjoyed throwing molotov cocktails, sure, but I don't think anyone can call his passionate opinions on the worth or lack of worth of various ideas and public figures as anything but painfully honest. He was willing to lose friends and lose jobs for the right to speak his mind. An atheist Trotskyist who rubbed shoulders with the US conservative elite for a time. That right there probably tells you exactly how much he subscribed to orthodoxy and the opinions of others.
He's been dead for quite a while now, but I recently started reading his final book of essays, "Arguably." I've only started but every sentence reminds me of his voice and that sadness I felt when he died. It's probably a sign of how little I'd had to deal with the death of loved ones in my life at that point, that his death hit me the hardest I had felt for a long while. But the point is that his death hit me because I knew he was the kind of person who would not get replaced in my life. I do not think I will ever have another mentor who makes me want/need to be a more....complete man. Maybe it's a part of aging where your goals get more specific and less expansive. I'll admire this person or that their achievements in one field or another. He makes more money, she's gone further up the ladder, etc.
But I will not have another Hitchens in my life. He was one and done.
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