He was vain and particular in his habits, smoking mountains of strong Turkish cigarettes which I suspect were more immediately responsible for his esophageal cancer than God. “The air reeks of smokelessness,” he quipped to us after arriving on the Wabash campus. He also joked about Indiana’s blue-light liquor laws, which had somehow prevented him from ordering a second drink one Sunday night at the local Applebees while his first whiskey was still unfinished.
It’s hard to fathom how such a person meets the end of his life. I only know Hitchens suffered a lot in his final illness and I’m sorry he’s gone. When I think of him today, I still recall him as the quick-witted journalist I met at Wabash, rather than as the conflicted atheist he later became. But I also know they were the same person: a frustrated idealist who was filled with much bitterness despite also being a deeply compassionate man.
Sometimes, I even find myself praying for Christopher Hitchens to the God he said he never knew. Why Hitchens? I suppose I do it because he was the last good American atheist.
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