Alan Jacobs

Saint Peter: Next!

Man [defiant]: Christopher Hitchens.

St Peter [a half-beat late]: Personal account?

Hitchens: Do you know who I am? Of course you do, it’s one of the drawbacks of omniscience. And this place… It’s obvious where this is. I haven’t seen taste this bad on such a scale since I last liberated one of Saddam’s palaces. No, no, let me finish. I suppose I should have known you’d turn out to be one of those drivelling relativists who thought that war was a bad idea. But answer this: has even one of the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve passed through your gate since I was so thunderingly right about Iraq blamed me at all? They probably just snivelled about Satan. The pathetic prisoners of religion.

Saint Peter: So you still don’t think you might have been wrong about God?

Hitchens: Oh, don’t think you can catch me with that old chestnut. Just shows how religion poisons everything. Let me tell you: death is certain, replacing both the siren song of paradise and the dread of hell.

Saint Peter: So you aren’t in the least bit surprised to find yourself here…

Hitchens: Here? [repeats with rising, scornful incredulity] Here? This… continent of spacious heaven, adorned with plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold… This kind of divine North Korea? Come off it. Where are the ashtrays? I’m off somewhere I can get a drink. [exits]

In a number of interviews during the course of his cancer treatments, he discussed the prospect of a “death bed” conversion, and it was clear that he was concerned about the prospect. But, he assured interviewers, if anything like that ever happened, we should all be certain that the cancer or the chemo or something had gotten to his brain. If he confessed faith, then he, the Christopher Hitchens that we all knew, should be counted as already dead. In short, he was preparing a narrative for us, just in case. But it is interesting that the narrative he prepped us with did not involve some ethically challenged evangelical nurses on the late shift who were ready to claim that they had heard him cry out to God, thus misrepresenting another great infidel into heaven. It has been done with Einstein, and with Darwin. Why not Hitchens? But Christopher actually prepared us by saying that if he said anything like this, then he did not know what he was saying.

This is interesting, not so much because of what it says about what he did or did not do as death approached him, and as he at the same time approached death. It is interesting because, when he gave these interviews, he was manifestly in his right mind, and the thought had clearly occurred to him that he might not feel in just a few months the way he did at present. The subject came up repeatedly, and was plainly a concern to him. Christopher Hitchens was baptized in his infancy, and his name means “Christ-bearer.” This created an enormous burden that he tried to shake off his entire life. No creature can ever succeed in doing this. But sometimes, in the kindness of God, such failures can have a gracious twist at the end. We therefore commend Christopher to the Judge of the whole earth, who will certainly do right. Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-2011). R.I.P.

Lorna said to me, ‘You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.’

I said, ‘What thing is that?’

She said, ‘Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’

I said, ‘If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.’

Lorna said, ‘Wel there is a millying and mor.’

I said, ‘Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?’

She said, ‘Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part.’

“Captain Najork,” said Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, “is seven feet tall, with eyes like fire, a voice like thunder, and a handlebar moustache. His trousers are always freshly pressed, his blazer is immaculate, his shoes are polished mirror-bright, and he is every inch a terror. when Captain Najork is sent for he comes up the river in his pedal boat, with his hired sportsmen all pedalling hard. He teaches fooling-around boys the lesson they so badly need, and it is not one that they soon forget.”

— Russell Hoban, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen

First forgive the silence
That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
That stains the silence.

Excuse the absence
That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
That insists on presence.

Pardon the delay
Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
Your impatience.

Forgive God
For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
The betrayal of language.

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Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.

I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been. A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could. I’d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess.

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.

This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today . People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to. My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it.

By the time Milton reaches Book VII he has come to a kind of accord with his own frustration. All right, he says: I can’t get up to heaven, and if I try I “fall/Erroneous”. Writing purely about God, he comments, is like being an amateur rider on a particularly frisky winged horse. Humanity is the proper perspective for poetic endeavour; so he asks the Christian muse, Urania, to carry him downwards and deposit him safe in his “Native Element”. He will write now about the earth: about its nature, its making; about its creatures; about relationships and sex and intellectual curiosity and mistakes and sorrow and “the human face divine”.

 

This is most deeply God’s place to speak through his poet, he points out; singing amid violence; taking love into hell; readying himself for sacrifice, to be destroyed by the blind desires of an angry mob. The figure with whom he identifies in connection with this role is Orpheus, the prototype poet of myth. But, of course, he is thinking about Christ too, who in Christian theology is God suffering all that humans inflict on each other. There won’t be much explicit scope for Christ in Paradise Lost. But Milton sees his own position – surrounded by rabid Royalists, “fall'n on evil dayes”, slandered by “evil tongues” – as Christlike. In the face of violence, Milton too will sing.

Pour la skieuse Lindsay Vonn, le tebowing prend encore une autre signification. Elle a imité la pose du footballeur américain après sa victoire à Beaver Creek la semaine dernière en précisant ne pas vouloir moquer mais rendre hommage, non pas forcément à l'aspect religieux du geste, mais plus prosaïquement à l'équipe des Broncos de Denver… “J'ai demandé à son frère, présent sur place, si Tim Tebow serait embêté que je le fasse, en cas de victoire. Et je l'ai donc fait, allez les Broncos !” Sur son compte Twitter, c'est le basketteur Dwight Howard qui s'est également pris au jeu, ainsi que des champions de Nascar.

But while the Web and related telecommunications portals are, as Pagel says, explosively expanding the universe of “docile copiers,” these same networks are also explosively expanding the linkages among what you might call “engaged edge pushers.” The variety of experimentation is mind boggling, ranging from the group-created, and modified, mashup of music, video and art of the Johnny Cash Project to an entire new Journal of Visualized Experiments. Both offer not only new ways to publish work, but to experience information.

That can only raise the odds of achieving the kinds of social, scientific, pedagogical and technological innovations that will be needed for a smooth ride as human numbers and appetites crest in coming decades. After all, while there are plenty of lone geniuses whose ideas have triggered momentous leaps in the human condition, there are many other such leaps — the Internet among them — that have come from the collision of, and competition among, ideas generated through discourse and exchange.

Amazon’s Dec. 10 Price Check promotion specifically excludes books.

That’s right. You can use the price check app to shop for books, and maybe save some money, but the extra 5 percent off deal Amazon was offering was for electronics, toys, music, sporting goods and DVDs. This is because Amazon simply doesn’t care about independent bookstores. Little bookshops are not even on Jeff Bezos’ radar anymore. He and Amazon are after bigger game: Best Buy (who have pulled bar codes off their products to defend against precisely this), Wal-Mart, Target, Toys ‘R’ Us, Costco, and Macy’s.

Amazon is a retail and technology company of a scope and potential that’s simply unprecedented in our history. Books and digital reading devices — even as they’re selling by the millions of units for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week — are a Trojan horse.

Why, then, did the debate over Amazon’s Price Check promotion find its flashpoint with indie bookstores, rather than big-box retail? It’s simply because it’s a debate we’re used to having. Neither Russo nor Manjoo are actually contrarian at all, except to one another, in the same way that neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to say anything far outside conventional political orthodoxy.