Catch-22

The new issue of Vanity Fair includes a brief and eloquent piece by the inimitable Christopher Hitchens on his cancer diagnosis and treatment; it is a must-read for anyone who loves (or hates) Hitchens’ musings on any number of subjects.  The prognosis sounds grim, and Hitchens does not flinch from what seems from his own admission to be simply a matter of moving medical pawns around in the endgame.  I was reminded despite myself in reading it (dare I say?) of the way that Cardinal John O’Connor and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin handled their cancer diagnoses–not shrinking away from the facts but using their final years as a teaching moment on the often-taboo subject of the realities of a terminal diagnosis.  Hitchens remains, of course, an avowed and truculent atheist, and rejects any attempt (even his own) to find poignancy or larger meaning in this most unfortunate news.

It is classic Hitchens–in one graf, the reader can be moved to tears by his honesty and eloquence; mere lines later, one can be dismayed by an absurd and irrelevant linking of Joseph Ratzinger to Henry Kissinger (as if clumsy mismanagement of an unwieldy church were the moral equivalent of illegally carpet-bombing sovereign nations).  And yet there is something in that honesty, in his rejection of cliche (Martin Amis is surely proud), that should be moving even to those (including myself) who have rolled their eyes at every clever but vicious bon mot and logical fallacy that ever came out of the rascal’s mouth.

He concludes with an intriguing suggestion that in a future issue he will take up the subject of the many Christian groups who have offered prayers for his recovery; that, I am sure, will be the essay of the year…