Christopher Hitchens' wit and warmth remembered as New York pays tribute

[MindMover]

Last edited Fri Apr 20, 2012, 09:53 PM - Edit history (1)

"Little Keith" called him a suffering auto-contrarian and likened him to Houdini; Graydon Carter said he was a "bit of a scallywag" but an editor's dream; and the doctor who treated him for the cancer of the oesophagus that killed him said he was a "pioneer at the frontier".

Unsurprisingly, though, it was Christopher Hitchens who had the funniest and the most apposite words with which to describe himself at his own memorial in New York on Friday. He was, he said of himself in posthumous film clips and readings, a "radical freelance scribbler" who had devoted his life to curiosity, irony, dubunking, disputation, drinking, love and hate (though of all those things, it was hate that got him out of bed in the morning).

"The cause of my life," Hitchens said in one snippet included in a compilation put together by the Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Dibney, "has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win – it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition."

For an hour and a half, the cavernous Great Hall of the Cooper Union in Manhattan was filled with the wit and the excoriating erudition of the man universally referred to as "Hitch". But for Martin Amis - "Little Keith" as Hitchens always called him – the most enduring quality was friendship.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/20/christopher-hitchens-memorial-new-york?

Remembering Christopher Hitchens
Posted by David Remnick

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/remembering-christopher-hitchens.html

[angstlessk]

1. I forgot he died..now I am sad all over again...n/t