The Hitch on Death

Christopher Hitchens, brooding on “how much faster I’m dying than anyone else” is interviewed by Oliver Kamm in today’s Times (pay wall). The Hitch responds to what Kamm calls “one of the great non sequiturs of newspaper commentary” about Hitchens’s cancer, that he remains an atheist. Kamm says that his interviewee “retains his fierce objection that the faithful are temperamentally unable to keep their convictions to themselves”, and quotes him thus:

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: ‘Don’t be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones.’ People might suppose this was in poor taste.

Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/Polaris

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