The plague took an immense toll on the society. And it brought the worst out in people who were grasping at anything trying to make any sense of the senselessness. Blame had to be apportioned, and the results varied from blaming “loose” female behavior to self-flagellation to most brutal pogroms in the horrific spike of antisemitism that seems to be always haunting Europe. This was indeed the end of the world and rationality.

And so the struggle begins; he writes with a calm and searching honesty about the idea that "I don't have a body, I am a body." As someone who liked a struggle, indeed often went downtown in search of one, he discovers that "when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge bag of poison and plug it into your arm … the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you." While he loses his hair, he is rather pleased that "the chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn't yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it is a rather patchy affair." Creating this b

StatPearls [Internet].

Undoubtedly, the average Englishman found the mortality as frightening as the average Florentine or Parisian, but a phlegmatic, self-contained streak in the English character kept outbursts...relatively infrequent.

Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist." As an advanced prostate cancer patient myself, still undergoing treatment - Hitchens doesn't waste one word, he nails every aspect of the experience of existing in Tumour Town.

He makes mordant play with the bloggers who posted remarks about how God was punishing his atheism by removing the voice with which he blasphemed. He dispenses with the fallacy that people courageously "battle" cancer. He considers the idea that it is battling him, then dismisses that as a pathetic fallacy. The real struggle in Mortality is not with mortality. Hitchens cleaves to the logical conclusion of his materialism. He hints, rather, at a fear of losing himself, of becoming an imbecile, someone who might, in terror and pain, say something foolish or (God forbid) religious near the end, to give his enemies satisfaction. The true struggle of his last writings is to remain himself, deep in the country of the ill, for as long as he can. Jonathan Blaustein is an artist, writer, and educator based in Taos, New Mexico. He has exhibited his work widely in galleries and museums the US, and festivals in Europe. His photographs reside in several important collections, including the Library of Congress, the State of New Mexico, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Classic Hitchens style even in the midst of such physical and emotional distress. The well-written afterword by his widow included some good insights, especially her perspective on the treatment Hitchens pursued and endured, including why. I didn’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens (war with Iraq, for instance) but I always admired his brilliant mind and I enjoyed his feisty, combative personality. Because Hitchens was an outspoken atheist, I was most curious to read his observations on mortality. These moving and brave final essays were so much more than what I expected. I found them to be deeply thought-provoking and sometimes difficult but compelling to read.