A Letter of Advice to Young Contrarians from Christopher Hitchens

“Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others.”

Today would have marked the sixty-third birthday of acclaimed author and professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who succumbed to esophageal cancer last December. “One should try to write as if posthumously,” he famously — prophetically even, were such a contention not to be blasphemous to him — declared three days before he became gravely ill in 2010. Perhaps he had this dictum in mind when he penned, on a challenge from his New School students, Letters to a Young Contrarian, condensing years’ worth of his advice “to the young and the restless” into a series of letters written as if to just one of them — a form borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

This particular excerpt distills a great deal of Hitch’s lens on life in just one short paragraph:

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

These words of wisdom join other astute advice to young guns from such cultural figures as John Steinbeck, C. S. Lewis, Albert Einstein, and Jackson Pollock’s dad.

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Christopher Hitchens: “One should try to write as if posthumously.”

Hitch on death, public opinion, and freedom from inhibition.

Exactly a week ago today, the world lost Christopher Hitchens and cried a chorus of mourning. On June 4, 2010, three days before he became gravely ill, Hitchens took the stage at The New York Public Library’s excellent LIVE series (one of the many reasons I support NYPL monthly) to discuss his newly published memoir, Hitch 22. In this excerpt from his conversation with NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber, hair-raising in retrospect, Hitchens discussed the duality of his relationship with death, both a fiend of fear and a frontier of freedom.

Holdengräber: In the first 4-5 pages of your memoir, one thing that strikes me is a real fear of death, and in some way I think that the memoir is written to hold it at bay.

Hitchens: Of course. I’ve always known that I’m born into a losing struggle… don’t know anyone who’s come out of that a winner. One should try to write as if posthumously. Because then you’re free of all the inhibition that can cluster around even the most independent-minded writer. You don’t really care about public opinion now, you don’t mind about sales, you don’t care what the critics say. You don’t even care what your friends, your peers, your beloved think. You’re free. Death is a very liberating thought.

Watch the full program here and don’t miss Hitchens’ final collection of essays, Arguably.

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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, Possibly His Last

From Ben Franklin to Qadafi, or what the Egyptian Revolution has to do with Harry Potter.

Christopher Hitchens — legendary self-described “antitheist”, tea master extraordinaire, one of the most opinionated and controversial journalists of our time and despite that, or precisely because of it, also one of the greatest. Last year, his prolific career — which spanned such iconic titles as Vanity Fair, The Nation and Slate — was derailed by a grim cancer diagnosis. (His Vanity Fair essay on losing his “writer’s voice” as cancer attacked his vocal chords is a must-read.)

This month marks the release of Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens Hitchens’ first anthology since 2004 — and, as the author writes in the book’s introduction, possibly his last:

…About a year ago, I was informed by a doctor that I might have as little as another year to live. In consequence, some of these articles were written with the full consciousness that they might be my very last.”

The anthology collects some of Hitchens’ best recent work — including “America the Banana Republic,” “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” “Iran’s Waiting Game,” and “God of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment” — imbued with his signature style of lucid nonfiction written with the passion and narrative enchantment of really, really good fiction. Unapologetically candid, wryly humorous and keenly insightful, the essays examines such cultural icons as Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, Ezra Pound, Abraham Lincoln, George Orwell, and even Harry Potter in the context of contemporary events, weaving history and present together in Hitchens’ web of timelessness and timeliness as he reflects on the most pressing political and social issues of our time.

From the book’s dedication and introduction:

To the memory of Mohemed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamedeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu

The three names on the dedication page belonged to a Tunisian street vendor, and Egyptian restaurateur, and a Libyan husband and father. In the spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak’s Egypt. The third, it might be said, gave his life as well as took it: loading up his modest car with petrol and explosives and blasting open the gate of the Katiba barracks in Benghazi — symbolic Bastille of the detested and demented Qadafi regime in Libya.”

Crisp and cunning, Arguably is bound to live on as material for the journalism curricula of the future and a priceless piece of the legacy of one of our era’s sharpest minds.

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