Christopher Hitchens

“Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.”

-- Henry James, “The Ambassadors”


“If Hitchens didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to invent him.”

-- Ian McEwan

I was thinking that I should put some more non-fiction into my reading diet and fight against my learned inclination to avoid reality with all its slings and arrows and sorrows. I suppose man cannot live on literature and pop-fiction alone. So, I thought I would try reading more essays, and Christopher Hitchens has to be a good place to start.

I have begun his “Arguably” collection. The first quote above is the epigraph he used to open his book. Its celebration of living life to the fullest is particularly apt, since he put this collection together in the knowledge that he was dying from cancer. The McEwan quote is a blurb for the book, and it too seems most apt, because although Hitchens is not god, his writing can often seem outright godly, and, yeah, he was pretty great.

Chloe Grace Moretz

Chloe Moretz on the trials and tribulations of being a fifteen-year-old movie star.



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Superbowl Sunday

Pop returns from Ms. Walker's place with cases of beer and a bag of ice. It is Superbowl Sunday, and I suppose Pop will have guests coming over. Uggh, it feels like Thanksgiving but without the consolation of a good turkey dinner.

Pessoa

Mr. Pessoa writes evocative of the tension one feels as a lowly, humble member of society with the sense of seeming to have a great soul, between the mundane reality and the ache of beauty and grandeur.

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… and from the majestic heights of my dreams, I return to being an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon.

But the contrast doesn’t overwhelm me, it frees me. And its irony is my blood. What should theoretically humiliate me is what I unfurl as my flag; and the laughter I should be using to laugh at myself is a bugle I blow to herald - and to create - a dawn into which I’m transformed.

The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one knows... And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.

And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, writes words as if they were the world’s salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance...

-- Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

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Superbowl Sunday

I was going to say that Pop ended up not having any guests, but then Jack and some of the family came over in the last few minutes of the fourth quarter. Curious. The game proved to be a good one, going down to the wire. When I went to clean up after dinnner, the TV was set on the channel and I got hooked and watched the last quarter. Could they have wanted to see the close of the nail-biter on the big-screen? But they probably have a big-screen TV of their own. Who knows? All I know is that it proved to be a very easygoing Superbowl Sunday.

Daily Fun

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