# Hitch-22  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Christopher Hitchens]] - Full Title:: Hitch-22 - Category: #books ## Highlights > desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance’s pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down with the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop. W.H. Auden, “Death’s Echo” ([Location 69](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=69)) > We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow ([Location 74](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=74)) > “Remembrances” ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=81)) > Kingsley Amis: Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=186)) > Albert Camus provided a nice précis by saying: “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” ([Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=575)) > Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest: To give, and not to count the cost, To fight, and not to heed the wounds, To toil, and not to seek for rest, To labor, and to ask for no reward, Save that of knowing that we do thy will. That is from Ignatius Loyola. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=1129)) > My encounter with all this liberating knowledge and inquisitive atmosphere was very nearly over before it had begun. In my very first term, in October 1962, President Kennedy went to the brink, as the saying invariably goes, over Cuba. I shall never forget where I was standing and what I was doing on the day he nearly killed me. (It was on the touchline, being forced to watch a rugby game, that I overheard some older boys discussing the likelihood of our annihilation.) At the close of the BBC’s programming that night, Richard Dimbleby enjoined all parents to please act normally and send their children to school in the morning. This didn’t apply to those of us boarders who were already at school. We were left to wonder how the adult world could be ready to gamble itself, and the life of all the subsequent and for that matter preceding generations, on a sordid squabble over a banana republic. I wouldn’t have phrased it like that then, but I do remember feeling furious disgust at the idea of being sacrificed in an American quarrel that seemed largely to be of Kennedy’s making in the first place. I have changed my mind on a number of things since, including almost everything having to do with Cuba, but the idea that we should be grateful for having been spared, and should shower our gratitude upon the supposed Galahad of Camelot for his gracious lenience in opting not to commit genocide and suicide, seemed a bit creepy. When Kennedy was shot the following year, I knew myself somewhat apart from this supposedly generational trauma in that I felt no particular sense of loss at the passing of such a high-risk narcissist. If I registered any distinct emotion, it was that of mild relief. ([Location 1195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=1195)) > But this is very much like the rest of life, where, as Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward. ([Location 1907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=1907)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Literature and Revolution, Trotsky had spoken lyrically of a future in which “the average man will rise to the stature of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx”; in which his very physique would become “more supple, muscular and harmonious,” and had closed by saying that “beyond these hills, new peaks will rise.” ([Location 2004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2004)) > “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. ([Location 2146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2146)) > Evelyn Waugh’s portrayal of The Daily Beast. ([Location 2472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2472)) > P.G. Wodehouse: Webster sat crouched upon the floor beside the widening pool of whisky. But it was not horror and disgust that had caused him to crouch. He was crouched because, crouching, he could get nearer to the stuff and obtain crisper action. His tongue was moving in and out like a piston… And Webster winked, too—a wholehearted, roguish wink that said, as plainly as if he had spoken the words: “How long has this been going on?” Then with a slight hiccough he turned back to the task of getting his quick before it soaked into the floor. ([Location 2644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2644)) > I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, these can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. ([Location 2872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2872)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > (Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.) ([Location 3148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3148)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity. ([Location 3431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3431)) > horseflesh haciendas in Virginia and Kentucky, ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3569)) > In my hometown of Portsmouth there was a riot in 1943, with the locals scorning attempts by American military policemen to enforce a color bar in the pubs. The young Medgar Evers apparently told his English friends that after what he’d seen and learned, when he got back to Mississippi he wasn’t going to put up with any more of this garbage. ([Location 3571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3571)) > It wasn’t very long before our guests and deliverers from across the Atlantic were being sourly described as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here,” though it was generally agreed, as George Orwell noted at the time, that the black or “Negro” soldiers were the most courteous and gallant among them.) ([Location 3589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3589)) > I quietly opened another front and applied for the Coolidge Atlantic Crossing or “Pathfinder” Scholarship, awarded by Balliol College every year so that about ten of us could be introduced to the American Way. The endowing patron of this award, Mr. William Appleton Coolidge, was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson through the Randolph family of Massachusetts. ([Location 3659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3659)) > rare as rocking-horse droppings ([Location 3744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3744)) > I decided to venture back to the epicenter of jihad and wrote an essay—“On the Frontier of Apocalypse”—which said that the problem country was actually not so much Afghanistan but Pakistan: our oldest regional ally and the working model for a nuclear-armed, failed-state “Islamic republic.” ([Location 4333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4333)) > Amid all this chaos on the various frontiers what I increasingly thought was: thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United States of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity. ([Location 4338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4338)) > Nobody in our world was religious; even India was basically secular, surely, and when white racists attacked British Asians they called them all “Pakis” without, if you like, discrimination. (The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.) ([Location 4623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4623)) > I had long since learned to ask John Maynard Keynes’s question: “When the facts change then my opinion changes: and you, sir?” ([Location 4879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4879)) > (I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.) ([Location 5187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5187)) > * ([Location 5345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5345)) > Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt; He only lived but till he was a man; The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d In the unshrinking station where he fought, But like a man he died. This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds: Your cause of sorrow Must not be measured by his worth, for then It hath no end. ([Location 5680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5680)) - Note: Macbeth > Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called “meaningless” except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough. ([Location 5731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5731)) > The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall. ([Location 5738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5738)) > And I’ve lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like “Against the Stream,” “Against the Current,” “Minority of One,” “Breaking Ranks” and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg’s withering remark about “the herd of independent minds.” ([Location 5841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5841)) > And I think it may be possible to review “the chronicles of wasted time.” William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called “the cunning of history” is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind. ([Location 5882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5882)) > John Rickatson-Hatt used to say that he would try anything once “except incest and Scottish dancing.” ([Location 6028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=6028)) # Hitch-22  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Christopher Hitchens]] - Full Title:: Hitch-22 - Category: #books ## Highlights > desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance’s pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down with the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop. W.H. Auden, “Death’s Echo” ([Location 69](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=69)) > We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow ([Location 74](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=74)) > “Remembrances” ([Location 81](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=81)) > Kingsley Amis: Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you—free. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=186)) > Albert Camus provided a nice précis by saying: “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” ([Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=575)) > Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest: To give, and not to count the cost, To fight, and not to heed the wounds, To toil, and not to seek for rest, To labor, and to ask for no reward, Save that of knowing that we do thy will. That is from Ignatius Loyola. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=1129)) > My encounter with all this liberating knowledge and inquisitive atmosphere was very nearly over before it had begun. In my very first term, in October 1962, President Kennedy went to the brink, as the saying invariably goes, over Cuba. I shall never forget where I was standing and what I was doing on the day he nearly killed me. (It was on the touchline, being forced to watch a rugby game, that I overheard some older boys discussing the likelihood of our annihilation.) At the close of the BBC’s programming that night, Richard Dimbleby enjoined all parents to please act normally and send their children to school in the morning. This didn’t apply to those of us boarders who were already at school. We were left to wonder how the adult world could be ready to gamble itself, and the life of all the subsequent and for that matter preceding generations, on a sordid squabble over a banana republic. I wouldn’t have phrased it like that then, but I do remember feeling furious disgust at the idea of being sacrificed in an American quarrel that seemed largely to be of Kennedy’s making in the first place. I have changed my mind on a number of things since, including almost everything having to do with Cuba, but the idea that we should be grateful for having been spared, and should shower our gratitude upon the supposed Galahad of Camelot for his gracious lenience in opting not to commit genocide and suicide, seemed a bit creepy. When Kennedy was shot the following year, I knew myself somewhat apart from this supposedly generational trauma in that I felt no particular sense of loss at the passing of such a high-risk narcissist. If I registered any distinct emotion, it was that of mild relief. ([Location 1195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=1195)) > But this is very much like the rest of life, where, as Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward. ([Location 1907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=1907)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Literature and Revolution, Trotsky had spoken lyrically of a future in which “the average man will rise to the stature of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx”; in which his very physique would become “more supple, muscular and harmonious,” and had closed by saying that “beyond these hills, new peaks will rise.” ([Location 2004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2004)) > “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. ([Location 2146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2146)) > Evelyn Waugh’s portrayal of The Daily Beast. ([Location 2472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2472)) > P.G. Wodehouse: Webster sat crouched upon the floor beside the widening pool of whisky. But it was not horror and disgust that had caused him to crouch. He was crouched because, crouching, he could get nearer to the stuff and obtain crisper action. His tongue was moving in and out like a piston… And Webster winked, too—a wholehearted, roguish wink that said, as plainly as if he had spoken the words: “How long has this been going on?” Then with a slight hiccough he turned back to the task of getting his quick before it soaked into the floor. ([Location 2644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2644)) > I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, these can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. ([Location 2872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=2872)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > (Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.) ([Location 3148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3148)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity. ([Location 3431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3431)) > horseflesh haciendas in Virginia and Kentucky, ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3569)) > In my hometown of Portsmouth there was a riot in 1943, with the locals scorning attempts by American military policemen to enforce a color bar in the pubs. The young Medgar Evers apparently told his English friends that after what he’d seen and learned, when he got back to Mississippi he wasn’t going to put up with any more of this garbage. ([Location 3571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3571)) > It wasn’t very long before our guests and deliverers from across the Atlantic were being sourly described as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here,” though it was generally agreed, as George Orwell noted at the time, that the black or “Negro” soldiers were the most courteous and gallant among them.) ([Location 3589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3589)) > I quietly opened another front and applied for the Coolidge Atlantic Crossing or “Pathfinder” Scholarship, awarded by Balliol College every year so that about ten of us could be introduced to the American Way. The endowing patron of this award, Mr. William Appleton Coolidge, was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson through the Randolph family of Massachusetts. ([Location 3659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3659)) > rare as rocking-horse droppings ([Location 3744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=3744)) > I decided to venture back to the epicenter of jihad and wrote an essay—“On the Frontier of Apocalypse”—which said that the problem country was actually not so much Afghanistan but Pakistan: our oldest regional ally and the working model for a nuclear-armed, failed-state “Islamic republic.” ([Location 4333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4333)) > Amid all this chaos on the various frontiers what I increasingly thought was: thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United States of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity. ([Location 4338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4338)) > Nobody in our world was religious; even India was basically secular, surely, and when white racists attacked British Asians they called them all “Pakis” without, if you like, discrimination. (The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.) ([Location 4623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4623)) > I had long since learned to ask John Maynard Keynes’s question: “When the facts change then my opinion changes: and you, sir?” ([Location 4879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=4879)) > (I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.) ([Location 5187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5187)) > * ([Location 5345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5345)) > Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt; He only lived but till he was a man; The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d In the unshrinking station where he fought, But like a man he died. This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds: Your cause of sorrow Must not be measured by his worth, for then It hath no end. ([Location 5680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5680)) - Note: Macbeth > Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called “meaningless” except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough. ([Location 5731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5731)) > The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall. ([Location 5738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5738)) > And I’ve lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like “Against the Stream,” “Against the Current,” “Minority of One,” “Breaking Ranks” and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg’s withering remark about “the herd of independent minds.” ([Location 5841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5841)) > And I think it may be possible to review “the chronicles of wasted time.” William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called “the cunning of history” is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind. ([Location 5882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=5882)) > John Rickatson-Hatt used to say that he would try anything once “except incest and Scottish dancing.” ([Location 6028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00351DSAU&location=6028))