Parenting & Family Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Mortality lands here not as a soft epiphany but as an outraged accounting error. Hitchens frames his illness as a theft of schedule, not a metaphysical lesson: he had "real plans", he’d "earned" the next decade, and the universe has the bad taste to audit him early. The tone is classic Hitch: intimate but combative, turning even personal dread into an argument about fairness, entitlement, and the moral arithmetic of a life spent working, fighting, and performing.

The bite comes from how he stacks the future he’s losing. First, the domestically sacred: children married, the ordinary reward of sticking around. Then the civic, almost journalistic milestone: the World Trade Center "rise again", a phrase that carries both patriotic narrative and a skeptic’s awareness of how societies stage rebirth after catastrophe. Finally, the wickedly comic, ideologically loaded wish: to "read - if not indeed write - the obituaries" of "elderly villains" like Kissinger and Ratzinger. He’s not just cracking a morbid joke; he’s insisting that history still has scores to settle, that the powerful too often outlive their reckoning, and that his own vocation is to narrate that reckoning with relish.

Subtext: fear is permitted, self-pity is not. Even staring down death, he keeps his posture as polemicist, converting vulnerability into a last, defiant claim on the future: if the bastards are still here, why shouldn’t I be?