Time & Perspective Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens meets mortality the way he met most opponents: with cold arithmetic and a refusal to perform consolation. The opening move - "I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic" - is a characteristic bit of self-policing. He knows the script cancer patients are expected to follow (bravery, uplift, vague hope), and he declines it without posturing as a stoic hero. Realism, here, is both a moral stance and an aesthetic one: no sentimentality, no metaphysical bargaining, no inspirational arc.

"Statistics" is doing a lot of work. It yanks the conversation out of the realm of personal exceptionalism - the belief that willpower, positivity, or fame can game biology. Hitchens, a lifelong polemicist against comforting fictions, leans on numbers as a substitute for prayer. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: the body is evidence, prognosis is the verdict, and rhetoric can't appeal the sentence.

Then he sharpens the point into something harsher than fatalism: the "wager". That word echoes his old fascination with Pascal, but it arrives stripped of religious payoff. The bet isn't about salvation; it's about suffering. He frames treatment and decline as a grim bargain where pain is guaranteed and survival is merely possible, even unlikely. The line about wishing you were dying is brutal not because it's shocking, but because it insists on naming what polite culture edits out: the indignities of illness, the non-heroic texture of dying, the possibility that endurance itself can become a coercion.

Context matters. Late in his life, Hitchens wrote and spoke publicly about his esophageal cancer, refusing the inspirational-patient role as aggressively as he refused the believer's. The intent isn't to scare; it's to reclaim honesty from the soothing language that so often surrounds death.