Hitchens: What does not kill you does not make you stronger.
Christopher Hitchens is our guide through the intellectual minefields. He reports from the last frontier.
Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch
In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier. But does the rhyme suggest a reason? Perhaps it does, or can, in matters of the emotions. I can remember thinking, of testing moments involving love and hate, that I had, so to speak, come out of them ahead, with some strength accrued from the experience that I couldn’t have acquired any other way. And then once or twice, walking away from a car wreck or a close encounter with mayhem while doing foreign reporting, I experienced a rather fatuous feeling of having been toughened by the encounter. But really, that’s to say no more than “There but for the grace of god go I,” which in turn is to say no more than “The grace of god has happily embraced me and skipped that unfortunate other man.”
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 11th, 2011 at 04:12
Aww, Hitch. Compelling read as ever. The Atheist community owe this man a lot.
December 11th, 2011 at 05:31
Interesting. This week, I just happen to be trying to read (“trying” being the operative word) Nietzsche’s last book “Antichrist” as I decided I was finally ready to tackle him. Premature. I think I need to be in a philosophy class with a good professor to handle Nitch.
As for Hitch, the world for me would be a lot more boring without him. I hope they get to prolong his life (with the least amount of suffering) as much as they could. We need more übermenschen like Hitch and Nitch and less brain-melting soap operas.
December 11th, 2011 at 08:13
An asteroid has just been named after him. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/Asteroid-Named-for-Christopher-Hitchens#pluck-comments
December 11th, 2011 at 13:56
One of my favorite of Hitch’s:
Also Manila’s in it, :P
Why Are There No Atheist Churches?
That’s our strength. We don’t need support groups. When I meet someone in Georgia, or Manila, or Calcutta who thinks like me, it takes a few minutes of conversation before we understand each other. We know there are millions of us all over the world. It’s an easy handshake of recognition. We don’t think “OK, now we have to get together every seven days, or twice a day, to shout and holler just to reassure ourselves that we still believe it.” We don’t need that. It can be believed without effort, without fanaticism. It’s an understanding, and it’s based on reason, and literature, and to some extent irony, and a little humor, and culture.
The fact that religion keeps having to pump people up at mass rallies is a sign of its weakness. It needs constant reinforcement, and would crumble without it.
December 12th, 2011 at 06:49
Let this be our profane secret between you and among your fanatic followers: I stole a Hitchen’s book called God IS Not Great;How Religion ruins everything, in a backpacker’s lodge in Northern Queensland! I know, I know, I have a light case of bibliophilia. I’m done reading it. It’s so good it’s like drinking 5 shots of espresso and 2 shots of Tequila at the same time. For the record, I didn’t get struck by lightning ,not yet anyway. Bwahahahaha! And while I am writing this comment, it is very cloudy in Sydney. I did appease the gods by buying Hitch-22. Please, if you’re in Sydney, go to T. Kelly Books at 583 George St., they have tons and tons of beautiful beautiful books and the guy at the counter knows good stuff!
December 13th, 2011 at 13:23
Hello Miss Z..i am the newest addition to your growling community! I haven’t read Hitch but I know Hitchens like i know my ego because my professor back in college practically drilled him into our collective consciousness. I wonder if he read Mitch Albom’s Have a little faith? ( ROFL)