Christopher Hitchens died on Friday from a tumour on the oesophagus. He once wrote of the paradox: 'Nothing is more predictable and more certain than death, and nothing is less predictable and less certain.'
In one of his last interviews with his dear friend Tony Jones from the ABC he recalled the injunction of the Cuban writer Jose Marti that a man has three duties: to write a book, to plant a tree and to have a son. He was well satisfied that he had fulfilled the injunction thirty years previously:
I remember the year my first son was born was the year I published my first real full-length book. And I had a book party for it and for him, Alexander my son, and I planted a tree, a weeping willow, and felt pretty good for the age of, what, I think 32 or something.
He never made 62. His writings and media interviews survive, as do his three children, and the tree he planted.
He came from the left and from the UK. Publishing a thousand words a day on all manner of subjects, he ended up as a US citizen regarding Bill Clinton as 'a despicable figure' and George W. Bush's Iraq War as justified.
He introduced a 2004 anthology quoting an antique saying that 'a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty and war'. As a journalist and essayist he tasted love and war in spades. He experienced little by way of poverty and he regarded religion as the most toxic of foes, 'the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity'.
He reserved a special hatred for Mother Teresa, the contemporary religious icon for service of the poor, publishing a short book irreverently titled The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, followed by a documentary entitled Hell's Angel. To be fair, he said the TV network that broadcast the documentary chose the title 'very much against my will'.
The Vatican even interviewed him in opposition to the canonisation of Mother Teresa. He said he had 'walked around Calcutta in her company and formed the conclusion that she was