While he was watching his own death, the slow intercellular disintegration, from Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center with the same intellectual curiosity with which he watched the passion plays of history in his sunny days, Christopher Hitchens couldn't resist going back to 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." When Hitchens first thought about the doggerel, in his memoirs, he refused to "applaud this admirable fatalism" because he wanted to "do death "in the active and not the passive." In his last published article, in Vanity Fair, his conversation with death became a lot more intimate, and modest; he almost abandoned the Nietzschean bravado of "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger". Even in his last painful moments, though, he was strong enough to reach the computer and bring out yet another finely textured argument. It was a life lived in the enchantment of dissent.
