He disappeared in the dead of winter.

Woke up to this sad, sad news.

I started out with Auden’s poem in my mind -

…for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

- but it’s the life, not the death, that’s the thing. The Hitch was bigger than life. He knew everything, he went everywhere, he was political to the bone and yet understood culture, and his fearsome understanding gave him a wit so sharp that to be the victim of one of his ripostes became known as being ‘Hitch-slapped’. His prose was the most beautiful.

And he’d seemingly do anything. He revelled in protest, in being arrested, in playing with revolutionaries. He was photographed with guns, on mountainsides with dangerous men, with US presidents, on chat shows, at parties, in bars, and – often – with books. He went, for a series called ‘the Limits of Self-Improvement’, to a spa and was photographed in a face mask. Above, he contravenes a series of New York City by-laws, including one about ‘feet on pedals’. He had himself waterboarded to see if it was torture. (Verdict: yes.)

He was – though unrepentantly, gloriously arrogant in this age of ‘everyone’s opinion is equally valid’ – often wrong, and was in any case such a contrarian bundle that no one could agree with all his positions. Some of them possibly made things worse – the support for the invasion of Iraq, for example – and some of them were maybe not as well thought through as might be. In particular, I was disappointed in the lack of argumentative rigour in God is not Great – polemically, he demonstrated his position by throwing loads and loads of facts at it, and I ruefully noted that there is not a sentence in the book that would lose meaning if you replaced the word ‘religion’ with ‘human nature’. But his convictions were true convictions and went through him like a stick of rock.

His upholding of the importance of free speech, and of language itself as the vehicle of that, was unwavering – and attested to by the quality of his own. I’m editing in here to add this clip Niall O’Sullivan has just reminded me of, in which – debating the knighthood of Salman Rushdie – Hitchens towers over Shirley Williams on ‘Question Time’. (Here he is in Vanity Fair, discussing the cultural implications of the Rushdie affair.)

There were privileges, one of which I think might be the testosterone-fuelled muscularity of his energy – he was the alpha male of a group of alpha males; his career would be impossible to achieve as a woman – and one of which was his education, which made it all possible. ‘If there’s going to be an upper class in this country,’ his mother said of the future socialist firebrand, ‘Christopher’s going to be in it’.

But there was no one else with whom one would be happier to disagree, as opposed to merely thinking to be wrong. When he was right, he was very, very right, and when wrong he was still gloriously himself, and had arrived at his own position, and made other people look small and cavilling by comparison. It was this willingness to be himsel, to think things through for himself, to occupy his own position fully, that made him the most right, and the most extraordinary.

Do you remember, recently I mentioned the idea of occupying one’s own space as the true start of ‘Occupy Poetry’? Christopher Hitchens occupied himself utterly, and thus became fearsome. And fearless. Even the cancer that killed him he declared ‘banal’, saying, ‘It bores even me’. He is exemplar, and refused to be sentimentalised by illness.

The New York times quotes him on the possible regret he might feel for the unhealthy life that brought him cancer of the oesophogus:

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

The parties, the conversation, the necessity of good talk. Two essays he wrote about his cancer – one, about his diagnosis and admission to the Country of the Sick; and two, the final essay he wrote, about pain, life and dying  – demonstrate the power of this remark.

Outside, the rain is turning to snow; the day is cold, drear, forbidding. Seize it. I mean to try. If we learn one thing from the Hitch, it’s that.