Why Not You?

Many of you have read or quoted from Christopher Hitchens’s profound essay on his cancer. I point out this little bit, because it speaks in a few sentences what I dislike about religion or, more specifically, constant religiousness. Things don’t have to happen for a reason. To think otherwise is creating a crutch. That’s no way to live. Especially as you fight death.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read”if not indeed write”the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?