Large Fierce Mammal

“We have everything to fear including fear itself, and the bad news hasn’t yet hit, I don’t think. You’re running into a losing struggle. No one has ever beaten these odds. I’ve looked up ahead, or if you prefer, down the road. I know what’s coming. I know no one beats these odds, and it’s a matter of getting used to that and growing up and realizing that you’re expelled from your mother’s uterus as if shot from a cannon towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It’s a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way, and try not to do anything nasty to your fellow creatures. That leaves us with the question of why should we care. Somehow I’m glad that at least that bit of our innate nature is useful. But if we praise ourselves for what’s innate, we’re going to be praising a lot of unpleasant things too, and there’s no way around that. There’s only the pretense that there’s a way around it.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

As many of you no doubt know, after a lengthy bout with Christopher Hitchens, the tumor that had been growing on his esophagus passed away on 15 December 2011. Unfortunately it took the rest of him with it, but not before its ungrateful host had the chance to bear witness for the rest of us to the matter of a certain inevitability and the experience of meeting it headlong.

“The novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.” ~ Staying Power, ‘Mortality,’ by Christopher Hitchens

Tonight’s Dark Sentiment, courtesy of Prometheus Unchained, is Christopher Hitchens – Memento Mori, a 12 minute tribute to a Man who chronicled for the rest of us his “year of living dyingly”.