Trial of the Will

However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier. But does the rhyme suggest a reason? Perhaps it does, or can, in matters of the emotions. I can remember thinking, of testing moments involving love and hate, that I had, so to speak, come out of them ahead, with some strength accrued from the experience that I couldn’t have acquired any other way. And then once or twice, walking away from a car wreck or a close encounter with mayhem while doing foreign reporting, I experienced a rather fatuous feeling of having been toughened by the encounter. But really, that’s to say no more than “There but for the grace of god go I,” which in turn is to say no more than “The grace of god has happily embraced me and skipped that unfortunate other man.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 7, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,062 words)

Unspoken Truths

Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice,” or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,979 words)

Topic of Cancer

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 7 minutes (1,770 words)

In Defense of Foxhole Atheists

It’s no secret that conservative Christians dominate the U.S. military, but when higher-ups start talking about conversion missions, it’s time to worry. The author meets a group of soldiers who aren’t having it.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 15, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,542 words)

Don’t Call What Happened in Iran Last Week an Election

It was a crudely stage-managed insult to everyone involved.

Source: Slate
Published: Jun 14, 2009
Length: 4 minutes (1,063 words)

Hemingway’s Libidinous Feast

In a restored edition of a great classic, sexual anxiety looms large.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jun 28, 2009
Length: 7 minutes (1,892 words)