On Christopher Hitchens and the art of writing

I was reading on books by the late Christopher Hitchens while at Kinokuniya today. I was interested to read up on his books after watching a youtube video featuring him with three other prominent atheists – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. In that video which features a discussion amongst these atheists about their beliefs, I was impressed with the way Christopher Hitchens carried the conversation amongst his peers. He just flowed with interesting epigrams and anecdotes of various figures and historical information. There was a comment in the video by someone who aptly states that Christopher Hitchens turns conversation into an artform. And from the other videos that I watched of him, he is clearly an excellent orator, unmatched by both his opponents and his peers. Richard Dawkins, delivering a eulogy at the funeral of Christopher Hitchens, remarked that during his time in Balliol College, Oxford, where he was contemporary with Christopher Hitchens, he didn’t manage to get to know Christopher then because he was not within the literary circles at Oxford which Hitchens was. I thought that Dawkins himself was quite an orator and writer, his writings brimming with wits and eloquence, but even he thinks Hitchens a notch above himself.

During my secondary school days, I would try to imitate the writing styles of some of my favourite writers for the composition section of the English paper. In particular, I tried imitating the writings of Lin Yutang, a nominee for the Nobel Prize for literature, but I always felt it appeared quite substandard when I read my writings. And until today, I don’t think my writings will be considered to be of worthy standard. I would have thought that I would naturally assimilate the writing styles of the books of the writers whom I read, but I guess that is a belief that I have come to see debunked. Writing seems to me to be as much an innate ability as one’s intelligence.

But there is a nice saying by the philosopher Bertrand Russell which goes, “Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.” It is a wise quote that bears some sobering consolation.