err so much for sleep, i drifted into an almost sleep state when i realised i needed to walk my dog and feed him, so i clambered off my sofa and woke myself up with some stretching and yawning and drooling. pan the ever jubilant hound covered me in love, dog love, slapping that huge tongue over my face and covering me in his fur. yeah this is the love i'd like, loyal, consistent and something you can depend on. mmm, unlikely to get it from any women although their curvy bits make it difficult to rule out the picture entirely and just when i'm feeling good, just when i think, hey things ain't so bad i get some very bad news and disappointments come rolling in one after another. it's hard to really fight these sorts of things, it's hard not to be despondent, it's overwhelming. one mans deity is another man's demon, i have to meditate on the new future, weave some magick, turn the lead into gold and take this awful situation and make it good.

i watched christopher hitchens last night, his interview with tony james was brilliant and powerful, such an incredibly honest and articulate man, his brain still works acutely and despite his lack of belief in an intelligent universe i think politically he is the best journalist of contemporary politics writing. here's the transcript.


The interview's in two parts.

Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year while on tour promoting his memoir Hitch-22.

Tonight's interview deals with how he responded to the illness and whether facing death has softened his fierce atheism or caused him to modify his belief that "religion poisons everything".

Here's the first of our two-part special.

It's very good to see you.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR & JOURNALIST: Tony. Nice of you to come to DC.

TONY JONES: It's a pleasure to be here, although the circumstances aren't great. And the question that most are going to want to know is how are you at the moment? How are you feeling?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: If this had been yesterday - I was wondering in fact yesterday if I could do this today.

That's because I've just had a kill-or-cure dose of venom cocktail mainlined into me, and in the first few days after that, you feel very compromised, very nauseated, very weak, very demoralised. And that's on top of knowing why you have to have it, which is I have a tumour in my oesophagus which has spread. So it's called stage four.

The thing about stage four is that there is no stage five, so I'm finding out how this can be managed, whether I can live with it, whether it can be - I doubt curable. I think the word "curable" doesn't really apply, but it can be treatable. What kind of life and how much of it I have is my big preoccupation now.

TONY JONES: Are the treatments working? Do you know?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, the tumours were shrinking with the first round, but they've stopped doing that. They're having to try something a bit stronger now and I may be a candidate for radiation therapy, which is a very tough thing. You've got to be quite strong for it. I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

TONY JONES: We wouldn't say advanced years.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

TONY JONES: So are you actually up for a long interview about life, death, the universe and everything?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Oh, yes. I mean, my interest in all the large questions hasn't dimmed at all. In fact, it's quite a good way of concentrating the mind.

TONY JONES: You've talked and you've written about the cancer right from the very beginning and people have been following your account as you put out your monthly pieces in Vanity Fair. You've talked about crossing a border into the land of malady. What is that like?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, for me personally it was a bit like being deported, in that I woke up in New York, having gone to bed feeling more or less OK during a very gruelling book tour, and I woke in the morning thinking I was actually dying.

The whole liquid sac, the pericardium, as it's called, around my heart had just filled up. It was if my whole chest (inaudible) had been crammed with wet cement. I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe. And I managed to call the emergency services and these wonderful New Yorkers arrived, very heavily armed with cuffs and torches and boots. And I remember thinking idly as they loaded me into the ambulance, "Why do they need all this for one stricken civilian?"

It was a bit like being arrested and deported. And in fact, in their kindly way, they were escorting me across the frontier from the land of the well into the land of the very ill indeed. And, well, it's not a transition you can ever forget making and of course it's not one you can ever fully make back again either. However well I respond to treatment, I'll never be able to feel the way I did the day before.

TONY JONES: What does it actually mean for your day-to-day life because we see you continually out there writing, doing interviews like this, taking on, as you said, lectures, debates? I mean, how hard is it to actually get yourself out of bed in the morning to continue the life of a public intellectual?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I don't get out of bed much before 11 these days and I go to bed much earlier than I did, so I can do about half, I suppose, of what I was doing before. I can continue to write as well. That's my big test.

There were a couple of days when I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to write, and that terrified me very much because being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do. It's my - without sounding I hope too affected, it is my raison d'etre, and as well as being terrified of the thought that I wouldn't be able to do what I'm supposed to do, I was afraid that it would diminish my will to live.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

TONY JONES: Being a writer, you actually personified or personalised the cancer. You call it a blind, emotionless being. You know, that is a pathetic fallacy; you've acknowledged that yourself. But does it feel like that: that you've been invaded by something?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, obviously it can't have emotions and as far as we know it can't see. It is a being. The thing is, it can't have a life of its own, but it is an alien and it is - it is alive as long as I am. Its only purpose is to kill me. It's a self-destructive alien.

It's like the absolute negation, I suppose, of being pregnant, having something living inside you that is entirely malevolent and that wishes for your - doesn't wish for, but is purposed to encompass your death. And keeping company with this is a great preoccupation. Once you think about it like that, it's hard to un-think it.

TONY JONES: How do you feel about the people who are praying for you, because there are some, there are some who are praying for to you go to hell?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: There are many more in fact who are praying for you to be cured and some who are praying for you to be converted?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: That's right - or converted and cured, to be fair to them. Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, "Well, good on you. See you there," sort of thing.

I don't feel I'd be very much obliged to engage with them. For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly. I mean, it's a show of concern, it's a show of solidarity, which is a very important word to me. It's a kindness. If it doesn't do any good, and I'm sure it doesn't, it doesn't really do any harm.

The only objection I have is one I touched on a moment ago which is it seems to me a bit crass to be trying to talk to people about conversion when you know they're ill. The whole idea of hovering over a sick person who's worried and perhaps in discomfort and saying, "Now's the time to reconsider," strikes me as opportunist at the very best and has a very bad history in the past.

There've been false claims made by people who bothered Thomas Paine while he was dying or - and published reports later that he'd recanted on his death bed. Even tried that on Charles Darwin; there was an attempt at a false story of that kind. This I think is shameful, and to the extent that it reminds me of that, I resent it.

TONY JONES: The New York Times says your illness has actually spurred one of the most heated discussions that they can remember of belief, religion and immortality. It's almost inevitable, isn't it, when a famous atheist faces death, that this will happen?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. Yes, it's an occasion and people never tire of saying when - as they do, many people write to me or email me, including perfect strangers, readers, well-wishers, sometimes former students or people who know me a little bit, they all, one way or another, make the point that, "OK, I won't pray for you, don't worry," or, "Perhaps you won't mind if I do."

They are all doing as if they're doing it for the first time. It's rather touching. But as I say, the argument's about immortality, the supernatural, the last things - death, judgment, heaven and hell - are or are not valid quite independently of my mental or physical state. And so there's something fishy to me in the suggestion that, "OK, now that your system is breaking down, wouldn't it be a good moment for you to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime?" Again, there's something about the underlying assumption there that I want to resist.

TONY JONES: More than 20 years ago - you mentioned Thomas Paine - but more than 20 years ago, the Oxford philosopher AJ Ayer wrote about being drawn to a red light when he'd had a near-death experience and that was interpreted by a lot of people as a suggestion that it actually changed his views of a lifetime. Are you worried this kind of thing could happen to you?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: There are two great - well, Freddy Ayer's dead now. He died not long after that. But there have been in the recent past two great humanists and atheist thinkers: himself and Professor Daniel Dennett, who've come very, very close to death and in a semi-conscious state, enough to allow them to speculate about consciousness independent of the brain and other things that fascinate all of us.

But both of their conclusive essays on this matter are in my collection The Portable Atheist, because they both, having undergone, so to say, that test, came out with their convictions unaltered.

TONY JONES: Not entirely unaltered in Ayer's case. I mean, he did conclude the experience weakened his conviction that death would be the end of him. So, he had a - not a conversion, but at least a doubt thrown in about his pure atheism.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no after-life. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

But I think I'd be much more willing to say there's no evidence at all that any human being can tell you how you qualify or what's meant by seeing some bright light at the end of the tunnel or coming towards you, or that if you'll only make the right propitiation or right incantation or join the right church, they can tell you about how things will be after you're dead.

I'm quite sure there's no human agency that can do that. I like surprises. If there's to be a second look around with somehow not me and not my brain, but some kind of consciousness, well, that would be more fascinating than many days I've spent in real life.

TONY JONES: It would indeed. These debates have been going on for centuries, though, and ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, and I think will persist.

TONY JONES: You quote Blaise Pascal, who talked about a wager that could be made with a god that would actually allow you at the very last minute to make a deal with him, ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ... to believe for a brief period and that wager would be that, "What have you got to lose?"

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well it's rightly called a wager 'cause there's something rather hucksterish about it. And I'm not a Christian, let alone a Roman Catholic Christian as Pascal was and I'm also not a theorist of probability as he was. He was a great mathematician.

But I say hucksterish for this reason: his wager assumes two things: one, a very cynical and credulous god; in other words, a god who would say, "Well, I can see your mind working and I know that you're wagering on me because what have you got to lose, so naturally I'll reward you if you say you believe in me." Why does that follow? Why wouldn't you think, "That's not a very good reason. It's not very good reasoning. It's not a very good (inaudible)."

You might just as well be a god; in fact, you should perhaps prefer to be a god who would say, "Actually, I've more respect for the person who couldn't bring himself to believe and certainly wouldn't claim to do so in the hope of getting a favour."

TONY JONES: Yes, we're talking now logic, and of course, ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, not just logic; I think there's a moral tinge to this.

TONY JONES: Well, exactly, because there's an argument that the jealous god who would consign non-believers to hell is actually immoral, so why would you follow him anyway?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: There's actually a Sufi prayer from the Middles Ages that is addressed to the creator and says, "Master," or however these things are addressed, "If I pray to you in the hope of getting heaven for myself, you should deny it to me. And if I pray for you only in the fear of hell, you should send me there."

These would be bogus forms of belief, they'd be simply behaviourist, reward and punishment stuff, conditioned animal reflexes, coercive and they'd require a slave mentality, which is my second objection to the Pascal wager: it demands of us that we think of this god as a cynical, rather credulous, rather capricious opportunist, easily flattered, and of ourselves as the raw material for a pretty cruel and meaningless experiment.

Now, often we un-believers are accused of being nihilistic and not seeing the lovely deeper meanings of life. Well, what could really be more negative, more pessimistic, more cynical than the attitude I've just described?

TONY JONES: Let's go back to those people who are praying for you, because if you are in fact cured, then they'll take credit for it to some degree and perhaps even describe you as a miracle. Are you a bit nervous about that?

Because, for example, we've had two cases of spontaneous remission from terminal cancer that allowed very recently the first Australian saint, Mary MacKillop, to become St Mary of the Cross. It only happened a month ago. But the idea of intercession by prayer has certainly not disappeared in the 21st Century.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, no, it hasn't and nor will it go away as long as our fear of death persists, which I rather think that it will. We are the only mammals, we are the only primates who do know that we're going to die, and we're the only ones who have made the attempt to award ourselves, under certain conditions, an afterlife. And it's a very tenacious illusion and it's very unlikely to be dispelled.

(Coughing). Sorry. This sometimes happens. How far back should I go?

TONY JONES: That's alright.

I'm wondering have you softened at all and are you prepared to concede anything at all to the faithful that there may be some value in it. I mean, the comfort that religious belief for example gives to people who are in the same position as you?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Tony, as with a lot of this argument, looking death more closely in the eye, as I have been doing, doesn't teach you much that you didn't already know, surprisingly enough. It focuses it, brings it into quite a sharp relief, but it isn't as if I didn't already know that some people, whether they're sick or whether they're well, derive great comfort from the thought that they have a saviour, that they're a member of a flock, for example.

I mean, I personally am incapable of describing myself as a member of a flock for reasons that I hope are self-evident. I'm not a sheep. Some people like to be called sheep and think that they'd like to have a shepherd. And if that makes them feel happy, I must say I think it's a rather contemptible form of happiness, but doesn't bother me as long as they keep it to themselves. As long as they don't try and make me believe it, as long as they don't try and have it taught in schools, as long as they don't want the government to subsidise it, as long as they don't want to block scientific research in its name or because of it, then that's fine.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "I don't mind if my neighbour believes in one god or 15 gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." As long as he or she leaves me alone. I don't want to even have to know what they think. But will they requite this bargain? Of course not. Of course not. They - it doesn't really make them happy. They can't be happy ‘till everyone else believes it too, and that's sinister, in my opinion, and creepy.

TONY JONES: You've grown to distrust the idea of a utopia.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: I presume actually you would imagine a world without religion would be utopian. But, let me ask you this: what do you think a world without religion, without all the cultural side-effects of it, would actually look like? I mean, would it be verging on pure commercialism and materialism? I mean, would it take people away from any spiritual side of themselves at all?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, no, that wouldn't be it because as we know from bitter experience, materialism and commercialism are unusually inordinately compatible with religion. That's why there've had to be so many successive affirmations, because the religious life goes so well with greed and accumulation and acquisition.

When asked where they really want power and influence, this world or the next?, they tend to think rather the same as the more crass materialists (inaudible) do. That doesn't make it any easier to imagine a world without religion, and it's not that I don't think that I have too little imagination to imagine that, it's just that I think it cannot in fact be imagined.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

All of them very crude and all of them long-since transcended and left behind, but respect for tradition alone makes it, I think, necessary for me to say that someone who doesn't know about religion or doesn't take an interest in it is only quasi-literate.

TONY JONES: I want to ask you what you think about Martin Amis' idea that writers like you must actually believe in some form of life after death because not all of you, not all of the parts of you are going to die because the printed words you leave behind constitute a form of immortality. I mean, is he just being kind, or do you think that there's a truth to that?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Littera scripta manet - "The written word will remain". That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

Of course I do write - I've always had the sense of writing, as it were, posthumously. I once wrote an introduction to a collection of my own essays. I stole the formulation from Nadine Gordimer who said you should try and write as if for post-mortem publication because it only then can screen out all those influences: public opinion, some reviewer you might want to be impressing, some publisher who might want to publish you, someone you're afraid of offending. All these distractions, you can write purely and honestly and clearly and for its own sake. And the best way of doing that is to imagine that you won't live to see it actually written, then you can be sure that you're being objective and you're being scrupulous.

I think that's a wonderful reflection, but it doesn't - it isn't the same term as immortality at all.

TONY JONES: As you say in your memoirs, you've written for decades day in, day out - I think you said at least 1,000 words a day for many, many years - despatches, articles, lectures, books - in particular books. Doesn't it give you some comfort that your thoughts, and indeed some version of you, is going to exist after your death, is imperishable?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, if you want to know - because I try to avoid the blues when talking about all of this, but if you want to know one of the most sour reflections that I have when I think that I'm 61 now and I might not make 65 - I quite easily might not.

One of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coalface, I worked very hard. In the last few years I've got a fair amount of recognition for it. In my opinion, actually, rather more than I deserve. Certainly more than I expected. And I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just, as it were, relishing that, enjoying it.

Not ceasing to work, not resting on the laurels, but savouring it a bit and that - I was just getting ready for that, as a matter of fact. I was hit right at the top of my form, right in the middle of a successful book tour. I'm not going to get that and that does upset me. So that's how I demarcate it from immortality.

Similarly, I'm not going to see my grandchildren - almost certainly not. One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

The great Cuban writer Jose Marti said that a man - he happened to say it was a man - three duties: to write a book, to plant a tree and to have a son. I remember the year my first son was born was the year I published my first real full-length book, and I had a book party for it and for him - Alexander, my son - and I planted a tree, a weeping willow and felt pretty good for the age of, what?, I think 32 or something.

But, the thought of mortality, in other words of being outlived, is fine when it's your children, your books or your trees, but it doesn't reconcile you to an early death. No, it doesn't.

TONY JONES: Is it only people outside of your existence then who can actually romanticise this idea of the immortal Hitchens?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, people write to me - and it does - I will say this having, sorry, surrendered briefly to the blues there, but I don't want to put on any false front. I mean, in the same way, by the same token there are people who write to me and say that what I've done or written has meant something to them, that I haven't wasted my time, that I've - my life's been worth living. That's very nice too, but I'd like to have hung around to get more such letters.

TONY JONES: It's interesting you say that because that's actually where I plan to end this part of our interview, because I do plan to give my sons Letters to a Young Contrarian, and I really hope that they then pass it on to their children. And to me, whatever that means to you, that's a kind of immortality, but it's something that only people who've been following you for years can actually do.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, you couldn't have said a nicer thing and I hope you would have said it - I'm sure you would anyway. And I have to have - I'm afraid, they're the same response. I would like to have heard even more people say that. And even met some of their grandchildren and seen if it worked for them too. And this I won't get, but I've - look, I've lived longer than I used to think I probably would.

I've written and published more than I thought I would. It's been better received than I expected, and without being falsely modest, in some cases better than I think I deserve. So don't mistake this for self-pity, but I'm not going to resort to any kind of bogus joviality either.

TONY JONES: Christopher Hitchens, we'll leave you there for now. In the way of things, we're going to come back to you again tomorrow. We thank you for ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: If I'm spared. Inshallah.