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: Althouse

"I think all the time I've felt that life is a wager, and that I was probably getting more out of leading a bohemian existence, as a writer, than I would have if I didn't."

"Writing is what's important to me and anything that helps me do that ? or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation ? is worth it to me, sure."

At this point, it's best not to have regrets.

(The whole show is here.)

AND: Andrew Sullivan says:

Hitch is dying as he lives, with integrity and passion. And since we all die in the end, alone, it is an impertinence even to enter this zone of another's last things. But for me, the human being, for good and ill, is more than reason. Reason must govern us, but it cannot explain us.



We live alone in a universe so vaster than we are and with an expiration date that defies our own attempts to understand it. We are wired to fear death and suffering, and in the spiritual transcendence of death and suffering we exercise our greatest humanity. The moments I have felt closest to God have been when I have been stripped of every security, the moments when I have felt no human love, known no safe home, witnessed unspeakable cruelty - and was rescued by nothing but His ineffable, boundless and yet intimate caritas.

This is not an argument, I know. It can easily be dismissed as wish fulfilment. All I can say is: this is not how I experienced these moments. They were real. In suffering I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father's compassion.

I know Christopher feels none of this, has never felt any of this, which puzzles but does not vex me. Friendship, in the end, is about the lack of any desire to change another person.

It is about loving him as he is. And in that love there is the only human redemption and, in my view, the true intimation of the divine.

Full post as published by Althouse on August 17, 2010 (boomark / email).