Detox To Retox

jhnmyr:

“In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”

—

Hitchens on battling cancer. (via cajunboy) (via soupsoup)

Brilliant and jarring… For as long as it takes to read this essay, you will have his cancer. And when you are done reading it, you will not have it anymore. (Hopefully he won’t, either.) But what you will be left with in your newly-minted “still hopefully cancer-free” state of health is a better appreciation of your life.