Well, we didn’t make it to St. Francisville tonight. We’re crashed at a hotel in Meridian, Miss. — four, four and a half hours from our destination, but we were just too fried to keep driving. When I was 27, I once drove a similar-sized van the 21-hour trip from Washington, DC, to my hometown in a single stretch. I’m 44 now, and, um, not so resilient. So be it.

I finished listening to “Hitch-22” today, and prayed for Hitchens’ soul several times throughout the journey. I cannot settle on an opinion of the man, except to hope, to sincerely hope, that he has been very pleasantly surprised by both God’s existence and His mercy. Some of what he stood for — his attack on Mother Teresa, for example — was unbelievably appalling. I thought his extreme vulgarity about Jerry Falwell upon the man’s death was simply unspeakable. I don’t begrudge him despising Falwell or anyone, but I hope to hear or read no one spiting Hitchens upon his passing as Hitchens spited Falwell. There is something so unshirted in Hitchens’ capacity to hate that I find it almost unnerving.

And unless I missed a chapter or two — as I might have done there at the end, fumbling around with the iPhone controls at a gas station, Hitchens, the great sniffer-outer of hypocrisies and frailties in others, never came to terms, at least not in this memoir, with his agitation on behalf of the Iraq War. It was eerie to hear his voice making the case for the Iraq War in 2008, invoking the same arguments that I and so many others found so persuasive in 2002. How could he be so certain he was right when things subsequently went so wrong? How could he have had such a fine and nuanced mind on some questions, but be possessed by the rankest simple-minded bigotry about religion? (I’ll have more to say about this a bit later, but I must confess in all fairness that some of what Hitchens said challenged my own somewhat settled views in one area of religion.) I started to write that Hitch rarely seemed to have second thoughts, but then again that isn’t true either. He was a bundle of contradictions (an utterly banal observation, I know, but I find it difficult to trace a logic to his life and passions, except possibly a hatred of bullying). But he does say, on at least two occasions in “Hitch-22,” that one of the great pieces of wisdom he has learned over his years is that life requires the keeping of two sets of books.

He also says, borrowing a line from a friend, that one finds that the worst sort of people are sometimes quite right. It’s also true, he observes, that the best sort of people are sometimes very wrong. In a lengthy section of the book about the Argentine military dictatorship. he discusses in detail so shocking that I audibly gasped (I was driving through Knoxville at the time I heard this, and won’t forget it) the various hellish tortures the Argentine regime inflicted on its prisoners, especially Jewish ones. The specific torture that made me gasp was so vile I can’t bring myself to write it here, because you won’t ever be able to get that image out of your head, but let me say that according to several sources I’ve just found online, Hitchens is neither inventing nor exaggerating this thing. Anyway, Hitchens recalls having visited the elderly Borges in his Buenos Aires apartment at the time. Borges praised the military regime. Hitchens forgave him that, invoking the “best people have the worst ideas” line, and pointing out that Borges repented. One surmises that Borges’ gifts as a novelist, and his robust secularity, earned him from the memoirist graces that he would never have considered extending to Mother Teresa. I don’t respect him for that.

And yet, I wanted to cheer for him as I recalled his having stood up for Salman Rushdie during the Khomeini crisis — this at a time when many other political, literary, religious and cultural figures of consequence were equivocating or actually criticizing Rushdie for being multiculturally (from the left) or religiously (from the right) insensitive. He was right early and often about Bill Clinton’s slimy character. His articulate appreciation of American liberties, especially freedom of speech and of the press, was thrilling to listen to, and his chapter meditating on the death of an American soldier who volunteered to go to Iraq after reading Hitchens’ work was intensely moving. I find it hard to imagine any person listening to or reading the entirely of Hitchens’s memoir, or as few as five of his essays, without finding something offensive, deeply unfair, or uncharitable to the point of perversity. Nor can I imagine any person doing same without finding something extraordinarily brave, brilliant, challenging, or beautifully expressed. I never met Hitchens, but I have conservative friends who disagreed with him about much, but who cherished his friendship. I get this. Maybe I’m guilty of the same inconsistency I accuse him of in going soft on Borges (as I likely would have been even quicker to have done): cutting him all kinds of slack because he was an extremely gifted writer of prose and was in some ways the best sort of person. Fine. As I have recently heard it said, so much of life consists of keeping two sets of books.

I commend to you for your edification the remembrance of the English traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens, paying tribute to his late brother, with whom he quarreled for most of his life, but plainly admired:

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.

This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today. People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to.

My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember. 

Yes, this comes through very clearly in “Hitch-22.” The courage, sometimes put to bad use, but always there, as clear and as bracing as the clang of a church bell on a cold winter’s morning.

OK, to bed now. Home in the morning, to a house in which I’ve never lived. A strange feeling. But in a day or two, I’ll be looking once again at my books on my bookshelves. And that’s a comfort. Having Christopher Hitchens as my traveling companion for these two days (well, not counting faithful Roscoe, who rides along on the seat next to me, keeping his own counsel) has made me want to do nothing more than be very still and quiet and read, read, read.