Christopher Hitchens died this week

The world lost an irreplaceable writer when Christopher Hitchens finally lost his battle with cancer this week. Only 62 when he died, Hitch wrote books, essays, articles, and was still churning out content in the weeks leading up to his death. The love has been pouring out of the media, particularly the publications he wrote for like Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and Slate.

 His Slate editor did a lovely round-up of some of his best stuff through the years, including his scathing obituary of Jerry Falwell. (It's incredible; here's the first line: "The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled 'credulous idiot.'") And don't miss Hitch's instructions on how to make tea. (John Lennon and Yoko Ono did it wrong, apparently.)

But my favorite is this list of the 15 most memorable things to come out of his pen. He was an incredibly smart, concise writer. Some of the shorter favorites:

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

"If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox."

And, of course,

"The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics."

We'll miss you, Hitch.

Whatchu talkin' about, Mark Twain?

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."
- Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger

Gangsta.

It's surprising how timeless certain ideas can be. As a writer, this immortality is both dis- and encouraging: On the one hand, it seems that all the wisdom has been found, wrought, digested, and regurgitated in "Inspirational Quote-a-Day" calendars. But on the other hand, we have these wonderfully knowledgeable guides to teach us things they learned the hard way. And who are we to balk at that? Especially since we can then take those lessons and build on them, make them relevant to ourselves and modern society. After all, Twain couldn't have anticipated what social media would do to happiness quotients, or how the Internet would render sanity an unnecessary prerequisite to amassing thousands of readers (or Twitter followers, but I contend that no one on Twitter is truly sane). (P.S. Follow me on Twitter!)

But Twain was obviously getting at something with this sanity/happiness thing, and the fact that we pluck this one sentence out of a book and put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs speaks to one of two things: either we're rocking the bookworm fashion, or we are able to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our own lives.

Do me a favor and think some more about the Twain quote.

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."

What was your initial reaction? More than likely you considered it, recalling the adage "ignorance is bliss," and then what? Did you dismiss it? After all, it makes madness sound like not such a bad way to spend a life, but you probably don't consider yourself truly insane. Or do you? How do we define insanity in various contexts? How much does this idea apply to something in your own life? Should we all just give up now?

I read an article today titled "30 Lessons Learned by 30." Despite being six years from the dreaded 30 (I hear it's not that bad!), I found myself immediately applying these one-liner lessons to my own life, evaluating how well I perform them on a daily basis, making mental notes to try harder to prioritize relationships, to be grateful and giving and loving, not to judge others. It's easy to roll your eyes at such well-meaning advice, to resist acknowledging that an entire life's lesson fits so easily into ten words. But understanding that lesson requires some background knowledge, some empathy with the situation. It's hard to argue with maxims like "Honesty is the best policy in relationships. The truth will come out eventually" -- but if you don't have any experience with dishonesty in relationships, then this means nothing to you. It is through life experience that we're able to boil down lessons into easy-to-digest tidbits. It's the reason cliches work and refuse to die: at some point, we realize they're all true.

This is also why grandmothers have so many things embroidered on pillows and hand-painted on adorable signs hanging around their house. Aging brings an understanding of and trust in digestible wisdom. And it's why young people, no matter how smart they are, will always be stupid: we simply don't have the years to back up what we claim to know. Experience trumps every other form of knowledge, always. Take it from a (still relatively stupid) young person who would love nothing more than to write a book that establishes a cliche that winds up on a coffee mug. It's the American dream, I tell ya.

I should mention that the opening quote was said by the main character of the unfinished and posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger. That character happens to be the nephew of Satan, and he spends the book ruminating on "the damned human race." It's heady stuff. The character goes on to say:

"No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result - and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race - and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."

No kidding, dude.

So You Want to Write a Novel

These really don't get old. Click here for the journalist version.

"How many editors will Random House assign to my novel?"
"Minus 13."
"--Because it's going to need a lot of editing. I'm not the best speller."

Reality Bites, a mini-review

Nice tights, Janeane.

Speaking of twenty-somethings, I recently watched the cult classic Reality Bites, starring a young Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke, with Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo, and Ben Stiller, who also directs. It's a healthy dose of early 90s culture, and though it fits the format of a standard romcom, its cult status is deserved. It's well-made and acted and it gets to the heart of the things that terrify 22- to 28-year-olds*.

It's about the romantic, despairing, and hopeless pursuit of a dream job; it's about the confusion of first loves and complicated friendships; and it's about trying to find a path to follow, whatever that may be. (I know, I know, cue the tiny violins, but stick with me.) The characters strive to reconcile their circumstances and their lifestyles while going through a time period that every self-aware adult recognizes. Coming out as gay, getting fired from a job (or twelve), experiencing amazing sex, getting that first taste of realistic success, suffering an AIDS scare -- even if these aren't our lives word for word, we can see the vibrations and understand where they're coming from. The breakdowns, the celebrations, the joy, the despair -- it's a 98-minute lyric poem.

I read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life this week for my revision workshop and pulled this quote from it: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." The simplicity of this statement just bowls me over. It's actually a beautifully freeing thing, because it implicitly awards the individual the choice of how to spend their time. It could have read "how we choose to spend our days is how we choose to spend our lives." Each day we're awarded 24 hours, and we spend them like currency -- this much on sleep, this much on work, this much on play, this much on dicking around and watching The Bachelorette on Hulu.

But those little choices each day build up, and as time passes they'll be what we remember because that's what actually happened -- not necessarily what we wanted or expected. So we seek this status quo, a state of being and set of habits, that will bring us the utmost happiness. For some that happiness is a secure job and a passionate love affair and a four-door sedan. For others it's a gypsy lifestyle, always on the move, always experiencing new things. There's no wrong answer, both the movie and Annie Dillard tell us, but you should probably at least be attempting to seek one out. You know, in your free time.

* I assume the quarter-life crisis will be over by 28. At least that's what I'm hoping, because I'm pretty sure the "I'm about to be 30" crisis will take over either way.

--

UPDATE, 12:13 p.m. - So after posting this, I continued daydreaming and waxing philosophic about being 24 and yadda yadda, and I had a thought. An extension of a thought, really, regarding how we spend our time like cash at a farmer's market, handing it out in return for various satisfactions. Why waste time, then, doing something you don't like -- spending on things you don't care for? I understand that people work jobs they hate because they need the money and that couples stay together for the kids sometimes. But a vast majority of the time, there's no one forcing us to conduct our lives any which way. So why wait around, being unhappy? It's like wasting money -- except that money is replaceable whereas time is not.

Oh...my...God...could it be? Could they have been RIGHT ALL ALONG?!!



Happy summer, everyone.

I'm pissed

I spent a lot of time last Friday finishing up a blog post about memoir and narcissism, and then Blogger spazzed over the weekend and lost it and still hasn't restored it. Anyone else have this problem? Did it get fixed?

I suppose common sense would be to back up all these posts on Word docs...still, I feel wronged.

Nonsequitur: I started Bossypants by Tina Fey this morning on train. My. God. I was worried it'd been overhyped and wouldn't live up to my grandiose expectations for basically the funniest woman on the scene right now. I needn't have fretted. It's awesome: I'm 10 pages in but it's already jam-packed with humor and good writing and good humor writing. Pick it up immediately.

The Great American Novel

Alas, I wish I knew what this really was. Possibilities range from the next Great American Novel to Donald Trump's contemplative memoir on why he's such a dick to the lost manual for my microwave. (I still haven't figured out how to thaw meat without cooking the edges.) I hope there's at least an index.

via 9gag.