Full Hitch Quote

I recieved a request as to the source of the quote I often refer to regarding materialism. It is from 'Mortality' by Christopher Hitchens. A collection of his writing during his demise with cancer.

"It's normally agreed that the question "how are you?" doesn't pu you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when these days, I tend to say something cryptic lke, "a bit early to say." [if it's the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go as far as to respond, "I seem to have cancer today."] nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of 'life' when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the folicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomena of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask....it's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body."

Last year I set out to work out why folk liked Hitch yet Dawkins always rubs folk up the wrong way. It comes not from what they believe or promote but is entirely within the humanity of communication and the beauty of language. Dawkins efficient yet brutal language can but hold a torch to Hitchens most poetic of prose. Here on the loss of his ability to talk.

"In the medical literature , the vocal cordis a mere fold, a piece of gristle that strives to reach out and touch its twin, thus producing the possibility of sound effects. But I feel that there must be a deep relationship with the word 'chord': the resonant vibration that can stir memory, produce music, evoke love, bring tears, move crowds to pity and mobs to passion we may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech. But we are the only ones that can deploy vocal communication for sheer pleasure and recreation, combining it with our two other boasts of reason and humour to produce higher syntheses. To lose the ability is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: it is assuredly to die more than a little.
My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been he prescience of friends. I can't eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come its only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them : They are talkers with whom it's a privelidge just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now everyday I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable tv ( often closed captioned just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired in to my body at two thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech."