In Memoriam: Hitch

As I said on Friday, Christopher Hitchens will live for a long time in the memories of his many friends. The first remembrance I read was that of Sam Harris, titled simply "Hitch":

There was simply no one like him...Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries. [–The Blog]

And, this morning, reprinted in a local newspaper from The Washington Post was Kathleen Parker's "There was just one Hitch":

To say I was a friend of Hitchens would be an exaggeration, though I did enjoy the pleasure of his company on several occasions. But one needn’t have known a writer to mourn his passing or to feel profound sadness about all the silent days to come. No matter what the topic, I always wanted to know what Hitchens thought about it, and, lucky for the world, he seemed always willing to end the suspense....
    Among the many things that made Hitchens unique was his precision of thought and expression. What made him rare were his courage and tenacity. He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords—his pen. Judging from his final essays, he was also fearless in the face of death. Terrified that he might lose his ability to write and therefore his being? Well, that was something else.

And Ms. Parker referred to yet another remembrance, that in The New Yorker by whom she calls "The Other Christopher" (Christopher Buckley), "Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011. It begins thus:

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that "benison" is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

And, brought to my attention by an email just read from a friend, Robert Scheer's "Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt," on Reader Supported News:

...This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.
    That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine.