考研阅读精选：想哭就哭

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Crying freedom
Dec 17th 2011, 19:21 by E.F.

  CROSSING an Athens street by foot on a warm spring afternoon in 1985, I  checked a taxi waiting at the light to make sure it was not going to  jump the red. In the back seat I spied the unmistakeable figure of  Christopher Hitchens, larger than when I’d last seen him, larger than  anyone in their mid-30s ought to be, made larger still by an unnecessary  overcoat thrown over the shoulders in the manner of a ballet impresario  from an earlier time. He saw me, called my name, threw open the door  and stepped into the street. The light was now green and traffic was  hooting. Heedless as ever to context but wholly in role, he let go an  uncounted shower of drachma notes into the grateful driver’s hand and  greeted me theatrically with a kiss on both cheeks. Like me, he was in  Athens to write about the Greek elections. The previous day, Andreas  Papandreou—the father of the recently replaced prime minister—had  handily won a second parliamentary term as leader of his country’s  Social Democrats. Though not like me, because Christopher was not like  other journalists. “I didn’t see you at the Press centre last night,” I  said. “No,” he replied, “I was at the Papandreous.”
How the next  hours unfolded, I don’t recall. I do vividly remember that around two in  the morning, Christopher was entertaining a small group of us at a  restaurant—quoting, parrying, recounting, provoking. His speed of memory  was daunting. He always seemed able to cite what an opponent in  argument had said or written years earlier, deploying it quickly and  wittily at the surest moment to expose them as fools, ditherers or  hypocrites. That essentially 18th-century skill made him as lethal on  television as he was on the page. He wrote the way he spoke, in boutades  and in paragraphs, often with a blood-level of alcohol that would leave  most of us speechless. He was catholic in his love and knowledge of the  written word, but on the whole stayed off movies, theatre, visual arts  and music. Had he a trace of Puritan suspicion that such arts were  elite, effete and not morally serious? I suspect it was more that each  of those arts has its standards of performance and he was a performer in  a competing medium—his own words. You had to hear him in real time, and  I rate myself lucky that on a few occasions I did hear him at  table—usually late on when everyone else had stopped talking, not  because they were silenced or bested but because there and then it was  simply more satisfying to listen to him.   
I don’t know, and  who does, if his copious writing will stand up in the way that the work  of his politico-literary hero George Orwell has stood up. Those who  found little to admire or agree with in Christopher, especially after he  backed the Iraq War in 2003, will laugh at the comparison. Even those  who enjoyed his overflowing talents as journalist and talker may find it  a stretch. Differences of water level and achievement stand out. Yet  there are likenesses, too. Neither could tolerate camps, least of all  their own: like Orwell, Christopher kept his harshest barbs for the  left. Neither were doctrinal and, though Christopher took on big  topics—notably religious belief, of which he claimed to have none—his  small-motor skills with tricky ideas were no finer than Orwell’s.  Neither were really interested in policy or government, though from  sheer forensic bravado Christopher would happily take on the  best-briefed wonk. Both wrote from an essentially emotional perception  about the moral condition of the world. Orwell once praised Charles  Dickens for the “vagueness” of his radicalism. He did not mean  evasiveness or lack of clarity, but a deep conviction that something was  wrong with society and that the only constructive suggestion was:  “Behave decently”. Christopher’s constructive suggestions were never so  clear, but his negative drive was unmistakeable and gave him a  consistency his detractors wrongly said he lacked: locate power,  distrust it and take it down a peg, even if you can’t knock it off its  perch. Odd as it sounds, somewhere in Christopher was a backwoods Tory  anarchist.
Status and power fascinated him as targets, not as  ways to discrimate among people. He was open to everyone and called all  comers by first name—that memory again!—even if they were not near  friends. My calling him “Christopher” repays the compliment. “Hitchens”  would sound both too distant and too knowing.
Now I think about it,  at that restaurant in Athens it was probably closer to three in the  morning. Holding up an empty bottle, Christopher waved it back and forth  to get the attention of a waiter, slumped against a far wall. When the  waiter came over with a fresh bottle, Christopher raised an empty glass  to him and cried with a Byronic flourish, “Eleftheria!”—which means  freedom or liberty in Greek. In perfect English the waiter shot back,  “We’ve already got that”. The exhausted man had made his point and for  once Christopher had no comeback. He’s silent now for good, and, agree  with him or disagree, it’s a loss to us all.