My Favorite People
My Favorite People
A disadvantage of knowing great people is that you miss them when they are gone. This is a list of people I’ve known, living and dead, that stand out in my mind for one reason or another. I could easily write an essay about each of them detailing our friendship. I will insert a short phrase if something pithy occurs to me. Oliver Sacks, always interested. Jonathan Miller, effortlessly himself. Peter Strawson, kindly acerbic. Richard Wollheim, never ordinary. Freddie Ayer, generously egotistical. Robert Silvers, energetically focused. David Pears, sweetly urbane. Jerry Fodor, ruthlessly jolly (and depressed). Christopher Hitchens, ridiculously clever (and nice). Martin Amis, hilariously steely-eyed. Edward St Aubyn, tragically funny and literate. Bernard Williams, attractively venomous (but delightful). George Stephanopoulos, extremely intelligent, moral, and charming. George Soros, amiable but cut off. Noam Chomsky, scary, sharp, principled. Richard Dawkins, passionately clever, somewhat remote. Malcolm Budd, dear friend and colleague. Tom Nagel, genuinely deep, good sense of humor.
What makes Chomsky scary?
He’s very smart and very intellectually aggressive.
I have a question about Hitchens. He was clever and never backed down from a fight. He would not back own from a fight with the current Republican nominee for President were he alive.. There aren’t enough journalists or intellectuals of the stature of Hitchens, or they are sidelined.
I’d imagine Hitchens would relish such a battle, though given America today who knows with what outcome.
Both Hitchens and this Republican nominee are Marlovian figures. It’s a good idea for a short story, I’d suppose.
Just to be counterfactual and literary about the matter. There seems to be no Democrat who is the anti-Trump (there I said it)Hitchens may have missed his chance to change history.
It has often occurred to me that Hitchens might have stopped the ascendancy of Trump, though it seems that nothing could stop it except the disenfranchising of his supporters.
Glad you agree. There was that press conference in which Trump had his way with the assembled journalists. Trump has a very specific kind of intelligence; Hitchens had everything Trump has but could actually think and not just talk. All Trump’s vaunted charisma would have crashed on takeoff.
Sad to think about it, though we can carry on the struggle.
Hitch would have made mincemeat of him in a direct encounter.
I’m friends with a humorist at the New Yorker, who’s not a philosopher but quite smart.
She said first Trump is not intelligent in any way (a reply to what I said) and that the debate would go nowhere as they both “speak a different language.”
I disagree, because while Hitchens is in his element with literature and philosophy, he can also go low, because he is conversant with people on the street or even of the gutter, like Trump.
Hitchens had many registers, to allude to Erich Auerbach.
We could also waste time wondering how Odysseus or Alexander the Great would deal with Trump, a more than literary exercise.
I agree: Hitchens was quite capable of low rhetoric when necessary. He could outsmart Trump in dumbness, then skewer him with sophisticated rapier wit.