So BIG THINK'S book of the month—Mortalilty by Christopher Hitchens—is a moving account of a singularly personal effort to die as a free man. Hitchens wanted to see death as it is, to avoid sentimentality and especially to avoid taking refuge in the degrading, deluding consolations of the tyrant-God of the Christians. That the latter temptation might have been real to him is suggested by all the words he uses to fend it off. Unlike Pascal, he wanted to experience, unflinchingly, the misery of man without God. He wanted to die with his personal identity intact as a free thinker expressing himself through writing about his suffering.
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