In just over 100 pages, Christopher Hitchens tells us what it’s like to arrive at the point where you are pretty sure you’re close to death. One morning, he says, he “came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse”. An intense image. He feels like a prisoner — of himself. Or rather, of his physical self, which is no longer quite him. This sense of bifurcation is powerful. For instance, he says he spends “a good deal of time preparing yourself to die... while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival”. I learned a lot from this book, and a lot more when I read it a second time.
