Response to Christopher Hitchens By Liane Carlson

Posted on September 2nd, 2010 | Filed under InterViews

A response to this interview with Christopher Hitchens.

From his prison cell, Oscar Wilde wrote his former lover a long, recriminatory letter, accusing him, among other things, of sentimentality. “The fact is that you were and are still, I suppose, a typical sentimentalist.  For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.  You think one can have one’s emotions for nothing.  One cannot...  You should pass out of that conception of life.  As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality and be better for that knowledge.”

A few months before my grandmother died, I became obsessed with this passage.  Maybe it was the ever-present empty indignation of graduate school, maybe it was the sudden horrified recognition it inspired of my own lack of emotional discipline.  Regardless, it somehow seemed distressingly clear how much of my emotional life - of anyone’s, it seemed, but I could only judge my own - was counterfeit, a play of feelings created to keep me entertained.  And I began to wonder what it would look like to pay for an emotion, and if I had ever had an emotion I’d really earned.

And then my grandmother died.  It was the first significant death of my adult life.  The details aren’t necessary, and are private, besides, but it’s enough to say that as the priest shook my grandfather’s hand and murmured that “she was in a better place,” I understood for the first time very viscerally the sort of comfort that belief offered.  Not for me, though - for my grandfather.  I rejected it immediately, not because it seemed implausible or irrational or any of the reasons that people usually trot out, but because it seemed to miss the only thing we could learn from her death: how much we had loved her.  Because the extent of our grief corresponds to the magnitude of our love.  To believe that she lived on seemed a way to avoid grieving, to skirt the enormity of the loss and the corresponding preciousness of her life.  Unmediated grief was clean, in a certain way; it was what it meant to pay for an emotion.  This, I think, is what’s at stake for Hitchens, to some extent.

But then there was my grandfather, who had loved her for 60 years.  I didn’t know what I would feel in his place.  Maybe I would need that belief to stay sane.  Maybe my desire to do without that comfort just meant that I hadn’t loved her enough.  But as I looked at him, and imagined what I would feel to have a man 40 years my junior tell me that my wife lived on, as if he knew what he was talking about, I wondered if the act of will wasn’t to refrain from believing in the afterlife, but, in depths of nihilistic grief, to believe at all.  I wondered if death blurs the line between belief and non-belief, is it because we all need that comfort, or, rather, that grief makes atheists of us all.  Why else would you need the priest there to remind you?