On living well

Peter Lawler ponders the life and death of the late Christopher Hitchens: "Hitchens did not live as if he were a body. He did not, God love him, live in fearful attentiveness to every conceivable risk factor that might extinguish his biological being. He smoked and drank heavily, and he ignored his body to enjoy life. From the point of view of the health-and-safety puritans around these days, he was pretty much a madman. ... But we might say that his relative indifference to the body was one cause of his undeniable intellectual greatness, his courageous advocacy on behalf of human liberty everywhere. That indifference might be understood to be in the service of the truth, which is that a life without biological death couldn't possibly be one lived in personal freedom. Living well, after all, isn't all about living just a bit longer." Amen.