Where is christopher hitchens funeral

Hitch was an atheist writer. In his later career, he wrote a great deal about what he called "anti-theism," the view that faith is anti-social. As a friend of Hitch's, I was curious to see how his family would mark his life, given that view.

Faith has always monopolized funerals. If you wanted a decent burial, the temple was the place to go, the shaman the man to pay. The arrival of scientific atheism in the 18th century only changed this somewhat. Many secularists continued to have religious funerals — for lack of other ritual, or for fear of sticking out. The Hitch memorial solved this problem. The solution was to embrace a deeply personal truth of Hitch's own: the idea that atheism must celebrate a secular trinity of love, human equality and art, just as much as it denies God.

The celebration must feed the denial, and the denial the celebration. For Hitch, anyone who preferred denial of faith to celebration of life was merely nihilist and could not claim true fellowship with the godless. The service took place at Cooper Union, the great 19th-century liberal arts school for adult students in Greenwich. I also think that his voice was very important. It was a perfect voice, without any mannerism or any kind of some poncy intonations that I can't seem to purge my own voice of.

The Hitch has landed, he used to say on the phone when he landed at Heathrow. And when we did Charlie Rose the other night, when we remembered him, I and others, Charlie, I think, was surprised and a bit alarmed to learn that Hitch often referred to himself in the third person.

This is not a habit consonant with cloudless mental health, audience laughing in most cases. Though the Hitch was one of the sanest people I've ever known.

Not always rational, and by no means always prudent, but penetratingly sane. He knew who he was. He was also something of a self-mythologizer. The Hitch has landed. When he took up the Cypriot cause, partitioned Cyprus, he told me, I'm such a good friend of the Cypriot people, that when I arrive, it says on the headline in the Nicosia Morning Post, it says, Hitch flies in. I said, What does it say when you leave? And he says, Hitch flies out. And he said, She loves the Hitch. She wants to marry the Hitch.

And another time, he said, Martin, you're always coming out with phrases like this. He says, Whenever there is injustice, immiseration or oppression, the pen of the Hitch will flash from its scabbard.

And he didn't like this one. He said it was anticlimactic, but I'm very fond of this story and it seems to crystallize something and lead us to what was perhaps the heart of the charisma of the Hitch. Having driven that far from where we were staying, in search of the most violent possible film on the island. Our idea of happiness was to take a bottle of whiskey into a film like Dirty Beast or Scum.

It specialised in long lunches and what to others seemed puerile and frequently obscene word games. But he was hooked on America as a year-old when he visited on a student visa and tried unsuccessfully to get a work permit.

In October , on a half-promise of work from the Nation, he left for the US. It was the making of his career: Americans have always had a weakness for plummy voiced, somewhat raffish Englishmen who pepper their writing and conversation with literary and historical allusions. He became the Nation's Washington correspondent, contributing editor of Vanity Fair from , literary essayist for Atlantic Monthly, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a talking head on innumerable cable TV shows.

He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. The targets included Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa "a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf" ; his books on Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were more positive, and less widely noticed.

His most successful book, which brought him international fame beyond what Susan Sontag called "the small world of those who till the field of ideas", was God Is Not Great, a mocking indictment of religion which put him alongside Richard Dawkins as a leading enemy of the devout. Hitchens was also, to his great pleasure, a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and, for a time, visiting professor at Berkeley in California, as well as a regular on the public lecture and debate circuit.

Hitchens loved what he called "disputation" — there was little difference between his public and private speaking styles — and America, a more oral culture than Britain's, offered ample opportunity. When his final break with the left came, it seemed to some as though the pope had announced he was no longer a Catholic. His support for Bush's war in Iraq — which he never retracted — and his vote for the president in , were even bigger shocks, and some suspected a psychological need, as the first male Hitchens never to wear uniform, to prove his manhood.

But Hitchens, in many respects a traditionalist, was never a straightforward lefty. He abstained in the UK's election, admitting he secretly favoured Thatcher and hoped for an end to "mediocrity and torpor". He supported, albeit belatedly, the first Gulf war, demanded Nato intervention in Bosnia, and refused to sign petitions against sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Hitchens, though, did not deny he had changed. He became, if truth be told, a bit of a blimp and ruefully remarked — with the quiet self-irony that often underlay his bombastic style — that he sometimes felt he should carry "some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart".

But, he insisted, he wasn't making a complete about-turn. Though no longer a socialist, he was still a Marxist, and an admirer of Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevera; capitalism, the transforming powers of which Marx recognised, had proved the more revolutionary economic system and, politically, the American revolution was the only one left in town.

He remained committed to civil liberties. After voluntarily undergoing waterboarding, he denounced it as torture, and he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Bush's domestic spying programme. He never let up in his "cold, steady hatred … as sustaining to me as any love" of all religions. Other things were unchanging. Even Hitchens — ever the auto-contrarian — had a poke at himself in that regard, too. At the end of the Gibney film Hitchens — his head by now bald from chemotherapy-induced hair loss — is heard insisting that there is no after life.

This article is more than 9 years old. Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis among those at Cooper Union to celebrate life and work of 'pioneer at the frontier'.

Martin Amis described his close friend Hitchens as an auto-contrarian and a 'bit of a scallywag'. Reuse this content.