See Slate’s full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens. Read Slate’s complete collection of Christopher Hitchens' columns. 
 
 
 
 Here is how I came to hate Christopher Hitchens. Hate—as in envy. 
 
 In the early 1980s, as a twentysomething trying to start a career as a crusading journalist, I was fortunate enough to share an office with Hitchens. It was just the two of us. And one phone line. We were both working at The Nation. He had come to it as part of an exchange program with the New Statesman, a British publication, and had elected to remain in the wonderful and wild New York City of the late disco era. I was an editorial grunt. The magazine was running short on workspace, and we were assigned a small, windowless office on a floor apart from the main offices. These were the days before voice mail—and much else—and we would take phone messages for each other on pink slips of paper from “while you were out” notepads. 
 
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 You can learn a lot about a person by sharing an office—and taking phone messages for him. 
 
 This is how the average day proceeded: I’d arrive in the morning around 9-ish. The phone would soon start ringing—with calls for Hitchens. I’d tell the callers he was not yet available, and they would leave messages: “Tell him, that was a wonderful dinner last night.” Or, “Mick was so pleased to meet him.” Or, “We may all get together again this evening.” Within an hour or so, the nature of the messages would shift to cover plans for lunch that day: “Tell Christopher we’re all meeting at the Spanish place.” 
 
 About this time, Hitchens would saunter in. He’d say hello, turn to the pink slips I had placed on his desk, and return the calls. Did I say this was a small office? We each could hear everything the other said on the phone. He’d first phone his compatriots from the previous evening and review what had transpired. He then would talk to his lunch-mates for the day and arrange the details. Then it would be time … to leave for lunch. 
 
 While he was gone, calls would come in for him with invitations for afternoon drinks. (In those days, youngsters, late-afternoon drinks were practically obligatory in certain journalistic circles. Think of it as Manhattan teatime.) After a, shall we say, longish lunch, Hitchens would stop back in the office and return the calls regarding the pending drinks. Then it was, ta-ta, once again. 
 
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 By now you are getting the picture. But I’m not done yet. After afternoon drinks, the general practice was to return to the office. Upon his arrival, Hitchens would sort through the latest pink slips with phone numbers from his friends, colleagues, and adversaries who had called about dinner plans and after-dinner drinks. (Yes, in those days, after-dinner drinks were a separate stop.) 
 
 Soon, it was time for Hitchens to head out to the dinner engagement. He would start packing up. About now, Elizabeth Pochoda, the literary editor of the magazine, would poke her head in the door. “Christopher, you’re going to have that review of the Disraeli biography for me tomorrow, right?”—a soft touch of menace in her voice. 
 
 “Oh, yes, of course.” And as soon as she had departed, he’d open his desk, rummage through a drawer, and pull out an 800-page biography of the British prime minister. It was clear to me that the book had yet to be opened. He’d tuck the volume into his bag and say goodnight. 
 
 By this point in the day, I knew all his plans for the evening, including the 11-ish rendezvous for cocktails. I wondered how he would be able to read this book and write a review by the next morning. But come the following day—after the calls about the previous night and the calls about the lunch to come had started—he’d trundle into the office, Pochoda would show up, and he’d hand her a 1,500-word essay. And it was—you know the punch line—brilliant. Did I mention this was in the days before computers? Next, it was off to lunch. 
 
 I did learn much from Hitchens, but never how to function in quite this manner. What allowed him to live such a packed life was a trait that any of us would relish: He never forgot what he had ever read or learned. His mind was always expanding. That was a natural gift that few of us possess. He could not teach it. But observing Hitchens practice his craft and thrust and parry with intellectuals almost as sharp as him was as valuable an experience as I could have imagined. It sure beat attending J-school. And I much appreciated his sense of social egalitarianism. I found that few journalists of his stature paid much serious attention to the young wannabes nearby. I recall one particular moment, at some social/literary event, when I heard him utter what at the time seemed to be these improbable words, “Carly, you do know David Corn, don’t you?” (It was that Carly.) She, of course, didn’t. Hitchens, as a journalist and as a colleague, was inspiring. 
 
 In later years, Hitchens and I had our differences. I was not heartened when he provided left-of-center and intellectual cover to the impeachment crusade waged by extremist radicals of the right in the 1990s. And we had words over his support for the Iraq War—including within the pixels of Slate. I wish I could forget the time, a few months into the war, when he assured me, “Wolfowitz has the rats on the run and this will all be over soon.” 
 
 Yet policy and political debates, as important as they are, come and go. Examples remain. Hitchens set one for me. And I know there is no reason to ask him to rest in peace. ||||| A formidable lineup of writers, editors, actors, scientists, and assorted intellectuals gathered at Cooper Union's Great Hall, at 7 East 7th Street, to revive for one last occasion the voice of Christopher Hitchens, which was silenced by esophageal cancer on December 15, 2011. 
 
 The novelist Martin Amis delivered a heartfelt but unsentimental eulogy, praising his late friend's good looks ("More handsome than a man has a right to be, he liked to say") and voice ("He had none of the poncey affectations that I can't seem to eradicate") but gently mocking his self-mythologizing tendencies. Noting that Hitchens' habit of referring to himself in the third person was in no way a sign of mental illness -- "Hitch was penetratingly sane; he knew who he was" -- Amis nevertheless observed that Hitchens, who hated to go unrecognized, once endured 15 painful minutes of not being stopped by admirers, causing him to conclude that everyone in the vicinity was hopelessly uncultured. 
 
 Above all, however, Amis spoke admiringly of how Hitchens, unlike so many journalists, refused to fall into the trap of impartial observation. "He made intellection dramatic," he said. 
 
 Most of the afternoon's presenters -- including Hitchens' wife, Carol Blue -- were content to let the late journalist, author, debater and "scallywag" (host Graydon Carter's word, not mine) do the talking. They sampled his vast output of books and articles from the past four decades, summoning a torrent of impossibly eloquent words aimed against his cherished targets (Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, God) and in favor of his revered ideals (skepticism, liberation, civilization). 
 
 The playwright Tom Stoppard read a dispatch from Prague, where Hitchens was arrested at a meeting of reformists; the author Salman Rushdie read a virtuoso takedown of religious injunctions against eating pork, adding, "Christopher always appreciated the loss of my porcine virginity"; the actor Sean Penn read from Hitchens' exposé on the biological horrors inflicted on Vietnamese civilians by America's deployment of Agent Orange; the editor Cary Goldstein read Hitch's frank and funny words of advice about drinking (doing it alone is perfectly acceptable, but never mix, never drive, and never combine booze with narcotics); and the actress Olivia Wilde -- whose parents, journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, relied on Hitchens as a babysitter -- read a heartbreaking report from post-earthquake Haiti. 
 
 British multi-hyphenate Stephen Fry prefaced his reading with some amusing remarks about his sometimes contentious relationship with Hitchens. After quoting Hitchens' declaration that "the four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics," Fry, who is gay, remarked, "Three out of four isn't bad." 
 
 James Fenton read his poem "For Andrew Wood," which begins by asking, "What would the dead want from us," and the scientist Lawrence Krauss spoke proudly of having once identified himself as Hitchens' "personal physicist." And the filmmaker Alex Gibney produced a gripping montage of Hitchens jousting in public and on TV, not omitting the moment when the great verbal swashbuckler resorted to giving Bill Maher's audience the finger and shouting, "Fuck you." 
 
 There were more luminaries in the audience, including Steve Kroft, whose 60 Minutes profile of Hitchens turned up in Gibney's montage; SNL player Jason Sudeikis, who is dating Olivia Wilde; former U.S. Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, with whom Hitchens formed an unlikely alliance during the run-up to the Iraq war; and a full contingent of Graydon Carter's fellow Condé Nast editors, including The New Yorker's David Remnick and Vogue's Anna Wintour. 
 
 In the end, it was Carter who had the last word. After reading the transcript of a hilariously brutal phone message that Hitchens once left for an unlucky detractor, he sent us all off with a very Hitchens benediction: "As Christopher would say, may you all thrive." ||||| "Little Keith" called him a suffering auto-contrarian and likened him to Houdini; Graydon Carter said he was a "bit of a scallywag" but an editor's dream; and the doctor who treated him for the cancer of the oesophagus that killed him said he was a "pioneer at the frontier". 
 
 Unsurprisingly, though, it was Christopher Hitchens who had the funniest and the most apposite words with which to describe himself at his own memorial in New York on Friday. He was, he said of himself in posthumous film clips and readings, a "radical freelance scribbler" who had devoted his life to curiosity, irony, debunking, disputation, drinking, love and hate (though of all those things, it was hate that got him out of bed in the morning). 
 
 "The cause of my life," Hitchens said in one snippet included in a compilation put together by the Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Dibney, "has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win – it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition." 
 
 For an hour and a half, the cavernous Great Hall of the Cooper Union in Manhattan was filled with the wit and the coruscating erudition of the man universally referred to as "Hitch". But for Martin Amis - "Little Keith" as Hitchens always called him – the most enduring quality was friendship. 
 
 Amis, delivering the eulogy, recalled the 16 or 17-hour sessions that they would have together, fuelled by food, drink, tobacco and conversation. "Who could be more agreeable than Hitch?" Amis asked. 
 
 The novelist pondered the secret of why Hitchens had been so widely loved over his career as an essayist, polemicist and public intellectual. It was partly, Amis said, because of his "full and friendly" good looks, partly because of his "perfect voice without any mannerisms or poncey intonations like mine" and partly because he loved nothing so much as to argue with himself. 
 
 "He was an auto-contrarian: he contradicted himself as if he felt the only person really worth arguing with was Christopher Hitchens." 
 
 At times, Amis said, he tied himself in knots, getting into difficult places over his support for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the invasion of Iraq. Unbeknown to many, Hitchens "suffered very much from these isolations that he brought on himself." 
 
 The memorial marked the final gathering of the Christopher Hitchens gang – Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton – with Hitchens' central place in the circle marked by a photo of him with his face caked in cosmetic mud and a cigarette stuck in his mouth beamed on screens above them. 
 
 Stephen Fry recalled that there were few pleasures in life as great as having a disagreement with Hitch. The agreed on their love of WH Auden and PG Wodehouse but disagreed on cricket and opera. 
 
 "Hitch thought the four most overrated things in the world were champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics. Three out of four, there," Fry said. 
 
 The quirkier side of the writer was on abundant display, from the reference to the asteroid that was named after him – Hitchens 57901 – to the time Margaret Thatcher slapped him across the buttocks with a rolled up parliamentary order paper, to the many photographs of him dressed in his beloved white linen suit even in the middle of a dusty Iraqi battlefield. The ubiquitous glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label and his love of the cigarette were also amply remembered. 
 
 But the aspect that boomed out most loudly was his relentless pursuit of secular humanism in the face of ignorant religion. That came across even when his last doctor, Francis Collins, was speaking, addressing the memorial audience as a "follower of Jesus Christ". 
 
 Collins, head of the US National Institutes of Health, said Hitchens had helped forward the search for scientific answers to cancer by agreeing to try new therapies. Collins also revealed that, ironically, he had prayed for the great atheist in his final days. 
 
 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. 
 
 "I will never change my mind on that. Never change my mind," he says. 
 
 After a pause, he adds: "But I do like surprises."
– There is no shortage of reflections on the life of Christopher Hitchens today, filled with memories and anecdotes that all seem to include the word "cocktail." Writing for Slate, David Corn recounts his "Hitchens tale," one that occurred some three decades ago while the two shared a tiny, windowless office at The Nation. It seems that Corn spent most of his day taking phone messages for Hitchens. In the morning, they'd be along the lines of "'Tell him, that was a wonderful dinner last night.' Or, 'Mick was so pleased to meet him.'" Then they'd shift to invitations for lunch, afternoon drinks, dinner, and an 11pm cocktail date, with Hitchens popping in just long enough to get those messages, then depart for said restaurant or watering hole. At some point, an editor would stop by to double-check that Hitchens would have, say, the review of a biography ready for her tomorrow. He'd say yes, then slip an 800-page book that clearly "had yet to be opened ... into his bag and say goodnight." What he somehow turned in the next day was—"you know the punch line—brilliant. Next, it was off to lunch." Corn writes that he learned many lessons from Hitchens, but "never how to function in quite this manner. What allowed him to live such a packed life was a trait that any of us would relish: He never forgot what he had ever read or learned." It's not a skill that could be taught, but watching Hitchens "practice his craft and thrust and parry with intellectuals almost as sharp as him was as valuable an experience as I could have imagined."