Yesterday we set the completion date for our twelfth house move in sixteen years. On 18 December, we’ll move away from a place we bought from strangers who — against all advice — became fast friends, our weld forged through the possibilities that moving promises. The kind of friends who stay with you until the end, which came too soon for one of our party; a death we couldn’t handle, kept distanced behind masks and windows and heartache, as the sunniest of us faced a twilight death on a song-filled Spring morning, her favourite kind. Cancer deaths are painful movements, taking people, to tailor Hemingway, gradually then suddenly away. Believing in god, as she did, perhaps, makes these moments bearable. I’ll never know — journeying to a hereafter is not a notion for everyone. But god or no, death is not always the end of life; dead people move us all the time. Like our stolen friend, whose name alone recalls her lovability, Mandy. So, fearing that leaving here means leaving her, we make plans to uproot her roses and perhaps the peonies, and daydream about carefully capturing the robins whose lean winter song has fat enough to carry us to our new place on a now-set day that feels too soon, time’s gradual march quickening, suddening the space between here and there. Our moving day falls among others, great and small. Like 15 December, the 349th day of the year, which comes three days before our flit and is — by design — the day this piece goes live. It is also the date Christopher Hitchens died, twelve years ago, on a winter’s night at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. A writer and speaker adored, despised, and feared the world over, a light-bringer stolen from the public sphere at the top of his game. A ‘man for all seasons’ with no expectation of a warm resurrection, either through fire or light. Indeed, being already reborn — on his 58th birthday as an American citizen — wishing for a third wind would seem more than a little grabby. But, of course, he didn’t. As Seneca advised, he simply lived well and then died. His last breaths taken 4,826 miles from his first in Portsmouth, England, just shy of 23,000 days apart and a mere ten days before Christmas, a holiday period he abhorred. (My tangential recourse to numbers feels like a clumsy means of measuring this polariser’s turn upon the world’s stage.) The juxtaposition of these two contrary events — a messiah’s birth and an anti-theist’s death — has seen December 15 jocosely become known as ‘Hitchmas’, a celebration of reason that ‘Hitch’, as he was sometimes known, would have surely revelled in. Hitch: to journey freely, hopefully, without fear or limit or fixed destination, to be transported elsewhere by chance, to wander both inner and outer spaces, sometimes leaving footprints, like the fossilised sets found in shorelines around the world, the comfort of those caught in White Sands, New Mexico, echoes of distant times come willowing across the sand, as Pink Floyd imagined it. In a cold and corrupting world, this free-spirited, liberatory impulse doesn’t always lead to wonderland, but rather to wastelands, often with unbearable consequences, especially for women and girls. Pippa Bacca sits with me still — a young woman with ‘itchy feet’, as my mother used to say, who was raped and murdered while hitchhiking from Milan to Jerusalem for world peace. (She also said that my wanderlust would kill me someday, and I wonder if Pippa’s mom warned the same thing too.) Hitchens’s migration to America saw him retrace the steps of generations of white Europeans — steps that were not always freely taken, as his were. An arrival decades in the making with no clear departure date, just a desire, or need, to make a new place home. And he did. The ease of his going, or homecoming, as he’d have it, echoes our soft decision to stay home, here, on a truly emerald island planted with strangers roughly twenty generations ago, a godawful move troubling their children’s children to this day. To stay or to go — a timeless refrain. Our homespun dilemmas, flecked with privilege, lead to safe, small movements, the luxury of indecision and personal choice not lost on us. Every day, we yellowly watch other worlds in which matters of staying, leaving, or making a new home have migrated into political realms, the Stygian domain of warmongers. Matters which, according to the most recent estimate of global migration, touch 281 million people, a number that, once again, fails to illuminate the realities that lie beyond it. A calamity glibly marked on ‘International Migrants Day’, which this year, in an unsettling coincidence, falls on our completion date, journey’s end, 18 December. Eliot’s words strike me, ‘paralysed force, gesture without motion’. Home being held in the arms or gaze of a loved one — some imagine this to be true while others know it. a gesture, phrase, or way of doing something, holding a cigarette or arching an eyebrow, or doing nothing, hunkering down, deftly hovering between sitting and standing — today, eyeing the middle distance. an object, now become treasured, carried through the seasons by its keeper, a compass bearing home on journeys that oftentimes terminate somewhere in-between, citizens of nowhere, a marchland between hearth and home, a place of boredom and terror, like war. Holding on to objects from other places and their stories is a time-honoured way of making unknown parts home, like the butter yellow roses we’ll soon plant in new ground. But objects don’t just travel by our own hands; they move through political feats too. Migrations made without their keepers, the piteousness of tots alone on long-haul flights, tear-stained strays craving home and their people. Like the ‘contested objects’ housed in the British Museum, often boxed in the basement, a nowhere place, the Maqdala treasures, two stone moai, ‘stolen friends’, Moai Hava and Hoa Hakananai'a, no longer hunkered at the Earth’s navel, lost to sky, ground, and their own kind for 150 years and counting, Nazi loot, and human remains unearthed from the whole round world. To this wanting list — like our numbers, failing to convey the horrible truth of it all — we can also, still, add the Parthenon marbles, carried away from Athens by Lord Elgin in the early 19th Century. Looted objects, taken from their homelands and objectified in ours, also help make unknown parts feel like home, as if they belong to us; our ways and ideas swarm there, and the things we want from there stream here, only wanted things mind. And while the snatching and sundering of materials from the Parthenon was not directly part of the British colonial project — which saw about one-fifth of the world’s population yoked by violence and propaganda — their ceaseless display in ‘The World’s Museum’ boosts the UK’s soft power and, through notions of universalism, maintains the colonial status quo — the British Museum as an unmarked place, neutral, like whiteness or maleness or straightness. Brutish for British, is there a better synonym? To stay or to go? For over two centuries, that’s been the hot story of the Parthenon marbles, even drawing in Lord Byron, an ardent philhellene. Should the stray pieces of Athena’s temple stay in Britain or go back to Greece, most notably the 75 meters of the Parthenon frieze lodging in Rooms 18a and 18b, Great Russell St., London? It’s a question that the British Museum and successive British governments assiduously side-step, as tiny-suited Rishi Sunak recently demonstrated when he abruptly cancelled a meeting with Greece’s Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotaki, in which the marbles were just one of several topics. Hitchens joined the fray in 1987 when his second book was set loose. (As the controversy evolved, so did the book, and later editions struck Elgin’s name off the cover and put the right title in its place, The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification.) And while Hitchens fought other battles — writing 18 books and countless essays on cultural politics and, of course, faith — the injustice of the exiled marbles was never far from his thoughts. Always he sought to move us in — what he felt was — the right direction not least by conveying trixsy ideas in an accessible and often playful manner. Like his Mona Lisa analogy — wouldn't we wish to reassemble the painting if it’d been cut in half during the Napoleonic Wars? To which most people respond, ‘Yes’, if not ‘YES!!’. It’s the only sensible answer. (A point remade just this month by our snubbed Greek premier, such is its lasting effectiveness.) For who would not wish to see the Parthenon frieze reunified in the purpose built Acropolis Museum, just a stone’s throw from the temple of Athena, the frieze's home ground. Its 160 meters long story allowed to unfold without intermission. ‘Only the foolish’, we cry, ‘the churlish’, and narrowing our eyes, ‘the brutish institutions and’, pausing for effect, ‘their diminishing allies’. That’s Hitchens’s style — to make a simple point and to make it well, and, wherever possible, to add some fire, sauce, and honey, his views adorned, no, charged, with words from the world’s visionaries. Despite his disavowal of after-life journeys, Hitchens’s story did not end twelve years ago. Long after his last words were spoken, his last sentences written, and his last breaths taken, his corpus continues to advance knowledge and debate — like his body, donated to medical science — and to move us in all kinds of ways. Already preserved in print, Hitchens’s death saw him wholly migrate to other realms, those of memory and imagination, departing our pale blue dot for the digisphere. A nowhere place where his words, always best when spoken, wait ready to move us. His digital footprint, deep and resonant, is a timeless invitation to engage his work, to — and forgive me here — hitch a ride with him, and, if he’s lucky, we’ll ditch the map to wonderland and find ways to argue about where we’re headed. It looks like he got his third wind after all.
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