"Why not?"

I'm not a big Christopher Hitchens fan, but the man is one of the greatest, deepest minds of the generation.  I remember his last appearance on The Daily Show and feeling a sense of understanding of where he was coming from for the first time in a long time without his usual smugness blinding me to the poetry of what he was saying.

Little did I know that the same man I was watching was struggling through the illness of his yet-diagnosed cancer.  Read his moving account of his first weeks struggling to recover here at Vanity Fair.