"My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice," explained George Orwell in his literary self-portrait. Not to simply write when there is injustice but to write about said injustice; his countryman and fellow political voice, Christopher Hitchens, would agree.

Christopher Hitchens (April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011) was not a force of nature. He would be akin to a tornado but more organized. A tidal wave but more deliberate. A high wind but less gentle. And he had so much high intelligence that he could only be human. Extraordinarily human.   Stephen Fry once wrote of Douglas Adams' extreme writing habits: "He'd run upstairs pounding his full weight on the fragile timbers of the stairs (Adams was nearly 6'5''), belabor a single sentence for hours only to run back downstairs in a panic and declare 'It's no use, I'm done.'"    
     
Hitchens, who turned his death into his own journalistic endeavour in Mortality; Hitchens who must be an invention of human imagination according to Ian McEwan; Hitchens who would drink and talk and smoke all night only to wake up and write a completely perfect essay in half an hour. He possessed a superhuman writing ability. Despite his other mortal afflictions.

Despite the title, to call the collection of essays in And Yet... a contrarian's manifesto would also be incorrect. But that is what Hitchens is most famous for contrarianism.

Contrarianism is an art. It must ascend petulant criticism. It is perfected by constant vigilance and unrelenting rejoinder to any whiff of authoritarianism or hypocrisy.

Also critical is a clear, upfront statement of one's ideological principles and assumptions. Hitchens begins And Yet... with lines from his 2005 book Letters to a Young Contrarian:

One should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganizing it.

From the West's shallow applause of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk to the savage cult of Che Guevara to Charles Dickens' idolization of childhood, the most frequent recipient of Hitchens' irascible common sense is religion. Christianity, in particular. Modern Christianity. Christianity as it exists within reindeer and Douglas firs spread across public spaces like bulk-buy salad dressing.

This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from the train stations to the department stores an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy.

Contrarianism must also come from a genuine interest in knowledge and history, thoughtful consideration for humanity's well-being, and preserving the critical aspects of society. Hitchens' prose is so fast, furious, and intellectualized that it is difficult to find an emotional soul, but it's there. Strong and even tender.

From his 2011 review of Joan Didion's Blue Nights, her chilling and immediate account of grief following her daughter's death.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grace or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. This endurance need not necessarily be one's own: indeed, the experience of watching over a sibling or mate in extremis can be even more acute. But nothing, according to the experts, compares to the clutching, choking nightmare that engulfs the one who is slowly bereft of a child. [...] In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish.

We must cultivate and protect contrarians—those who fight against one-mindedness. (While simultaneously being vigilant about what that one-mindedness is. Who has the power these days? It seems to be shifting and dispersing. It feels like all extremes tend to be one-mindedness. As much as we protect contrarians, we must also hold them to the same standards they hold others.)

My favorite essay in this collection, "On the Limits of Self-Improvement," is a series for Vanity Fair where Hitchens checks into a spa. It sounds tame and domestic, but then you remember it's Hitch. Hitch in fluffy robes, salt rubs, and painful therapy sessions that tried to get him to quit smoking (only to fail miserably).

About all the downsides—the shame of being conned by the tobacco companies, the disgrace of being an addict, the suspension of one’s reasoning faculties in the face of self-destruction—I already knew. […] Anyway, I left my pack and my lighter in O’Hara’s care and for a couple of days didn’t smoke and didn’t much miss it either. But then I hit a difficult patch in an essay I was writing and turned again to the little friend that never deserts me.

Read Hitchens' essays alongside Alan Lightman's thoughts on whether there is space for God in the universe and Marilynne Robinson's call for civic-mindedness in today's culture or the essays of Joseph Brodsky on the reality of evil and the ruinous aspects of tyranny.