Me and the boys boppin’
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Portrait of Dave Gahan by Dean Chalkley.
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Eric Cantona
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George Best knew how to sport a moustache.
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Paul Weller
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What was clear enough before my death was that visions of an afterlife were no more verifiable than any other bedtime tales designed to offer false hope to toddlers frightened of the dark. They are the ultimate embodiment of the solipsism at the heart of all religions. This infantilizing fiction comes in various guises, from orthodox religions with their fabricated consolations of fairytale heavens—whether it is the Islamic fanatic’s seventy-two celestial virgins or the Christian fantasia of winged angels—to the modern pseudoscientific “research” into so-called near-death experiences (known with ridiculous technicality as NDEs). These hallucinatory claims, originally popularized by a Dr. Raymond Moody for Me Generation readers of the 1970s, rest on numerous banal and repetitive testimonials about floating above one’s body, hurtling through a tunnel toward a bright light, vividly reviewing episodes from one’s past as if watching a holiday slide show, and encountering various beings lit up with an unearthly glow. These latter apparitions can range from one’s surprisingly youthful-looking relatives to an omniscient spiritual guide, including the ubiquitous Jesus if you’re a Christian, not-so-coincidentally matching your own faith or lack thereof.
— Christopher Hitchens - Was I wrong about the afterlife? No.
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A seismologist listens to the Solfatar Volcano in Pozzuoli, Italy, 1917.
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It’s the one thing one is certainly born to do.
— Christopher Hitchens on death.
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I fucking give you up. I give up when it comes to you. We don’t meet different women, we meet them differently.
— Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, in a letter to a friend about girls.
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