Hitchens
by Adam | Sunday 8 May 2011
Christopher Hitchens, who is ill, writes about his loss of speech in Vanity Fair. It's some sad and heavy work.
Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.