The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Read Online Free PDF

faith.”
    Courtesy naturally commanded a prompt acknowledgement of his letter. I immediately sent him the following reply:
    Dear Mr. Hitchens,
    Thank you for your letter. Now that I have your address, I shall certainly be able to send you the review, as promised—but it may still take a little while: I am a slow writer.
    Regarding your insistence that the title of your book—when applied to an 86-year-old nun who serves the poor and made a vow of chastity nearly 70 years ago—cannot be read as an obscenity: if a schoolboy draws on the blackboard a cartoon of his teacher copulating with a goat, one may feel irritated by his immature prank, but at the same time, one must grudgingly acknowledge his spirited irreverence. If, however, this same schoolboy eventually insists tearfully that he did not do anything, that he did not mean to be cheeky, that he merely meant to draw an honest and plain zoology assignment, he simply cancels the only merit one could ever have credited him with. Forgive my frankness: in a way, your original offensiveness was more respectable than your present glosses and disclaimers.
    Thank you for the newspaper clipping you sent me. I found it very amusing and will add it to my rich collection. But I would question the soundness of the distinction you make between “the problems of unbelief” and “the problems of faith.” I am afraid you did not draw the demarcation line in the right spot. People who share Mother Teresa’s faith are not likely to discover her face in cinnamon buns (or if they do, they would have a good laugh). When a man ceases to believe in God (as Chesterton said), the problem is not that he starts to believe in nothing, but that he will believe in anything . He may not believe that Christ is alive, but then he will believe that Elvis Presley is.
    At one point in his little tract (page 66), Mr. Hitchens observes that Mother Teresa “must necessarily admit to being disqualified by inexperience” when she chooses “to speak on matters such as sexuality and reproduction.” Nowadays a similar criticism is also often made of the Pope—once I even came across an intriguing variation on that theme: according to one particularly inspired critic, the pontiff’s alleged incompetence in these matters was to be ascribed to his being merely “an old Polish bachelor.” I have still not grasped in what way the fact of hailing from Poland should constitute a specific disability for someone who has to adjudicate on the issues of sexual morality.
    By Mr. Hitchens’s logic, only a cow should be truly qualified to run a dairy farm. Still, the notion that it is generally unwise to make pronouncements in areas that lie outside one’s expertise remains a sound principle. I only wish that Mr. Hitchens himself would abide by it.
    In the very first chapter of his pamphlet, before fully launching into his diatribe against Mother Teresa, Mr. Hitchens makes a fantastic reference to an episode in the life of Jesus Christ, which exposes an ignorance that is so staggering, it simply takes your breath away. In this new Gospel-according-to-Christopher, Jesus himself once broke a costly box of unguent on his own feet. (Presumably in homage to himself—another instance of his notorious sense of self-importance?) At this point, the innocent reader is positively hit by a sudden fit of dizziness and rubs his eyes in disbelief.
    How should I describe this feeling? Imagine a new book, a critical essay on—let us say—some fundamental aspects of Western cultural history; the book in question is attracting much attention; it is controversial and has already provoked earnest debate. Yet, on the first page, you come across this statement: the Trojan horse was a famous stratagem invented by Joan of Arc at the siege of Orléans.
    Mr. Hitchens goes on to blame Mother Teresa for not doing what she never intended to do in the first instance; and he finds it scandalous that she is doing precisely what she originally