"Especially over the course of the last ten years, the word 'martyr' has been utterly degraded by the wolfish image of Mohammed Atta: the cold and loveless zombie -- a suicide murderer -- who took as many innocents with him as he could manage. The organizations that find and train men like Atta have since been responsible for unutterable crimes in many countries and societies, from England to Iraq, in their attempt to create a system where the cold and loveless zombie would be the norm, and culture would be dead. They claim that they will win because they love death more than life, and because life-lovers are feeble and corrupt degenerates. Practically every word I have written since 2001 has been explicitly and implicitly directed at refuting and defeating those hateful, nihilistic propositions, as well as those among us who try to explain them away."

That is from Christopher Hitchens' introduction to his elephantine essay collection "Arguably." It is not for nothing that his epigraph to the whole book quotes Lambert Strether in Henry James' "The Ambassadors": "Live all you can; It's a mistake not to."

It is Hitchens' melancholy circumstance to understand Strether in a cellular way not necessarily given to the rest of us. The brute wallop of life circumstance accompanies his paraphrase of Nadine Gordimer on the 1988 publication of his first collection "Prepared for the Worst:" "to the effect that a serious person should try to write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints -- of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion -- did not operate." (As he says in that same introduction.).

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 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Twelve 788 pages, $30

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Then came his cancer diagnosis. And "then about a year ago, I was informed by a doctor that I might have as little as another year to live."

The apocalypse within is not one to be ignored. And so he hasn't. In moving but pitilessly candid reports, he has written about his own fate the same way he has usually written about literature and the ongoing world: wittily, elegantly, savagely and with sentences whose grace is, itself, an argument for life and civilization as persuasive as any that his words can make.

Heart disease can be a reaper as quick as it is grim. It took James Agee in the back seat of a taxi. Cancer confers time and perspective. Susan Sontag had time to become even more herself. In a different arena, Roger Ebert -- whose "Life Itself" is now coming out -- had to revert exclusively to being the writer he'd always been rather than the chortling celebrity of his greatest fame.

I think what now ought to be faced is that Hitchens is, as others (Christopher Buckley, for one) have said, the greatest living essayist in the English language. Twenty-three years ago -- when "Prepared for the Worst" was published-- I'd never have come close to writing that. Twenty-three years from now, I doubt strongly that there'll be many, if any at all, who will subscribe to that hierarchy in our era.

But history and circumstance have singled Hitchens out. John Updike is dead. And Gore Vidal -- who once appointed Hitchens his rightful heir -- has now, as Hitchens so aptly puts it in his essay "Vidal Loco," reacted to Sept. 11, 2001, by becoming "more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant."

History and circumstance have long since turned Vidal's work posthumous in a woeful way, even though he's still very much with us and ready to celebrate his 86th birthday in a few weeks. It is Hitchens -- atheist, journalist, polemicist, diagnostician, provocateur-in-chief of the literary world -- who is the great critic and wit and intellectual in our era.

The old relentless Oxford debater is very much in evidence. So too is the journalistic stunt-flier. Hitchens is a man for whom the word "circulation" denotes more than just the sluice of the blood. He's got a journalistic instinct for boosting it. A voluntary waterboarding produces the conclusions that "you are not being boarded, you are being watered" and "when contrasted with actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay." (Hitchens is almost as fond of sexual allusions as Pauline Kael used to be.)

His famous essay grenade "Why Women Aren't Funny" -- which he now rightly terms his most misunderstood -- turns out, on even a cursory dispassionate reading, to be in the ancient British lineage of "Why Women Are So Much Better Than We Men Are" (see anthropologist Ashley Montague for the definitive iteration of that). His "argument" in brief is that a man's "chief task in life" is "impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, many fellows have very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh ... Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men if you catch my drift."

I think we do. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge as the Monty Python boys might have it. The whole essay is, in fact, many innocent miles from misogyny and "sexist" only insofar as unseemly levity can always be accused of some sort of mentally unhygienic "ism."

But then Hitchens is a man who says -- and clearly believes -- "the people who must never have power are the humorless." (Who, most emphatically in the Hitchens order of things, do NOT include all those women who've laughed at his jokes all these years, in print or otherwise.)

The subjects here are as encyclopedic as they are in one of those periodic pachydermal thudmakers that Updike used to drop on the world every few years -- everything from Jefferson and Franklin to Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin, Stephen Spender and Harry Potter between covers, from JFK, Lincoln, Larry Craig to Afghanistan, Iran, Algeria, Pakistan, and Nazi Germany out in the world.

I'd rather read Hitchens, say, on Arthur Koestler, than anyone else in the world. And yet it's hard to resist a critic who admits "it took me decades to dare the attempt but finally I did write about Vladimir Nabokov." (An aside to answer most, if not all, slams at Hitchens' "arrogance.")

Courage, of course, is owning up to fear. And overcoming.

I have no interest in following Hitchens into every dark polemical corner that his convictions lead him -- not when the sentences he writes convey, in all their grace, everything important about what he stands for.

Those sentences are all the argument he'll need at this moment, really.

 Jeff Simon is the News' Arts and Books Editor.