Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
Interpretation
The quote compares the challenges of facing a severe illness to the experiences of warfare, emphasizing the endurance required to cope with both.
Christopher Hitchens draws a parallel between the prolonged struggle of living with a serious illness and the experience of war. He highlights that both involve extended periods of waiting and anxiety, disrupted only by moments of intense fear and suffering, illustrating the psychological and emotional toll that such experiences can have on an individual.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, one might quote this to emphasize the emotional struggle of patients.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way β because itβs had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But youβve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.
... resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.
In my sport, the quick are too often listed among the dead
You can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia - a fear of wide, open spaces - simultaneously on a spacewalk.
As a child, I sat in the back of the bus. I was told, time and time again, that God's potential didn't exist in people like me. I've spent my life fighting to change that. And, from the first day when I met Hillary Clinton, I've known that she's someone who cares just as much and fights just as hard.
Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.
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