When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!”

I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

Some days, this is how it felt when I was in the hospital: trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, the rain of tears of the families of the dying pouring down.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”