When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death—it’s something that happens to you and those around you.

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.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.