When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

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

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.

Only later would I realize that our trip had added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

Normally, you breathed it in, without noticing it. But some days, like a humid muggy day, it had a suffocating weight of its own.

Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive,

“We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.”

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.

We all inhabit different selves in space and time.