When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

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

Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.

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

life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.

Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it?

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.

The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth.

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.

At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s the only way I know how to breathe.”