When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.

Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering.

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,” and I felt like one.

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

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 main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

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

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. 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.