When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? Heading into my sophomore summer, I applied for

had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.

epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What

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

knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

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.

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. Yet one thing

lucid. He observed. He understood, as a physician,