When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air is the memoir of a young neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer. Kalanithi did his undergraduate at Stanford, and had the same bioethics professor as I’m having right now, and went on to do his residency at Stanford as well. I was struck by how fluent and poetic of a writer he was. His personality was a unique mix of morose realism and transcendental holiness; he’s ventured into the depths of despair, of human suffering, yet he still doesn’t want to let go of that central belief in life’s sacredness even when his psyche is battered by the specter of death daily during his interactions with his patients. The section detailing his work while he was healthy was especially profound, as the patients that Kalanithi dealt with were often ones with neurologic disorders, whose conditions bring up the profound philosophical and for Kalanithi, the theological questions of what being a human means.

Kalanithi retorts to Socrates: “if the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” I find myself sometimes falling in the trap of being paralyzed in thought; the extreme end of this paralysis being Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” who thinks incessantly but never acts. I live an undramatic and simple life, in the name of being disciplined: reading an hour a day, going to bed early and not staying up on weekends; yet this simplicity can too easily, if it hasn’t already, devolve into a kind of morose, monastic austerity, as if I am a dead person infesting my living body. For all my efforts of examining, in learning to be wise from the eminent dead, on final examination my efforts may chillingly turn out to be my own autopsy. At times my hair is white, skin withered, and I look upon the living with tantalizing envy but simultaneously a dooming impotence that I cannot be them. Yet, my personality is quiet and tranquil, a peaceful white floating in a chaotic coalescence of colors; I cannot turn into something I am fundamentally not. This riddle does not have a pure or universally appealing answer - the sphinx won’t ever die; but it’s something to do, to grapple with it even knowing the outcome.