When Breath Becomes Air

A neurosurgeon, at the peak of his career, finds that he has cancer. This book is about Paul Kalanithi, a doctor who chose the medical field (or neuroscience for that matter) to connect his interest in philosophy with science, to find the meaning. Only later would he know that his actual journey would start when he would receive the test results that will change his entire life.

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While reading When Breath Becomes Air, Paul walks us through his various phases of life. There are only two parts(chapters) in this book, the first part is about his previous life, and the second is all about how he faced death itself.
I like the honesty and the depth of this book. Paul’s writing is exceptional. While expressing his childhood experiences, he takes us through his childhood curiosity, his imagination, and the philosophy about life. The second chapter, however, it’s purely about his fight against cancer. Without any false hopes, Paul accepted the reality. In this eight months-long journey, we see his transition from a doctor to a patient and just a husband to a father.

In my opinion, When Breath Becomes Air can give you a little more understanding of death, and so for the life. For sure, you gonna get impressed by his writing.

Here are few highlights from the book, without any context they can be little hard to understand but still we can see the depth in them.

Highlights from When Breath Becomes Air

“philosophy became the subject of my college admissions essay, in which I argued that happiness was not the point of life”

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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?

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

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Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job — not a calling.

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“Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, he richest material for moral reflection.”

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“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”

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“I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge, in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.”

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“As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives—everyone dies eventually—but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.”

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“Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness.”

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“Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients”

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“A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

“As a doctor, I had had some sense of what patients with life-changing illnesses faced—and it was exactly these moments I had wanted to explore with them. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death?”

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The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.

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“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. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them”

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And the most important one,

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

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Read this book (again)