When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

Question 1

In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back

Ephemera - things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time.

Orwell’s 1984 instilled in me a deep love for language

I still felt that literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

Meaning seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land resonated profoundly, relating meaninglessness and isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection.

Literature provided the richest material for moral reflection.

Unconscionable - not right or reasonable, unethical, indefensible

Nuland’s seminal book ‘How We Die’ wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms die.

Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including the one that says entropy always increases.

All order tends toward entropy and decay.

Disease are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.

Answer 1

I was compelled by neurosurgery, with its unforgiving call to perfection. It seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity and death.

Learning to judge whose lives should be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.

The twilight existence of unconscious metabolism becomes an unbearable burden.

A son’s death already defies the parents’ ordered universe.

I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work or whether it was worth it.

Heidegger argued that boredom was awareness of time passing.

Death comes for all of us: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolising organisms. Death always wins. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked against you.

Scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. Money and status hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.