Human brain is a powerhouse. A hub of electrical activity where billions of neurons interact with each other every minute controlling thousands of conscious and unseen tasks that keep us alive. But more than that, these same neurons and their interactions make us what we are. Construct meaning of the world we live in. Give us our mind. Yet, the distance between our brains and our minds has been one of the widest, and one that we are yet to cross.
Paul Kalanithi marveled at the ability of mind, but was also curious to find the physiological connection of the brain. His quest to answer age old questions of finding the meaning of life took him from Stanford to Cambridge to Yale. Words have enabled us to express our external world and ponder over deepest darkest corners of our mind. His love for Literature and philosophical bent pushed him into pursuing Master’s in English Literature. But he could not shake-off the urge to explore the connection between mind and the material.
When Breath Becomes Air
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (January 12, 2016)
ISBN: 081298840X, 978-0812988406
Although his time at Cambridge gave him all he could learn about science from books, it didn’t ring right. It didn’t provide the first-hand perception of what people think makes life meaningful. He just couldn’t go along with what he read. He wanted to talk to terminally ill patients. He wanted to feel what they felt. And in his quest, he spent years at Yale studying the brain.
But there are certain things in life that cannot be felt by reading or talking. Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s life took U-turn with a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. And everything he thought he understood from talking to his terminally ill patients went for a toss. A devastating news, at the cusp of his life when all the efforts of the last decade were culminating in a life he had imagined, rattled him to the core.
In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi chronicles all this in the last few months, waiting for his time. A writer, a philosopher, and a medical doctor. A heady combination that can see life from different perspectives, eyes of not one person but countless other doctors and philosophers like him, but also with an eye of a prolific writer who can express these perspectives with the full force of language.
Imminent death can make you hopeless. Or it can give you unimaginable strength. Force you to look at the meaning of your existence and the value of everything you have coveted or fought for. This memoir is characteristic of the strength that we find when faced with an unsurmountable challenge. Feeling your mortality is a strange place. Different people react differently in face of this reality. But Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is not about mortality, it is about life and what you make if it. A must read memoir for fans of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.