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.
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.
There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.
If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?
When Breath Becomes Air recounts the life of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer during his last year of residency.
PAUL KALANITHI was a neurosurgeon and writer. He held degrees in English literature, human biology, and history and philosophy of science and medicine from Stanford and Cambridge universities before graduating from Yale School of Medicine. He also received the American Academy of Neurological Surgery’s highest award for research. His reflections on doctoring and illness have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Paris Review Daily and in his New York Times number one bestselling book, When Breath Becomes Air.
Kalanithi died in March 2015, aged 37. He is survived by his wife, Lucy, and their daughter, Elizabeth Acadia.
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