Book review- When Breath becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

 

If unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

Heading into this year, I finished the recent read called “When Breath becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi. In my notion, the overview of the book is eloquently straightforward i.e. make life as meaningful as you can in the time you have. Be grateful.

As the author said, “you could either study meaning or could experience it”. And fortunately, while breathing, I am on the quest of studying & learning and experiencing & learning. This book shows up in the first part i.e. learning from exploring others' experiences.

When Breath Becomes Air is about the author, Paul Kalanithi, a 36 years old neurosurgeon, and his painful combat with cancer. In the first section of the memoir, the storyline is fairly peaceful and happy. It is all about Paul’s early life and his time in college. He highlighted a few of the more memorable moments in his life whether that was about his time in college, or about his time learning to become a surgeon. In the second section of the memoir, the reading started to become relatively emotional as cancer primarily started affecting Paul’s daily life and reached the ultimate end. Lucy, his spouse, finishes the memoir with an epilogue, describing the events of Paul's death. Around Christmas, Paul's third treatment option stops working, and cancer spreads to his brain.

The book has many messages about life itself and many expressive questions for the reader to ask themselves.

What attracted me to this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir is the list of questions that resonates with my life pursuit. Questions like- What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another is gradually fading away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestled in his book and I am still pondering upon.

Sharing some of the quotes I liked in this book (rather a memoir)

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

“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.”

“Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”