The Greatest Science Books of 2016
.
4.WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR
All life is lived in the shadow of its own finitude, of
which we are always aware — an awareness we systematically blunt through the
daily distraction of living. But when this finitude is made acutely imminent,
one suddenly collides with awareness so acute that it leaves no choice but to
fill the shadow with as much light as a human being can generate — the sort of
inner illumination we call meaning: the meaning of life.
That
tumultuous turning point is what neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi chronicles
in When
Breath Becomes Air — his piercing memoir of being diagnosed
with terminal cancer at the peak of a career bursting with potential and a life
exploding with aliveness. Partway between Montaigne and Oliver Sacks, Kalanithi weaves together philosophical reflections on
his personal journey with stories of his patients to illuminate the only thing
we have in common — our mortality — and how it spurs all of us, in ways both
minute and monumental, to pursue a life of meaning.
What emerges is an uncommonly insightful,
sincere, and sobering revelation of how much our sense of self is tied up with
our sense of potential and possibility — the selves we would like to become,
those we work tirelessly toward becoming. Who are we, then, and what remains of
“us” when that possibility is suddenly snipped?
Paul
Kalanithi in 2014 (Photograph: Norbert von der Groeben/Stanford Hospital and
Clinics)
A
generation after surgeon Sherwin Nuland’s foundational
text on confronting the meaning of life while dying, Kalanithi sets out to answer these questions and their
myriad fractal implications. He writes:
At age thirty-six, I had reached the
mountaintop; I could see the Promised Land, from Gilead to Jericho to the
Mediterranean Sea. I could see a nice catamaran on that sea that Lucy, our
hypothetical children, and I would take out on weekends. I could see the
tension in my back unwinding as my work schedule eased and life became more
manageable. I could see myself finally becoming the husband I’d promised to be.
And then the unthinkable happens. He recounts
one of the first incidents in which his former identity and his future fate
collided with jarring violence:
My back stiffened terribly during the flight,
and by the time I made it to Grand Central to catch a train to my friends’
place upstate, my body was rippling with pain. Over the past few months, I’d
had back spasms of varying ferocity, from simple ignorable pain, to pain that
made me forsake speech to grind my teeth, to pain so severe I curled up on the
floor, screaming. This pain was toward the more severe end of the spectrum. I
lay down on a hard bench in the waiting area, feeling my back muscles contort,
breathing to control the pain — the ibuprofen wasn’t touching this — and naming
each muscle as it spasmed to stave off tears: erector spinae, rhomboid,
latissimus, piriformis…
A security guard approached. “Sir, you can’t
lie down here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, gasping out the words.
“Bad … back … spasms.”
“You still can’t lie down here.”
[…]
I pulled myself up and hobbled to the
platform.
Like the book itself, the anecdote speaks to
something larger and far more powerful than the particular story — in this
case, our cultural attitude toward what we consider the failings of our bodies:
pain and, in the ultimate extreme, death. We try to dictate the terms on which
these perceived failings may occur; to make them conform to wished-for
realities; to subvert them by will and witless denial. All this we do because,
at bottom, we deem them impermissible — in ourselves and in each other.
BRAIN PICKINGS
No comments:
Post a Comment