A defining trait in our species is the will to strive forward. Kalanithi captures that with his posthumously published book that he wrote while dying of stage IV lung cancer and through that journey trying to more deeply understand the purpose of his work, the life he has lived and has left to live, and the lives and identities he has been entrusted to save and protect as a neurosurgeon. Kalanithi writes and poetic and philosophical memoir as his personal reflection on the challenge of facing death head-on while being both the doctor and the patient.
Motivations to Read
I've been thinking a lot about mortality and family members have been going through health issues. It was a emotionally eerie experience to learn that the author knew of his terminal condition while writing this, so I felt I would read a powerful perspective.
3 Reasons to Read
- Touching story from the perspective of when the doctor becomes the patient.
- Lessons on identity and how to face uncertainty.
- The authors perspective on what makes life meaningful.
Notable Quotes
“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”
“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death -- it's something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
Notes for this book are still being transcribed.
