A review of When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
A few weeks ago, needing a good cry to escape my mental funk, I decided to read When Breath Becomes Air again. A guaranteed tearjerker I first read exactly ten years ago.
It did its job but also pushed me into a deeper funk. I cried, but not for the obvious, man-dying-of-cancer reasons.
I cried for me.
Reading this book about a neurosurgeon with a remarkable mind and an English degree, his search for meaning in life and death, his family of doctors, their dinner parties, their pursuit of knowledge, and conversations about literature made me feel like I was reading about a more evolved species. If it were fiction, I would have scoffed at the author’s attempt to make their protagonist too well-rounded.
I’m a testament to all those famous quotes about books: Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Books let you travel without moving your feet,” William Styton’s “You live several lives while reading,” and of course, Emerson’s famous “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Growing up sheltered and discouraged from doing anything that made life richer than studying, I found fiction an easy path to the outside world. Books were my legs and eyes. My news channel. My divine light. I told myself I didn’t need my own experiences if I read enough.
Even after I grew out of the shelter, I actively turned down experiences to stay home and read. Books became a veil through which I viewed the real world. Truth blended with the worlds I read; I came to care about the imaginary, someone else’s reality, more than my own.
What, in my formative years, was a solution to a problem became my way of life as an adult.
I believe learning to be an adult is a lifelong pursuit. Once you stop being a child, you spend the rest of your life entering adulthood. Paradoxically, part of being an adult is striving to preserve the child in you while ruthlessly navigating the ugliness of being grownups. I did it by shrinking my world, by reducing the touchpoints with reality whenever possible. By saddling my desires and ambitions onto beloved characters and letting them live in my stead. Why dirty myself traversing the festering lanes of physical existence when the mind was like the wind? Books could take me anywhere, let me see what the characters saw, and let me be privy to their misthoughts and epiphanies. For a few rupees, their hard-earned lessons were readily available in my hands. “This is how you live as a reader,” I told myself.
For the longest time, I couldn’t understand it when my reader friends prioritised going out over reading, even for a night. I was surprised when they revealed connections and knowledge that couldn’t have come from books.
How did they figure out, so early in their lives, that a reader’s life is enriched by living? How dare they escape the reader bubble?
To date, there is a unique blend of admiration and betrayal I reserve for well-rounded people. Certified nerds, doctors and lawyers and scientists who’ve travelled extensively or have a passion for food or music, or name their favourite football plays as easily as they would recite Emily Dickinson, who have curated a wider palette of experiences even compared to those who live for experiences. To me, they are enlightened beings. They fool us with their friendly, curious nature that opens every door for them, then bamboozle us when we get close enough to see the worlds within them. I wonder if, beyond being awed, Arjuna also felt duped when he saw his seemingly human Uncle’s divine form.
Encounters with enlightened beings rarely end with me shining in borrowed light. I am the darkness they leave after.
Paul was my age and he was dying of cancer, and I was jealous of him. He saw inside human brains, went on six-mile bike rides up scenic hills while carrying a deadly disease, witnessed numerous births and deaths; he wasn’t simply a doctor but a decorated one. He had close friends and family who understood him. He dabbled with atheism before returning to faith (a journey that seems unfathomable to me). And in between all the living, he read widely. Philosophy, poetry, fiction. And there, on his deathbed, he wrote a whole book.
He was enlightened. He might look down at us from his place in the clouds, running around like ants, still breathing and living; perhaps he would feel a tinge of envy, but would he ever trade positions? Give up his consciousness and become limited? I don’t think so.
I cried because this dead man was giving me the key to living, and I couldn’t find the lock.