Lung cancer tore up Paul Kalanithi. Paul tore back with words. When Breath Becomes Air is about, 'After thirty minutes, we let him finish dying', a Paul line for a patient. As he negotiates life walking to death, is into poetry, thought, trying to squeeze a hope out of lung cancer. But he starts not a doctor. 'I knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor.' His mother served him books...'she made me read 1984 when I was ten years old; I was scandalized by the sex, but it also instilled in me a deep love of, and care for, language...'; a Masters in English literature from Stanford; 'I didnt quit fit in an English department'. One day walking away from football, Augustine in the garden commanded: 'Take up and read,' but the voice I heard commanded the opposite: Set aside the books and practice medicine. Paul becomes a neurosurgeon, making a sharp distinction: 'While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact..' Between the brain and heart, me was told long ago by a surgeon, heart is a tad more touchy and without blood pumped by a heart, a brain cannot hold....cannot think (does then blood think?) and if there is a soul does it go with the brain or the heart....for Tuka, Kabir, Ramana Maharshi, Basho.. the heart is imperative...what happens in a coma? .. scared to raise the query ...or as Paul asks: 'What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?' Paul somewhere styles himself 'the gravedigger with the forceps'. On the third Sunday of Lent, Paul goes to church after walking away for some time. But is Jesus of help though me relishes a quiet seat in an empty church. 'Phrases of doubt fell from my mouth,' Paul writes on his screen; at a second place he chimes in: ' Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.' In an Epilogue, Lucy Kalanithi, his wife says: 'Paul was buried in a willow casket at the edge of a field in the Santa Cruz Mountains, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a coastline studded with memories...But Paul is revealed by Abraham Verghese: 'I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree outside my office and lighting this scene -- Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet's beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me...' The thing about this book for me is me wants to see him Live, just once....at surgery, at reading T.S. Eliot, in his bed, with his daughter Cady ...with the Air.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Paul Kalanithi
Lung cancer tore up Paul Kalanithi. Paul tore back with words. When Breath Becomes Air is about, 'After thirty minutes, we let him finish dying', a Paul line for a patient. As he negotiates life walking to death, is into poetry, thought, trying to squeeze a hope out of lung cancer. But he starts not a doctor. 'I knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor.' His mother served him books...'she made me read 1984 when I was ten years old; I was scandalized by the sex, but it also instilled in me a deep love of, and care for, language...'; a Masters in English literature from Stanford; 'I didnt quit fit in an English department'. One day walking away from football, Augustine in the garden commanded: 'Take up and read,' but the voice I heard commanded the opposite: Set aside the books and practice medicine. Paul becomes a neurosurgeon, making a sharp distinction: 'While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact..' Between the brain and heart, me was told long ago by a surgeon, heart is a tad more touchy and without blood pumped by a heart, a brain cannot hold....cannot think (does then blood think?) and if there is a soul does it go with the brain or the heart....for Tuka, Kabir, Ramana Maharshi, Basho.. the heart is imperative...what happens in a coma? .. scared to raise the query ...or as Paul asks: 'What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?' Paul somewhere styles himself 'the gravedigger with the forceps'. On the third Sunday of Lent, Paul goes to church after walking away for some time. But is Jesus of help though me relishes a quiet seat in an empty church. 'Phrases of doubt fell from my mouth,' Paul writes on his screen; at a second place he chimes in: ' Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.' In an Epilogue, Lucy Kalanithi, his wife says: 'Paul was buried in a willow casket at the edge of a field in the Santa Cruz Mountains, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and a coastline studded with memories...But Paul is revealed by Abraham Verghese: 'I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree outside my office and lighting this scene -- Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet's beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me...' The thing about this book for me is me wants to see him Live, just once....at surgery, at reading T.S. Eliot, in his bed, with his daughter Cady ...with the Air.
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