I’m listening to Macy Gray under the late October sun, thinking about books.

Or, one book. If you haven’t heard of it, prepare to be emotionally wrecked, irrevocably.

THE UNSUSPECTED INTERSECTION OF ART & SCIENCE

What is the one of the most beautiful books that I have ever held in my hands? Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air.

I first read it when I overheard an otherwise stoic guy in my class say that he was up all night reading it, in tears. Oh, sign me up. I bought it that day.

What makes the book so shatteringly beautiful is not just that he wrote it on death’s doorstep, the doorstep that he waved goodbye to his blossoming surgical career, loving wife, and brand new baby daughter from, but that each page is a testament to the heartbreakingly brilliant mind that he had. The rare mind that loved and understood both science and art. Numbers and words, in a world that tells us that we need to choose. Brains tend to either see the world in fact or metaphor, concrete truth or abstract ideals. Kalanithi’s did both. He held prestigious degrees in both literature and biology. He devoured novels and dissected brains, unable to ever sever his need for one from his passion for the other. That, I believe, is what made him so painfully, unfairly, exceptional.

In reference to that aforementioned dichotomy, he writes,

“We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity.

As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. 

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.”

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Perhaps the nerdiest, densest book that I own is called Living With the Stars: How the Human Body is Connected to the Life Cycles of the Earth, the Planets, and the Stars, by Iris Schrijver and Carolus J. Schrijver. It’s essentially a science textbook, but with excerpts of poetry at the start of every chapter. The authors link the concrete, scientific world of fact, with the abstract musings of the human mind’s eternal search for grander meaning. They write from the intersection of the two, and it’s beautiful. Maria Popova, if I could ever stop mentioning her, does something similar. It’s why I fell into such a deep love with her blog so many years ago.  

A YIN AND YANG

Because Kalanithi is right. There tends to be this idea that art and science oppose each other, that the concrete nature of one directly contradicts the fluid abstractions of the other. But the way that I see it, it’s more of a yin and yang. One cannot flourish with the other.

Science, as Kalanithi points out, cannot explain everything. It can’t dissect the nuances of love or the intricacies of hope. It can’t pinpoint the root of our existence to anything more than cells. Art tells us that we are more than cells. Art offers cathartic insight into the things that science cannot touch. Science offers an explanation for the waves and art makes the connection to the experience of grief. Science presents visual parallels, such as the branches of a tree to the nerve endings of our hands, and art makes meaning out of that connection. Art tells us that there is always more.

Kalanithi possessed a profound awareness of this. It haunts every page of his book.

He writes,

“When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool…Words have a longevity I do not.”

-Paul Kalanithi

What a chilling thing to read, for now, years after his body has returned to dust, his words remain so very much alive in my hands. I would never have met his mind without them.

So he had these two, great loves. Science and Art. And how poetic that in the end, one was killing him, while the other promised to keep him alive. Science was the cold, steel scalpel slicing his life to pieces, and art was the warm hand gently placing itself in his. When science failed him, when it offered no explanation or solution to the fate that he awaited, art stepped in to promise him an eternity. 

SOMETHING LARGER

It also comforted him, with its relentless, thorny inspiration. When science told him he needed to stop, that his time was ending, that he was succumbing to something larger than him, art reminded him that there was something larger even still. 

When describing the lows of his illness, he writes,

“It was literature that brought me back to life during this time.

The monolithic uncertainty of my future was deadening; everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action. I remember the moment when my overwhelming unease yielded, when that seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted.

I woke up in pain, facing another day — no project beyond breakfast seemed tenable. I can’t go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett’s seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I’ll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

-Paul Kalanithi

Literature. The thing I have credited to saving my own life so many times, was the catalyst of his grit. It was the thing that disallowed his surrender. It made him want to continue living, even while dying. And even more, it allowed him to keep living, if only through the paper in my hands. That is extraordinary to me.

What’s more though, is how it speaks to everyday life. We’re all dying, technically. We all know that there will be a day when our atoms will return to the earth. It’s the invisible string connecting us all. When he writes my future was deadening; everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action, does that not speak to the existential uncertainty that loves to greet us on the random street corners of our everyday lives?

COMBATTING EXISTENTIAL DREAD

It is so easy to fall into questions of why, why are we here and what is the point of it? They are the all-too-exhausted questions that have haunted humanity since it took that first, screaming breath. We all get to write our own answers, decide on our own ideas. We start etching them out in those smoke-filled garages of our adolescence where we first began to awaken to the complex nuances of what it actually means to be alive, and what we are to do about it.

Kalanithi’s answers to these questions might not soothe you. They might not offer any comfort. You might have to find your own. But for me, literature, and everything that it stands to represent, is more than enough of an answer to the cold, shouting void of our earthly existence. It tells us that we are here, if I may be so bold as to say, to feel things and to think so deeply about them that just walking down the street becomes so saturated with meaning that we feel ourselves drowning in the mundane beauty of it all.

It is also, as Kalanithi knew, the one thing that documents and preserves the minds of people who will never speak again.Words, in their every-dizzying array, serve as little tattoos of who we are that we get to pass on. They get to outlive us. They get to reach out to people that we will never know and make them feel connected to something. They get to stitch our minds into the march of time.

So that when breath does become air, we don’t have to.

Love, m.

GET ON THE LIST

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.