When Breath Becomes Air

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection

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.

Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them.

But it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

Great literary works provided their own sets of tools, compelling the reader to use that vocabulary.

I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing.

Only later would I realize that our trip had added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

Suddenly, now, I know what I want. I want the counselors to build a pyre…and let my ashes drop and mingle with the sand. Lose my bones amongst the driftwood, my teeth amongst the sand….I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night.

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?