作
者保罗·卡兰尼斯先后就读于斯坦福大学、剑桥大学和耶鲁大学医学院，曾是一名优秀的神经外科医生。36岁时，他被诊断出患有晚期肺癌，瞬间从治病救人的医
生，转变为危在旦夕的病患。面对死亡，如何使自己有限的生命更具价值？在病榻间，卡兰尼斯从科学的角度思索了对人生的认识。他于2015年3月去世，终年
37岁。
一个看上去即年轻又已攀登了人生最高峰的神经科医生，前途无限之刻。。。。。。上帝却给他画上了句号，让人惊叹不已。当一个人在所向披靡，无所不能为的时刻，这个打击是致命的。What
makes a life worth living? 他写了这本书回答了这个问题。
a young neurosurgeon
faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What
makes a life worth living?
At the age of thirty-six, on
the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul
Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor
treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just
like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath
Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student
“possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms
die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford
working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally
into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living
in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward
your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to
have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of
the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely
observed memoir.
Paul Kalanithi died in March
2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift
to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality,
in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from
Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When
Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the
challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient,
from a brilliant writer who became both.
书名来自于英国诗人FULKE GREVILLE的一首诗《You that seek what life is in death》
You that Seek What Life is in Death
BY FULKE GREVILLE
You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
BY FULKE GREVILLE
You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
