When two people recommend the same book -separately- in a week, that's a good sign it's one to read. When Breath Becomes Air is a deeply moving and beautifully written account by a doctor, Paul Kalanithi, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer in his 30s and how he lives in the face of death.
A few quotes:
I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.
***
Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.
***
A message to his baby daughter:
That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
***
You left me, sweet, two legacies,
— A legacy of love A Heavenly Father would content, Had he the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time, Your consciousness and me.
—Emily Dickinson
***
“Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too.”
No comments:
Post a Comment