When Breath Becomes Air

The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?

The desert offered a pantheon

bathos

Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.

Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

What kind of life exists without language?

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?”

The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions.