When Breath Becomes Air

A younger version of Paul’s self knew he’d never be a doctor like his father, whose career pulled him away from his children throughout their childhoods. Paul’s father moves them the family from a suburb north of Manhattan to Kingman, Arizona, to start a practice that he hopes will become regionally recognized.

During this time, Paul forms a close relationship with nature, dodging black widows and rattlesnakes. Kingman–the least educated district in America according to the census–is foreign territory for Paul’s mother. She’d been trained in India as a psychologist before marrying Paul’s father, a Christian. This cultural difference, as well as the remote location of the new family’s home, creates tension between Paul’s parents.

His mother lavishes Paul and his brother with literature, and Paul soon forms a love affair with books that only feeds his attention to schoolwork, and he’s accepted at Stanford University.

The summer before his move to school is a transformational one. His girlfriend Abigail lends him a book that, despite not being high culture, gives him something crucial to think about. Its assertion that the mind is an operation of the brain starts him thinking about human existence, and that humans are biological organisms that also have free will. He opens his Stanford course catalog, adding a number of biology and neuroscience courses to his literature courses.

After almost completing his English literature and human biology degrees, Paul feels driven by a need to understand “what makes human life meaningful” (30). Throughout college, he had experienced both the need to study and the need to experience what he studied, so when the summer of his sophomore year rolls around, he decides between an internship at a research center and a gig as a prep chef at summer camp.

He chooses the summer camp, enjoying the colors, sounds, and sights of the Eldorado National Forest. He loves being outside at sunrise, experiencing his “speck like existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe” while feeling his “presence among the grandeur” (34).

Back at school, his life is enriched by this mingling of study and experience, the pursuit of a “deeper understanding of a life of the mind” (35). During his senior year, one of his classes visits a home for people who have survived severe brain injuries. Distraught by the lack of visitors to the home, and by the guide, who explains that it is difficult to care for these children, Paul turns to his mentor. Only after this experience does he realize that a healthy brain provides our ability to make life meaningful.

Paul is accepted into the master’s program for English Literature at Stanford and dives into his studies, completing his thesis on Walt Whitman. He feels close to Whitman’s work, focusing on Whitman’s idea of “the Physiological-Spiritual Man” (40).

However, Whitman’s failings to materialize this concept, combined with Paul’s own inkling that literature has an adversity to science, leaves him again to wonder about where and how his interests intersect.