Matthias Stomer, “Young Man Reading by Candlelight”
Monday
I spent all day yesterday driving from Tennessee to Maryland so today’s post is just a teaser. I finally got around to reading neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, and it is as good as I hoped it would be. Kalanithi draws on both his knowledge of literature (he has a Master’s degree in English) and his knowledge of medicine to make sense of the fact that he is dying. Tomorrow I will delve into the use he makes of specific works. This passage gives you a taste:
A few years later, I hadn’t thought much more about a career but had nearly completed degrees [as an undergraduate at Stanford] in English literature and human biology. I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand in earnest. What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land resonated profoundly relating meaninglessness and isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection. I found Eliot’s metaphors leaking into my own language. Other authors resonated as well. Nabokov, for his awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another. Conrad, for his hypertuned sense of how miscommunication between people can so profoundly impact their lives. Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.
Kalanithi sounds very much like Sir Philip Sidney in expressing his dissatisfaction with philosophy although one philosopher he would probably like very much is Martha Nussbaum, who talks about the power of literature to help us enter the mind of another. But I’ll talk more about this tomorrow.