Tag: books

Book Review and Quotes from Atul Gawande's Being Mortal

Notes and Quotes from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

This morning, I spent some time reorganizing my bookshelves before the start of my workday. Reorganizing my books relaxes me. It’s like a mindfulness session, if you know what I mean. So, sometimes, I do it for that reason alone.

When I picked up Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, I began to flip through its pages and went on reading the sentences I had underlined years ago. I remember loving the book. I remember reading it back when I was “studying” death: What is the meaning of death? How does the awareness and the fear of death affect us? What is the death instinct? How does one prepare to die? Etc. Besides the classics like Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Gawande’s Being Mortal was one of the books I ended up reading.

Being Mortal talks about aging and the inevitable conclusion of life. More precisely, it talks about what medicine can do about these inescapable realities.

Here I am now, sharing, for no particular reason and after so many years, some of the sentences I had underlined, and they are not necessarily about death…

First Quote

Nothing that takes off becomes quite what the creator wants it to be. Like a child, it grows, not always in the expected direction.

– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

I like this quote because it can live outside the book it was created for. Even when used out of context, it still delivers a philosophical insight. In a way, it does not need its surrounding words; on the contrary, its surrounding words become more meaningful when it is added to them… So, let us take this quote and walk out of the book for a moment. Doesn’t it make us want to ask the following: Can the creation transcend what it was created for? And is not the answer a resounding yes? Think about it.

Second Quote

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not.

– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

Aloneness will, sooner or later, swallow us whole if we don’t chain ourselves to an idea that is larger than life. One cannot live a fulfilling life without believing in something. As they say, a good reason to live for is simultaneously a good reason to die for.

Third Quote

All we ask it to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.
This is why the betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures.

– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

Gawande repeats this idea in different parts of the book. I’d even say that he repeats it more poetically elsewhere. Don’t worry, however; the quote I chose delivers the message clearly. What Gawande keeps communicating throughout the book is that life becomes meaningful when it feels like a story. When you lose chapters of your story or when you’re no longer able to connect the dots of your self, life loses its meaning. Life doesn’t only end when one’s story ends. Life also (figuratively) ends when it ceases being a story.

Fourth Quote

Patients tend to be optimists, even if that makes them prefer doctors who are more likely to be wrong.

– Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

This is already observable with the naked eye: A person has the tendency to prefer the flatterer over the critic. But those who plan on becoming better, must eventually leave behind the former and listen to the latter.

Quotes from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Notes

One Lesson You Learn Reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

I like to describe The Old Man and the Sea as Ernest Hemingway’s Moby Dick. After all, it’s about an old man going after a giant fish. Am I right?

The first time I read it, I was in my early twenties. I didn’t like it much. The second time I read it, I was in my early thirties. I liked it a little better that time even though reading it was a little like eating sauceless boiled spaghetti – as is.

But there’s this one killer paragraph that I keep coming back to. This paragraph makes the whole novel worth reading. It will sneak inside your soul and slowly, very slowly, change you.

Actually, I opened the book today looking for this paragraph that I’m telling you about. It was like I needed to read it.

The paragraph says:

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

– Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

What do we learn from this?
Well, let me put it this way and motivate you as I simultaneously motivate myself:

Go after what you want.
Go after something big, something beautiful, something noble.
Go after it with all you have – mind, body, and spirit.
Do everything in your power.
And then, do everything in your power again.
Risk everything.
Do it.
When you inhale, it’s this dream that fills your lungs.
Do it.
It doesn’t matter if you come out of it a winner.
If you give it all you got, if you really give it all you got,
it’s all that matters.

As you chase your dreams, it’s okay to say, “You are killing me, fish.”
Because, like Charles Bukowski once put it, “Find what you love, and let it kill you.”
And as Samuel Beckett once put it, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Review of and quotes from Paul Virilio's The Aesthetics of Disappearance

A Compressed Review and Quotes from Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Paul Virilio’s ideas flow in The Aesthetics of Disappearance like rainwater in roadside channels. Raindrops (like ideas) come together in these channels and flow (like theories) towards an undisclosed final destination. There’s a (speed-)storm, but the roads are kept from flooding. Major thought systems are merely rinsed; they’re (disappointingly) left undamaged. Virilio’s picnolepsy, which is “the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed,” flows in roadside channels, proceeds through catch basins, travels through closed pipes, and where it ends up nobody knows… How do underdog theories survive? The book is read casually by a dilettante who remembers only this: the progressive increase in speed entails the progressive disappearance of consciousness. “For the picnoleptic, nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped.”

Quotes from Paul Virilo’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance

It’s our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

– Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Any man that seeks power isolates himself and tends naturally to exclude himself from the dimensions of the others, all techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance