Sirāt

Sirāt (الصراط): "the path" or "the road" — a spiritual path in earthly life and a literal bridge in the afterlife. Existence. Cosmic indifference. Surrender. Where God is... Love.

"Cinema is a place for catharsis. Like the Greeks, they didn’t go to the theater to have fun. They were going to purge, to clean, to protect society from itself. I think cinema can cure the collective imaginary in that sense. We can connect with this wound that all of us have. That is a healthy thing. We have to die before dying." Oliver Laxe 

Neurosurgery

“A long time ago, I thought brain surgery was exquisite – that it represented the highest possible way of using both hand and brain, of combining art and science. I thought that brain surgeons – because they handle the brain, the miraculous basis of everything we think and feel – must be tremendously wise and understand the meaning of life. When I was younger I had simply accepted the fact that the physical matter of brains produces conscious thought and feeling. I thought the brain was something that could be explained and understood. As I have got older, I have instead come to realize that we have no idea whatsoever as to how physical matter gives rise to consciousness, thought and feeling. This simple fact has filled me with an increasing sense of wonder, but I have also become troubled by the knowledge that my brain is an ageing organ, just like the organs of the rest of my body. That my ‘I’ is ageing and that I have no way of knowing how it might have changed.[…] My understanding of neuroscience means that I am deprived of the consolation of belief in any kind of life after death and of the restoration of what I have lost as my brain shrinks with age. I know that some neurosurgeons believe in a soul and afterlife, but this seems to me to be the same cognitive dissonance as the hope the dying have that they will yet live. Nevertheless, I have come to find a certain solace in the thought that my own nature, my I – this fragile, conscious self writing these words that seems to sail so uncertainly on the surface of an unfathomable, electrochemical sea into which it sinks every night when I sleep, the product of countless millions of years of evolution – is as great a mystery as the universe itself.”

• Dr. Henry Marsh, Admissions

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death -- it's something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air