{"id":2671,"date":"2023-11-20T15:06:26","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T15:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/?p=2671"},"modified":"2023-11-20T15:49:51","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T15:49:51","slug":"when-breath-becomes-air-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/20\/when-breath-becomes-air-2\/","title":{"rendered":"When Breath Becomes Air"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Endless books and authors followed, as we worked our way methodically down the list:\u00a0<em>The Count of Monte Cristo,\u00a0<\/em>Edgar Allan Poe,\u00a0<em>Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe,\u00a0<\/em>Gogol,\u00a0<em>The Last of the Mohicans,\u00a0<\/em>Dickens, Twain, Austen,\u00a0<em>Billy Budd\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college:\u00a0<em>The Prince, Don Quixote, Candide, Le Morte D\u2019Arthur, Beowulf,\u00a0<\/em>Thoreau, Sartre, Camus. Some left more of a mark than others.\u00a0<em>Brave New World\u00a0<\/em>founded my nascent moral philosophy and became the subject of my college admissions essay, in which I argued that happiness was not the point of life.\u00a0<em>Hamlet\u00a0<\/em>bore me a thousand times through the usual adolescent crises. \u201cTo His Coy Mistress\u201d and other romantic poems led me and my friends on various joyful misadventures throughout high school\u2014we often sneaked out at night to, for example, sing \u201cAmerican Pie\u201d beneath the window of the captain of the cheerleading team. (Her father was a local minister and so, we reasoned, less likely to shoot.) After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I\u2019d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she\u2019d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Endless books and authors followed, as we worked our way methodically down the list:\u00a0The Count of Monte Cristo,\u00a0Edgar Allan Poe,\u00a0Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe,\u00a0Gogol,\u00a0The Last of the Mohicans,\u00a0Dickens, Twain, Austen,\u00a0Billy Budd\u2026 By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college:\u00a0The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":916,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entrepreneurship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2671"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2700,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2671\/revisions\/2700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armeniansbeyond.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}