There is an even longer shot that I do propose to attempt even though its likely efficacy lies at the outer limits of probability. I am going to try to have my entire DNA “sequenced,” along with the genome of my tumor. ... So perhaps I will be able to contribute a little bit to enlarging the knowledge that will help future generations.

It could really have an impact if I get it right. Something that will get the next generation to see there is a way to think about politics that is not just the way we've been habituated to do it. I care about that and I think I can do it.

Dear God, not a bucket list? Really, there is nothing that I want to do before I die, except perhaps just lie back and enjoy the morphine, daydreaming my way to oblivion.

Yes, but I don’t think I have the energy. I’ve been hit in the face by a cricket bat at 1,000 miles an hour. I think the last round-up is here. But that’s OK. It would be bad manners to complain. I’ve had a lucky life, and I’m grateful for it.

And I spent four years at a boarding school in the country, probably a rather abusive boarding school, and seeing very little of my parents, and that was a very bad time for me. A bad and almost a mad time. ... I think that some sort of trust, and ability for closeness, may have been compromised. And I think I’ve perhaps, to some extent, sort of kept a distance since that time, although this is not a distance I feel with my patients or my students.

It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. ... I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.” “We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

The first biography I read — I think the first scientific biography — was Madame Curie . And my mother, who was a surgeon, worked at the Marie Curie Hospital. She’d met Marie Curie, who was one of her great heroines. And reading the book, I think, was the first portrait of a scientist and the romance of a scientific life.