The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby.
Title: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Author: Jean-Dominique Bauby.
Genre: Non-fiction, memoir, journalism.
Country: France.
Language: French.
Publication Date: March 6, 1997.
Summary: Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French Elle, the father of two young childen, a 44-year-old was victim of a rare kind of stroke. After a coma, Bauby awoke into a body which had all but stopped working: only his left eye functioned, allowing him to see and, by blinking it, to make clear that his mind was unimpaired. He was soon able to express himself by blinking and was able eventually to compose this extraordinary book. By turns wistful, mischievous, angry, and witty, Bauby bears witness to his determination to live as fully in his mind as he had been able to do in his body.
My rating: 9.5/10
♥ The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted wallowings that were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, manoeuvring the taps with my toes. Rarely do I feel my condition so cruelly as when I am recalling such pleasures. Luckily I have no time for gloomy thoughts. Already they are wheeling me back shivering to my room on a trolley as comfortable as a bed of nails. I must be fully dressed by ten thirty and ready to go to the rehabilitation centre. Having turned down the hideous jogging-suit provided by the hospital, I am now attired as I was in my student days. Like the bath, my old clothes could easily bring back poignant, painful memories. But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.
♥ We install ourselves at the Beach Club - my name for a patch of sand-dune open to sun and wind, where the hospital has obligingly set out tables, chairs and umbrellas, and even planted a few buttercups which grow in the sand amid the weeds. In this neutral zone on the beach, a transition between hospital and everyday life, one could easily imagine some good fairy turning every wheelchair into a chariot. 'Want to play hangman?' asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it take s several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid. Impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball - and I count this. Forced lack of humour one of the great drawbacks of my condition.
But we can certainly play hangman, the national pre-teen sport. I guess a letter, then another, then stumble on the third. My heart is not in the game. Grief surges over me. His face not two feet from mine, my son Theophile sits patiently waiting - and I, his father, have lost the simple right to ruffle his bristly hair, clasp his downy neck, hug his small, lithe, warm body tight against me. There are no words to express it. My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible. Suddenly I can take no more. Tears well and my throat emits a hoarse rattle that startles Theophile. Don't be scared, little man, I love you. Still engrossed in the game, he moves in for the kill. Two more letters: he has won, and I have lost. On a corner of a page he completes his drawing of the gallows, the rope and the condemned man.
♥ I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded and spread out before my eyes, in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the post the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the glare of disaster to show a person's true nature?
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.