the diving bell and the butterfly
Today while waiting the two hours and forty minutes to pick up my defective iphone, I had the great pleasure to read my second favorite gift from cover to cover The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. I’m sure by now everyone has heard of the excellent movie chronicling the former editor of French Elle’s biographic account, following his massive stroke which left him paralyzed with “locked-in syndrome.” Able to communicate only by blinking his left eye, Bauby dictated the short book not too long before his death.
The movie and the book are both amazing. Its one of the few instances I’d recommend both in whatever order. While the movie embellishes the stories told in his book, adding and subtracting characters for whatever reason and deals much more in the hopeless portion of his struggle than the book for cinematic purposes, it makes up for it by being visually stunning. Everything was enriched by the so-beautiful-it-breaks-your-heart cinematography, the perfect handling of the flash backs, the way the movie seemed to be paced perfectly ebbing and flowing like the ocean.
The book on the other hand is just simply amazing. Bauby uses his words to inspire hope, despair, the power of imagination. So much so that twenty pages in I was blinking back tears. You can see the lavish meals and the wonderful trips. You dream each dream and live each memory with him. You can feel the pain at not being able to ruffle his son’s hair. All of this told with wit, humor and aplomb. All never ceasing to be amazing, not simply because of the means with which the story was told but because of it’s sheer power and magnitude. I didn’t want to stop reading it and once I finished I wanted to pick it up and read it again and again. I found myself pouring over passages lest I missed the subtle meaning of each line.
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 mail 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 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 harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passages of time: rose 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.
It will keep the vultures at bay.
* * *
From the Chapter: Twenty to One
(my favorite passage I chose because in the movie the imagery of the iceberg breaking away with the narration behind brought tears to my eyes)
The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mirthra-Grandchamp is the women were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but fail to bet on the winner.
**heading to the at&t store in the morning to replace what I believe is simply a defective sim card.
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