Sunday Salon: Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
This book arrived unbidden in the mail yesterday. I'd not heard of it before, but since it was so short I decided to read it, and so I did, straight through, a thoroughly accidental read. By the time I'd finished I was too tired to write a Sunday Salon post, so here, belatedly, is my reaction to the book.
Vintage © 1998, 144 pages [amazon]
On December 8th, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the forty-three-year-old editor-in-chief of the French Elle, suffered a massive stroke that damaged his brain stem and left him a quadriplegic. Bauby could no longer speak, but his intellect remained intact, trapped inside the "diving bell" of his body. He could shake his head and blink his left eye, and he was able to spell out complex thoughts by blinking when an interlocutor, running a finger across an alphabet board, pointed to the correct letter. During the summer of 1996 Bauby wrote a memoir of his incapacitation, "dictating" by eye blink, letter by letter, the prose he had composed mentally. Bauby writes about his life as a quadriplegic: the searing moment when he realized what everyone else around him already knew, that he wasn't going to regain his speech or mobility; his stints in physical therapy and speech therapy; the indignations of being helpless. He is not self-pitying, but very much aware of the horror of his situation and of what is going on around him.
Posted by Debra Hamel on November 26, 2007 | 
