Seeing Paris in the Blink of an Eye

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

“That city with a hundred mouths and a thousand cars, which knows nothing, but says everything,” is how Jean-Dominique Bauby describes Paris, the city where he lived and worked as editor-in-chief of French Elle before his stroke. The stroke left him at age 43, completely paralyzed except for his left eyelid and partial head movement. He was one of the rare patients suffering from ‘Locked-in Syndrome’, meaning that from the time of his stroke, and his recovery from a coma, he remained almost entirely paralyzed and mute, but still completely lucid.

Under these most difficult circumstances, he took on the task with the help of transcribers to communicate his book by blinking his eyelid at the sound of a letter.

Just the sheer thought that every letter on each of these 139 pages had to be communicated by a blink of an eye gives a weight and urgency to this project. Bauby died soon after the publication of his book in 1997.

He has left of us with the heartrending view of the world from the bed of an intern who addresses his imprisonment in the most simple and succinct terms, but with the beauty and grace of haiku. As a fellow blogger, Birocco, wrote after reading Bauby’s account – you could send some bloggers to the moon and their writing would still be crap - . Bauby was a talented writer.

I looked in vain for information on the net about his life – before the life-changing event, and aside from the Wikipedia info giving the dates of his stroke and death, little is mentioned about any writing he had done before his stroke. You need to read his book to learn about his life – which sounds in its way to be not so extraordinary – if you take away the glamour of working in the offices of a well-known magazine in one of the most glamorous cities in the world.

It is not necessarily the city or his business life he misses as much as the things that most of us take for granted – being able to eat – for example. His fascination with food, the preparation of food and the smells even of potatoes frying in oil becomes at times all-absorbing.

Meanwhile, back at the Café Flore, in the eyes of his peers, he himself has turned into a ‘turnip’.

Far from it, he has condensed his life, analyzed letter by letter. Confronted the regrets and the lost opportunities, for me, the most painful being the chapter about the horse race: Bauby writes after having failed to place a bet on a horse that was sure to win at 20 to 1: The horse was named Mithra-Grandchamp – “Mithra-Grandchamp was the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments we allowed to drift away. Today it seems that my whole life was nothing but a string of near miss: a race whose result we knew beforehand, but in which we fail to bet on the winner.”

From a personal context, this book is extraordinarily moving to read because my sister’ and my father suffered very similar experiences with a stroke that left him in a veteran’s hospital for four years.

Read this book – if only as a reminder to yourself to make the most of your life – and if you find yourself in Paris – savor each morsel of food. Walk as much as you can if you can walk. Don’t let any opportunities slip by. Go to the races. Bet on a horse with a beautiful name. Tell a beautiful woman you love her – or tell a man he’s your hero.