The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

by Jean-Dominique Bauby

And my weekly bath plunges me simultaneously into distress and happiness. The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted immersions 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, maneuvering 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.

If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.

it me

Which explains the gratification I feel twice daily when Sandrine knocks, pokes her small chipmunk face through the door, and at once sends all gloomy thoughts packing. The invisible and eternally imprisoning diving bell seems less oppressive.

or, at the very least, to copy out one thousand times: “I must not tamper with masterpieces.” But the gods of literature and neurology decided otherwise.

This would make great art.

As a rule, I do not recall my dreams. At the approach of day their plots inevitably fade. So why did last December’s dreams etch themselves into my memory with the precision of a laser beam? Perhaps that is how it is with coma. Since you never return to reality, your dreams don’t have the luxury of evaporating. Instead they pile up, one upon another, to form a long ongoing pageant whose episodes recur with the insistence of a soap opera.

I also remember no dreams

Today is Father’s Day. Until my stroke, we had felt no need to fit this made-up holiday into our emotional calendar.

one would never mistake the cafeteria crowd for members of the Dead Poets Society.

Hw

When I last checked, Olivier was neither a fighter pilot nor a secret agent nor adviser to an emir (careers he once considered). Fairly predictably, it is in the advertising world that he wields his inexhaustible faculty for gilding every lily.

I mechanically carried out all those simple acts that today seem miraculous to me: shaving, dressing, downing a hot chocolate.

Her purse is half open, and I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another.