The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

by Jean-Dominique Bauby

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly.

Like the bath, my old clothes could easily bring back poignant, painful memories. But I see in the clothing 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.

Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter—when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.

Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.

The invisible and eternally imprisoning diving bell seems less oppressive.

We are both locked-in cases, each in his own way: myself in my carcass, my father in his fourth-floor apartment.

I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.

Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?

Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we 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 in which we fail to bet on the winner.

Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing.