The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

by Jean-Dominique Bauby

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

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.

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.

All this reshuffling has a purpose: to make it easier for those who wish to communicate with me.

Meticulous people never go wrong: they scrupulously note down each letter and never seek to unravel the mystery of a sentence before it is complete. Nor would they dream of completing a single word for you.

His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil, before I realized it was only mine.

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,...

There is always the chance that we will stumble upon some unknown corner of the hospital, see new faces, or catch a whiff of cooking as we pass.

Or else I dissolve into the landscape and there is nothing more to connect me to the world than a friendly hand stroking my numb fingers.

In one section are a score of comatose patients, patients at death’s door, plunged into endless night.

And to complete the picture, a niche must be found for us, broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.

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

As the weeks go by, this forced solitude has allowed me to acquire a certain stoicism

The invisible and eternally imprisoning diving bell seems less oppressive.

You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language.

Sometimes the phone interrupts our work, and I take advantage of Sandrine’s presence to be in touch with loved ones, to intercept and catch passing fragments of life, the way you catch a butterfly.

These two are the outer links of the chain of love that surrounds and protects me.

I am overwhelmed by them. How dearly I would love to be able to respond with something other than silence to these tender calls.

“Are you there, Jean-Do?” she asks anxiously over the air. And I have to admit that at times I do not know anymore.

The scene has remained engraved in my memory.

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

Every now and then he calls, and I listen to his affectionate voice, which quivers a little in the receiver they hold to my ear.

It cannot be easy for him to speak to a son who, as he well knows, will never reply.

So why did last December’s dreams etch themselves into my memory with the precision of a laser beam?

I try desperately to warn them, but my dream conforms perfectly with reality. I am unable to utter a word.

Irrational terror swept over me. What if this man got carried away and sewed up my left eye as well, my only link to the outside world, the only window to my cell, the one tiny opening of my diving bell?

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

First I downed a half-bottle of mineral water at one swallow. Divine bottle, never will I forget the touch of your glass neck on my parched lips!

For a while I watched the wall behind our pillows jump into and out of darkness. What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?

the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter.

So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball—and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.

and I, his father, have lost the simple right to ruffle his bristly hair, clasp his downy neck, hug his small, lithe, warm body tight against me.

My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible. Suddenly I can take no more.

No one can predict whether Théophile will be happy; but it is certain that he will live in the shadows.

Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, Sheila, Clo-Clo François, Françoise Hardy—

Sylvie and I remain alone and silent, her hand squeezing my inert fingers. Behind dark glasses that reflect a flawless sky, she softly weeps over our shattered lives.

My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.

I shed a few tears as we passed the corner café where I used to drop in for a bite. I can weep quite discreetly. People think my eye is watering.

Nothing was missing, except me. I was elsewhere.

everybody now understands that he can join me in my diving bell, even if sometimes the diving bell takes me into unexplored territory.

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?

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.

My present life is divided between those who knew me before and all the others. What kind of person will those who know me now think I was? I do not even have a photo to show them.

I know who he is, but who is he really?

But I never tire of the smell of french fries.

All you can see through the half-open doors are bedridden wretches whom fate has cast to the far edge of life.

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.

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.