art is the new religion

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

Until I heard about Julian Schnabel's film adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I'd never heard Jean-Dominique Bauby's story.  In case you're not familiar with it, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the Editor of French Elle, a successful man with kids and a full life, until one day at the age of 43 he suffered a stroke and lived the rest of his short life with "locked-in" syndrome.  His entire body was paralyzed except for one eye, but his spirit and intellect remained whole.

Think about that for a minute.

We have no way to fathom what we might do in that situation, how we might have felt.  But Bauby lived to tell us how he felt, what he did, what it was like, by writing a memoir.  His speech therapist devised a tablet with the letters of the alphabet listed in order of the frequency of their use (in the French language) and he dictated his entire memoir to her, letter by letter.

The memoir is short; I finished it in less than two hours yesterday. The writing is rich, moving from simple to lyrical, from angry to ebullient.  Each chapter is no more than three pages or so, but he captures full emotions, truths and experiences in those short swatches of prose.

''One day when attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune).'' 

At one point I stopped myself mid-page and thought about how long it might have taken Bauby to craft one sentence: first forming it in his head, editing it in his mind until it was ready, then holding it there and dictating it to his transcriber, one letter at a time.  How long would it take to create one sentence as short as this one? 

Bauby died two days after the French publication of his book.

I know there are a lot of aspiring writers in the world, and we give ourselves all kinds of excuses why we can't write.  But reading this book will make you laugh at your own excuses.  It will transmute many of the hardships and problems we think we endure every day.  In fact, it might be the perfect book to start off the new year and remind ourselves how very much we all take for granted and how we should appreciate life in the moment.  Just what are we determined to be or do or finish, and through what circumstances will we persevere?

If you have any interest in this story or Schnabel's film, please take the few hours of your time to read Bauby's book.  It's a triumph and a legacy that deserves to be shared and celebrated.

• Buy The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death from Amazon.

Reading for the Long Weekend

I usually don't post about a book until after I've read it, because it's a big risk that I'll never pick it up or finish it, and what if I tell you about a book that ends up being terrible?  I'm just going to tell you about this one anyway. The other night I was strolling around Book People here in Austin, looking for a different kind of book, something I hadn't heard about before.  I read through probably 25 different staff recommendations before I settled on this book:

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts    

Synopsis from the back of the book:  "Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay -- where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia.  Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release."

Anyone who knows me will recognize that this isn't my typical reading fodder.  No matter what type of book I'm looking to read, I subject them all to the first-page test.  If it doesn't grab me on the first page, I move on.

This book had one of the best first pages I've read in a long while.  In fact, I was sold on the first paragraph:    

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.  I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.  It doesn't sound like much, I know.  But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility.  And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life."