Lesson from life
Hello, my friends. For those who seek meaningful experiences, I am writing today. However, many of you may not know Jean-Dominique Bauby or his novel ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.’
This man lived something rare, he lived inside death while he was in touch with life. Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist and writer, suffered a severe stroke at the age of forty-three that left him unable to move any muscle in his body except for the eyelid of his left eye. His body became an eternal prison for his spirit. He cannot speak or move at all, but he only looks at the world from his left eye and communicates with it through his eyelid.
His mind was completely sound, he was aware of the reality he lived in and the events happening around him. This is what drove him to write his novel ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.’ He challenged all circumstances and wrote this novel with the help of his colleague Claude, who sat next to him and recited the entire alphabet for him, again and again, to choose the required letter by blinking his left eyelid. She spent six hours with him every day to complete just half a page, and so on until the novel was finished with one hundred fifty pages.
Jean-Dominique Bauby tried to live freely with his spirit outside the confines of his paralyzed body when he believed that his spirit could roam like a butterfly, visiting the woman he loves and caressing her face while she sleeps, traveling to distant lands to visit places he could never reach before.
He describes his state in the narrative by saying: “He is slowly distancing himself, but with confidence, like a sailor watching from the open sea the disappearance of the shore from which he set out, feeling his past fading away; his old life is still kindled within him, but it is about to gradually turn into ashes of memory.”
Dominique concludes his novel, which was adapted into a film directed by Julian Schnabel, by describing his state as he drifts into contemplation of imagined scenes he has recovered and sinks into thought, questioning: “Are there in this space keys to open my diving suit? A subway line without a destination? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? I must search elsewhere. I will go there.” This marks the end of his life journey and the liberation of his soul from the shackles of his body, as he passed away three days after the novel was published.
