Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly after a car accident left him in a coma and he woke up paralyzed everywhere except his eyes. One of his eyes got infected and sown up. With one eye left, a speech therapist helped this man communicate with one wink yes and two winks no. Jean-Dominique Bauby was the head editor of Elle magazine one day; the next day he was a vegetable. It is not only the story that made his book famous but what he wrote about imagination. Here is an excerpt:
“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches the home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory. Yet since taking up residence in my diving bell, I have made two brief trips to the world of Paris…” -page 77
This is half way through the book and it continues. I am hoping leaving you off like this will make you go out and purchase the book.
And on a funnier note,
“Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely known. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language. Just now I am struggling with the letter l, a pitiful admission for an editor in chief who cannot even pronounce the name of his own magazine!” -page 40
