The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly

I picked this up from the public library partly on a whim, and knowing fully well that a film had been made based on this memoir of an ex-fashion magazine's editor, a Parisian.

I truly don't know what to expect, another "Tuesday with Morrie" perhaps? No, this is not the old professor talking philosophy, far from it. Yet, such humility! Especially in view of the calamities that Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered and bared to my own shame of living, and breathing the very same air. There was no inkling of depression, only silent acceptance (enforced at times? But I couldn't have understood) and adjustments made to find a place in his world, to make sense of our world.

So in his "cocoon" (which he often referred his "locked-in syndrome" to), like in a "giant invisible diving-bell", where he was paralysed save for his neck and an eye, he bestowed his imagination freedom of a butterfly, to tell us his life story in a final blaze of the undying human spirit.