![]() These flights of fancy show that Bauby yearns to have his old life back and is wistful for all he’s lost, but they also create a larger existential question about felt experiences versus imagined ones. Bauby’s imagination-symbolized by the fluttering wings of butterflies-allows him to pass the long hours that define his dreariest days. While sitting outside on a lonely terrace, he imagines himself at Cinecittà, one of Europe’s largest and most lively movie studios, directing his dream pictures. When he’s being perfunctorily sponged down each Sunday, he luxuriates in recollections of long, lazy soaks in the tub, a glass of Scotch or a good book in hand. Depending on the season and his mood, he pictures juicy melons, decadent oysters, warm beef stews, or the succulent sausages he loved as a boy, allowing his memories of taste and texture to elevate his drab present moment. When he’s being fed through a tube daily, he imagines what it would be like to eat something off a real seasonal “menu” that he curates and rotates with the changes in weather. ![]() ![]() With hours on end and no way to entertain himself other than through his own memories, Bauby decides to use the power of his mind for good rather than idleness-and uses his memories to seek out moral lessons, to reexamine what kind of friend and lover he’s been, and to find symbolism and meaning in events that previously seemed mundane or quotidian.īauby also uses memory and historical knowledge to invent alternate presents for himself. By retreading old memories, even the difficult ones, he engages in a form of entertainment and escapism-but he is also doing the difficult, necessary work of understanding his life in retrospect and confronting the sum of his experience on earth. For example, he revisits a painful series of mean fights with an ex-girlfriend, Joséphine thinks longingly about botching a lucrative tip about a horse race alongside one of his old friends and coworkers, Vincent and he even recounts in great detail the ordinary December day that became the most fateful of his life-the day of his stroke. Bauby looks back on his memories of the most beautiful and painful parts of his life to fill the void of experience which faces him each day-and to try to make sense of the man he has been and the man he is. Through these short chapters, Bauby demonstrates the power of the human mind and suggests that he is not only finding escape or distraction through his memories and flights of fancy-he is truly healing himself from the inside out and finding shelter in revisiting his memories, learning lessons from his past, and using a combination of memory, historical knowledge, and whimsy to envision an alternate present (and future). Though much of the memoir concerns Bauby’s day-to-day life as a stroke victim and “locked-in” patient at the Berck-sur-Mer hospital in France, its most detailed, joyous, and profound sections involve his memories and his imagination. Through the power of his memories and the bravery of his imagination, Bauby manages to find freedom even in the confines of the “ diving bell” he feels his body has become-and argues, through the memories, dreams, and fantasies he recounts in his memoir, that people can find freedom, relief, and indeed escape through their minds. ![]() ![]() Throughout Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir of “locked-in syndrome,” the only resource at his disposal in the face of paralysis, isolation, and the end of his days as a wealthy, powerful Paris magazine editor is his mind. ![]()
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