Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Greatness, unfulfilled. Why, I ask, did Bauby waste his too-brief life in the shallows of a fashion magazine? Why didn't he suffer his stroke sooner, less fatally, so that he might have blinked his way through decades instead of months and arrived at a more substantial oeuvre? Two months of hard summer work in July and August of 1996 are the major remnant of this man's life. The reams of glossy paper that consumed much of Bauby's writing life are truly dead, just more dominoes long-ago fallen in the endless stream of anorexia and sex that floods supermarket checkout aisles, never to be remembered.

Bauby wields exceptional ability, rendering tableaux that shimmer with honest pathos. What more might he have accomplished had he lived?

Ignore the cover snippets. The Diving Bell is not "one of the great books of the century;" nor is it "gripping;" nor "a testament to freedom and the delight of the human mind." It is a beautiful adolescence brought to an unfair halt. Whether with one eye or with both hands, it is unfortunate that Jean-Dominique Bauby did not write more.

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