The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Bauby loved to travel in his former life. He counts himself fortunate to have stored up “enough pictures, smells, and sensations over the course of the years to enable [himself] to leave Berck far behind on days when a leaden sky rules out any chance of going outdoors” (103). He catalogues some of his choices: the sour smell of a New York bar, the odor of a Rangoon market. The “white icy nights of Saint Petersburg or the unbelievably molten sun at Furnace Creek in the Nevada desert” (103).

He tells us that, this week, he has flown to Hong Kong at dawn every day in his imagination, in order to attend a conference for the international editions of what he still calls “his magazine” (103). He has trouble filling in the details of these imaginary tripsdue to the fact that, in his former life, some small misfortune or happenstance always prevented him from actually making the journey to Hong Kong. On one occasion, he gave up his seat for a Jean-Paul K., who was later taken hostage by terrorist group Hezbollah. He intimates that, although he was fond of Jean-Paul, he never saw him following his incarceration and release—perhaps because he was ashamed to be “editor in chief in the frothy world of magazines while [Jean-Paul] wrestled with life on its most brutal terms” (104). However, “Now I am the prisoner and he the free man”, he muses (104).

He pictures his colleagues wrestling with daylong barrages of questions in Chinese, English, Thai, Portuguese, or Czech, as they try to answer what he sarcastically calls that “most metaphysical of questions: ‘Who is the typical Elle woman?’” (105). He pictures them wandering down the cosmopolitan streets of Hong Kong, “trotting behind the eternal bow tie of our chief executive officer as he leads his troops to the charge” (105). He imagines them asking whether they should go to Macao, or to the Felix Bar in the Peninsula Hotel, which was decorated by the French designer Philippe S. He confesses that he himself would choose the second location, out of vanity. His own portrait, taken a few weeks before his stroke, is emblazoned on the back of one of the chairs there, as he is “one of dozens of Parisians whose portraits Phillipe S. incorporated into the décor” (106). He playfully muses that he does not know whether his chair is more popular than any of the others, and entreats the reader to never tell the barman what happened to him and thereby incur the superstitions of the Chinese.