subtext

I read “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby today. It is the memoir of a man who had a stroke and was left paralyzed completely. He was able to move his head and his left eye. He suffered from what they called “locked-in syndrome,” because he could still think, see, smell, and hear, but could not communicate with the outside. His speech therapist came up with the idea to rearrange the alphabet into the most commonly used letter order. Visitors would say this new alpha order and when they arrived at the letter of the word he was trying to spell, he would blink his left eye. Early in the book he wrote that he would think about what he wanted to write before someone arrived, because he did not want to waste time thinking about what he wanted to say when he was writing. It was a funny, say, moving story. It made me think about how much time we spend in our own heads, and Vygotsky’s inner speech. Jim Harrison wrote that most of the talk we do is with ourselves. Yes, community is important: Bauby’s amazing effort to communicate is testimony to that, but his book is also testimony to the depth of the world we live inside of our skulls.