The Details, Stoked

The high, sweet smell of an overripe Bartlett pear, sun that falls silver on the branch across the way, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly read through this morning, a promise I kept for myself. I'd watched the movie a few weeks ago and couldn't get it out of my head, nor was there any reason to: It is a bright pirouette of a film, an affirmation.

Appreciated even more now, in light of this masterful book, this memoir, a mere 132, big-type pages long and steeped. Bauby, the former editor, rendered locked-in by a massive stroke and speaking through the blinking of one eye. Letters read off to him until he consents to one and then another. Words congealing. Story. Hope.

Most of us are blessed with hands that grip pens, fingers that do our calling on keyboards. And yet we are, perhaps, tempted to hurry through scenes for the love of writing the next one, or to subsume a detail not readily recalled, or to lean on a familiar turn of phrase because the melody is familiar (I have done these things; I confess). If we are, if I do, I will again read Bauby, to be reminded of what a man blinking each letter into place can achieve with language and with heart:

The lighthouse and I remain in constant touch, and I often call on it by having myself wheeled to Cinecitta, a region essential to my imaginary geography of the hospital. Cincecitta is the perpetually deserted terrace of Sorrel ward. Facing south, its vast balconies open onto a landscape heavy with the poetic and slightly offbeat charm of a movie set. The suburbs of Berck look like a model-train layout. A handful of buildings at the foot of the sand dunes gives the illusion of a Western ghost town. As for the sea, it foams such an incandescent white that it might be the product of the special-effects department.