This young man, who bestrides the bike between her children, one excited and the other fear is Jean Dominique Bauby, the French journalist, suffering from a rare syndrome the brainstem, from the name that recalls a plane (locked-out syndrome), following a stroke in December 1995 remained completely paralyzed, unable to move only one eye and blinked.
passed the first and black despair, a prisoner of his body, which gave him the feeling of being stuck in a diving suit divers of the deep, he realized that his thoughts and his memories, like a butterfly, allowed him to fly somewhere far away in space and time, and that his adventure decided to make a book.
The book was dictated, letter by letter, with a grueling but effective method: one sent to the publishing house's stone the letters of the alphabet, according to a "code" frequency in the French language, and he, closing the lid on composed the letter the right words, then sentences, then chapters, and then throughout the book.
Jean-Do died a couple of weeks after the publication of the book, titled "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," published in Italy from the Ponte alle Grazie.
From the book was made into a wonderful film, which won awards at Cannes, but not in Los Angeles, but he would have deserved, perhaps because it was released simultaneously with another film about an extreme situation of the same type (The Sea Inside) .
I saw the film on Sky and I'm reading the book, which is well written with clarity, humor, without any self-pity, and that is worthy of the film because the film is worthy of the book.
Perhaps, if fate had not been so cruel, Bauby would have remained just a good journalist and a father a bit 'restless (he was separated from his wife, and I think it was a bit' womanizer).
But its fate that he dug from the depths of his spirit, free in the prison of the inert body, a great writer and the greatness of his humanity.
He could spend the last two years of his life, resigned, surly, incattivito, chose to live them with a fullness of thought and feeling soft and loving.
And I will call it as he called his father over ninety years old, his wives, his friends, Jean-Do. Great
Jean-Do, if as I believe heaven exists, certainly you a special place up there.
And you deserve it.
