Is it just a coincidence that I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a few days before I read about the death of author, Christopher Nolan?  Maybe, but I love the serendipity of discovering two unrelated things.  Must be why I’m a librarian.

Both the subject of the movie, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and the author, Nolan,  published books under extremely difficult conditions.  Bauby, at age 43, became totally paralyzed except for his left eyelid and Nolan, from birth, was mute and a quadriplegic. 

If anyone needs uplift and reminders that, current world news notwithstanding, life is much richer than we can imagine, these two men certainly provide them.  Nolan’s poetry is word-dazzling and his autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock, was a best-seller here and in the UK and won the Whitbread Prize.  Bauby had been editor-in-chief of Elle when he suffered a cerebro-vascular incident and went from living la bonne vie to living only in his mind.

Bauby’s memoir, titled the same as the movie, is more concerned with space and freedom (or the lack of it) and memory.  He dictated it to his therapist by blinking his eye when she said the correct letter. Nolan’s book is more concerned with time than space and is as inventive as his poetry.  He “wrote” it using a stick attached to his head with which he hit the keys of a typewriter.

Bauby died two days after his book was published; Nolan died twenty-two years after his autobiography came out.