Ultra Orange and Emmanuelle from the soundtrack of the movie “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” It’s a phenomenal movie made even more so with some real photographic and musical gems. Here’s a basic summary if you haven’t yet heard what it’s about:
On December 8, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later, mentally aware of his surroundings but unable to speak and physically paralyzed with the exception of some movement in his head and eyes (one of which had to be sewn up due to an irrigation problem). The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten months (four hours a day). A transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome. The book was published in France on March 7, 1997. Bauby died just two days after the publication of his book.
I highly recommend seeing the movie. Don’t think you’re going to go out and enjoy the rest of your day, but it surely is worth a night of beautiful sadness.
Here’s a photo of the real Jean-Dominique Bauby (I’m sorry Jen…I don’t know who the photographer was):
