Three years ago, in January 2005, I suffered a serious traumatic brain injury. The injury placed me in a coma for ten days and the hospital for weeks more. The injury changed my life. Since that time I have looked for voices and means of expression of what I went through and continue to carry with me.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the English translation of the French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon written by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby served as editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine ELLE. In December 1995 at the age of 43 his life changed. He suffered a massive stroke. The results of the stroke included complete and permanent paralysis of almost all his voluntary muscles while retaining nearly full awareness of his senses. Vision, hearing, tactile sensation remained absent any ability to act upon the information those senses provided. This rare condition is known as “locked-in syndrome”. For Bauby, his sole means of communication to the outside world was the ability to blink his left eye.

Using that one remaining ability, Bauby wrote and edited this book– painstakingly, tediously, letter-by-letter, two minutes per word, he wrote the book over the course of a year. The book gives voice to his thoughts and feelings about his life and the situation in which he found himself. The title serves as a clear description: the diving bell refers to the empty shell he considered his body, the butterfly refers to his spirit. The book was published in 1997. Two days after publication, Bauby suffered a heart attack and died. His astonishing book continues to give cheer to those who face life’s ultimately impossible odds and the confrontation of the sudden, merciless, fickle nature of life. The book serves as an inspirational reminder of mortality: the plain fact that swift and sudden changes can sweep away anything we might have taken for granted.

From the book’s back cover:

In a voice that is by turns wistful and mischievous, angry and sardonic, Bauby gives us a celebration of the liberating power of consciousness: what it is like to spend a day with his children, to imagine lying in bed beside his wife, to conjure up the flavor of delectable meals even as he is fed through a tube. Most of all, this triumphant book lets us witness an indomitable spirit and share in the pure joy of its own survival.

I knew the Oscar-nominated film There Will Be Blood was inspired by the novel Oil!. What somehow slipped through my awareness was that Upton Sinclair was the novel’s author. This would be the same Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, the seminal novel about the Chicago stockyards in the 19th Century. I ran across the recent printing of the novel browsing the bookstore last week. I picked it up.

Contemporary society’s need for oil continues to dominate the social, economic and political landscape. I believe it is to this end that this edition’s back cover reads:

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy in this glorious 1927 novel to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California’s early oil industry. Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption and class warfare, feature a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. Sinclair’s epic drama endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.

Today’s oil fields may no longer be in America’s back yards of Texas and California but I do not think that makes them any less important or relevant. On the contrary, I believe that makes them all the more relevant, their impact all the stronger. While I do not live in The Jungle back of the yards, that particular Chicago that novel portrays continues to haunt me. Also, while I do not own an automobile– and thus avoid a more visceral connection to oil through the ritual of the gas pump– I suspect Oil! will likely have a similar effect.

Richard Matheson wrote the apocalyptic novel, I Am Legend, in 1954. It is the story of the last man alive in a world overrun by a changed, bestial version of humanity. It is partly a vampire story. It is partly a zombie story. It is one of the definitive end of the world stories. I cannot help but hear Michael Stipe‘s rapid-fire mumble in the background as I read it. The novel has been adapted into film three times: Vincent Price starred in The Last Man on Earth in 1964. Charlton Heston starred in The Omega Man in 1971. Will Smith stars in the recently released film by the same name, I Am Legend. While I have only ever seen The Omega Man, I understand each of these film adaptations differ from the original novel in varying ways. I like a good vampire story; I like good zombie stories too. And you just can’t go wrong with positing the end of the world in gruesome ways.

So while the wintertime temperature plummets in Chicago, I think I’m going to curl up with a good book, maybe light a fire and see how Robert Neville gets through the original version of this story. If he does.

I discovered Max Frisch in the very early spring of 1991. I was living in Tübingen, Germany and picked up Homo Faber on the recommendation from a friend of mine at the university. The title is Latin for “man the maker”: a creature who controls his environment with tools. Stefan based his recommendation on my literary interests of the day and my desire to read modern literature in German. By the time I had completed the book, Max Frisch had died and Volker Schlöndorff had completed a film version of the story. Walter Faber, the story’s engineer protragonist, does not believe in coincidence or fate. Mathematics explains his life adequately as well as he is concerned. He tells you this in the first few pages. In this early paragraph, Frisch delivers all of the major plot points of his novel. All of the story’s dramatic twists and turns he lays out in a concise description without embarassment. And still we read on, we read the remaining two hundred pages as if we had forgotten he had told of all of this. I think we read on because it is the telling of the story that is important, rather than the particular results. All of this came back to me as I picked up the novel again. Sadly, I have not been able to find the film version since viewing it at the Universität Tübingen cinema.

My German Sprachkentnisse has waned in the intervening years, so this time I’m reading the Michael Bullock translation. Faber describes his life, or at least that significant portion of it in the novel, as eine ganze Kette von Zufällen— a whole chain of accidents. That description has resonated with me ever since: a series of otherwise disconnected events, some beautiful, some ugly where the only common element is my having lived them.

Not ten minutes after I finished reading The Mist, Whirl pressed this collection of Stephen King stories into my hand, Everything’s Eventual. She pointed out the inclusion of at least two Dark Tower-related stories: “The Little Sisters of Eluria” and “Everything’s Eventual”. When I cracked the binding I also discovered the collection includes the story “1408”. Whirl and I watched the movie adaptation of that story just a few weeks ago.

So as I dive into these 14 stories, I think I’ll follow the Tarot-inspired ordering of them without alteration. There are days when I just want an author to tell me a good story and I don’t read much more into it than that. These are those days.

Stephen King published The Mist twice before: the novella is included both as part of a broader 1980 anthology of horror stories from various authors entitled Dark Forces and in a 1985 collection of entirely Stephen King stories, Skeleton Crew. In conjunction with the movie adaptation of the story, publishers have brought a new, standalone, version to market. I had to take a quick trip to St. Paul, Minnesota for work, so I dragged this along for something to read on the plane. It is interesting to me to note that my plane left the Minneapolis-St. Paul runway just as a powerful winter snowstorm descended on the region.

King has an uncanny ability to take the most mundane item or experience and instill it with terror. I still remember an interview he did on the Tonight Show where he transformed a simple rocking chair into an item of utter horror. King did this spontaneously, without preparation. This is what King does with The Mist. He wrestles with the concepts of desolation and desperation, giving monstrous form to those fears from the amorphous void of a powerful summer storm followed by an even more mysterious fog.