I saw an intriguing movie the other evening: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."
The true story that inspired this movie concerns Jean-Dominque Bauby, the editor of "Elle" magazine, who suffered a massive stroke that left him completely paralyzed with a condition called "Locked-in" syndrome. When he came out of his coma, he had recovered all his mental faculties but was completely paralyzed with the exception of his ability to blink his left eyelid. He now lived ''like a hermit crab dug into his rock.'' His therapist developed a method for him to communicate through blinking and he was able to dictate an entire book in this manner.
I thought this movie might be depressing but it really was not. I found it profoundly uplifting. It took Bauby 200,000 blinks to dictate the book. Each word took two minutes. What a heroic act -- to overcome one's self-pity and face reality in such challenging circumstances!

He writes for example: ''One day . . . I can find it amusing, in my 45th year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn's. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy. But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad, and a tear rolls down through the lather a nurse's aide spreads over my cheeks.''

Bauby describes the life of the mind, now the only life he has left: ''There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court ... You can sit down to a meal at any hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it's a restaurant, no need to call ahead. . . . The boeuf bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelee translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness.''

The movie starts as if the viewer is looking through Bauby's eyes, though it later widens out, and it returns to that at the end. The acting and photography are excellent. The director decided to film the movie in the same hospital where Bauby had been treated so we see the scene he describes from the balcony where they wheel him from time to time. Mathieu Amalric as Bauby is extraordinary. In the DVD extra material (which I rarely watch but in this case is interesting) he describes how difficult it was to hold himself completely still when he is not in fact paralysed. There are also nice performances from Anne Consigny as the therapist and Emmanuelle Seigner as Bauby's ex-partner and the mother of his three children. Max von Sydow gives a tremendous performance as Bauby's father.

This movie explores what it means to be human and how resilient the human spirit can be. I strongly recommend it. The New York Times said the book Bauby managed to write a book as moving as Job's

A very painful episode unfolded today on the Lebanese-Israeli border when Hizbollah returned the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers in return for several live prisoners including one convicted of a particularly heinous murder, Samir Kuntar.
It raises difficult issues. On one hand, Israel is fulfilling a pledge it makes to all its soldiers never to abandon them and granting their families some closure. On the other, it is releasing hardened terrorists who may well kill again and granting Hizbollah a propaganda victory. Even now, they are celebrating their success in liberating murderers in exchange for corpses.
I was in Israel when that attack took place in 1979. I will never forget the horror.
Here are the words of one victim, Smadar Haran Kaiser, from an account published in the Washington Post (May 18, 2003)
"It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.
Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.
As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar."
By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

Reading the newspapers today made me see what a deep economic but also moral crisis the United States has fallen into.
Here are some of the things I saw:
" IT’S dispiriting indeed to watch the United States financial system, supposedly the envy of the world, being taken to its knees. But that’s the show we’re watching, brought to you by somnambulant regulators, greedy bank executives and incompetent corporate directors.
A week ago, Bridgewater Associates, a research firm, estimated that losses from the credit crisis we’re now mired in might amount to $1.6 trillion when all is said and done.
We’ll have to wait years to see if this is accurate. But whatever the number is, it will also represent, in stunning red ink, the cost to society of financiers who are shortsighted and greedy and regulators who don’t regulate. (Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times)
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Nearly three out of five middle-class retirees will probably run out of money if they maintain their pre-retirement lifestyles, a new study from Ernst & Young has concluded.
The study, set to be released tomorrow, finds that Americans will have to drastically reduce their standard of living before retirement to live comfortably, or even avoid destitution, later in life. The study, set to be released tomorrow, finds that Americans will have to drastically reduce their standard of living before retirement to live comfortably, or even avoid destitution, later in life. (The Washington Post)
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"Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers. " (Post Book Review Section, review of Jane Mayer's 'The Dark Side')
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"Standard Operating Procedure is a devastating critique of the Bush administration. It inspires outrage at everything and everyone from the Bush Doctrine to former attorney general Alberto Gonzales to the CIA. Yet, Gourevitch laments, "the stain is ours, because whatever else the Iraq War was about, it was always, above all, about America ... (Post review of "Standard Operating Procedure" By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris)

The Romanian senate passed a law last week requiring the media to provide their audiences with 50 percent positive news. The bill’s creators say the law will help fight the harms of negative news and its effects on people’s lives.
But Romania’s National Council for Audiovisual Broadcasting, the group that will be responsible for deciding what is positive and negative, has criticized the bill, stating that news should reflect reality – whether positive or negative – independent of any laws.

I read these remarks by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va) in the Washington Post. I'm posting them because they are so true.
"The most disciplined thing I've ever done in my life is probably the act of writing a book -- and novels are harder than nonfiction. People tend to think, Oh, novels, you just start writing a story, and, you know, let the muse take you. But there's enormous discipline in writing novels. I wrote my first one cover to cover seven times. I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, and then I couldn't get it published. When I was on my, like, fifth draft for the book, I was able to get it to a guy named Ted Purdy, a really renowned editor. Anyway, I was sitting here inventing conversations between people who never existed in a room by myself -- and Purdy called me and said, "I'm going to work with you on this." This is a guy who had edited some of the greats, the true greats. And he made me believe. ... Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to write something that I believe is really good. Writing is what I will always do, no matter what. My mind always writes. You never stop writing if you're a writer."

Well here I am on the overnight shift of a major international news agency in Washington DC. I have to do seven of these shifts every three months. This is my third night of four -- I'll do another three in a few weeks.
I come in at eleven and am on duty until 7 am. One by one, my colleagues leave and by midnight I'm all alone in the large newsroom.
It's usually rather quiet but sometimes it can be busy. I edit the stories that come in from the West Coast and after that I'm on alert. If something happens, I'm responsible for sending out the news to the world. We're connected to the U.S. Geological Survery which means I get an alert every time there's an earthquake anywhere in the world. If it's a biggie, I'll have to send out a bulletin. Then, check the Internet for tsunami warnings.
I monitor CNN (which is really boring at night). I write a bit, work on my own stuff, try to stay awake, drink herbal tea.
Last night, North Korea handed over information about its nuclear program to China. This happened around 5 am our time. My colleagues in Asia couldn't get confirmation that the documents had actually been handed over. I phoned the White House duty press officer who eventually confirmed it. Then I sent a bulletin. Soon after that, they announced Bush would speak about it at the Rose Garden at 7:40 -- that was another bulletin. By this time, two of our White House correspondents had rushed in to work. News came that the United States was taking North Korea off its list of states that sponsor terrorism. We sent another bulletin. Each bulletin has to be followed within 10 minutes by a longer story -- maybe a couple of paragraphs. I was still alone editing the story until help arrived at 7 am. I was very tired, my mind hardly functioning.
Then home to try try and get some sleep. It's tough sleeping in the day. I got in three hours in the morning but it doesn't feel like really restful sleep, more like a short nap. After that, I usually exercise and eat lunch, then I try to grab another couple of hours of sleep in the afternoon. By the fourth overnight shift, I'm carrying a large sleep deficit and feeling my age. Saturday can't come soon enough.

I've been thinking about whether we should be blaming God for the recent spate of natural disasters -- the Midwest floods, the typhoon in Burma and the Chinese earthquake. What prompted this is that on Saturday I have to do a talk in synagogue on the weekly Torah portion which is Korach. It tells of a rebellion against Moses and Aaron led by Korach, Dattan and Aviram. God opens the earth which swallows them and their supporters alive.
The Torah describes several cataclysmic events – floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, plagues, famines and infestations -- all of which explicitly are sent by God with two purposes: either to punish wrongdoers, or to demonstrate God’s mighty power, or both.
The most obvious examples include the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the famine that strikes Egypt during the days of Joseph; later there are the 10 plagues, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, the giving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai and this week the destruction of Korach and his acolytes.
The idea that we are judged and punished for our sins runs very strongly through Judaism. The prophets taught that the destruction of the Temple was punishment for the sins of the people.
We express the same idea in the blood-curdling ‘Unetaneh tokef’ prayer on Rosh Hashana with its haunting lines about how on that day it is written “…who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by beasts, who by hunger and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague.”
Yet today, we rebel against the idea that natural disasters are in fact acts of God. Why? Because we know they kill indiscriminately – the old and the young, the good, the bad and the indifferent, the beautiful and the ugly. And actually, it’s worse than that. As we saw in Hurricane Katrina, such disasters invariably target the poor, the helpless, the powerless and the weakest among us. It’s offensive to think of God meting out punishment like that.
In fact, when you think about it, natural disasters could be seen as a greater challenge to our faith in God, even than the Holocaust. Auschwitz after all was constructed and operated by human beings. You can squarely blame man and not God for the Holocaust. The Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina were natural phenomena. Who do we blame for them?
Far from blaming God, we seek to blame humans for natural disasters. Every disaster is followed by a postmortem. Why weren’t the levees higher, why weren’t the evacuation plans more efficient, why wasn’t there an early warning system, why did we build on wetlands, why were construction standards so shoddy? A thousand and one questions. And we’re right to ask them. One can certainly argue that human failings made every one of the natural disasters we’ve seen in recent years a lot worse – the refusal of the military junta in Burma to allow in foreign aid is a prime example. And yes, with global warming we are creating our own man-made natural disasters.
But let’s remember: there have always been hurricanes and tsunamis and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes -- and there always will be. Man did not create earthquakes. God did.
Many people feel God’s power in nature, but usually in a positive sense. They sense the presence of the Divine in a glorious sunset or an awesome mountain peak. Surely that same presence must be present also in an earthquake. You can’t have it both ways. God didn’t only create the nice things, the beautiful things. He created everything.
That’s why I say again, natural disasters challenge our faith more than Auschwitz.
So, the question becomes, how does one answer this challenge?
I’ve wrestled with this and the only answer I find partially satisfying is as follows – I say partially satisfying because I’m still not fully convinced myself.
One of the things that makes life precious is its very uncertainty.
Every day is precious because we never know how many we have left. I’ve often thought the real punishment in capital punishment is not the moment when the lethal injection takes effect but the months and weeks leading up to it (and here I speak as one who once witnessed an execution). How dreadful it is to know the exact day and hour of your death.
Just imagine if we were born knowing exactly how long we had to live. Such knowledge would be paralyzing. How many projects would never be begun because it wouldn’t be worth it – we’d know in advance there was insufficient time to complete them? How many love affairs would never take place? How many children would never be born? How many books and symphonies would never be written?
I was at a memorial service last week and one of the speakers said something which struck me as very wise. He said, when you die, they inscribe on your gravestone the date of your birth and of your death. Yet those dates, once you are gone, are meaningless. It is the dash between them – that little dash that links the two figures – that represents your life and what you did with your life. That little dash contains all meaning.
So we live with uncertainty, never knowing how much time we have in a world full of disease, and car crashes, and collapsing cranes and earthquakes and tsunamis and freaky accidents and misfortunes. The world can be cruel and capricious and life too can be cruel and capricious – but that’s one of the things that makes it precious.