A certain imaginative vigour is necessary to recompose the process by which the letters appeared one by one. It requires a retreat to spelling. S P E L L E R

Poetry lurches ahead. As Bauby has communicated to a transcriber: "Meticulous people never go wrong: they scrupulously note down each letter and never seek to unravel the mystery of a sentence before it is complete." Others run by intuition. And the results unravel mysterious kinships of words within words.

Bauby communicates by blinks that stop a reciter at the wanted letter.

The jumbled appearance of my chorus line stems not from chance but from cunning calculation. More than an alphabet, it is a hit parade in which each letter is placed according to the frequency of its use in the French language. That is why E dances proudly out front, while W labors to hold on to last place. B resents being pushed back next to V, and haughty J [...] while T and U, the tender components of tu, rejoice that they have not been separated. All this reshuffling has a purpose: to make it easier for those who wish to communicate with me.

T H E J U M B L E D

The story as told is silent about how the word breaks are indicated. How a sentence conclude. Does it ever? It is not by a single wave breaking against the shore that one judges the direction of the tide. The frontispiece depicts a man in a wheel chair on a balcony, head propped. The figure looks out to sea. Somehow the lines fading to the horizon echo the rhythmic design of the tile work on the floor, its squares receding to some vanishing point behind a wall.