The memoir is fascinating, the movie even more so:  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Once a high flying fashion mogul, Jean-Dominique Bauby unexpectedly suffers a stroke while driving through the French countryside and subsequently wakes up in a hospital to find that he can no longer speak.  His hearing is fine, but only one of his eyes work.  He lives in a world of sound to which he can no longer contribute.
     So Bauby learns to speak with his eyes.  Through the painstaking efforts of a therapist and amaneusis, he pens a memoir of his experience.  It's an unbearably slow process, but he preserves.  Tragically, he dies shortly after it is published.
     Life is so capricious, so terribly capricious.  We will never understand why things happen as they do.  And we will never know, fully, what lies around the corner.  We are helpless before the raw face of fate.
     Yet it is often too blithe and easy to say that amidst the unpredictability and contingency of existence, God is anything but capricious, that he is immutably stable and present, and that we can therefore trust him in all things.  If, however, we believe, counter to the enormous randomness of a materialistic worldview, in a personal, loving, and necessarily omnipresent God, we cannot do otherwise.  We realize we can trust this fact of a personal presence, this personal presence who suffered the capriciousness of life even more than we, a personal presence in whom therefore somehow, some way, meaning and purpose prevail.
     Rest well, Jean-Dominique.