Honky
Paris has stop signs and a subway and people and sometimes it rains. It's a city. When you are working full-time--at home--and not interacting with people very often, sometimes your mind tends to reduce your surroundings to their very elements. It's like saying a word over and over again: garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage, garage...a hard g, ahs where you expect ays, a soft g.
I look out my window and see a Volkswagen dealership. And pavement. And I could be anywhere. It's usually quiet on my block--Parisians don't honk as often as Americans--but if someone is blocking the road, even if it's a utility truck that has nowhere else to go, well, then! Honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk. Yes, we must teach this driver a lesson. How could he have blocked the road?! Monsieur, we simply don't do that! This is a disruption, and we'll not stand for it!
It reminds me of the harsh schoolteachers you see in French new wave films like The 400 Blows: they seem incalculably cruel, but you know they are just going through the motions. It's cultural glue: that teacher had a teacher who suffered through the same kind of teacher, and so did that teacher, and the one before, all the way centuries back to the advent of the Sorbonne, when students were running wild, drunk and brawling in the sewage-drenched streets, and if this teacher didn't make a spectacle of terrorizing his students like his teacher terrorized him when he was unruly, well, then, the whole system would just fall apart.
So they keep honking.
And I remain at my desk by the window, trying to run a Student's t-test, wondering when Paris is going to thrill me again. Because now it's honking honk honk honk, and the plugs and voltage are different, and I have to eat three times a day, and my thumb makes the same motion each time I ignite my lighter, and in my head I'm rehearsing the next short French conversation I'm going to have so I don't freeze up ("bonjour madame, je cherche des...um...en anglais on dit 'batteries,' comment on dit en francais?"), and I meet people out for drinks, and they're quite nice, but really they are just friends of someone I know back home, and...
Why did I come here?
Then I walk outside for a cigarette and the Eiffel Tower is blinking, 20,000 lights blinking at once, and I turn around and notice that it's even more beautiful to see the reflection of the lights in the windows of my building. And this is more beautiful than looking directly because I can only see parts of the tower, the parts reflecting in the window, but my mind fills in the rest on my visual canvas, and I realize that my mind does the same thing with language more and more each day, filling in the blanks, and what my mind can't fill in, the people I talk to can, and I like speaking French, and they like speaking English, and we're sort of dancing with language, and then I think about my Latin teacher in high school and I feel like a humanist, and then I realize that deciding to learn another language is like deciding to accept all of humanity, and talking to anyone is like talking to everyone, and the longer I'm here, the more I understand how connected today is to 2,000 years ago in a country like this, a normal country that wasn't a social experiment half a world away isolated between two oceans, and if I let myself drift out with the undercurrent, past deGaulle and Haussmann and Napoleon and Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu and Henri IV and the Knights Templar and Philippe Auguste and the waves get longer and higher and Caesar, eventually I'll wash up on the same shore as everyone else.
I look out my window and see a Volkswagen dealership. And pavement. And I could be anywhere. It's usually quiet on my block--Parisians don't honk as often as Americans--but if someone is blocking the road, even if it's a utility truck that has nowhere else to go, well, then! Honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk honnnk. Yes, we must teach this driver a lesson. How could he have blocked the road?! Monsieur, we simply don't do that! This is a disruption, and we'll not stand for it!
It reminds me of the harsh schoolteachers you see in French new wave films like The 400 Blows: they seem incalculably cruel, but you know they are just going through the motions. It's cultural glue: that teacher had a teacher who suffered through the same kind of teacher, and so did that teacher, and the one before, all the way centuries back to the advent of the Sorbonne, when students were running wild, drunk and brawling in the sewage-drenched streets, and if this teacher didn't make a spectacle of terrorizing his students like his teacher terrorized him when he was unruly, well, then, the whole system would just fall apart.
So they keep honking.
And I remain at my desk by the window, trying to run a Student's t-test, wondering when Paris is going to thrill me again. Because now it's honking honk honk honk, and the plugs and voltage are different, and I have to eat three times a day, and my thumb makes the same motion each time I ignite my lighter, and in my head I'm rehearsing the next short French conversation I'm going to have so I don't freeze up ("bonjour madame, je cherche des...um...en anglais on dit 'batteries,' comment on dit en francais?"), and I meet people out for drinks, and they're quite nice, but really they are just friends of someone I know back home, and...
Why did I come here?
Then I walk outside for a cigarette and the Eiffel Tower is blinking, 20,000 lights blinking at once, and I turn around and notice that it's even more beautiful to see the reflection of the lights in the windows of my building. And this is more beautiful than looking directly because I can only see parts of the tower, the parts reflecting in the window, but my mind fills in the rest on my visual canvas, and I realize that my mind does the same thing with language more and more each day, filling in the blanks, and what my mind can't fill in, the people I talk to can, and I like speaking French, and they like speaking English, and we're sort of dancing with language, and then I think about my Latin teacher in high school and I feel like a humanist, and then I realize that deciding to learn another language is like deciding to accept all of humanity, and talking to anyone is like talking to everyone, and the longer I'm here, the more I understand how connected today is to 2,000 years ago in a country like this, a normal country that wasn't a social experiment half a world away isolated between two oceans, and if I let myself drift out with the undercurrent, past deGaulle and Haussmann and Napoleon and Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu and Henri IV and the Knights Templar and Philippe Auguste and the waves get longer and higher and Caesar, eventually I'll wash up on the same shore as everyone else.
posted by disappearingink at 1:48 AM
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