Le temps et le monde et la personne ne se rencontrent qu'une seule fois.

Time and the world and the person only meet a single time. - Helene Cixous

Just for the record, I had a moment in grammar class a few weeks ago when the sun shone through the window and illuminated with Wordsworthian clarity for me the necessity of Helene Cixous’s idea of l’ecriture feminine. Yes, French is an inherently ‘sexist’ language, if you will, in a far more essential way than English. For example, given the concept of gendered modes of expression, one notes that if even ONE male is present in a group of people, that group is automatically and linguistically masculinized in French. That’s just how it works. It’s interesting, on the other hand, to note that I’m calling that a privilege. Were I to say that one drop of blood, a la Showboat, made someone black, that would be marginalizing. Whew. The politics of identity. C’est tres complique pour moi! And that’s exactly why I want to be a doctor. For my own work, I need the facility and visibility of immediate succor. I discover that I prefer to conserve meditation on ontological and epistemological quandaries as a comfortably facultative avocation.

How goes the French Language? Ai, ai, ai. For the good bits, I certainly get a great deal more than I presumed I would, and oceans more than when I first arrived. Actually speaking a language, one finds, is quite different than reading it, or even understanding it. One is often frustrated by the need or the desire to communicate outside the limits of one’s paltry and malnourished vocabulary, one’s Lincoln Log sentence constructions. It’s Fun With Dick and Jane, en francais. ‘I study French.’ ‘Do you study French?’ ‘The cheese is very good’. ‘I don’t like hot chocolate.’ ‘I see you at the cinema.’ ‘I’d like to buy some stamps.’ After one manages the hurdle of the first few phrases, all generally goes well until the person with whom one is conversing (to use a far-too-lofty term) assumes more credit than one deserves and deviates from the script. And finally one gives up in despair. ‘Do you understand English?’

I feel perched on the crest of a genuine understanding of this language, I really do. I’m certainly not there yet, and if there’s one thing that has most assuredly changed in me it’s that I’ll always wonder what someone means when they tell me that they’re fluent in another language. I speak English well. More fluently than many, I would say. (Small digression: on a recent excursion, while walking through pastures gazing at clumps of beige animals I thought at first were goats and then cows, until we got close enough for me to see that they were sheep – yes, I’ve been wearing my glasses a lot more since then – several of us realized that we didn’t actually know the names for groups of animals, in English. A herd of cows, fine. A herd, also, of goats. Or a flock? A … flock of sheep? A flock of birds, but a murder of crows. Antelopes? A pod of dolphins. Rabbits? And then what’s the difference between a tribe and a clan? See, it becomes Ecco-esqe.) But, I can’t imagine grasping the nuances of any other language with anything approaching the intricacy that I do English. It must be possible. I’m looking into the trough of a thousand conjugations that are just beyond the tip of my tongue. While the other students hunch their shoulders and screw up their mouths and protest against its idiosyncrasies (‘But, in English, it’s like … ), I am beginning to see the patterns. I’m four turns of the kaleidoscope away from something magical, I think.

Make no mistake – there are many things that frustrate. It’s the language of a country that produces 400 kinds of cheese. What do you do with that? For every grammatical rule there are fourteen or so exceptions. Just take the numbers, for example. Saying any number between 70 and 100 involves math. Sixty is ‘soixante,’ but seventy is ‘soixante-dix,’ sixty-ten. It gets worse. Seventy-one is the equivalent of sixty-eleven, 72 of sixty-twelve, and so on. Eighty is ‘quatre-vingts’; quite literally four-twenties. And ninety is the most absurd of all, at ‘quatre-vingt-dix.’ No joke, four-twenty-ten. Yeah, okay, it’s logical, in its way. One supposes. One could spend a Proustian eternity pondering the frustrating irregularities of ballet vs. billet, ville vs. fille. But in English we have enough and through and thorough. As with anything else, there are some questions one simply cannot ask. Like where love goes. Or if there's anyone who just naturally peels an orange all in one strand. Or why one feels compelled to set one’s watch at precisely eight minutes ahead.

But, all that being said, the frustration is often, of course, a motivating factor. You learn because you’re angry, because you can’t stand feeling foolish, because you have things you want to say. Even if all you want to say is ‘No, I don’t care for any ketchup, thank you.’

Yes, just as we wish that French people all walked around in black turtlenecks smoking and being cynical (and sometimes they do) or wore striped boatnecks and carried baguettes in the crook of their arms (sometimes they do that, too), the French do think that Americans eat everything with ketchup and growth hormones. I talked to someone the other day who, during a discussion (which, in France, is interchangeable with ‘conversation’ – debate is a national pastime, and that’s a joke they make themselves) about religious differences between France and the United States, mentioned that while Scientology was merely a sect in France, in the US it was a respected and widely-held belief system. Ah, non, I hastened to assure him. He stared goggle-eyed and disbelieving at me as I tried to explain that even Americans have difficulty with a religion that propounds that we were all left here by aliens in spaceships, let alone disavowing medication. I could see the wheels turning as he knitted his eyebrows and contemplated the ends of his scarf. Finally, he raised his eyes to me with an expression of feeble incomprehension and choked out ‘Buht … buht … Tohm Kroowise … ?’

Go to France. Learn that, for Europeans, Washington D.C. may be the alleged capital of the United States (though many aren’t aware of the difference between that city and the state of Washington), and Manhattan may be the center of the universe for we huddled masses yearning to buy low, but the real encapsulation of all that is the Land of the Free beacons, brighter than the torch of Lady Liberty, from the other side of the continent. Screw Plymouth Rock. America is Hollywood.