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| Bordeaux by lamplight. May 2014 |
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Three months shy of marking two years here in France, I’ve been
noticing a new sentiment creeping into my psyche: some sort of emotion that seems
important, but it’s lurked in the shadows just enough to avoid being
identified. Tonight, though, as I ambled back to my centre ville apartment with
my Tuesday-night-carry-out-special pizza from Dominos, I finally got a clearer
view.
So here I am, ready to describe this little perp to the
police sketch artist.
For so much of the time since I arrived in France, I’ve been
very impatient, wanting desperately to really absorb this language. For me,
language isn’t just a binary code of on and off switches. It’s soul. And I’ve
wanted desperately to enter into all the places that accessing that soul can
take me.
There have been glimmering, hopeful moments along the
language-learning way, but it wasn’t until the past six months that something
really changed. First, I just didn’t feel so tired anymore after days spent in French.
Then, I began to understand without translating. Then, I began to be able to
speak more and more spontaneously (on good days, anyway) and even crack the occasional joke.
And now, as I head into summer and mark two years of
immersion and language study, I understand why people moving abroad often do
two years of language study. My language skills still vary by the day, but
mostly they’re solid enough now that they provide a hefty core mass for the
snowball that’s rolling down the hill (or up the hill, since that sounds like
more of an accomplishment :-) ) and constantly adding new words and expressions
to its dictionary. I have a solid enough base now that this language thing is starting
to improve exponentially.
But there’s another thing happening, and that’s the thing
that surprised me as it stepped into the light tonight: A different kind of
fear has replaced my impatient fear that I’d never master this language. You see,
French is in me now. The on-off switch I kept trying to switch on is now
permanently on. I can no longer turn it off. I can no longer choose not to
understand French. Oh, I still don’t understand EVERYTHING, but I pretty much
always understand something.
And the scary part is that I’m not in control of this
anymore. Really, in truth, I never was; I realized months ago that I couldn’t make myself understand even though I
desperately wanted to. I just had to wait until the words worked themselves into
me.
But now I can’t make myself not understand.
So the scary part of all that—other than the
not-being-in-control part--is that now that French has taken up residence in
me, I can’t kick it out (kind of like the way French landlords can’t easily kick
out their protected-by-law tenants :-) ). My new tenant won’t ever leave and
has already done and will necessarily do more remodeling in me. And I don’t
know what the result is going to be. So that’s the scary part. I can’t undo
what’s been done during these past two years. And I can’t stave off what French
will do as I keep using it and giving it an ever homier home in me.
We’re always changed by new experiences, and any travel or
living abroad will always change us. So I’d anticipated that. But somehow this
infiltration by this language, that I pursued and welcomed, feels like a deeper
change than that wrought by trying new foods and meeting people who are
different from me.
Because language is more than the right letters and words
and punctuation marks. Because it’s more than words correctly combined and
uttered at the right time. It’s soul. And the French soul has infiltrated my
English-speaking American soul. And there’s no going back now. Scary or not, on
y va! (Let’s go!)
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