I do my best to emulate their French accent in my French accent to make myself understood, but there is a leak somewhere because when I begin to speak English to them, I am speaking in a way that I hope will allow them to understand me. Simply. Perhaps, my vocal chords have been tied and shortened, limited by the things I am able to say in French and left knotted in English as well. I speak English with a French accent, my language plated for their tastes, accessible in cadence, emphasis, and sound so that they can pick it up. I let it slide when the little boy leaves off pronouncing the 's' at the end of the plural word, because, really, I knew what he meant. I don't push too hard to impress upon them the difference between "'ere," and "here," because in Ireland there isn't one, and I'd rather not teach any one single authority in the enormity of English.
But when I bake my grandmother's cookie recipe with the girls, I want to make sure they know it is "la recette de ma grand-mere," and I have them repeat, "th-th-th-thanksgiving," over and over. Somehow this one is important. Even then, I had to convert the recipe from cups and
tablespoons to grams (which I concede is a better system of measurement), and they turned out slightly different.
French butter is, just is, better, and this recipe calls for a lot (225 grams, or 2 sticks). It was an idea of my grandmother's cookies, but it wasn't really her recipe. Albeit, still delicious.
When Celine asks me if the cookies came out right, I say, "ouai, c'est comme ca." And I know she has no idea how funny it was to joke about putting nuts on my grandma's half of the batch. How do I even begin to tell them that she's the reason I'm here?---
La Cimetiere Pere Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris. I took courage on the train to get off at a stop further down the line than I've taken before and got off at Place de la Nation. Walking in a seemingly much more modern area of Paris among 7-11 type shops and brick buildings that seem somehow heavier than the marble and gargoyles of the lower districts, I follow the metro maps and street signs to Pere Lachaise. It is cold. I find a cafe on the corner of Rue du Repos (repose, or rest), just a few meters away from the cemetery entrance, and I warm up with my dose of 'expresso,' and a slice of quiche that makes me proud of my own recipe. I find the map at the entrance to the cemetery, search for who I came to see, and realize shortly that I confused Pere Lachaise with Montparnasse in my desire to visit Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I am quickly appeased as I scan the list of frequently visited famous dead people and find Marcel Proust, Colette, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Guillaume Apollinaire.
(*if there is not a video embedded here, please click here*)
Rows and rows of headstones, shiny marble slabs, and broken sepulchres, it looks like rain but it doesn't. The place is littered with flowers and chestnuts, some are hidden completely from view by the moss given free range. I find my way to the general area of Proust's bed, and when I think I'm getting close, I am clued into his exact spot by another visitor sitting and gazing at the hunk of sleek black marble delicately decorated with roses and nuts and one very worn copy of "Du Cote de Chez Swan," presumably left there by an admirer.I sit on someone else's bed and stare across at Proust's name, "MARCEL PROUST," engraved in gold, and wonder why I am there. I respect and appreciate Proust's work, and what's done for me the little of it that I know, but I have no memory of what he smelled like. There was no moment of knee-buckling sadness and heaps of tears the way I have for my grandmother's passing. I 'pay my respects,' as if there were someone keeping account, and with a pat on the tomb like a dog, I walk to meet Monsieur Merleau-Ponty.
It took more effort to find his site than Proust's, namely due to the lack of another visitor to serve as an arrow in the still crowd of dead beds. Having walked for near 30 minutes from Marcel to Maurice, and having thought of Bach in the meanwhile, I kneel upon seeing the white tomb engraved in modest letters the names of his family now covered in pine needles. I turn the camera on myself and proceed to fold the life of this man, his works and thoughts, and the technology of his time into the modern day 'selfie.' I look ridiculous in this old cemetery, laying on the tombstone of this dead philosopher, puckering my lips and trying to get the right angle for optimum facebookage. You're mine, Mr. Ponty, you've been swallowed.
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Outside of the RER station, I spot a magazine vendor, and check to see if the December edition of Philosophie has been released. It has, and it is also full to the brim with quotes from Proust and Sartre, Rousseau, and Nietzche among others. Sitting on the train on my way back to Rueil, I flip to this, from Mr. Proust,
"Comme nous ne sommes tous, nous les vivants, que des morts qui ne sont pas encore entrés en fonctions, toutes ces politesses, toutes ces salutations dans le vestibule que nous appelons déférence, gratitude, dévouement et où nous mêlons tant de mensonges, sont stériles et fatigantes. De plus, – dès les premières relations de sympathie, d’admiration, de reconnaissance, – les premières paroles que nous prononçons, les premières lettres que nous écrivons, tissent autour de nous les premiers fils d’une toile d’habitudes, d’une véritable manière d’être, dont nous ne pouvons plus nous débarrasser dans les amitiés suivantes ; sans compter que pendant ce temps-là les paroles excessives que nous avons prononcées restent comme des lettres de change que nous devons payer, ou que nous paierons plus cher encore toute notre vie des remords de les avoir laissé protester."
"As we are all of us, the living, but the dead who have not yet entered service, all these courtesies, all these greetings in the hall which we call respect, gratitude, devotion and where we mix so many lies, are sterile and tiring. More - the early relationship of sympathy, admiration, gratitude, - the first words we speak, the first letters we write, woven around us the first threads of a canvas of habits, of a genuine way of being, which we cannot get rid of in the following friendships not to mention that during this time the excessive words we have uttered remain as bills that we must pay, or which we will pay yet more expensively our whole lives with remorse for having allowed them the exception of being paid."He refers to us, the living, as 'but the dead who have not yet entered service,' and yet we the living make so little use of the dead who are at our service! We utter les politesses in deference and respect to our living peers and to our dead models, but we rarely dare touch them, and in leaving them untouched, we tie ourselves, as Proust says, in strings of habit and accrue a debt of dishonesty.
I watch the girls, 7 and 3, dancing gangnam style, and am at once amused and despairing. We are, all of us, born into a culture only at a certain time, and it is our woe that we are not better provided the length of tradition behind us and available, and as Proust says, in service to us. We are either never told that we are a part of a culture with a history waiting to be continued, or we are only presented it behind glass and out of reach of our hands or mouths. We are restrained in our creativity in a lack of access to the resources buried under tombstones and we struggle with the internal contradiction of what does and does not belong to us.
On the page opposite that excerpt from Proust, is an article in which the author asserts a need for a "double lesson in humility and obstinacy."
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| humility |
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| obstinacy |
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