🌿The Joy of Not Knowing Everything (La joie de ne pas tout savoir)

 

Un café, s'il vous plaît. Some sentences I have mastered.

I spent much of my life assuming that learning was supposed to lead, eventually, to knowing. Now I suspect it mostly helps me find the next thing I don't know.

I spend a good deal of time trying to learn things. I have been studying French for years, and it is slightly humbling that I still can't speak as well as a three-year-old. A French toddler can ask for a biscuit without first considering the gender of the biscuit and whether the verb requires any special treatment. I would like to have that kind of confidence.

There are words I recognize easily on a page that seem to vanish entirely when someone says them aloud. Then, just as I am wondering whether all this effort has accomplished anything, I understand a sentence. An actual sentence, spoken by an actual French person, at an actual French speed. That is usually enough to keep me going.

Lately I have been collecting common expressions, the kind people really say in the course of an ordinary day. I write them down and repeat them. Occasionally one begins to feel familiar enough that I might be able to retrieve it when it's needed. Whether it would arrive before the conversation moved on is another question.

I have also put a fair amount of time into the flute, which I took up in middle age and have carried with me into old age. It is rewarding to play with the flute ensemble, but the truth is that I will probably always be an intermediate player.

Some passages require far more practice than their small allotment of space on the page would suggest. A few measures can occupy a surprising amount of an afternoon. Sometimes I get them right and then fail to reproduce the accomplishment the next day, as though the notes had only been loaned to me.

Still, I can sit among other flute players, follow my part, and contribute to music none of us could make alone. That is a substantial return on the effort. I don't have to become a concert flutist for those evenings to be worth having.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this stage of life is realizing that I don't have to become an expert on everything that interests me. I can simply follow the trail and see where it goes.

Recently one trail led me to 84 Charing Cross Road. I settled in to watch a movie and found myself drawn into a particular time and place: a New York writer, a London bookseller, and twenty years of letters between them about old books. Somewhere around the scenes set in 1951, I began to feel a connection with the world of my childhood, and with people who were living their ordinary lives while I was beginning mine.

Then I wanted to know why meat was still being rationed in England six years after the war had ended. The movie had handed me a question I hadn't known to ask. (Meat rationing, it turns out, lasted there until 1954.) Before long I was thinking about postwar London, food parcels sent across the Atlantic, bookshops, and the way a friendship could grow entirely through letters between two people who never met.

I hadn't planned to spend any time on any of that. I was just watching a movie.

Another trail took me into cousin relationships. I thought I understood cousins until I tried to explain exactly how several people in our family were related. Then there were common ancestors to identify, generations to count, and people who were once or twice removed.

I would get one relationship straight, and then somebody's daughter would enter the discussion, at which point we seemed to need to begin again. I eventually understood more than I had at the start. I would still prefer to have paper and a pencil nearby before making any firm pronouncements.

These are not subjects I expect to master. I am unlikely to be consulted on postwar British food policy, and the family would be wise to check my cousin calculations. But I enjoyed finding out. Each question gave me something interesting to think about, and sometimes something to talk over with someone else.

Progress is one useful way to measure learning, and I don't dismiss it. I do want to improve, especially when the same difficult measures reappear at the next rehearsal. But I find I am enjoying more of what happens along the way.

I hear a familiar French phrase and catch its meaning. I play a passage more easily than I did last month. A movie sends me looking for the book it came from, or a family conversation leaves me with a question to untangle.

The French toddler, I suspect, isn't worried about any of this. She simply asks for the biscuit.

There is always another thing I don't know. At this point, that seems like a fairly good arrangement.

Janis @ Maison Tranquille

Still Curious. Still Growing. Still Grateful.