French Lessons

I had better start opening my French books again. It feels horrible to not be able to construct a decent sentence anymore. Thinking about it now, I wonder why I stopped in the first place. Maybe because I've given up hope of being accepted into a comparative literature program in a US university. And it somehow scares me that I'm not even bothered anymore, that I'm starting to entertain the idea of not leaving for postgraduate studies altogether. I guess I'm slowly losing sight of the point of needing to pay outrageous sums of money to study about things I can read about at home (I can't believe I'm saying this). And the way things are at universities today—the mechanization of the humanities, the academic approach of study that I now find superficial—it takes away the original beauty of literature and makes of it a mere specimen to be clinically taken apart and analyzed.

Poetry supplies beauty in my life, and reading saves me from falling into the traps of boredom and nihilism that postmodern mentality elaborately but surreptitiously orchestrates. Do I really need a degree from a fancy university to prove to myself that I can understand and appreciate literature? Of course I don't. A child can read Peter Pan or Robinson Crusoe and appreciate the beauty of its language and reality without needing to associate it with pompous and complicated ideologies.

Marxism, feminism, structuralism—there was a time when I genuinely found joy in studying them. I felt pride whenever I read something and could immediately identify the theories with which I could approach their text. I loved how well I could use words like bildungsroman or iambic pentameter or factive heteronomy and reveled how people seemed to be so impressed whenever I did. But after a while, I found that I was slowly losing the joy from reading because I was always consumed by a priori thinking. I approached everything I read as if they were frogs I needed to dissect in a laboratory. I hated it. So I stopped reading altogether.

What resuscitated my heart for literature was philosophy and theology. Through it I rediscovered the depth and meaning I guess I've always looked for in poetry and prose. I read Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Orwell, Camus with newborn eyes and felt a deeper kind of appreciation for the humanity with which they informed their works and admiration for the beautiful poetry through which they fashioned their language.

Alors, est-ce que tu parlez français? 

Petit un peu. 

Do I still want to learn French? Bien sûr!

But not anymore so I could arrogantly splash "I speak French" in university applications. Not even so I could brag to anyone that I can articulate rolled r's. But just because I genuinely want to. It's such a beautiful language. And besides, I've already started reading Camus's L'Etranger in French (although this was over a year ago when I still can read past two sentences without consulting a dictionary), why not just finish it? 

So yes, this summer, I will start opening my French books again.