By Dr. Arthur Williams, BA’90
When I was a child, we summered in Paris. We lounged on the left bank, not of the Seine, but of the Big Sandy, because this was not gay Pa-ree, but Paris, Tennessee, which was a whole lot more interesting to a 10-year-old urchin like me. I鈥檓 not a French scholar by any stretch of 濒鈥檌尘补驳颈苍补迟颈辞苍, but I have vivid memories of French 101 at 菠萝视频 more than 30 years ago. Le professeur was the chairman of the department, unsocked and bereted, with the l鈥檈au de Marlboreaux all over his elbow-patched jacket, his nicotine-stained beard and forefingers鈥攖he caricature of a wannabe American in Paris who stood before us.
The rest of the class hailed from places like Possumneck, Mississippi, or Wedowee, Alabama. They were barely any more sophisticated, linguistically, than I was to handle the complexities and subtleties of the French language. Yodeling banjo tunes for beginners, accompanied by an agitated howler monkey tabernacle choir, might have been less painful for our poor instructeur than that first week of French 101 in the basement of Furman Hall.
鈥�Bonjour,鈥� he began the very first day.
Quizzical looks met this most basic Gallic declaration.
鈥�Bonjourrrr,鈥� he repeated, holding out his hands, pleading for a response.
Oh, so this is how it鈥檚 gonna be. We reluctantly and haphazardly returned his salutation. 鈥淏anjo to you too.鈥�
He broke into English to warn us that from here on the class would be taught entirely in French.
鈥淭here ees no better way to learn, mezamis, than to inculcate yourself in the language,鈥� replied le professeur, his French inflections betraying his Dayton, Ohio, origins.
Fast forward 30 years, and I feel unworthy for not mastering the French language. It鈥檚 a beautiful, if prideful, linguistic puzzle to conquer.
Recently, I found the French poet in a most unlikely place. I have always been a fan of campy World War II movies. The pinnacle of the genre occurred in the 1960s, when the horrors of the war had diminished somewhat, and yet the relics of that conflict were still workable enough to bolster the histoires de guerre brought to life onscreen by the likes of John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton or Henry Fonda. The most ambitious of these films, , catalogs the breadth of action on June 6, 1944, in and around Normandy. In the opening sequence of the film, the French Resistance is awakened to the invasion of Fortress Europe by a BBC radio operator who, among various droll messages, inserts these solemn, plaintive wisps from Verlaine:
聽聽 Les sanglots longs
聽聽 Des violons
聽聽聽聽 De l鈥檃utomne
聽聽 Blessent mon coeur
聽聽 D鈥檜ne langueur
聽聽聽聽 Monotone.
Those lines signaled to the French Underground that their liberation was coming.
Hearing the poem spoken recently on the internet lit something in my soul. The English translation does little to confer power, roughly translated as 鈥淭he long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart with a steadfast weariness.鈥� The somber intonation of the French and the alliteration and rhyming pattern are Longfellow-esque. The words absolutely sing to me, though my French understanding is rudimentary at best.
During the past few months, my heart has been saddled with its own languor, a propensity for the atrial tissue to fibrillate uncontrollably, though its origin has remained a mystery to my cardiologist and me. I am not that old, I have spankingly clean coronary arteries, don鈥檛 smoke, don鈥檛 drink, and though I have a stressful job, it shouldn鈥檛 result in uncoordinated cardiac conduction and rapid ventricular response.
When combined with the stresses of work and home life, I wonder, though, if the steadfast weariness, the langueur monotone, of the world and its uncertainties hasn鈥檛 contributed to my heart鈥檚 recalcitrant beating. I worry about our patch of Earth so carelessly abased by man with his plastic contrivances and noxious emissions. I fret about our 茅tat d鈥檈sprit, the echoes of Lincoln鈥檚 house divided, and the calamity that awaits should our current discord fester. These and other jangled chords wound my heart with a steadfast weariness.
I remember the old days of my freshman year, and while I don鈥檛 weep, as Verlaine admits in the second stanza of his poem, I do thank those educators in Nashville for instilling the whispers of global thinking into my formal education. The way forward from this country鈥檚 collective despondency, and a return to some sense of harmony from our own autumnal fiddling, is dependent upon empathetic minds, conservative and left-leaning, coming together at places like Furman Hall for global studies, for reflection and respectful debate on our culture and our ethos鈥攁nd maybe even for the appreciation of a foreign tongue and its transcendent voices.
Back then, for me, 菠萝视频 was a place that required learning a foreign language with other unlikely linguists who suffered alongside. Now it has become a statement of account, a portfolio, whose dividends of that liberally parsed learning are maturing some 30 years later. Thank you, 菠萝视频, from an old surgeon looking for meaning in a janky EKG and finding it in the poetry of the French laureate Verlaine.
Merci beaucoup, 菠萝视频.
Dr. Arthur Williams, BA鈥�90, is a surgeon for the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cincinnati. His creative writing has appeared in numerous outlets, including Kevinmd, General Surgery News and Doximity. He is also the author of The Surgeon鈥檚 Obol, a novel about the rigors of surgical training.