I warned you a little while ago about pedantic blogs, and I think this is going to be one... I can tell, it's been building up in me for some time, and now I must let it out. I've been thinking, really, about the nature of personal identity and how much it's related to language. When I speak English here, I have a certain idea of who I am. I'm the one who lived in Seattle and went to grad school at Cornell and met Sean. I have certain commitments and ideals that I'm pretty certain about and it's easy for me to find the right words to describe them, and I have certain struggles also that I know about and can describe with some amount of precision, struggles having to do with eating, and others having to do with accepting my role as a house wife, that sort of thing. But when I speak French, it's as if all those well-formed ideas I have about myself completely disappear. I don't know what I believe, I don't know what I like or dislike, I don't know what my strengths and weaknesses are, it's not clear my personal history has any coherence or meaning, words come out of my mouth that are completely neutral, they don't seem to come from a certain person I know fairly well, they seem to come from a machine. Weird. Maybe it's a kind of mental illness, like some kinds of brain problems that cause people to have different personalities. Maybe when I'm speaking French I do unspeakable things that my English-speaking self doesn't know anything about. I hope not.

Possibly, this is related to the fact that (a) my French is a little rusty, so I'm quite a bit slower in French than I am in English. Words don't come as precisely or easily; a lot of my attention is required to produce the mere language, so that I have no attention left for the content of what I have to say, or to think about what I'm going to say before it comes out; and (b) anyone here that I speak French to knows nothing about me except that I'm an American who speaks quite good though slightly rusty French, and that does seem to disorient me a lot, that I'm speaking to people who don't have of me the conception I have of myself (in English, since I have none in French). Still, the resulting feeling is that English comes out of the person Claudia, whereas French comes out of an automaton I don't consider to be myself.

The result of all this thinking (this is where the really pedantic part comes in, if you want to skip to the next paragraph) is that I am starting to view the nature of the person less as an entity, something like a soul or even like a character, something that subsists, and more as a set of activities. My English personality consists in certain thoughts I have and certain discourses I hold. When I stop having the thoughts and holding the discourses, when I start having different thoughts and holding different discourses, I become something (or someone) different. If I stop having thoughts altogether, I become an automaton. Then there's the more worrisome problem of how much power other people have over the nature of the being I am, not even what people do, but just what they think of me or know or fail to know about me.

On the other hand, it could be that I'm drinking a bit too much wine here.

Okay, now I'm done with pedantism for another month, you can all breathe a sigh of relief. Let's see, the marking events of the past weeks are these: Magdalene has been getting a greater than desired experience of the French tendency to politicize, solidarize and generally get hysterical over nothing. After I successfully changed her from the lame class (with all the bad and unfriendly students) to the good class (with the students of Greek AND the two lovely friends, whom Magdalene has been hanging out with all the time since), the whole of her school erupted in some kind of uproar. All the students in her old class (3e F) as well as their parents were yelled at for harassing her, then all the students came to her to ask who had harassed her, to which she replied that no one had harassed her, and then the teachers asked her who had harassed her... Poor thing. It's a really major scandal. Even the school's principal asked if she was happier and less harassed now that she was learning Greek. Since I never used the fact that she was harassed as an argument for changing her, I assume that the main teacher as well as the administrators were so worried about other parents demanding that Magdalene's precedent-setting change of class be given to their sons or daughters too, that they exaggerated the problem hugely, and then, having exaggerated the problem, were stuck going along with it as if it were a genuine scandal. I hope it dies down soon, so that Magdalene can focus on catching up a month of Greek.

My brother and his family came to visit us this week-end (that's Gabriel with Simeon above, and Nicolas and Ramona to the left). All the cousins got on wonderfully again. Mimi had planned a big outing that included a stop at her favorite bakery to buy the children a gouter, then a walk to the park that has the babybobs and a merry-go-round, and two rides on the babybobs and one on the merry-go-round. Matthias caught the monkey's tail on the merry-g0-round, which entitled him to a free ride, but there was no time, so he generously handed it to a random french child. While the children were riding on the Merry-go-round, my brother and I were sitting on a bench watching them and holding the dogs, and this lady came over to chat with us.

First about the dogs (Oh, what a nice Jack Russell, I see you didn't clip her tail, how good of you, and oh, why on earth do you have a muzzle on your dog, no, it's not a muzzle, it's just a leash, oh, she wouldn't bite, she looks so sweet, I'm telling you, it's not a muzzle, really, poor little beast, I really don't approve of muzzles...), anyway, from the dogs, the talk moved here and there, until she suddenly asked me, after learning I was American, was I also a worshipper of Obama? I should have known, from her using the word 'worshipper', but I didn't really notice, you know, it was my French automaton persona, she's not that smart. So I said, yes, we were really pleased about the Nobel Peace Prize, and she said, "so, are the Blacks going to take over now?" At that point, even my french self noticed that something was weird. My brother had long since left me all alone with the lady, not being as servile or polite as my french self is (whereupon the lady had promptly criticized his dog for being badly behaved as compared to my exemplary one). I said I didn't think blacks wanted to take over, just have the same privileges as everyone else (I was speaking French, mind you, so I had to keep it fairly simple). And just when things were about to get really sick, Sean came to get me because the kids were done with their ride. That was interesting.

Sean's institute has been decidedly eating up his time (both literally and by overfeeding him and giving him wine at lunch all of which make him sleepy). He has to have 2 hour lunches twice a week, and a 4 hour dinner once--unfortunately on the night I used to go swimming, so no more swimming in a sea of human flesh for me. On top of which, on Sunday, he went on a lunch boat cruise (organized by the institute) with Magdalene, Simeon, and Matthias, which they all said was stressful: the older academics at their table were completely uninterested in the children, the food was bad, and they couldn't explore the boat, they were stuck sitting at lunch for 3 hours looking at derelict chateaus out the window and listening to a loud french tour guide. I'm glad I got to walk around the city with my brother, and then babysit Miriam during her nap, so that I could read Freud in preparation for a seminar in psychoanalysis that I will be attending starting next week. Better than a three hour bad lunch with pretentious french academics.