Salut,

When I was wrapping up my second masters degree at the CUNY Graduate Center in the fall of 2005 I vowed that when I finished I would take it upon myself to learn a second language. I had actually minored in Russian as an undergrad, but that had been a decade and a half earlier and my Russian was, to put it mildly, rusty. I chose Russian because my brother and I had made a trip to Europe in November 1989 that included West and East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union; when I returned to my studies in spring 1990, six weeks or so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vague notions of learning the language and being part of the post-Cold War period in a direct and  immediate way. As you might imagine, it did not work out that way.

Maybe it is living in New York, or perhaps it is that my brother now lives in France, but I realized as I was finishing school in ’05 that one needs, if not full-fledged bilingualism, at least a working knowledge of another language. In the winter of 2006 when it was time to begin I narrowed it down to French and German. I chose French because I thought it could help me in more of the world than German probably could. I would still like to travel within the Francophone world. Things were going well in my studies until some major life changes required me to focus–quite happily–on other things.

Today, after a long hiatus, I pulled out my lesson books and came up with a plan to brush off the dust and bring my French up to where I want it to be. My goals are 1) to be able to converse in basic French when entering a hotel, restaurant, or similar social setting, and 2) to read and write at at the high-intermediate level. Certainly I can find 45 minutes a day to make this happen.

As I said in my post the other day about the 1960s, I have become increasingly aware of the need to think holistically and not pigeon-hole oneself. Currently, I am about a quarter of the way through the late Warren Zimmermann’s First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. Triumph tells the story of how Teddy Roosevelt, Elihu Root, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred T. Mahan did just that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The reason I say all this is because to me the book is reinforcing the importance of thinking wider than 1861-1865 to understand the Civil War. Hay is an especially interesting character because he started of course working for Lincoln in 1860 and was still serving his country and president three and a half decades later. This included several stints overseas. Often we think the people who fought in the Civil War, or who served in whatever capacity in which the served, lived hermetically sealed in those four years. Of course, they did not.

So, here I am up to my elbows in the imparfait and  passé composé yet again. It feels pretty good.

À bientôt

This morning I finished Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America by James T. Patterson. I often read in cycles, and Eve was the third of a three-part installment, if you will, in a project to read more about contemporary history. Five years ago, just prior to my first visit to Gettysburg, I made a conscious effort to raise my game regarding Civil War history. I feel I have done that, though I still have a ways to go. I have gained a great deal, but recently I felt I was losing my mojo in other areas. There are only so many hours in the day; every time you are doing one thing by definition you are not doing something else.I believe so many focus so intently on the Civil War, especially those who dwell on the minutiae of the battles, that they lose something. One cannot understand the war, or our complicated history, without context.

In his preface Patterson makes clear that no one year can “change everything,” as the blurbs and  subtitles often shout to us when we walk the aisles of the local bookstore. Life just doesn’t follow the calendar like that. Still, as Patterson shows, 1965 was a transforming year in American history. The assassination of Malcolm X, Selma, Vietnam escalation, Watts rioting, Voting Rights Act, immigration reform, the alphabet soup of Great Society programs that President Johnson felt secure to create after being given a mandate during his landslide victory in November 1864 and inauguration in January 1965. Not for nothing did Johnson proclaim during the lighting of the national Christmas tree in December 1964  that we were living in “the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” It was typical LBJ hyperbole, but as was the case with many of Johnson’s pronouncements it had a ring of truth. Ironically, America’s prosperity and hopefulness are what led to to the anger and cynicism of the era as it became clear that our many problems were not so easy to fix.

Culturally things were changing as well. The Beatles released Rubber Soul at the end of the year. It is hard not to believe that 1965 was the year that the sixties became The Sixties. I have added Patterson’s Grand Expectations, the United States, 1945-1974 to my short list.