A slow news day here in my little town so let me tell you what’s cooking:
Today’s “interesting” walk photograph:
Les choses de la vie. Impressed with my French? Don’t be, just something I came across in my internet wanderings today. The choices life makes for you. I guess that resonated because it aligned with some of what I was thinking as I walked this morning. I don’t want to cede control of my choices in life to chance or fate, but would I have chosen the life I’m living now had circumstances not created the “opportunity”? Yeah, all this time later I’m still thinking about what I had and what I lost. Which is not to say I’m unhappy with this life I’m living now. It is what it is and I’m making the best of it. Knowing me, if I was somehow magically carried back to that old life I’d probably find myself missing this one. Best to just accept les choses de la vie.
My internet travels also encountered a brief mention of a collection of Buddhist inspired short stories by a venerable Monk titled: Un arbre dans la forêt (The Tree that Hides the Forest). The only quotation offered from that book seemed to underscore my thinking:
Be mindful, don’t hang on to things but let go and surrender to the way things are.
I’m getting there. One step at a time.
That looks delicious. You should have a dinner party.
Great-looking food!
As for the French… where to begin…
les choses de la vie = the things of life (or “life’s things”)
The French term for “choices” is les choix. (pronounce that “ley shwah”)
If you’re really trying to say “the choices life makes for you,” you’d say, “Les choix que la vie fait pour toi” or more poetically, “Les choix que fait la vie pour toi.”
un arbre dans la forêt = a tree in the forest
If you’re trying to say, “The Tree that Hides the Forest,” you’d say, “L’arbre qui cache la forêt.” Which is a fairly clever title, really. The verb cacher means “to hide,” and it’s where the English word “cache” (pronounced “cash,” not “cashay”) comes from. A cache is a hidden store of something or other. The word that’s pronounced “cashay” is spelled cachet, and it refers to one’s high status or prestige: “There’s a certain cachet that comes with being an Oscar-winning director.” Contrast this with: “As the cops approached, the Oscar-winning director desperately searched the huge limo for his incriminating cache of coke.”
Thanks for the corrections to the poor French examples I used. Here’s the paragraph where I found “les choses de la vie” for context:
“Patrick did not come to live here by choice or careful design. Why then did he end up living here for close to 20 years? One could call it destiny, karma or simply by Patrick’s own reckoning; “les choses de la vie” (the choices life makes for you). An accurate description as he is a proud Frenchman to the core of his heart. Perhaps the main reason his local language skills have never surpassed the very limited bargirl Thai and his English was at best jolty. Our conversations therefore are always conducted to this day in the more melodious language of Molière, Rousseau and Voltaire.”
The writer of the above claims to be a French speaker, but maybe it’s not his first language. Who knows?
As for “Un arbre dans la forêt”, the writer claimed that was a book of short stories written by a Monk. It wasn’t translated, so I plugged it into Google. Somehow yesterday I got the result for “l’arbre qui cache la forêt” even though I searched for “un abre dans”. So I used what Google gave me–The tree that hides the forest. This morning I searched un abre dans and got the correct translation: a tree in the forest. Strange.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Once I’ve mastered English I can start butchering other languages as well!
It turns out there’s a film called “Les choses de la vie.” You can read about it here. I think I saw part of this film on TV once while I was in France. Based on the Wikipedia entry, the film seems to be about a man who gets in a car crash (that’s the scene I remember; there’re a lot of slow-motion interior shots as the car rolls over and over); he reviews his life in flashbacks as he hovers between life and death, re-experiencing signal moments from his past.
So it could be that, if the author of the blog entry was using “les choses de la vie” as a kind of shorthand reference for this film and what the film is about, “the choices life makes for you” might actually be an appropriate interpretation of that concept, even if it fails as an exact literal translation of the French-language phrase.
Chided. Very civil. Scolded is more close to what I experience on occasion. Of course, it’s all good. I appreciate he interaction. Chided makes me think of chives. That might add an interesting flavor to your next pot roast.
Kevin, yeah the theory on the film title makes sense. The guy from the story I quoted was on vacation and suffered a heart attack while driving in Thailand. He was hospitalized for several months, Fell in love with his nurse, got married, and never left. Les choses de la vie!
Mark, forgot you were a blog reader too! If I add potato next time I won’t need the chides!