It pleases me

I’ve taken up French again. The last time I studied it in earnest was when I was working in the mosquito lab. I would listen to Coffee Break French through my earphones while I pipetted homogenized mosquito sludge from one Eppendorf tube to another. Glamorous, I know.

Maybe it’s the lack of goggles, but for some reason I seem to be enjoying French a lot more this time around. I think as you grow older, you learn things more because you want to and not because you feel like you should. This time I’m finding every phrase to be so much more beautiful. I think my accent is better too (or maybe I’m more delusional!). Perhaps because of the perceived beauty of it all, I handle each word more delicately.

One of the phrases that I really like is ça me plaît, which translated directly means, “it pleases me.” My understanding is that the French use it in multiple contexts to mean things like, “I enjoy it,” “I like it,” or “I am pleased.” The example that really hits home for me is, “Je le fais parce que ça me plaît,” meaning, “I do it because it pleases me.”

In English we also say “enjoy,” although not nearly enough, in my opinion. I feel like people used to say, “I’m pleased that…” but even this has become old fashioned and an overly polite way of speaking. I wonder why this concept of enjoyment/pleasure has faded away from the modern English vocabulary.

Is it that we think that we don’t deserve pleasure? That our lives are meant to be drudgery? And who drilled this concept into us? Maybe it was all those TV series like Suits or Madmen, where people are working like crazy, gaining material status, and receiving the esteem of their peers. We see how miserable, or at least hollow, those characters are in their private lives, and yet we still walk away from the show with the desire for status and esteem rather than the more blatant lesson that this pursuit robs your life of all enjoyment.

I’m as guilty as any other viewer. I remember watching Suits a few years back and searching on Pinterest for outfits I could wear to look more like the senior law partner, Jessica Pearson. We can see that these characters are not living from a place of enjoyment. They are living up to the expectations of others and out of a mad compulsion to be something greater than what they think they are. We relate to these shows on a deep level, however, because even at several stories below the penthouse, we are doing the same thing.

What I like about ça me plaît is not only the striking visual beauty of the ç and the î but the whole philosophy that underpins it. It’s the idea that we can do something just because it is pleasing to us. It doesn’t have to please anybody else. It doesn’t have to meet any expectations. It doesn’t have to propel us forward. To me this phrase implies that as human beings, we’re allowed to figure out what we like and simply embrace it.

It seems that the French have already figured this out. Maybe by studying the delicate French language, I’ll dip my toe into a now archaic reservoir here in the Anglosphere: pleasure for its own sake.