The Future Simple

After a mere eighteen language lessons, we were asked to project what our lives will entail in 2040.  In class we took turns impersonating palm readers, and later I waxed poetic in my written homework.  Inspired by my fantastically-romantic writer-hero Patrick Leigh Fermor, I will swim the Hellespont at an advanced age (I’ll be 57)—and do him one better, reciting Byron’s verses in between breaststrokes (another Europe-to-Asia swim club member).  The future conditional (to say nothing of the subjunctive) is a beautifully nuanced construction.  In English it’s so concrete to say “If I see him, I will talk to him”; I rather like the French finessing of the verb to express the potentiality of the action, with conjugative elements of the infinitive, future, and imperfect all wrapped up in one word (“Si je lui vu, je lui parlerai”): I totalkperchancewill to him.

Crossing the bridge to the medieval quarter of Lyon, where verisimilitude = bed bugs.

All last week the city slowed.  One by one the bakeries put up notices of August closure and the dive-bomb buzz of motorbike engines lessened.  It was doubly surprising to find that Lyon, France’s second largest city, was simultaneously near-abandoned and stuffed with tourists.  Lyon, I cannot fathom why in the still of summer holidays you hosted some WNBA showcase with commentary amplified to fifty miles around until after midnight in addition to posting willfully atonal brass bands on every third corner.  And in case I didn’t get the hint that Lyon doesn’t like me…bedbugs.  Universe, you were supposed to check off the box for failed/traumatic youth hostel stay when I was, like, 20: why did you wait until now?

Luckily, the near future (at the moment of bedbug horror) was good.  In French, any plans further down the road than the next hour or so qualify for the future simple:  

-What are you going to do today?  

-I will meet up with a friend, we’ll catch up, go eat a delicious lunch, drink a glass of wine, and then walk around town for a while.  

No finessing layers of meaning into as few words as possible; just, simply, the future.