Patience and the restless sleeper

There’s a thing about living in France that always amazes some outward suburban zone of my American brain: I go into the store, I get checked out by the cashier, I pull out my credit card, I put it in the little credit card machine, and a word appears on the screen: Patientez.

Be patient. In the United States, when dealing with machines, the signs and recordings are rarely rooted in such a quasi-moral, such a Ciceronian admonition. Rather, they tell you that they are busy processing your information. Or maybe they tell you that all operators are busy and please wait on the line until the next operator is available. But to be asked to wait is a moral degree away from being asked to be patient. Waiting, after all, can be done impatiently – it is all physics, it is all being a body in a place in time. Patience, however, is being a certain kind of subject, having a certain kind of attitude.

I’ve long had a Barthesian revery that if I could just understand the “patientez” sign, I would grasp some larger mythological characteristic of France. See the rest here.