Paris in the Present Tense

by Mark Helprin

These were mainly white and silver, but some blinked red at the tops of smokestacks and masts, or made the illuminated triangles and summit caps of skyscrapers green, gold, or pale blue. The sun had fallen into New Jersey, which was now nothing more than a burning red rim.

Description

Jules would often fall in love this way, intensely and briefly with women who justly deserved it and often elicited it. But these infatuations would quickly lead to his deep love for Jacqueline, who was now gone.

Internal landscape

With stars all around, the plane split a path through the night, rising and falling more smoothly than a boat on a gently rolling sea.

Description

“Of course not, but you’re wrong. Love is absolute. It can’t be measured, or contained, or truly analyzed. It’s the one thing that you hold onto as you fall into the abyss. When you love, you experience a power close to that of the divine. And, like music, it enables you so far to transcend your bounds that you can’t even begin to understand it. So when you love, as a child loves his parents or a parent his child, you suffer the illusion that the limitless power you sense can save them. It can’t. I know, but my soul doesn’t, and it makes me want to die so I can share their fate.”

Highliht

brothers are billionaire, adult, juvenile delinquents. They have lots of girlfriends but they keep their perfectly vacant wives because they’re, to quote one of the brothers speaking about the mother of his own spawn, ‘explosively fuckable.’”

Funny