Paris in the Present Tense

by Mark Helprin

daven.

Just as I had known and not known, I was split then, as I have been ever since, between wanting to follow her wherever that might be, and wanting to fight for life so that she would continue to live in my memory.

banlieue,

The world is full of men and women with souls like swallows and bodies like buffaloes,

in theory, light can travel infinitely far.”

Since the universe is not boundless, what happens to light at the bound?

weltschmerz

I’ll lie in the sun and feel at least three types of despair: despair that life is mostly gone and I’ve wasted it; despair that I cannot feel now what I thought I would if I saw all my struggles through; and despair that, because I don’t know any other course to take, nothing will change.

Badoit.

Jules was allergic to intellectuals, who he thought did not quite live in the world and were often incapable of appreciating it. He likened them to condemned men who would analyze their last meal rather than eat it. But as a Maître of the Paris-Sorbonne music faculty he was surrounded by intellectuals. Almost everyone he knew was one. They depended upon the label as if it were an iron lung, and by more or less continuously checking its motor and other parts they strained to demonstrate their intelligence at every opportunity and in almost everything they did, as if failing to do so would explode a bomb inside their chests. When he was young, Jules was relaxed about admitting that he had no desire to be, and was not, what everyone assumed he would want to be. It was a shock to one associate after another, who within a short time would become mysteriously unavailable, decline invitations to play tennis, or fail to return his calls. He understood that he had exiled himself and was no longer in the pack. It hurt, but he could not have done it any other way, and the music was enough. It flowed through him like a river flooding with snowmelt. It had only to be recognized, liberated, illumined, and it would fill the air like rain in the beam of an arc light. Just as the electrons of radio transmissions saturated the entire world, music was present in everything, but, unlike radio transmissions, it was elemental, present at the creation, and lasting without diminution even past th...

pléiade

ado

She was not confident that she would be able to work in the American university system much longer, as she was guilty of what had become its gravest sin: she thought and spoke freely.

flics

RER

lamed vavnikim.”

“How can you fault yourself for being in love?” “Because obviously I’m crazy. I lose all sense at the first appearance of a lure. I’d be a terrible fish. I fall for images, voices, and, God knows, women I meet sometimes just for a moment. Not because I’m frivolous, but because I see in them their true qualities. I penetrate too fast, right to the core – which is so often angelic. It isn’t that every woman has this, but that so many do.”

When jealousy finally cracks, it releases insatiable anger. And people who aren’t innocent don’t believe that innocence exists. People who aren’t good don’t believe that goodness exists. Alcoholics believe that everyone drinks. Thieves think that everyone steals. Liars think that everyone lies. And those who don’t lie, believe even liars.”

“It’s not as if she was always faithful to you.” For Jules, it was as if a bomb had exploded nearby and knocked the wind out of him. (This had happened once, in Algeria, and he knew what it felt like.) “What?” he asked, as he recovered, observing in François a moment of panic quickly made unobservable by his long practice in debate. “I mean, she died, Jules. She left you.” “That’s not what you meant, because you said always, and that doesn’t fit.” “It is what I meant.” “No, it isn’t. It’s not as if I haven’t known you forever, François. I know what you meant. Why did you say that? Who told you?” “Do you really want me to say, Jules? Because it would be better if I. …” “Yes. You have to.” “Do I really?” “If you ever want to see me again.” “Then I won’t see you again, ever, because no one told me,” François said. “No one had to. Jules, it was a long, long time ago, and we were all so young.” Even as he dismounted from the wall, Jules reeled. It was as if he were falling off a cliff and nothing was left of the world. After he jumped down, he couldn’t look in François’ direction, much less at him. Instead, he turned and blindly made his way up the hill, the fountains on his right still bursting forth unpredictably.

Judenfrei?”

“Music is evanescent, not even like a painting. It flees like smoke in the wind. It’s just gone.” “Everything is evanescent. Why do you think I offered you the apartment? If there’s a God, and I do believe so even if He’s become inscrutable to me, music is the finest and possibly the last way of reaching Him. I wanted you to teach my boys so they could escape what in fact they’ve become, but they’ve always sought what they should avoid.

poilu

226 Jews of Reims

biscuits rose de Reims,

Despite what they told him, he thought that this and all the other unusual things were normal.

Chevaux de frise

Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren.

He associated the joy of success with betrayal of his mother and father, and as if to be true to them in their darkness as, he imagined, they moved through eternal space, he failed time after time.

François, who without inhibition gave himself over to study while surrendering his body to wine, tobacco, and frenzies of the intellect.

he would make a telephone call to set in motion a series of events that were they to go smoothly or even just adequately would as in the last movement of a symphony unite disparate currents into one stream. Although he himself would never see the braiding of the threads, he hoped that they might save Luc; help Catherine and David; punish the son-of-a-bitch, lying, dishonorable Jack and the crazy, son-of-a-bitch, lying, dishonorable Rich Panda; allow him to escape jeopardy for what he had done on the Île aux Cygnes; and, finally, achieve at last his greatest ambition.

charrette

“Horoshow!

“They

Clothes can be a great frame for beauty, but when a woman is in uniform – military, police, nurses – the only thing that matters is her face, and you see the real person, freed of plumage.

“The first instant I saw you I fell in love. It’s not right that I did. I don’t deserve it, and nothing can or should come of it. I’m three times your age. My own child is much older than you. I’ve always had contempt for men who reach for life through the agency of a young woman. It’s understandable that they would as their lives are rapidly vanishing. But it’s unmanly, I’d even say cowardly. Better to tie yourself to the mast of your convictions and loyalties and receive your death without trying to escape in the arms of someone as fresh and beautiful as you, because there is no escape.

if one doesn’t believe in God, then it must seem strange that conscience acts just like Him.

“I heard you play. Then I saw you one time as you left the building in the Cité de la Musique. I was on the corner, ten meters away. You stopped to stare at a tree as the wind was shaking its leaves in the sunlight. I was amazed to see that because of this you missed the bus. It was then. I understand what you’ve told me. You’re right. Nothing will happen between us except the music. But some people fall in love with a touch while shaking hands, and others, just as inexplicably, in other ways.”

dispositif

“dernier étage”

“I’m a Jew,” Jules told him. “My parents were murdered by the Germans because they were Jews. The gravest, most persistent sin of mankind lies in not treating everyone as an individual. So, in short, I take Arabs as they come, just like everyone else.”

“We’re in barbaric times. What is supposed to be and is no longer art has fused with publicity like a dead tree wrapped in ivy, and anyway, you don’t find your own voice ‘til you’re older.” (Jules had said these very words to her.) “If you do find it early, it will likely be insufficient – unless you’re Mozart.”

DGSI.”

General Directorate for Internal Security, a French intelligence agency

He knew he was irrational and in love with a woman with whom he had spent all of fifteen minutes. He was as much in love as he had been with Élodi, but this was different because it was possible, because Amina knew what he knew, because separately they had come to the same place in their lives. He said to himself that he was just crazy, that she could not have possibly fallen in love with him as he had with her. It was a lesson he had learned many times over, in many infatuations. And yet he could not help but continue to believe that she had.

La Manche?”

Amina.

He was tired of life, but full of love. Though he had long believed that only God was capable of infinite love, the love he had for so many people and so many things seemed nonetheless to have no limit. Ashamed and surprised, only on his last day and in his last hours had he discovered that one can love infinitely not as an attribute of one’s capacities but rather as an attribute of love itself.

But Jules was not quite ready either to run or for the last few seconds in which one may or, he suspected, may not see and feel the justice, love, and satisfaction for which one has struggled all one’s life.

Perhaps because of history, his own circumstances, or his particular nature, he had, like so many others, spent his life unhappy to live. It had been a disservice to Jacqueline, to Catherine, and to everyone he had known, and yet another reason to regret that he hadn’t been murdered in his infancy. But, now, in his last hour, he was finally happy to live and unafraid to die.

Music had been the oxygen that had kept him alive. He hadn’t become a great musician or a great composer, either of which would have diverted him from the essential task of his life.

Essential task of his life ?

knowing that at the last he might have, as he had been told, thirty seconds more, thirty seconds when all threads were braided, all feeling risen, all memories recollected not in detail but in sum, in a miraculous density, in a song too great to be heard by the living.

How did the violent acts on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim change your understanding of Jules? Was Jules’s reaction to the events he stumbled upon justified?