Paris in the Present Tense

by Mark Helprin

He hadn’t seen it at first. Then he did. So even though he was not younger, he did begin to fall in love, for a moment, a minute or two, and in an afterglow when she left. Then he resisted, as had she by the time she bent to speak to the next passenger. 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.

This extraordinary young woman does not photograph like a model (so many of whom seem unalive, unpleasant, and stupid), because her beauty is not fixed but the result of what she is as she moves and speaks. The life within her is what makes him love her, and he thinks how lucky he is to have met her when both of them are so young.

and she knew that, tenure or not, she might not last long, perhaps not even until retirement, although having seen the quiet desperation of professors emeritus she wanted to work until she dropped. How could she communicate the reality of war and its effects – her field was twentieth-century France – without upsetting some Alice-in-Wonderland student who, having experienced nothing and been hypnotized into victimhood, would demand a trigger warning? It was a madhouse, made even more difficult for her in navigating the shoals of what was her second language after French, the third being a childhood Arabic fortified by some later study. To her astonishment, she was forbidden to describe atrocities against white people or men. At first she thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t, and she quickly came to the realization that such a regime was merely a mechanism to give power to one or another struggling political faction in the highly infected, incestuous bloodstream of the university.

Helprin sounding like Wolfe

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.”