Paris in the Present Tense

by Mark Helprin

The palisade of buildings was pitch black on its eastern face, but light from the sun side broke so hard upon steel and glass that its coronas roiled over the rooftops like waves breaking over a sea wall.

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.

Music is like the inconclusive testimony of a temporary visitor to a wondrous world. As it plays, you have everything, but when it stops you are left with nothing.”

“No offense taken. I like being glittering scum.

Younger children are not only quiet but less predictable and more interesting, in that they are fascinated by the world rather than straining to make the world fascinated by them.

Saint-Germain-en-Laye will never be fashionable or dazzling, but there is no end to the praise of a good and peaceful place high on a hill.

The keen, the myopic, the color blind, and the blind looking at a mountain range from different angles and in different light would see or not see many different things, but the mountain range would be the same.

“For me, beauty is a hint, a flash, a glimpse of the divine and a promise that the world is good. And in music that spark can be elongated long enough to be a steady light.”

“We have what was denied to them. We would betray them were we not happy to be alive. It’s nothing less than an obligation – to see as they cannot see, hear as they cannot hear, feel as they cannot feel, taste as they cannot taste, love as they cannot love.”

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?

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.

Jules hoped that if parents and grandparents truly loved and tried their best, the children would forgive the mistakes even when those who had made them were long gone.

She had to be distant now, as he had never had the chance to be distant with his parents – who were forever vulnerable, and who had to be cared for in perpetuity and protected in retrospect, if only in the imagination. And, whatever she did and however she acted, he had to do for her and for Luc whatever he could.

You could tell from her expression, particularly from her eyes, that she expected not to live. Jules understood only too well that this was the ever-present foundation upon which rests all that is done to remain above it.

“No, but France is helpless before it, and when France is helpless, one way or another, it surrenders.”

“Bird shouldn’t fly into traps.” “All of France is a trap. For the moment, we’ll take refuge in a neglected corner. If you were a German, would you pay more attention to Paris or Reims?”

Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren.

“The Bach we did today is just that. It was my father’s favorite piece, on this very instrument.” He held it out, and brought it back. “He knew how joyful it was, and yet how sad. It was the first piece I heard him play, and the last.”

It was human nature not to lie as well to two people as to one, because it was human nature to be jangled by two sets of eyes at two different angles.

“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.”

anodyne.

“Why don’t you stay for a swim and work it off. Do we have enough chicken?!!” he screamed so loudly that Duvalier’s drink spilled. Because the judge had been looking straight at Duvalier when he shouted the question,

“No. But we have ham, too!” It was a very strange hearing, which ended when the two policemen – a Muslim and a Jew, who had had a nice lunch of ham – left their guns with the judge and went off to the beach.

Les Barricades Mystérieuses,

There are many hidden courtyards in France. It might be said that the whole country and its culture is a form of architecture that protects private life.

As a soldier, he had come to know the courage that comes on the heels of anxiety. Always anxious before a patrol, when he took his first step into the darkness he accepted death, and from that point forward he left all fear behind and experienced a lightness and joy as if he were invulnerable.

Jules was free and gone, but the music remained – sonatas, symphonies, and songs present even in silence, waiting to be heard by those who might stop long enough to listen on their way.

The virtues of right-conduct, courage, modesty, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice are largely absent from the modern anti-hero, whose job is often to show them as destructive and hypocritical.