Prose: “Weltpolitik,” by Noah Lee

“Weltpolitik” is the runner-up of Euphony‘s 2025 prose contest, which has a theme of “Endings.”

Sophomore year was relieved by a few brief trips to her in DC or me in Chicago. But generally, I drifted into a naive possessiveness as our relationship, conceived in long-distance, continued to be long-distance. Our fights made no sense, I couldn’t understand her problems, and worse yet, I offered my help to fix them. When we shared an apartment for a month mid-summer, I was somnambulant. We both had appropriate summer internships, and apart from those working hours, we hardly left each other’s sight. Ironically, I grew dependent on our shared sleep—there were no expectations on either of us if we weren’t awake. In August, she went back home upstate to be with her family. Then, in September, our problems briefly mended themselves when she and I met again.

Before her own school year started, she flew to Paris to visit me while I took a study abroad course on the French Revolution with Prof. Myorar. He was a political and legal scholar, numb about America’s future, and in his own words, considered ‘teaching the least important part’ of his job. He was my favorite professor. Most classes, he would steer our department-mandated discussions on topics like Versailles or the Sans-Culottes closer to his true interests: authoritarianism and Hannah Arendt. In Myorar’s class, whoever found a way to work in a point about Arendt during discussion would be regaled with stories: A classmate discovered this phenomenon after mentioning Arendt’s name and receiving a twenty-minute response. That this was a class on the French Revolution was just a cover and we all came to know it. One day, I texted my dad about the class discussions, and he returned with an elaborate thread (which I quickly heart-reacted on iMessage) about Arendt and her curious love affair with the Nazi jurist, Martin Heidegger. I was impressed that my dad had this niche anecdote prepared. He reminded me that in college he had been, of course, an economics major—but also a philosophy minor. That would explain the presence of the uncreased Schmidt and Speer on the living room bookshelf at home.

Class would go by quickly. I would have the rest of the day to myself. But for the week she was with me in Paris, I was happy. Sure, she would stare past me and let tears well up after we ate pho in the 13th Arr.. And sure, the photos I took of her at Montmartre with the little skyline in the distance all came out lifeless. Sometimes I got the feeling that things were turning horribly wrong; other times, I paid it no attention at all. Either way, by the time we fell asleep on the tiny cot in my temporary dorm at Cité Universitaire, I promised myself there was nothing to be afraid of. As if I were lying down on a hospital bed in a state of terminal lucidity, I forgot all my anxieties, eliminated one-by-one the hundred doubts in my mind, and shut my eyes.

She left Paris to return to her own college after that week and quickly resumed a regimen of limited communication. “There’s just not much to say,” she would say. In seminar, I asked Prof. Myorar about the Arendt and Heidegger affair, and he straightened up, leaning in with uncharacteristic attentiveness. I remember only bits of what he said since the question possessed him to speak in postdoc-level catechisms, but I gathered that their bond was found in the synthesis between Heidegger’s ‘being toward death’ and Arendt’s ‘being toward life’. What did that mean for me? I understood neither Heidegger’s death impulse nor Arendt’s free and active life—and Myorar wanted me to grasp their synthesis? I was sleepwalking through Paris, my relationship with her, and Myorar’s classroom diatribes. In this way, I did feel between life and death.

I became mercurial under the sparse, depressed conditions of our relationship. Without her in Paris, where was my ‘being toward?’ At Gare du Nord, I wanted to declare myself hers, pin her to me, and die with her. At the Musee d’ Orsay, I wanted my freedom and a return to the levity of the past. On warm nights in the dorm, lying alone on my still-too-small cot and submitting to the unfettered smells of chlorine and dew drafting in through the window, I did the noble thing and did nothing about how she was drifting away. The classroom was blurring together with my post-class walks along the Seine. I would carry with me, for hours at a time, thoughts stemming from my under-understanding of the philosophical nature of Arendt’s and Heidegger’s relationship. Was there a synthesis between their embraces of life and death? What did Prof. Myorar mean by “dialect of negation?” And was he going to stop pretending that this class was about the French Revolution? It’s funny how both my dad and Myorar approached my questions about the Germans with so much enthusiasm. I found here that nobody wanted to talk about French history. There was a heavy air here and I was sick of it.

On my penultimate day in Paris, I was walking through Gare du Nord to evacuate to neutral Belgium. (I wanted to buy chocolates for my family and for her) Right as I was getting on the Eurostar train, five undercover police officers wearing a mix of baseball caps, sneakers, and hoodies approached me requesting to search my bag and examine my ID. I quickly registered them as petty criminals and any legitimate police credentials they may have had were lost on me. I said—in horrific French—“you are not really the police,” brushed them off, and started again for the train. I made it about four steps before they grabbed me, handcuffed me, and beat me up. Something atavistic gripped me and I started fighting back. You never know what sort of response you’re going to have in instantaneous situations like this. Whether you fight, run, or freeze up is something neither you nor society can program in advance. With my arms cuffed behind my back, being dragged across the station platform, I berated myself about why I didn’t just give them what they wanted. After all, even if they weren’t the police and just wanted to rob me, resisting wouldn’t be worth it. Deep down I knew I wanted to fight; to die and be vindicated.

I felt an unfamiliar mix of penitence, fury, and adrenaline as I sat cuffed to the foldable chair inside the offsite customs office. There were three pieces of furniture here, all banal—a table, a chair, and a white ceiling light. The officers were strategically positioned around me in case I made any sudden moves.

“I will remove the handcuffs if you don’t fight again. Will you fight us again?” One Yankee-capped officer asked me in magnificent English.

“No. You have a gun.” I replied.

And so I watched them fish for my passport in my backpack until one officer found it, held it up like the Statue of Liberty, and it became apparent that I was American and would have to be let go. The collective groans of “putain” and “merde” filled the room. I have never been so grateful to be from the United States of America.

I made it on the next train to Belgium, but I wanted to leave this whole continent and go back home. Didn’t the Allied powers win the war in the end? I didn’t care to ask Dad or Myorar about their thoughts on the matter. Oh, and she never got those Belgian chocolates.

Noah is a fourth-year LLSO, History, and CEGU major from Los Angeles majoring in laws, letters, and society; history; and environment, society, and urbanization. He has a dog named Mouse and likes to paint cityscapes.