Ficciones

The following passages struck me as I was reading my latest novel. Even then - during the Cold War - Americans were held in disregard for their careless bluntness in defending the nation. But at least then there was some standard, some authority that could be beckoned to get the job done. Today, there seems nothing but the gray wash of relativism; no one to turn to to define the boundaries between good and evil; between that which is in one’s nation's self-interest and that which is not.

After the mole had been discovered, ‘G. S. lived in limbo. To his neighbors, when they noticed him, he seemed to have lapsed into a wasting grief. He rose late and pottered around the house in his dressing gown, cleaning things, dusting, cooking meals for himself and not eating them. In the afternoon, quite against local bylaws, he lit a coal fire and sat before it reading… or writing letters… seldom completed and never posted. When the telephone rang, he went to it quickly…’ but drew back. ‘Outside the window the weather continued foul, and a few passers-by were huddled in Balkan misery.

‘…he had the wistful notion of liking B. and respecting him: B. was a man, after all, who had had something to say and had said it.’ But, then his mind balked. The more he puzzled over it, the more conscious he became of the contradictions. ‘He tried at first to see B. in the romantic newspaper terms of a thirties intellectual, for whom Moscow was a natural Mecca. “Moscow was his discipline,” he told himself. “He needed the symmetry of a historical and economic solution.” This struck him as too sparse, so he added more…: “B. was a romantic and a snob. He wanted to join the elitist vanguard and lead the masses out of darkness.” …he imagined B’s Marxism as making up for his inadequacy… and for his loveless childhood. Later, of course, it hardly mattered (even) if the doctrine wore thin. …Treason is very much a matter of habit…’
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Italics taken from John LeCarre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier. Spy”.