Call for the Dead

by John Le Carré

the fantastic prospect of working completely alone.

Always withdrawn, he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty; he guarded himself warily from spontaneous reaction.

‘It’s the devil you don’t know that gets you.’

he even tried on occasion to plan in his head a walk through a European city – to record the shops and buildings he would pass, for instance, in Berne on a walk from the Münster to the university. But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away.

What did Hesse write? ‘Strange to wander in the mist, each is alone. No tree knows his neighbour. Each is alone.’ We know nothing of one another, nothing, Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing.

the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body:

“Only make no laws, no fine theories, no judgements, and the people may love, but give them one theory, let them invent one slogan, and the game begins again.”

“Can’t you see it’s the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour.

men who work for a dream will work for ever”

the starlit sky, a glimpse of eternity between two worlds.