The Secret Pilgrim

by John Le Carré

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And what they teach is what they can’t do any more, because either the body or the spirit or both have lost their singleness of purpose; because they have seen too much and suppressed too much and compromised too much, and in the end tasted too little. So they take to rekindling their old dreams in new minds, and warming themselves against the fires of the young.

‘Sometimes I think the most vulgar thing about the Cold War was the way we learned to gobble up our own propaganda,’ he said, with the most benign of smiles. ‘I don’t mean to sound didactic, and of course in a way we’d done it all through our history. But in the Cold War, when our enemies lied, they lied to conceal the wretchedness of their system. Whereas when we lied, we concealed our virtues. Even from ourselves. We concealed the very things that made us right. Our respect for the individual, our love of variety and argument, our belief that you can only govern fairly with the consent of the governed, our capacity to see the other fellows’ view – most notably in the countries we exploited, almost to death, for our own ends. In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we preferred the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.’

There are deaths we unconsciously prepare for, depending on our choice of trades. An undertaker contemplates his funeral, the rich man his destitution, the gaoler his imprisonment, the debauchee his impotence. An actor’s greatest terror, I am told, is to watch the theatre empty itself while he wrestles in a void for his lines, and what else is that but a premature vision of his dying? For the civil servant, it is the moment when his protective walls of privilege collapse around him and he finds himself no safer than the next man, exposed to the gaze of the overt world, answering like a lying husband for his laxities and evasions.

‘And you, Ned, how did it go for you?’ she asked, as if we were two generals reporting to each other from successful, but separate, campaigns.

Retirement is no time to be wandering lost, or puzzling how to reinvent mankind.

Like Quixote, I had set out in life vowing to check the flow of evil. Yet in my lowest moments I was beginning to wonder whether I had become a contributor to it. But I still looked to the world to provide me with the chance to make my contribution – and I blamed it for not knowing how to use me.

I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the object of it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.

I had found what I was looking for – a man like myself, but one who in his search for meaning had discovered a worthwhile object for his life; who had paid every price and not counted it a sacrifice; who was paying it still and would pay it till he died; who cared nothing for compromise, nothing for his pride, nothing for ourselves or the opinion of others; who had reduced his life to the one thing that mattered to him, and was free.

A traitor needs two things, Smiley had once remarked bitterly to me at the time of Haydon’s betrayal of the Circus: somebody to hate, and somebody to love. Frewin had told me whom he hated. Now he began to talk about whom he loved.