The Quiet American

accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding. Perhaps

‘Il est mort,

‘Peut-on avoir l’honneur?’

With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought.

‘I like it here. At home there are—problems.’ ‘Merde,’

Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, a man of middle age, with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight, ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger perhaps but more cynical, less innocent,

vermouth cassis.

‘Dear Thomas,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how swell you were the other

Caodaists.’