I couldn't help it.

A passage from The Quiet American. Recorded mostly for my own benefit and convenience. (But still worth reading nonetheless!)

"'Have you had a lot of women, Fowler?'
'I don't know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me--or me to them. The other forty-odd--one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one's social obligations, both mistaken.'
'You think they are mistaken?'
'I wish I could have those nights back. I'm still in love, Pyle, and I'm a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted, too.'
'You don't think there is anything wrong of me, do you Thomas?'
'No, Pyle.'
'It doesn't mean I don't need it, Thomas, like everybody else. I'm not--odd.'
'Not one of us needs it as much as we say. There's an awful lot of self-hypnosis around. Now I know I need nobody--except Phuong. But that's a thing one learns with time. I could go a year without one restless night if she wasn't there...One starts promiscuous and ends like one's grandfather, faithful to one woman.'
'I suppose it's pretty naive to start that way . . .'
'No.'
'...You know, Thomas, it's pretty good being here, talking to you like this. Somehow it doesn't seem dangerous any more.'
'We used to feel that in the blitz,' I said, 'when a lull came. But they always returned.'
'If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual experience had been, what would you say?'
I knew the answer to that. 'Lying in bed early one morning and watching a woman in a red dressing-gown brush her hair.'
'Joe said it was being in bed with a Chink and a negress at the same time.'
'I'd have thought that one up too when I was twenty.'
'He's fifty.'
'I wonder what mental age they gave him in the war.'
'Was Phuong the girl in the red dressing-gown?'
I wished he hadn't asked that question.
'No,' I said, 'that woman came earlier. When I left my wife.'
'What happened?'
'I left her, too.'
'Why?'
Why indeed? 'We are fools,' I said, 'when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing--I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.'
'Death?'
'It was a kind of death. Then I came east.'
'And found Phuong?'
'Yes.'"


There's quite more to their conversation, in a watch tower one night with two young guards, where they sit hoping the Vietmihn don't try to attack their particular tower as they sit there essentially weaponless. Including Pyle subtlely and sulkily accusing Fowler of not loving Phuong, having been with 40+ women, because of his understanding of the way the young Vietnamese girl "loves." And a discussion of what it means to be a virgin. It's really interesting. I like the simple, straightforward sincerity of it. Old English Fowler, young American Pyle, both stuck in a watch tower and in love with the same Vietnamese woman.

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