WESTERN

John le Carré on Atheism


a Mingrelian proverb ... : 'Why do you want light if you're blind?'
p 53

I am not a God man, though I believe society is the better for Him than without Him. I do not reject Him, as Larry does, and then go scurrying after Him to apologise. But I do not accept Him either.

If deep down I believe in some central meaning, some Urgeist, as Larry would call it, my route to it is more likely to be the aesthetic one -- the autumnal beauty of the Mendips, say, or Emma playing Liszt for me -- than the path of prayer.
p 82-3

- John le Carre' (David Cornwell), Our Game (Knopf: New York 1995)

"Mingrelian (Turkey) with about 360,000 speakers in an area between the Black Sea and the Tskhenists'q'ali river and bordering the Svan homeland to the north. Although mutually unintelligible, Mingrelian and Laz are viewed by some as dialects of a single language, Zan. Georgian serves both as a lingua franca and as a literary language for speakers of Svan and Mingrelian, while most Laz speakers are bilingual in Turkish."

"The Mendip Hills stretch across an area of the South West of England, within easy access of Weston-super-Mare, Bristol, Wells and Bridgwater. Every year, thousands of tourists flock to these towns."


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