An Area of Darkness: His Discovery of India (Macmillan Collector's Library)

by V.S. Naipaul

‘Autocracy has its charms,’

The physique of Europe had melted away first into that of Africa and then, through Semitic Arabia, into Aryan Asia.

I tried to remember that in Bombay, as in Alexandria, there could be no pride in power, and that to give way to anger and contempt was to know a later self-disgust.

Customs are to be maintained because they are felt to be ancient.

To me as a child the India that had produced so many of the persons and things around me was featureless, and I thought of the time when the transference was made as a period of darkness, darkness which also extended to the land, as darkness surrounds a hut at evening, though for a little way around the hut there is still light. The light was the area of my experience, in time and place.

A few reassuring relationships, a strip of land, and he could satisfyingly re-create an eastern Uttar Pradesh village in central Trinidad as if in the vastness of India.

sadness for our common loss: mine, which he did not suspect, the result of my own decision or temperament, his, which by his behaviour he openly acknowledged, the result of history and environment:

a world which had lengthened out, its energy of inertia steadily weakening, from the featureless area of darkness

I understood better than I admitted.

it is part of the serious buffoonery of Ancient Rome, an aspect of the Roman pietas.

It was in a dingy Chelsea boarding-house whose façade was like all the other façades in that respectable, rising street: white, the area railings black, the door an oblong of vivid colour. Only milk bottles and a quality of curtaining betrayed the house where, in a passageway, below the diffused, misty glow of a forty-watt bulb, I first saw Ramon. He was short, his hair thick and curling at the ends, his features blunt, like his strong stubby fingers. He wore a moustache and was unshaved; and in his pullover, which I could see had belonged to someone else who had made the pilgrimage to London from Trinidad and had taken back the pull-over as a mark of the voyager to temperate climes, he looked shabby and unwashed. He was of a piece with the setting, the green grown dingy of the walls, the linoleum, the circles of dirt around door handles, the faded upholstery of cheap chairs, the stained wallpaper; the indications of the passage of numberless transients to whom these rooms had never been meant for the arranging of their things; the rim of soot below the windowsill, the smoked ceiling, the empty fireplace bearing the marks of a brief, ancient fire and suggesting a camping ground; the carpets smelly and torn. He was of a piece, yet he was alien. He belonged to unfenced backyards and lean-tos, where, pullover-less and shirtless, he might wander in the cool of the evening, about him the unfading bright green of Trinidad foliage, chickens settling down for the night, while in a...

How to Explain someone in sync yet in contrast different to their surroundings

He was incapable of assessing the morality of actions; he was a person to whom things merely happened. He had left his wife behind; she had two children. ‘And I believe I have something else boiling up for me.’ The words were spoken without the Trinidad back-street pride. They recorded a fact; they passed judgement neither on his desertion nor his virility.