“The New York streets from a taxi. That misty gap at the end of the Avenue. Beyond the bright windows, loaded with color and light—beyond the green and yellow lights—the misty rift in the stone—those buildings beyond the Arch—gray on the gray-pale sky—beyond Madison Square—the sun on the biscuit-box buildings and the clock tower—beyond the cigar stores of the Avenue and the red lights of the Flatiron corner drugstore, the trolleys and the trucks on Twenty-third Street—that stop my taxi—girls in nude summer stockings—those personalytiless international eating places—we’re nearer the Arch—Fourteenth Street—a slab of sun—turns down Twelvth Street toward the El—Jefferson Market Court.”
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
