Word: besting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toad simultaneously loved walking as an escape from thought, a way of setting the world itself astir, like a cycloramic dream, so that it flowed through his eye to his mind at the speed that suits the total creature best -- all higher speeds being a mere greed for frivolous accelerations, for wind in the face...
...best walking is a liberation, and a way of thinking. A creature like Toad is not a tree, but is designed to move across earth's surface, perpendicular to gravity and companioned by time. Somehow walking, thought Toad in his mellower moments, makes time a passage that is not only bearable but also sweet and festooned with an everlastingly changing array of scenery...
Conversation, Toad thought, was best when walking, since talk itself is an ambling. Toad even talked better to himself when walking -- though if he moved his lips when doing it, he looked like a street crazy. It was at last in the walking that Toad's soul, he found, was most at rest...
Naipaul's success story is similar to those of other gifted outsiders who have become part of the tradition of English letters. Coming from backgrounds they found provincial and embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island society...
...think that way. People turn things around. I'm for individual rights and for law." It is a long view that includes his fascination with ancient Rome ("I can barely express my admiration for it") and the imperial record of the English. Their achievement calls forth some of his best bis: "Pretty terrific. It would be churlish to say otherwise. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It would be unhistorical to say otherwise...