Naipaul on Palookaville

Here’s VS Naipaul again, this time reflecting on what it is like to be born on the edge of nowhere:

I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. It is one of those sayings which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced the truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder. From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king’s crown, I had sensed this. Now I was to discover that disorder has its own logic and permanence: the Greek was wise.

—VS Naipaul, The Mimic Men 118 (Penguin ed. 1969)