Time & Perspective Quote by V. S. Naipaul

A shrug disguised as a philosophy: that is Naipaul’s specialty. “What was past was past” sounds like common sense, almost consoling, until the next sentence turns it acidic. “I suppose” is the tell - not belief, not acceptance, but a wary concession. The phrase “general attitude” finishes the job by shifting responsibility from an individual to a social climate, the kind of collective emotional weather that lets people survive by not looking too closely at what they’ve survived.

Naipaul’s fiction is crowded with societies trying to move forward while standing on rubble: colonial inheritance, political upheaval, personal humiliation, historical violence. This line doesn’t celebrate resilience; it anatomizes avoidance. The repetition of “past” is blunt, even childlike, as if language itself has been exhausted by what happened. When the only thing you can say about history is that it is behind you, that’s not closure - that’s fatigue, or fear, or both.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of forgetting as etiquette. “General attitude” suggests a communal agreement to treat memory as bad manners, to keep the conversation usable. It’s also Naipaul being Naipaul: suspicious of easy redemption arcs, allergic to the sentimental idea that time naturally heals. The sentence structure mirrors the psychology - a firm statement immediately softened into resignation. The result is devastatingly polite: a culture’s moral compromise delivered as small talk.