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true historian and it is noteworthy how many of Hogarth's scenes, both indoors and outdoors, happen to contain a clock, and that the clock he introduces always appears to tell the real hour. Time is perpetually moving, as his personages move; they are travellers, on their road to a destination that only the artist has yet glimpsed. The period does not merely provide a setting - the right furniture and clothes and ornaments: it is implicit in the personal demeanour, in the whole spiritual ambiance of every man or woman shown.

p 179 2-19-82

The Old Country - by Robert Towers review of Malgnoli Days by R. K. Narayan NYR of Books 4.1.82

The inhabitants ... still partake of what might be called the "old consciousness," in which men and women define themselves (and are perceived by others) more in terms

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of their occupations, their roles, or stations in society than as the embodiments of individualized psyches. The major transactions of life are public, externalized; what happens in the marketplace is deemed more significant than the private exchanges of the bedroom.

p 21

... The occupations are fixed (sometimes hereditarily, by caste), and each occupation is likely to be associated with a particular personality. A painter of signs is perceived as being in some way different from a vendor of sweets, though their economic status may be exactly the same; both are identified with their trade - find their identities in it - as no television repairman in Milwaukee or Liverpool is identified with his. Poverty is more likely to be regarded as a fate than as an economic condition. Indeed, the notion of Karma or destiny