'He Was a Cure for Simple Minds'

“Though a sepulchral inscription is professedly a panegyrick, and, therefore, not confined to historical impartiality, yet it ought always to be written with regard to truth.”

Simple epitaphs are best, preferably composed in complete sentences that avoid sloganeering and inflated claims about the virtues of the departed. Name and dates will do, of course. If more is called for, keep it terse and true, like a J.V. Cunningham epigram. Dr. Johnson’s advice above, from “An Essay on Epitaphs” (1740), is a suitable style guide. V.S. Naipaul died last Saturday, and in his brief City Journal remembrance of the novelist, Theodore Dalrymple composes, in his final sentence, a fitting inscription:

“He was a cure for simple minds.”

A simple mind is already made up. Its thoughts are prefabricated. A simple mind is seldom confused. It already has the answers. Naipaul had none. He was a rare contemporary without ideology. His subject, distilled to essentials, was human nature. In 1990, Naipaul spoke at the Manhattan Institute. His lecture, “Our Universal Civilization,” was published the following year in City Journal. In it he writes:

“I have no unifying theory of things. To me, situations and people are always specific, always of themselves. That is why one travels and writes: to find out. To work in the other way would be to know the answers before one knew the problems; that is a recognized way of working, I know, especially if one is a political or religious or racial missionary. But I would have found it hard.”