Non-PRO English Art/Literary General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters

the term is from v.s. naipaul's "the enigma of arrival"

the author uses it in two passages:

"the history i carried with me, together with the self-awareness that had come with my education and ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of glory dead; and in england had given me the rawest stranger's nerves."

"i dreaded change both here [the surroundings of the author's cottage] and on the droveway [an old road where he is used to walk]; and that was why, meeting distress half-way, i cultivated old, possibly ancestral ways, of feeling, the ways of glory dead, and held on to the idea of a world in flux..."

now, the author is of indian origin; born in trinidad, where his ancestors were settled by the british some time in the 19th century. his indian ancestry is poor and rural. the setting he talks about in the second passage is the english country, a setting that he unexpectedly finds much more benign than any other place in his life. it is a cottage located in the grounds of a manor. the whole place is rather neglected, nature taking over the once meticulously tended grounds, and the author rejoices the seclusion and decay of his surroundings. but living in the second half of the 20th century, change is very nearby (e.g. old farm buildings being replaced by new ones, old residents of cottages replaced by younger, urban people with ways that wouldn't match country life) and the author prefers to look at it not as decay but as change or flux - this is his way of coping, possibly inherited from his indian ancestors who had to live in an insecure world.
the author receives his education in trinidad around and just after the time of WWII. this is a colonial, abstract education where he gets an idea of the old british imperial glory, but this glory he doesn't find in london where he arrives in 1950 - so this might relate to the "glory dead" in the first passage, perhaps, but i feel that the term in the second passage (both terms are used in consecutive pages) has to do with his indian past.

i hope the context is clear enough. can you please explain how i should understand the term? thanks