TORONTO HAS BEEN in Edward Said's consciousness since 1956 when as a student at Harvard he found himself transfixed by a Glenn Gould record. Later he would rush to Gould's performances in Boston; buy all his records; follow his career until his death in 1982; and, being an accomplished pianist himself, write knowledgeably about the genius, including an erudite piece last fall, The Virtuoso as Intellectual.

So in 1986, Said - professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and the leading Palestinian intellectual of this era - was glad to come to the University of Toronto as the Northrop Frye visiting lecturer in literary theory. And this month to the campus to receive an honourary degree. And ruminate about several subjects, including his health.

Battling leukemia since 1991, and having had unsuccessful radiation and chemotherapy, he is undergoing experimental treatment. ``I am functioning pretty well,'' he says, though he is often tired and out of breath.

But he hasn't let that dent his indomitable spirit. Or the ``passion, courage and boldness'' for which he was lauded by Linda Hutcheon, U of T professor of English, at the convocation. Or the eloquent advocacy for Palestinians that Professor Michael Marrus, dean of graduate studies, credited him with.

Said remains combative, in keeping with his often lonely mission to ``speak the truth to power.'' His has been a David and Goliath battle against a range of adversaries: Orientalists, right-wing Zionists, autocratic Arabs, and Holocaust-deniers and anti-Semites among his own people.

In an interview, he spoke provocatively on a range of issues:

THE PEACE PROCESS: Having dismissed the 1993 Oslo accord as a Palestinian Versailles that created bantustans in the occupied territories, Said calls it ``a trick'' to avoid United Nations resolutions demanding total Israeli withdrawal.

He predicts that, current pronouncements notwithstanding, ``Israel will accept a Palestinian state but not its boundaries, so that it will be a theoretical fiction of some sort.''

EHUD BARAK: The prime minister who promised peace, and has pulled troops out of South Lebanon, is, to Said, ``as bad, if not worse, than (Yitzhak) Rabin and (Benjamin) Netanyahu. He wears a better mask but his ideas are the same - unimaginative, conventional, authoritarian.''

YASSER ARAFAT: The head of the Palestinian Authority is ``a prisoner of the Israelis.'' He is a tyrant to boot, running a ``lawless land, with no constitution and no basic law,'' and inflicting ``horrible repression'' on his people, by maintaining ``an atmosphere of terror.''

HUMAN RIGHTS: ``There should be a single standard for human rights, not one for Palestinians and another for the rest of the world.''

Yet, he says, too many crusaders ``talk of human rights for everyone except the Palestinians. It's moral hypocrisy of the worst sort.''

THE FUTURE: Said is pessimistic for now - ``the current generation is hopeless'' - but optimistic in the long run, particularly because of the slow evolution of Israel itself.

The traditional Zionist narrative is being changed to acknowledge unpleasant facts. School texts now say that, contrary to myths, Arabs were indeed expelled in 1948; that Jewish forces enjoyed numerical superiority over Arabs in that war; and that innocent Arabs were massacred by Jewish zealots. Students also read Palestinian poet Mahmoud Derwish who, like Said, opposes Oslo.

``The Israeli public,'' says Said, ``is now much more advanced than the Jewry in North America,'' which feels duty-bound to defend Israel at all costs and attack him even as he gains readers and credibility in Israel (a Hebrew translation of Orientalism, his seminal work, is coming out).

Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has praised him as a Renaissance man of great moral authority. On Said's suggestion, he conducted a concert in the West Bank. And last fall, the two joined cellist Yo-Yo Ma for a workshop in Weimar, Germany for young Israeli and Arab musicians. P> HIS MEMOIR: Said is forceful in refuting the ``shabby tactics'' used by ``extreme right-wing Zionists'' to discredit Out Of Place, his 17th book.

An article by a Justus Weiner, working for a Jerusalem group funded by the convicted junk bond felon Michael Milken, questioned Said's Palestinian roots. It said the house in which he was born didn't belong to his father, and that he may even have lied about attending school there.

But Said has never said anything other than that he was born in Jerusalem, that he studied in Cairo, that as part of his privileged upbringing he shuttled between those places and a mountain resort in Lebanon, but that his entire Jerusalemite family was uprooted. The house was registered to Said's aunt. A cousin, Yusuf Said, now living in Toronto, took the deed to Israel just three years ago to refile the family's claim.

Said says Weiner ``had never even read my book;'' didn't talk to him or family members; ignored those who confirmed Said's story; and had the article printed ``before my book was even published.''

The Weiner article ran in a conservative New York magazine, Commentary, after first being submitted to the pro-Israeli New Republic which insisted he first check out the galleys of Said's book.

Weiner's assertions have since been widely derided as ``absolutely rubbish,'' ``obviously wrong,'' ``malevolent'' and ``scurrilous,'' designed merely to discredit the most potent Palestinian symbol in America.

Said says the publisher of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, has admitted as much, telling a friend recently that ``he published it simply to discredit me because a lot of people are reading me, even in Israel.''

But the fuss ``helped sell my book, especially in Israel. And the greatest irony is that a Hebrew translation is coming out and will be serialized in Ha'aretz,'' the Tel Aviv newspaper.