D H Lawrence again, a new biography. Here New Yorker reviewer Benjamin Kunkel describes Lawrence’s final philosophy—
Lawrence’s philosophy becomes a kind of rapt
literalism, as his ethic becomes a coldly joyous solitude: the world is
only the separate bodies in it. Here is the author of “Sons and Lovers”
and “Women in Love” insisting, in a 1922 essay, on the crucial “thing
to do”:
And
it’s more difficult than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. . . .
Wives, don’t love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the
great babies! . . . Just boil the eggs and fill the salt-cellars and be
quite nice, and in your own soul be alone and be still. . . . Husbands,
don’t love your wives any more. If they flirt with men younger or older
than yourselves, let your blood not stir. . . . And learn, learn, learn
the one and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in the
sweetness of the possession of your own soul.
………….
Dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1929-30, unable to walk, and
rendered sexually impotent by his disease, he wrote these words on the
last page of his last book:
Man
wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and
once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is
to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme
triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The dead may
look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in
the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought
to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and
part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
—————–
In the current issue of Harper’s John Berger gives Geoff Dyer’s new book about photography a wonderful review. He opens it with this paragraph—a piece that we could use to comment on lots and lots of things about our time—
Let’s begin from far away. We are living today in a culture of information. I use the word "culture" in its anthropological sense; the information-culture has in practice no place for cultural heritages of any kind. It stimulates calculation but consistently discourages reflection.
Thus it substitutes information (and misinformation) for knowledge or wisdom. This is alarming, yet it’s a culture that sooner or later will spin out of control; it will not endure. (December 87)
"Stimulates calculation" and "discourages reflection." Is Lawrence’s "coldly joyous solitude" not most conducive to the sort of reflection Berger has in mind?
Does anyone write about a "warmly" joyous solitude?
