death restored the truth

"In fear and shame she looked at his naked body, that she had known falsely. And he was the father of her children. Her soul was torn from her body and stood apart. She looked at his naked body and was ashamed, as if she had denied it. After all, it was itself. It seemed awful to her. She looked at his face, and she turned her own face to the wall. For his look was other than hers, his way was not her way. She had denied him what he was - she saw it now. She had refused him as himself. - And this had been her life, and his life. - She was grateful to death, which restored the truth. And she knew she was not dead.

And all the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him. What had he suffered? What stretch of horror for this helpless man! She was rigid with agony. She had not been able to help him. He had been cruelly injured, this naked man, this other being, and she could make no reparation. There were the children - but the children belonged to life. This dead man had nothing to do with them. He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother - but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. She felt that in the next world he would be a stranger to her. If they met there, in the beyond, they would only be ashamed of what had been before. The children had come, for some mysterious reason, out of both of them. But the children did not unite them. Now he was dead, she knew how eternally he was apart from her, how eternally he had nothing more to do with her. She saw this episode of her life closed. They had denied each other in life. Now he had withdrawn. An anguish came over her. It was finished then: it had become hopeless between them long before he died. Yet he had been her husband. But how little! "

Odour of chrysanthemums - D.H.Lawrence

the little hard flame of truth

"I saw the Daily Mirror   to-day -the Zeppelin wrecks, etc.,how exhausted one is by all this fury of strident lies and foul death. But less and less does the world matter to one -people, and all they say or do, life, all that is out there in the world - it ceases to have any significance. Nothing matters, in the end, but the little hard flame of truth  one had inside oneself and which does not blow about in the draught of blasphemus living. It seems to me, things matter to one less and less and less, till little remains to one but the pure abstraction within one, and that is inviolable.

Still, I know that there are some other people, who have the same abstraction, who live finally by the central truth, and by nothing of the loathsome outer world. And in the end, I hope we can add our spirit together, unite in essential truthfulness, and create a new well-shapen life out of the smashed mess of the old order - I do believe we can, in time. But we have to give ourselves time -heaven knows how long."

September,27, 1916

The letters D.H. Lawrence

beliefs are beliefs

"All this war, this talk of nationality, to me is false. I feel no nationality, not fundamentally. I feel no passion for my own land, nor my own house, nor my own furniture, nor my own money. Therefore I won´t pretend any. Neither will I take part  in the scrimmage, to help my neighbour. It is his affair to go in or to stay out, as he wishes. If they had compelled me to go in, I should have died. I am sure. One is too raw, one fights too hard already, for the real integrity of one´s being. That last straw of compulsion would have been too much, I think.
Christianity is based on the love of self, the love of property, one degree removed. Why should I care for my neighbour´s property, or my neighbour´s life, if I do not care for my own? If the truth of my spirit is all that matters to me, in the last issue, then on behalf of my neighbour, all I care for is the truth of his spirit. And if his truth is his love of property, I refuse to stand by him, whether he be a poor man robbed of his cottage, his wife and children, or a rich man robbed of his merchandise. I have nothing to do with him, in that wise, and I don´t care whether he keep or lose his throat, on behalf of his property.  Property, and power -which is the same- is not the criterion. The criterion is the truth of my own intrinsic desire, clear of ulterior contamination."

Letters - D.H.Lawrence