Thought-Adventures

Abstract

Lawrence’s ideas animate many scenes in his fiction, and are implicitly or explicitly expressed in his poetry. He believed that the only genuine form of thought is instinctive or intuitive, since life is beyond mental analysis and, in the words of D’Annunzio, anatomy presupposes a corpse (K.xvi). ‘The thought-adventure starts in the blood, not in the mind’ (P2.618). Lawrence’s basic views developed very rapidly and, though subject to changing emphases, never altered radically; the best expression of them occurs at the end of Apocalypse, his last important work:

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul’. Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent…. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive…. 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…. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family.