The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Tremulation on the Ether: Versions of Instinctual Primacy in the Essays of D.H. Lawrence: Difference between revisions

Throughout the essays there are moments of luminous insight by Lawrence that indicate his instinctual grasp of the present and his prescient sense of the future. In “A Letter from Germany” (1942) he virtually predicts the cataclysm that soon will engulf the world. Tremulations are in the air: “But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of this still unconquered Black Forest. . . . Out of this very air comes a sense of danger, a queer bristling feeling of uncanny danger. Something has happened. Something has happened which has not yet eventuated. . . . It is the father of the next phase of events.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|pp=191-192}} In “Paris Letter” (1924) he acerbically anticipates a nation’s passivity and appeasement that will manifest itself in the coming war: “Men, particularly Frenchman, have collapsed into little, rather insignificant, rather wistful, rather nice and helplessly commonplace little fellows who should be tucked away and left to sleep, like Rip Van Winkle, till the rest of the storm rolled by.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|pp=185}} In “Art and Morality” (1925) he warns of the developing alliance between technological advancements and the blandishments of the ego; he criticizes “civilized man” for his lack of a visual creative imagination, as he increasingly displays “the slowly formed habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|p=223}} Indeed, Lawrence perhaps becomes the first and mournful predictor of the epidemic of the iPhone: “Man has learned to see himself. So now, he is what he sees. He makes himself in his own image.... The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct, the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.”{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|p=225}}  

{{quote|In early April I went with my wife to Syracuse for a few days, with the purple anemones blowing in the Sicilian fields, and Adonis-blood red on the little ledges, and the corn rising strong and green in the magical, malarial places, and Etna flowing now to the northward, still with her crown of snow. The lovely, lovely journey from Catania to Syracuse in the spring, winding round the blueness of that sea, where the tall pink asphodel like a lily showing her silk. Lovely, lovely Sicily, the dawn-place, Europe’s dawn, with Odysseus pushing his ship out of the shadows into the blue. Whatever had died for me, Sicily had then not died: dawn-lovely Sicily, and the Ionian Sea.{{sfn|Lawrence|2019|p=117}} }}

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* {{cite book |editor-last=Dyer |editor-first=Geoff |last=Lawrence |first=D. H. |date=2019 |title=The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays by D.H. Lawrence |location=New York |publisher=N.Y. Review of Books  |ref=harv }}