Tuesday, June 03, 2008

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (1885 – 1930)


D. H. Lawrence, engelsk forfatter og poet med en klar sosial samvittighet og antagonisme mot det moderne samfunnet:

"Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror."

"Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was."

"Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men."

"We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and is an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last."

"I don't believe in the world, not in money, nor in advancement, or in the future of our civilization. If there's got to be a future for humanity, there'll have to be a very big change from what now is."