Pavlo’s Reviews > Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence > Status Update

“And there you have it. One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence.”

“My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It’s not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one’s power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.”

“The more I ponder these questions the more I am persuaded that the real subject of this book, the one that writing it was an attempt to evade, is despair.”

“It was easy to imagine the scene described by Auden when he came here in 1939: ‘Cars of women pilgrims go up every day to stand reverently there and wonder what it would have been like to sleep with him.’”

“But in retrospect even this unbearable misery – I’ve said it before and I might well say it again – turns out to have been bearable. Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.”

Funny, but this has me thinking of “Three Men In a Boat”

“Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself. Before you know it desire has atrophied to the degree that it can only make itself apparent by passing itself off as an obligation.”

“Most people don’t want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he’d be lost without it. That’s why children are so convenient: you have children because you’re struggling to get by as an artist – which is actually what being an artist means – or failing
to get on with your career.”

“People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted.”

“‘A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction,’ warned Lawrence and the kind of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels. Which is why the novelists I like best are, with the exception of the last-named, not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard . . .”