Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essaysLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
English essays -- 20th century
He who has the sun in his face, in his body, he is the pure aristocrat.
He who has the sun in his breast, and the moon in his belly, he is the
first: the aristocrat of aristocrats, supreme in the aristocracy of
life.
Because he is _most alive_.
Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond.
He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or
not. In the face of the sun.
Life rises in circles, in degrees. The most living is the highest. And
the lower shall serve the higher, if there is to be any life among men.
More life! More _vivid_ life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless
masses of people.
Perhaps Dostoevsky was more vividly alive than Plato: culminating a more
vivid life circle, and giving the clue towards a higher circle still.
But the clue _hidden_, as it always is hidden, in every revelation,
underneath what is stated.
All creation contributes, and must contribute to this: towards the
achieving of a vaster, vivider cycle of life. That is the goal of
living. He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of
aristocrats. Or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our
not-being.
There is, of course, the power of mere conservatism and inertia. Deserts
made the cactus thorny. But the cactus still is a rose of roses.
Whereas a sort of cowardice made the porcupine spiny. There is a
difference between the cowardice of inertia, which now governs the
democratic masses, particularly the capitalist masses: and the
conservative fighting spirit which saved the cactus in the middle of the
desert.
The democratic mass, capitalist and proletariat alike, are a vast,
sluggish, ghastlily greedy porcupine, lumbering with inertia. Even
Bolshevism is the same porcupine: nothing but greed and inertia.
The cactus had a rose to fight for. But what has democracy to fight for,
against the living elements, except money, money, money!
The world is stuck solid inside an achieved form, and bristling with a
myriad spines, to protect its hulking body as it feeds: gnawing the bark
of the young tree of Life, and killing it from the top downwards.
Leaving its spines to fester and fester in the nose of the gay dog.
The actual porcupine, in spite of legend, cannot shoot its quills. But
mankind, the porcupine out-pigging the porcupine, can stick quills into
the face of the sun.
Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin
to recognize the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall
be lords of the earth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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