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
Those who will hold power, afterwards, they will sit on their rocks and
heights of unutterable morality, which have become foul through the
course of ages, like vultures upon the unchangeable mountain-tops. The
fixed, existing form will persist forever beneath them, about them, they
will have become the spirit incarnate of the fixed form of life. They
will eat carrion, having become a static hunger for keen putrescence.
This alone will support the incarnation of hoary fixity which they are.
And beside the carrion they will fight the multitudes of hoary, obscene
dogs, which also persist. It is the mortal form become null and fixed
and enduring, glassy, horrible, beyond life and death, beyond
consummation, the awful, stony nullity. It is timeless, almost as the
rainbow.
But it is not utterly timeless. It is only unthinkably slow, static in
its passing away, perpetuated.
Its very aspect of timelessness is a fraud.
What is evil?--not death, nor the blood-devouring Moloch, but this
spirit of perpetuation and apparent timelessness, this obscenity which
holds the great carrion birds, and the carrion dogs. The tiger, the
hawk, the weasel, are beautiful things to me; and as they strike the
dove and the hare, that is the will of God, it is a consummation, a
bringing together of two extremes, a making perfect one from the
duality.
But the baboon, and the hyæna, the vulture, the condor, and the carrion
crow, these fill me with fear and horror. These are the highly developed
life-forms, now arrested, petrified, frozen, falsely, timeless. The
baboon was almost as man, the hyæna as the lion: the vulture and the
condor are greater than the eagle, the carrion crow is stronger than the
hawk. And these obscene beasts are not ashamed. They are stark and
static, they are not mixed. Their will is hoary, ageless. Before us, the
Egyptians have known them and worshipped them.
The baboon, with his intelligence and his unthinkable loins, the cunning
hyæna with his cringing, stricken loins, these are the static form of
one achieved ego, the egoistic Christian, the democratic, the
unselfish. The vulture, with her naked neck and naked, small stony
head, this is the static form of the other achieved ego, the eagle, the
Self, aristocratic, lordly, pagan.
It is unthinkable and unendurable. Yet we are drawn more and more in
this direction. After the supreme intelligence, the baboon, after the
supreme pride, the vulture. The millionaire: the international
financier: the bankers of this world. The baboons, the hyænas, the
vultures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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