Women in Love

'I shall die--I shall quickly die,' said Ursula to herself, clear as if

in a trance, clear, calm, and certain beyond human certainty. But

somewhere behind, in the twilight, there was a bitter weeping and a

hopelessness. That must not be attended to. One must go where the

unfaltering spirit goes, there must be no baulking the issue, because

of fear. No baulking the issue, no listening to the lesser voices. If

the deepest desire be now, to go on into the unknown of death, shall

one forfeit the deepest truth for one more shallow?

'Then let it end,' she said to herself. It was a decision. It was not a

question of taking one's life--she would NEVER kill herself, that was

repulsive and violent. It was a question of KNOWING the next step. And

the next step led into the space of death. Did it?--or was there--?

Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside

the fire. And then the thought came back. The space o' death! Could she

give herself to it? Ah yes--it was a sleep. She had had enough So long

she had held out; and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to

resist any more.

In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was

dark. She could feel, within the darkness, the terrible assertion of

her body, the unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that

is too much, the far-off, awful nausea of dissolution set in within the

body.

'Does the body correspond so immediately with the spirit?' she asked

herself. And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the

body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation

of the integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as

well. Unless I set my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of

life, fix myself and remain static, cut off from living, absolved

within my own will. But better die than live mechanically a life that

is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move on with the

invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is

greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to

live mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as

an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious.

There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an

unreplenished, mechanised life. Life indeed may be ignominious,

shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like

the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.