Women in Love

Tomorrow was Monday. Monday, the beginning of another school-week!

Another shameful, barren school-week, mere routine and mechanical

activity. Was not the adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not

death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of

barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance.

How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live

now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear

any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One

might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to

be found? No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a

routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a

rotary motion, mechanised, cut off from reality. There was nothing to

look for from life--it was the same in all countries and all peoples.

The only window was death. One could look out on to the great dark sky

of death with elation, as one had looked out of the classroom window as

a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside. Now one was not a

child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner within this sordid

vast edifice of life, and there was no escape, save in death.

But what a joy! What a gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it

could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea

they turned into a murderous alley and a soiled road of commerce,

disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they

claimed too, shared it up, parcelled it out to certain owners, they

trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in,

with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep

between the spiky walls through a labyrinth of life.

But the great, dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was

put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little

gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn,

they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in face of it.

How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look

forward to. There one would wash off all the lies and ignominy and dirt

that had been put upon one here, a perfect bath of cleanness and glad

refreshment, and go unknown, unquestioned, unabased. After all, one was

rich, if only in the promise of perfect death. It was a gladness above

all, that this remained to look forward to, the pure inhuman otherness

of death.