Women in Love

He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how

near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how

strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times

take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But

best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were

satisfied in life.

He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested

with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she

proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of

conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of

love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the

horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive.

He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot

narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut

their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own

exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was

a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or

private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further

immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of

couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married

couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a

liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal

marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action.

On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that

turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other

broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in

herself. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites,

to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He

believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further

conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings,

each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like

two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.

He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for

unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration

should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world

of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost

unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself,

single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The

merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent

to him.