Women in Love

'Are you SURE?' she cried. 'It seems to me the reverse. They are

overconscious, burdened to death with consciousness.' 'Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts,' he cried.

But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic

interrogation.

'When we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but knowledge?' she

asked pathetically. 'If I know about the flower, don't I lose the

flower and have only the knowledge? Aren't we exchanging the substance

for the shadow, aren't we forfeiting life for this dead quality of

knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this

knowing mean to me? It means nothing.' 'You are merely making words,' he said; 'knowledge means everything to

you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don't want to

BE an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a

mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary--and more

decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the

worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion

and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts--you want them hard

enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes

place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won't be

conscious of what ACTUALLY is: you want the lie that will match the

rest of your furniture.' Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood

covered with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated

each other.

'It's all that Lady of Shalott business,' he said, in his strong

abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air.

'You've got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal

understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing

beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you

have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a

savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and

"passion."' He quoted the last word satirically against her. She sat convulsed with

fury and violation, speechless, like a stricken pythoness of the Greek

oracle.

'But your passion is a lie,' he went on violently. 'It isn't passion at

all, it is your WILL. It's your bullying will. You want to clutch

things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your

power. And why? Because you haven't got any real body, any dark sensual

body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your

conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to KNOW.' He looked at her in mingled hate and contempt, also in pain because she

suffered, and in shame because he knew he tortured her. He had an

impulse to kneel and plead for forgiveness. But a bitterer red anger

burned up to fury in him. He became unconscious of her, he was only a

passionate voice speaking.