Women in Love

'I don't worship Loerke, but at any rate, he is a free individual. He

is not stiff with conceit of his own maleness. He is not grinding

dutifully at the old mills. Oh God, when I think of Gerald, and his

work--those offices at Beldover, and the mines--it makes my heart sick.

What HAVE I to do with it--and him thinking he can be a lover to a

woman! One might as well ask it of a self-satisfied lamp-post. These

men, with their eternal jobs--and their eternal mills of God that keep

on grinding at nothing! It is too boring, just boring. However did I

come to take him seriously at all!

'At least in Dresden, one will have one's back to it all. And there

will be amusing things to do. It will be amusing to go to these

eurythmic displays, and the German opera, the German theatre. It WILL

be amusing to take part in German Bohemian life. And Loerke is an

artist, he is a free individual. One will escape from so much, that is

the chief thing, escape so much hideous boring repetition of vulgar

actions, vulgar phrases, vulgar postures. I don't delude myself that I

shall find an elixir of life in Dresden. I know I shan't. But I shall

get away from people who have their own homes and their own children

and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that. I

shall be among people who DON'T own things and who HAVEN'T got a home

and a domestic servant in the background, who haven't got a standing

and a status and a degree and a circle of friends of the same. Oh God,

the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one's head tick like a

clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and

meaninglessness. How I HATE life, how I hate it. How I hate the

Geralds, that they can offer one nothing else.

'Shortlands!--Heavens! Think of living there, one week, then the next,

and THEN THE THIRD-'No, I won't think of it--it is too much.' And she broke off, really terrified, really unable to bear any more.

The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day

following day, AD INFINITUM, was one of the things that made her heart

palpitate with a real approach of madness. The terrible bondage of this

tick-tack of time, this twitching of the hands of the clock, this

eternal repetition of hours and days--oh God, it was too awful to

contemplate. And there was no escape from it, no escape.

She almost wished Gerald were with her to save her from the terror of

her own thoughts. Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted

by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack. All life, all life

resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the

striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching

of the clock-fingers.