Aaron's Rod, D. H. Lawrence [book recommendations for young adults .TXT] 📗

of love and God is what ails us, when there’s no more grist between the stones. We’ve ground love very small. Time to forget it. Forget the very words religion, and God, and love—then have a shot at a new mode. But the very words rivet us down and don’t let us move. Rivets, and we can’t get them out.”

“And where should we be if we could?” said Aaron.

“We might begin to be ourselves, anyhow.”

“And what does that mean?” said Aaron. “Being yourself—what does it mean?”

“To me, everything.”

“And to most folks, nothing. They’ve got to have a goal.”

“There is no goal. I loathe goals more than any other impertinence. Gaols, they are. Bah—jails and jailers, gaols and gaolers---”

“Wherever you go, you’ll find people with their noses tied to some goal,” said Aaron.

“Their wagon hitched to a star—which goes round and round like an ass in a gin,” laughed Lilly. “Be damned to it.”

Aaron got himself dressed, and the two men went out, took a tram and went into the country. Aaron could not help it—Lilly put his back up. They came to a little inn near a bridge, where a broad stream rustled bright and shallow. It was a sunny warm day, and Aaron and Lilly had a table outside under the thin trees at the top of the bank above the river. The yellow leaves were falling—the Tuscan sky was turquoise blue. In the stream below three naked boys still adventurously bathed, and lay flat on the shingle in the sun. A wagon with two pale, loving, velvety oxen drew slowly down the hill, looking at each step as if they were going to come to rest, to move no more. But still they stepped forward. Till they came to the inn, and there they stood at rest. Two old women were picking the last acorns under three scrubby oak-trees, whilst a girl with bare feet drove her two goats and a sheep up from the water-side towards the women. The girl wore a dress that had been blue, perhaps indigo, but which had faded to the beautiful lavender-purple colour which is so common, and which always reminded Lilly of purple anemones in the south.

The two friends sat in the sun and drank red wine. It was midday. From the thin, square belfry on the opposite hill the bells had rung. The old women and the girl squatted under the trees, eating their bread and figs. The boys were dressing, fluttering into their shirts on the stream’s shingle. A big girl went past, with somebody’s dinner tied in a red kerchief and perched on her head. It was one of the most precious hours: the hour of pause, noon, and the sun, and the quiet acceptance of the world. At such a time everything seems to fall into a true relationship, after the strain of work and of urge.

Aaron looked at Lilly, and saw the same odd, distant look on his face as on the face of some animal when it lies awake and alert, yet perfectly at one with its surroundings. It was something quite different from happiness: an alert enjoyment of rest, an intense and satisfying sense of centrality. As a dog when it basks in the sun with one eye open and winking: or a rabbit quite still and wide-eyed, with a faintly-twitching nose. Not passivity, but alert enjoyment of being central, life-central in one’s own little circumambient world.

They sat thus still—or lay under the trees—for an hour and a half. Then Lilly paid the bill, and went on.

“What am I going to do this winter, do you think?” Aaron asked.

“What do you want to do?”

“Nay, that’s what I want to know.”

“Do you want anything? I mean, does something drive you from inside?”

“I can’t just rest,” said Aaron.

“Can’t you settle down to something?—to a job, for instance?”

“I’ve not found the job I could settle down to, yet,” said Aaron.

“Why not?”

“It’s just my nature.”

“Are you a seeker? Have you got a divine urge, or need?”

“How do I know?” laughed Aaron. “Perhaps I’ve got a DAMNED urge, at the bottom of me. I’m sure it’s nothing divine.”

“Very well then. Now, in life, there are only two great dynamic urges—do you believe me—?”

“How do I know?” laughed Aaron. “Do you want to be believed?”

“No, I don’t care a straw. Only for your own sake, you’d better believe me.”

“All right then—what about it?”

“Well, then, there are only two great dynamic urges in LIFE: love and power.”

“Love and power?” said Aaron. “I don’t see power as so very important.”

“You don’t see because you don’t look. But that’s not the point. What sort of urge is your urge? Is it the love urge?”

“I don’t know,” said Aaron.

“Yes, you do. You know that you have got an urge, don’t you?”

“Yes—” rather unwillingly Aaron admitted it.

“Well then, what is it? Is it that you want to love, or to be obeyed?”

“A bit of both.”

“All right—a bit of both. And what are you looking for in love?—A woman whom you can love, and who will love you, out and out and all in all and happy ever after sort of thing?”

“That’s what I started out for, perhaps,” laughed Aaron.

“And now you know it’s all my eye!” Aaron looked at Lilly, unwilling to admit it. Lilly began to laugh.

“You know it well enough,” he said. “It’s one of your lost illusions, my boy. Well, then, what next? Is it a God you’re after? Do you want a God you can strive to and attain, through love, and live happy ever after, countless millions of eternities, immortality and all that? Is this your little dodge?”

Again Aaron looked at Lilly with that odd double look of mockery and unwillingness to give himself away.

“All right then. You’ve got a love-urge that urges you to God; have you? Then go and join the Buddhists in Burmah, or the newest fangled Christians in Europe. Go and stick your head in a bush of Nirvana or spiritual perfection. Trot off.”

“I won’t,” said Aaron.

“You must. If you’ve got a love-urge, then give it its fulfilment.”

“I haven’t got a love-urge.”

“You have. You want to get excited in love. You want to be carried away in love. You want to whoosh off in a nice little love whoosh and love yourself. Don’t deny it. I know you do. You want passion to sweep you off on wings of fire till you surpass yourself, and like the swooping eagle swoop right into the sun. I know you, my love-boy.”

“Not any more—not any more. I’ve been had too often,” laughed Aaron.

“Bah, it’s a lesson men never learn. No matter how sick they make themselves with love, they always rush for more, like a dog to his vomit.”

“Well, what am I to do then, if I’m not to love?” cried Aaron.

“You want to go on, from passion to passion, from ecstasy to ecstasy, from triumph to triumph, till you can whoosh away into glory, beyond yourself, all bonds loosened and happy ever after. Either that or Nirvana, opposite side of the medal.”

“There’s probably more hate than love in me,” said Aaron.

“That’s the recoil of the same urge. The anarchist, the criminal, the murderer, he is only the extreme lover acting on the recoil. But it is love: only in recoil. It flies back, the love-urge, and becomes a horror.”

“All right then. I’m a criminal and a murderer,” said Aaron.

“No, you’re not. But you’ve a love-urge. And perhaps on the recoil just now. But listen to me. It’s no good thinking the love-urge is the one and only. Niente! You can whoosh if you like, and get excited and carried away loving a woman, or humanity, or God. Swoop away in the love direction till you lose yourself. But that’s where you’re had. You can’t lose yourself. You can try. But you might just as well try to swallow yourself. You’ll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end. A very nasty thing to wake up to is one’s own raw self after an excessive love-whoosh. Look even at President Wilson: he love-whooshed for humanity, and found in the end he’d only got a very sorry self on his hands.

“So leave off. Leave off, my boy. Leave off love-whooshing. You can’t lose yourself, so stop trying. The responsibility is on your own shoulders all the time, and no God which man has ever struck can take it off. You ARE yourself and so BE yourself. Stick to it and abide by it. Passion or no passion, ecstasy or no ecstasy, urge or no urge, there’s no goal outside you, where you can consummate like an eagle flying into the sun, or a moth into a candle. There’s no goal outside you—and there’s no God outside you. No God, whom you can get to and rest in. None. It’s a case of:

‘Trot, trot to market, to buy a penny bun, And trot, trot back again, as fast as you can run.’

But there’s no God outside you, whom you can rise to or sink to or swoop away to. You can’t even gum yourself to a divine Nirvana moon. Because all the time you’ve got to eat your dinner and digest it. There is no goal outside you. None.

“There is only one thing, your own very self. So you’d better stick to it. You can’t be any bigger than just yourself, so you needn’t drag God in. You’ve got one job, and no more. There inside you lies your own very self, like a germinating egg, your precious Easter egg of your own soul. There it is, developing bit by bit, from one single egg-cell which you were at your conception in your mother’s womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die—if then. You’ve got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it’s the only thing you have got or ever will have, don’t go trying to lose it. You’ve got to develop it, from the egg into the chicken, and from the chicken into the one-and-only phoenix, of which there can only be one at a time in the universe. There can only be one of you at a time in the universe—and one of me. So don’t forget it. Your own single oneness is your destiny. Your destiny comes from within, from your own self-form. And you can’t know it beforehand, neither your destiny nor your self-form. You can