Love (A Post for Valentine's Day)

Love is the flower of life: it blossoms unexpectedly and without law

and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

 

 

Although a self-declared priest of love, D. H. Lawrence was always ambivalent about the latter and quick to qualify his own remarks in praise of love. Thus, for example, he declares: "Love is the happiness of the world." But then immediately points out that "happiness is not the whole of fulfilment".

 

In the same essay, he writes: "Love is a coming together. But there can be no coming together without an equivalent going asunder." Indeed, according to Lawrence, "the coming together depends on the going apart; the systole depends on the diastole; the flow depends upon the ebb".

Thus it is that: "There can never be love universal and unbroken [...] The undisputed reign of love can never be."  

 

Which is one in the eye for Jesus and all the other love-idealists, including St. Valentine who was martyred on this day in 269, and whom lovebirds the world over commemorate by buying flowers, boxes of chocolates, heart-shaped balloons, etc. 

 

Lawrence's central message seems to be that love is a process, or journey, of some kind. But that it is fatal to push this process into a goal or mistakenly believe, like the much-loved Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, that it is better to travel than to arrive. 

 

This, says, Lawrence is the nihilistic belief of those who are "in love with love" and fail to understand that to arrive is "the supreme joy after all travelling". For in arriving, "one passes beyond love, or, rather, one encompasses love in a new transcendence". 

 

To insist on love as something that knows no consummation - an interminable journey stretching on to infinity like an endless straight road - is an abysmal thought; one which demonsrates a will to arrest the spring. 

In the novel Aaron's Rod (1922), Lawrence puts it this way:

 

"The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible, but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not to some horror of intensification and extremity wherein the soul and the body ultimately perish. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman. Only that. Which isn't exciting enough for us sensationalists. We prefer abysses and maudlin self-abandon and self-sacrifice, the degeneration into a sort of slime and merge.

      Perhaps, truly, the process of love is never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease."

 

 

Note: Apart from the final passage from Aaron's Rod, which can be found on p. 166 of the Cambridge Edition (1988), ed. Mara Kalnins, all lines quoted are from Lawrence's essay 'Love', which was first published in the English Review in January 1918, but which can also be found in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 5-12.