I.
The opening line from Lawrence's debut novel, The White Peacock (1911), reads:
"I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill-pond." [1]
It is spoken by Cyril Beardsall; a fairly obvious self-characterisation, even if Lawrence cannot be completely identified with the (artistically inclined but somewhat priggish) narrator of his novel.
Cyril is as enchanted by the intense stillness of the water as he is by the grey-silvery fish and the manner in which the entire scene was "gathered in the musing of old age" [2].
II.
Now, a Heideggerian critic might be tempted to suggest that Cyril knows what it is to not merely inhabit a space and reflect upon it like one of those moon-like philosophers whom Zarathustra condemns [3].
That he knows how to dwell in the world; i.e., to form a deep and meaningful relationship with all the various elements of his environment, in this case, fish, gloom, water, stillness, and temporality.
For Heidegger, dwelling is a fundamental aspect of Dasein that allows men and women to exist as mortals beneath the sky, upon the earth, and in the presence of gods.
But whilst it allows connection and interrelationship, dwelling is not a way for us to project ourselves into all things; i.e., it's not a form of existential narcissism and Cyril is not merely admiring his own reflection in the mill-pond and desiring to become one with it.
III.
Finally, it's interesting to compare the opening of Lawrence's first novel with one of his early poems, 'The Wild Common', whose setting and situation are somewhat similar.
In this poem, the young male narrator observes his own reflection on the surface of a pond: "Naked on the steep, soft lip / Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro" [4].
It is only after he plunges naked into the water that he fully appreciates how the natural world has physical reality that is
not dependent upon his perception and understanding of it: "Oh but the water loves me and folds me / Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me ..." [5]
And that it
is his self, in fact, which has no substantial reality apart from the world of flowers, sunlight, and pulsing waters.
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1.
[2] Ibid.
[3] In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche critiques the concept of immaculate perception (i.e., the mistaken idea that we are capable of pure knowledge and a detached, moon-like contemplation of the world free of all desire; emasculated leering, as he calls it). See the section entitled 'Of Immaculate Perception' in part two of Zarathustra.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Wild Common' - click here to read online.
Note that this is the original version of the verse, written c. 1905-06 and published in Amores (1916). Lawrence later revised it for his Collected Poems (1928), adding new material and finally saying what it was he had started to say (incoherently in his view) when he first wrote it as a young man. This final version can be found in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 5-6.
For a critical reading of 'The Wild Common', see the first chapter of M. J. Lockwood's, A Study of the Poems of D. H.
Lawrence: Thinking in Poetry, (Palgrave Macmillan, 1987).
[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Wild Common'.
