Lawrence on Death

I have been thinking about D.H. Lawrence and a scene from Women In Love. I'll go look for it. I may be mixing it up in my mind with Sons and Lovers.

The only window was death. One could look out on to the great dark sky of death with elation, as one had looked out of the classroom window as a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside. Now one was not a child, and one knew that the soul was a prisoner within this sordid vast edifice of life, and there was no escape, save in death.

Found it. It's Women In Love, Chapter 24. It's about the death of Gerald's father.

THOMAS CRICH died slowly, terribly slowly. It seemed impossible to everybody that the thread of life could be drawn out so thin, and yet not break. The sick man lay unutterably weak and spent, kept alive by morphia and by drinks, which he sipped slowly. He was only half conscious -- a thin strand of consciousness linking the darkness of death with the light of day. Yet his will was unbroken, he was integral, complete. Only he must have perfect stillness about him.

No one writes better about grief and sex than Lawrence. After his father dies, Gerard is so disraught, he walks through muddy fields and graveyards in the middle of the night to find Gudrun, his new love. He walks, as if in a trance, right into her parents' house, right up the stairs, right into her bedroom for the first time. Shocking for post WW1 English literature. Death, the mud, the misery of it all leading to a passionate coupling -- well, just read it. Lawrence was amazing.

'But why did you come to me?' she persisted.

`Because -- it has to be so. If there weren't you in the world, then I shouldn't be in the world, either.'

She stood looking at him, with large, wide, wondering, stricken eyes. His eyes were looking steadily into hers all the time, and he seemed fixed in an odd supernatural steadfastness. She sighed. She was lost now. She had no choice.

`Won't you take off your boots,' she said. `They must be wet.'

He dropped his cap on a chair, unbuttoned his overcoat, lifting up his chin to unfasten the throat buttons. His short, keen hair was ruffled. He was so beautifully blond, like wheat. He pulled off his overcoat.

Quickly he pulled off his jacket, pulled loose his black tie, and was unfastening his studs, which were headed each with a pearl. She listened, watching, hoping no one would hear the starched linen crackle. It seemed to snap like pistol shots.

He had come for vindication. She let him hold her in his arms, clasp her close against him. He found in her an infinite relief. Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. It was wonderful, marvellous, it was a miracle. This was the everrecurrent miracle of his life, at the knowledge of which he was lost in an ecstasy of relief and wonder. And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist. The terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation.