David Herbert Lawrence

half a loaf is better than no bread

The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it.
I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last. I would warn the generality of

Science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another.

And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of an individual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as a matter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in the nerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broods there with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of relief and renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be a pure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite in some great

creative or religious or constructive activity, or as when they fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative or constructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, must always be the goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goal arises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the blood in an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit.

A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive, constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the hope of passionate, purposive destructive activity: the two amount religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in itself is a disaster: a vice

But an ideal purpose which has no roots in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow humiliation and sterility.

So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Instead of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our intimate relationships, there should be the most intense open antagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it, say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won't have it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so, angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never

But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying

And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, believe in your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go. She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark.