D.H. Lawrence, “I must let things work themselves into being.”
Excerpt from a letter by D.H. Lawrence
…I must let things work themselves into being. One can do nothing now, forcing is disastrous. I shall not go to America until a stronger force from there pulls me across the sea. It is not a case of my will… Let me only be still, and know we can force nothing, and compel nothing, can only nourishing the darkness the unuttered buds of the new life that shall be. This is our life now: this nourishing of the germs, the unknown quicks when the new life is coming into being in us and in others — only patience, only patience, and endless courage to reject false dead things and false, killing processes.
This passage comes from one of D.H. Lawrence's letters, written during the Cornwall years (1916–1917), when he and Frieda had retreated to a small cottage in Zennor to escape wartime London and the literary world he felt was suffocating the real. He was thirty-one, recovering from the suppression of The Rainbow, working on what would become Women in Love, refusing to publish into a culture he believed was actively killing what mattered. He was also, by most accounts, ill, broke, watched by the authorities for his German wife and his pacifism, and increasingly certain that the war had ended something irrevocable in European life. This text found its way to me sometime in my late 20s, I can’t even remember where, but I sometimes think when I’m impatient with waiting, “I must let things work themselves into being.” Patience and endless courage indeed…This is someone who knew something about waiting.
