He Knows He Is Not A Man, Hence His Creed Of Harmlessness
Like a Romanian once said, the West is dying because of a lack of men, not a lack of programs
Man is a thought adventurer.
Which isn’t the same as saying that a man has intellect. In intellect there is skill and tricks. To the intellect the terms are given, as the chessman and rules of the game are given in chess. Real thought is an experience. It begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It ends as a new piece of awareness, a new reality in mental consciousness.
On this account, thought is an adventure, and not a practice. In order to think, man must risk himself. He must risk himself doubly. First, he must go forth and meet life in the body. Then he must face the result in his mind.
It is bad enough going out like little David to meet the giant of life bodily. Take the war as an example of that. It is still harder, and bitterer, after the great encounter with life, to sit down and face the result. Take the war again. Many men went out and faced the fight. Who dares to face his own self afterwards?…
To be a man! To risk your body and your blood first, and then to risk your mind. All the time, to risk your known self, and become once more a self you could never have known or expected.
To be a man, instead of being a mere personality. Today men don’t risk their blood and bone. They go forth, panoplied in their own idea of themselves. Whatever they do, they perform it all in the full armor of their own idea of themselves. Their unknown bodily self is never for one moment unsheathed. All the time, the only protagonist is the known ego, the self-conscious ego. And the dark self in the mysterious labyrinth of the body is cased in a tight armor of cowardly repression…
That’s the widdishins way of being a man. To know so absolutely that you are not a man, that you dare almost anything on the strength of it. You dare anything, except being a man. So intense and final is the modern white man’s conviction, his internal conviction, that he is not a man, that he dares anything on earth except be a man. There his courage drops to its grave. He daren’t be a man: the old Adam of red earth, with the black touchstone at the middle of him.
He knows he is not a man. Hence his creed of harmlessness. He knows he is not a man of living red earth, to live onward through strange weather into new springtime. He knows there is extinction ahead: for nothing but extinction lies in wait for the conscious ego. Hence his creed of harmlessness, of relentless kindness. A little less than kin, and more than kind. There should be no danger in life at all, even no friction. This he asserts, while all the time he is slowly, malignantly undermining the tree of life.
-“On Being a Man” by D.H. Lawrence (1928)