by Barbaraanne Helberg

Created on: February 01, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Author D.H. Lawrence lived without the burden of thinking. He threw all of life away to the joys of wonderment.

I mean, he was filled with wonderment that required no thinking, no other explanations. Or was he just strange?

Let me give a solid reason for my infatuation (writer for writer, that is) with Lawrence. He had so doggone little to say. Don't think about it, enjoy its wonderment, was his viewpoint. That makes him easy to keep up with, you tell yourself, when you suddenly find it heavy going in such matters as wonder, beauty, vitality, the divine, no absolute rights, amazement, the evils of knowledge, Thou Shall Nots, the desire to communicate - well, you get the picture. You just say to yourself: "None of this matters except the wonder of it," and you find yourself on Lawrence's non-thinking wave length.

In all his essays, Lawrence conveyed all these considerable ideas, and then avoided commitment in life through his acts of wonderment. Now, I don't admire that. But it interests me. And I'm really impressed by his ability to put all of that on paper, artistically and stylistically. That's very admirable. And it almost makes you look past the fact that he had little of concreteness to say.

Almost.

All that rhetoric may fool some, all of the time, and some, some of the time, but it could never fool all, all of the time. We all know Lawrence tried to be humble.
I like Lawrence because he non-thought nothing is absolutely right, because all things are ever changeable. That means we all know absolutely nothing about everything, doesn't it?

Well, who cares? Now there's a subject. Caring. Boy, did Lawrence hate those carers. I really can get into that non-thinking view. I mean, haven't the carers of the world made a mess of our lives? They instituted vehicle inspection, outlawed prayer in schools, made sure zoo animals have balanced diets (never mind the millions of hungry children world-wide - somebody will feed them), and gave our society its greatest gift - the democratic, bureaucratic tangle of social services. We owe a lot to carers. Just the same, I'm with Lawrence. I non-think they should go watch lady bugs fly for a week.

The fact that Lawrence knew a lot certainly came through in his work. Maybe that's why he non-thought education is dangerous. It takes us away from wonderment, and none of us can afford that shortcoming! Why, just non-think what would happen if we became so knowledgeable as to unlock the mysteries of cancer, or world-wide hunger, or communication

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