seemed to balance her perfectly in opposition to himself, in their dual motion of walking. So, suddenly, he was liberated and perfect, strong, heroic.
Ursula had her nose out of joint.
He insists on my accepting God knows what in HIM,' she resumed. 'He wants me to accept HIM as—as an absolute—But it seems to me he doesn't want to GIVE anything. He doesn't want real warm intimacy—he won't have it—he rejects it. He won't let me think, really, and he won't let me FEEL—he hates feelings
he says he believes that a man and wife can go further than any other two beings—but WHERE, is not explained. They can know each other, heavenly and hellish, but particularly hellish, so perfectly that they go beyond heaven and hell—into—there it all breaks down—into nowhere.'
'Into Paradise, he says,' laughed Gerald.
For she believed in an absolute surrender to love. She believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was MORE than love, or than any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was EVERYTHING. Man must render himself up to her. He must be quaffed to the dregs by her. Let him be HER MAN utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave—whether she wanted it or not.
'Of course,' she said easily, 'there is a quality of life in Birkin which is quite remarkable. There is an extraordinary rich spring of life in him, really amazing, the way he can give himself to things. But there are so many things in life that he simply doesn't know. Either he is not aware of their existence at all, or he dismisses them as merely negligible—things which are vital to the other person. In a way, he is not clever enough, he is too intense in spots.'
'Yes,' cried Ursula, 'too much of a preacher. He is really a priest.'
'Exactly! He can't hear what anybody else has to say—he simply cannot hear. His own voice is so loud.'
'Yes. He cries you down.'
'He cries you down,' repeated Gudrun.
Birkin could see only a strange, inexplicable, almost patternless collection of passions and desires and suppressions and traditions and mechanical ideas,
and desire for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion, a lovely state of free proud singleness, which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.
our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north
brightly-coloured embroidery
