The Simple Things
The Machine Will Never Triumph, part forty-one
A living
A man should never earn his living
if he earns his life he’ll be lovely.
A bird picks up its seeds or little snails
between heedless earth and heaven
in heedlessness.
But, the plucky little sport, it gives to life
song, and chirruping, gay feathers, fluff-shadowed warmth
and all the unspeakable charm of birds hopping and fluttering and being
birds.
—And we, we get it all from them for nothing.1
The greatest things in life are free, and money can never buy happiness. So much of a person’s life is devoted to making money, buying things, and then tinkering with those things, things, things, endless mountains of things. This is a state of affairs that is bad for the mind, body, and soul. Love doesn’t come from money, and the beauty of nature doesn’t come from money. We need to learn to start being rather than having. Look to the bird, so simple and unadorned, yet proud of itself in its being; full of life, connected to the beating heart of the world, and perfect in its song. Then look to modern man, surrounded by ugliness, and ugly himself. For us to be beautiful, we should first of all polish our souls like mirrors, and secondly surround ourselves with as much beauty as possible; real beauty, not manufactured beauty. As Lawrence writes:
The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed[…] was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.2
All of creation revels in the fullness of being. Only man, seated in his Machine forgets even hope and joy, as he sings his song of death as he destroys the world. Malcolm de Chazal writes:
All forms of things and all movement in life express joy: water playing on the riverbank, air wandering in the woods, the flower laughing between two patches of grass, the tree stretching itself in the sun, and great clumps of furze sporting in the pond. Man begins to manipulate nature and all kinds of constraints sadden the scene. The water moves stiffly in the pipe, the air jerks in the motor, the more you trim the thicket, the worse it looks, the flower smiles in the vase but no longer laughs. Nature once a carefree schoolchild in the sun’s playground sits down at its desk with set tasks to do.3
Bibliography
Chazal, Malcolm de. Sens-Plastique. Translated by Irving Weiss. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press, 2021.
Lawrence, D. H. Late Essays and Articles. Edited by James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 384.
D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 291–92.
Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-Plastique, trans. Irving Weiss (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press, 2021), 32.