The Rainbow - D.H Lawrence - Reflections

“When he heard the child cry, a terror possessed him, because of the answering echo from the unfathomed distances in himself. Must he know in himself such distances, perilous and imminent?”

The depth of the soul, is there anything more frightening, yet anything more sought after? This sentence perfectly captures the essence of the book; man’s struggle with his soul. We are born as social creatures, refusing to acknowledge the womb we carry inside of ourself, neglecting that utmost duty we owe, not to the world or to the next of kin, but to ourself, to life itself. Its depth promising the delivery to another, foreign, world, where our belongings shall not imply wealth but rather the lack thereof. Where our neighbors shall not have the power to confirm our Being, and we shall in solace stare into the unknown. Who am I, when the world around me falls apart? Without it, shall I have the strength to be, at all? Its empty silence pressures us to keep going, and the terror in our heart is nothing but the realization that we’ve lost the light we came from. The emptiness promises only one thing: the doubt if were we came from ever where, at all. As in a fever-dream, we must ask, we must shout, into the void, from the bottom of our soul. As the sound reverberates in the nothingness of space, we shall defy our very nature in the venturing forth, and we shall shed the chains of relative existence. Indeed, in such a womb, we shall lose ourselves, and surrender all notions of a return in order to allow recurrence to bless us with its fruits. We shall be born again, and in seeing the kingdom of God in the mundane world of the commons, we shall recognize beyond all doubt what it means to be truly human.