The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison

“We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

The great paradox of personhood is that the sum is simpler than its parts. We move through the world as a totality, fragmentary but indivisible, clothed in a costume of personality beneath which roil parts perpetually fighting for power, perpetually yearning for harmony. The person making the choices, the person bearing their consequences, and the person taking responsibility for...