| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Apocalypse: And the Writings on Revelation (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Book Description
This edition reprints the 'Review' as it was published in the Adelphi magazine for April 1924, since there is no surviving manuscript or typescript. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Man, the will-to-power
`Man wants his physical fulfillment first, the marvel of being alive in the flesh, to be part of the cosmic life of vitality, potency, prowess and power. Cosmic power is phallic power (fertility).'
`The primal, old-Adamic need in a man's soul is to be master, lord.'
Aristocracy v. Democracy
An aristocrat acts from a position of strength, a democrat from a position of weakness.
`Socialists hate all free, upstanding, daunting men. A democracy is bound to be obscene, composed of false individualities.'
Anti-reason, anti-science
For D.H. Lawrence, the Logos is the evil snake. Man's fall is the fall into knowledge'
`The final condition of science, of modern physics and physicists is a naked and disembodied universe. The atom has turned into nothingness.'
Christianity, paganism
Christianity is a `thou-shalt-not' doctrine. It denies the body and creates misery out of vital want. It is the religion of `death', of the dead body and the postponed reward.
The old religions were cults of vitality, potency and power. They were religions of `life'.
Christianity destroyed paganism in the Western world.
The Apocalypse (Revelation)
The first part of the book calls for a renewed world under the Messiah.
The second half is full of hate of worldly power. It expresses a lust for the end of the world. It is the equivalent of suicide with subsequent self-glorification. Therefore, indirectly, it is the revelation of the undying will-to-power, its final triumph: `if the entire universe has to be destroyed, still, O Christian, you shall reign as a king and set your foot on the necks of the old bosses.'
This book is an original (but one of the many) analysis of the message(s) hidden in John of Patmos's book.
But D.H. Lawrence's Nietzschean condemnations of science, reason and democracy are totally unacceptable.
Only for H.H. Lawrence fans and `Apocalypse' scholars.
The last page or two contain one of his most remarkable and inspiring observations about the individual and his soul. Lawrence often argues that you cannot "save" you soul; you must "live" it. Near the end of this book he writes:
"What man most passionately want is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos....I am part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched."
The most poignant phrase in this passage is "...and ours for a short time only." Lawrence lived a shorter time that most of us will, but in his lifetime his output was as perceptive and prodigious as any author who has ever written. Scattered throughout this book are irritating but illuminating thoughts like: "But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness."
Some people have taken that statement as proof that Lawrence is against democracy. But I consider it a valid danger for democracy, one that is being played out in the press every day. To preserve democracy, the best of all possible forms of government, we have to analyze and try to correct its failings and weaknesses.
Puzzle your way through this book. I hope you will find it as rewarding as I did.
Lawrence saw the aesthetic brilliance of Revelation as a bridge to a more mysterious, immediate, compelling theology. At the same time he condemns the apocalyptic churches who interpret the book as the evocation of Hell and Judgement, rather than in its potent poetic symbolism. He goes so far as to accuse John of Patmos of not presenting a revelation at all, but of appropriating a truer, more ancient historiography for eccliastical and political reasons. Not above placing his own eccentric opinions of government in this tract, he could be accused of mounting his own pulpit, if with literary distinction. His claim of an affirming devotion to the visible universe as the only 'true' route to the holy can be countered by reading some of the lively writings of Christian ascetics. This treatise, however, is not about them. It is aimed squarely at the convention seeking, socially regulating, sanctimonious attitudes that had censored and prosecuted him. Not surprisingly it did not raise his stock much among his critics, but it is an essential text in understanding the underlying motives behind his works.
The power of money must go, according to Lawrence, as the power of the sun must return--as it indeed has always been the power of life whether we recognize it or not. Also, the power of blood must be reasserted. As human beings we are connected to all things. However, this perspective is suppressed as it constitutes a threat to the status quo.
Lawrence here sees no salvation in either democracy or western monotheism; but solely in human beings connecting up once again to the universal forces of nature from which come life's vitality.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Classics
- Books > Fiction > Literary Fiction
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > Bible > Reference > Study > New Testament
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
