I read this travel narrative for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.
Twilight in Italy – D. H. Lawrence
Lawrence spent a couple of months in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany in late 1912 and early 1913. Out of the stay he got articles of long journalism for high-class magazines. He later worked up these pieces into this book which was released in 1916. In that terrible year of attrition I imagine readers felt a nostalgia for pre-war days and were looking for something to think about other than the Somme offensive.
This is in fact two books, one of vibrant travel writing.
I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank.
The other book is considering the spiritual challenges of living in the modern mechanized world. Lawrence, like many intellectuals of the time, was uneasy about the effects of industrialization in the US, the UK, France, Germany and other advanced countries.
He was disgusted with the natural world and landscapes being turned into a wasteland due to development. Lawrence describes his own English north-country as ‘black, fuming [and] laborious’, ‘spreading like a blackness over all the world.' So in the Alps, he looks down on the modern industrial hellscape and muses ‘... it seemed to have lost all importance, all significance. It was so big, yet it had no significance. The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but wander about?’
Veteran readers of Lawrence know they just have buckle up when the 27-year-old writer goes mystical. He has the supernatural ability to get inside the heads of other people.
She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment. That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there was anything in the universe except her universe. In her universe I was a stranger, a foreign signore. That I had a world of my own, other than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.
He will just go off, generalizing about national characteristics that are real and apparent, the natural and the artificial, the light and the dark, the secretive and the open. The confidence, the daring -- the audacity is endearing, making us sad he died so young, but grateful he was so prolific. He loved to write.
This is worth reading if for nothing else than Lawrence’s uncanny ability to describe people and places. He makes us see, because it is what Lawrence does with words, like a tree makes leaves, like clouds scud across the sky. It’s beautiful, it's strange, it’s sheer reading pleasure.
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