Etruscan Places – D.H. Lawrence
The author of Twilight in Italy journeyed through Etruria in April 1927, though the resulting narrative - delayed by illness, distraction, and death - emerged only in 1932. The prose flows with the practiced ease of a seasoned novelist, yet beneath its surface lies a curious tension: admiration and disdain, insight and prejudice, often in the same breath. He calls peasants “rats,” yet lingers over their gestures with affection.
The book is part travelogue, part art history, and part metaphysical speculation. Lawrence’s worldview resists tidy classification. He is not rationalist, certainly not empiricist. Rather, he sees the world as alive, animated by forces older than logic. His soul, he suggests, is a spark - divine, transient - carried briefly in a mortal husk before returning to the cosmic fire. It is a vision both Stoic and poetic, and not without appeal to those of us hardcore readers weary of mechanistic modernity and algorithmic post-modernism.
Like Elliot Paul, Lawrence captures a Europe that now feels impossibly distant. The interwar years - so close to catastrophe, yet oddly serene - evoke a nostalgia for a world we post-moderns never knew. A time before carbon guilt for every jet boarding, before the commodification of every village square.
His fascination with the Etruscans is infectious, though not entirely objective. He dislikes the Romans, seeing in them the cold engineers of empire. The Etruscans, by contrast, are sensual, mysterious, and conveniently unknowable. Lawrence, having read a few books, writes as if he knows more than most. He probably does - but not more than the scholars he dismisses. Still, his confidence is charming, reminiscent of a young Robert Byron waving away academic consensus with a flourishes of bombast and wit.
In the end, it is not the accuracy of Lawrence’s claims that matters, but the vitality of his vision. He writes not to inform, but to awaken.
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