In D.H. Lawrence’s hypnotic and powerful short story SUN (1928), Juliet, a sick woman, is prescribed sun therapy by her doctor. She starts sunbathing naked and magical changes happen in her body, psyche, and being. The “cold dark clots of her thoughts” start dissolving. A thread:
1/ Juliet’s sun-bathing sessions turn her into an aristocrat:
She develops a “contempt for human beings altogether”
Why?
Because they are “un-elemental” and “unsunned”
As if they are “graveyard worms” - always “innerly cowed” and afraid of the “natural blaze of life”
2/ Why was D.H. Lawrence obsessed with the sun? His father was a coal-miner, spending most of his time in the dark underground. Lawrence didn’t want that fate. He wrote: “The sun is to us what we take from it. And if we are puny, it is because we take punily from the superb sun.”
3/ For Lawrence, conscience is your inner sun:
“Conscience is sun-awareness and our deep instinct to not go against the sun”
When our gut instinct clearly blinks red or green
We experience borrowed clarity from the sun itself
Good ideas wish to live in a well-lit, sunny mind
4/ DH Lawrence's problem with the middle classes?
They’re “sunless”
Lawrence:
“They have only two measures: mankind and money, they have utterly no reference to the sun”
For Lawrence, life without a higher reference is “meaningless" like paper money "when the bank is broke”
5/ Why Caesar was an aristocrat
Lawrence wrote that the 1st century B.C. would’ve been “far less vital” and “less vividly alive” without him
He put people “into a new relation with the universe”
By uniting disjoint geographies, he “man in new relation to ice and sun”
6/ D.H. Lawrence’s definition of aristocracy is hard to improve:
“Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond. He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or not.”
All attention and loyalty go to the one who's burning with life
7/ Lawrence predicts a new Solar Elite:
“Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity! Time to recognize the aristocracy of the sun. There will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality, of men who have reached the sun.
In the coming era they will rule the world.”
8/ If civilization is to survive, then it is necessary for the lower to "serve the higher"
A proper hierarchy is a pre-condition of life!
Lawrence: "More life! More vivid life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless masses of people.”
9/ Who’s a SAVIOR?
D.H. Lawrence: “Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind & the universe, is a savior.”
Life tends to degenerate into “repetition, torpor, ennui, lifelessness”
A savior hits refresh on “the human connection with the universe”
10/ I love D.H. Lawrence's definition of immorality:
“It is only immoral to be dead-alive, sun-extinct, and busy putting out the sun in other people”
Pro tip: Don't put out the sun in other people
Thinking about the Soviet autist who showed how the Sun influences the number of geniuses and political revolution on Planet Earth, and was sent to the Gulag by Stalin for going against the Marxist view of history (lol)
There is a reason your creative juices start flowing in airplanes and long road-trips
I call it the "Kinetic Stillness Paradox" and I found this principle at play in the lives of nobodies like:
- JK Rowling
- Charles Darwin
- Albert Einstein
Let's dig in:
1/ 600 million people have read Harry Potter books—where was this iconic character born? In a train, as JK Rowling sat still for 4 hours, too shy to ask someone for a pen, mentally noting all details as the idea “simply fell" into her head
Harry Potter, inception location: train
2/ The theory of evolution rocked the foundations of religion, culture...even politics. Where was Charles Darwin when the eureka moment hit him? A horse-carriage...he remembered the "very spot in the road" 4 decades later
Theory of evolution, inception location: a horse-carriage
1/ Love precedes lovability: "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
1/ Love precedes lovability because a "primary devotion" to a place, thing, or person is the source of the creative energy that transforms it. Begin with love, not scorn. Commitment beautifies
2/ Modern streets are "noisy with taxicabs and motorcars," but that's the noise of "laziness and fatigue," not activity. If everyone walked, streets would be quieter but more alive. Modern thought is like a modern street - noisiness, long words, loud ideas...hiding laziness
You can do almost anything with a phone - and that's Bad, Actually
Because you can do anything, you end up doing nothing
The best tools are constrained and specific. They do you a favor by limiting you...
Thread:
1/ On a typewriter you cannot stream movies, check stock prices, or play online chess. You can only write. On a camera you cannot tweet, google trivia, or order groceries. You can only click. These older tools gave you a tunnel vision that their advanced alternatives just cannot
2/ If the only tool you have is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. If the only tool you have is a 7 inch flat screen, then all your problems look like pixel arrangement problems. That is Objectively False. Real problems demand more than tapping, clicking, coding
1/ One line from an 1883 philosophy book gets to the heart of the matter: "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood" (Nietzsche). Writing comes not just from your brain but from your guts, balls, sinews, feelings, blood. AI has none of that
2/ Chesterton wrote in Heretics (1905) that if you want exciting art, you have to go to the ideologues. To the men who have actual convictions. Only a "doctrinaire" - someone with a doctrine, a POV, a set of values - can tell a story worth hearing. A data server has no doctrine
1/ Einstein fell seriously sick at 5. Bed-ridden. His father brought home a toy compass to entertain him. He was transfixed by the magnetic needle. It made him wonder—what were the "deeply hidden" forces controlling the needle...and the world? He spent his life chasing the answer
2/ The Wright brothers were gifted a toy helicopter when they were 7 and 11. They played with it until it broke, and then they built their own model. Years later they credited this toy for sparking off their life-long obsession with flight