Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence writes about California the way a suspicious lover sizes up a new romance: magnetic, self-absorbed, and weirdly honest about it. Calling it "queer" isn’t just a period flourish; it signals a place that doesn’t behave according to Old World social physics. California, in his framing, has committed a geographic and moral pivot: it has "turned its back on the world" (Europe, history, inherited manners) and stares into the "void Pacific", an ocean rendered less as a body of water than as an existential blank page.

The intent is double-edged. He’s indicting California for "selfish" emptiness, a culture of appetite without tradition, but he’s also admiring its refusal to perform. That last clause is the tell: "not false" and "not full of false effort". Lawrence, allergic to bourgeois striving and moral posturing, hears in California a kind of brutal sincerity. The place may be hollow, he implies, but at least it isn’t stuffed with inherited lies.

Context matters: Lawrence arrives in the 1920s, after World War I has scorched European confidence and as Southern California is selling sunshine, reinvention, and spiritual novelty. His line catches that emerging American myth before it becomes fully Hollywood-processed: the frontier turned inward, the edge of the map turning into a psychological stance. The subtext is that emptiness can be either vacancy or freedom. California’s "void" is terrifying because it lacks meaning, seductive because it lets you invent one without apology.