"Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror"
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Lawrence imagines utopia as a landfill. In this brutal little thought experiment, “creation” isn’t the soft-focus miracle modern culture likes to sell; it’s a process with an appetite. One tree rises because another falls. Life, in his view, is structured by limits, trade-offs, and the ugly necessity of endings. Strip that away, and what you get isn’t paradise but a grotesque bloat: existence accumulating for its own sake, no longer sharpened by loss, no longer disciplined by scarcity.
The jab at “ideal mankind” is doing double duty. It’s aimed at a certain moral vanity - the belief that compassion means preventing all death, saving “every parasite alive,” preserving everything simply because it exists. The word “parasite” is calculatedly inflammatory: Lawrence isn’t just talking biology, he’s poking the modern impulse to treat all survival as equal virtue, as if nature were a public-policy problem and extinction were a solvable administrative failure.
Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Lawrence watched industrial modernity scale up: cities multiplying, bodies packed tighter, systems growing more abstract and less sensual, less rooted. His nightmare is a civilization that confuses quantity with progress, population with purpose, perpetual preservation with goodness. The final twist - “swollen to a horror” - suggests that the real terror isn’t death but its abolition: a world where nothing gets to end, and therefore nothing can truly matter.
The jab at “ideal mankind” is doing double duty. It’s aimed at a certain moral vanity - the belief that compassion means preventing all death, saving “every parasite alive,” preserving everything simply because it exists. The word “parasite” is calculatedly inflammatory: Lawrence isn’t just talking biology, he’s poking the modern impulse to treat all survival as equal virtue, as if nature were a public-policy problem and extinction were a solvable administrative failure.
Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Lawrence watched industrial modernity scale up: cities multiplying, bodies packed tighter, systems growing more abstract and less sensual, less rooted. His nightmare is a civilization that confuses quantity with progress, population with purpose, perpetual preservation with goodness. The final twist - “swollen to a horror” - suggests that the real terror isn’t death but its abolition: a world where nothing gets to end, and therefore nothing can truly matter.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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