Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Conversion, for Lawrence, isn’t a switch flipped by doctrine; it’s a nervous system jolted awake. The “low, vast murmur” is one of his signature moves: sound standing in for forces too sprawling to be neatly moralized. It’s not the sermon you hear, it’s the undertow you finally register. Lawrence frames human life as something you don’t simply join; it “troubles” you, disturbs the previous illusion that the self is self-sufficient.

The intent is quietly polemical. Lawrence is taking aim at the respectable, “unconscious” bourgeois subject who can drift through the world buffered by habit, class, and propriety. Conversion arrives when that insulation cracks and the individual becomes permeable to the crowd, to bodies, to need, to desire, to suffering. The murmur is both democratic and erotic: the mass of other lives, and the intimate recognition that you are made of the same raw material. Lawrence’s verb choice matters. “Troubling” is the point. Awakening is not a comforting self-improvement narrative; it’s an invasion that destabilizes the tidy ego.

Contextually, this tracks with a writer working in the early 20th century’s pressure cooker: industrial modernity, collapsing certainties, a culture of mechanized labor and social conformity. Lawrence’s fiction and essays repeatedly insist that modern life deadens sensation and replaces lived relation with abstract rules. Here, “converted” names a secular salvation: not being “good,” but being sentient. The subtext is almost accusatory: if you haven’t heard that murmur, you’re not innocent, you’re asleep.