Life & Wisdom Quote by Wyndham Lewis

Lewis doesn’t just insult humanity here; he anatomizes a posture. “Prostration” isn’t a mood, it’s a default setting: bodies trained to lower themselves before heat, power, fashion, comfort. The image is viciously tactile - not the noble animal struggling upward, but the worm, inching between “sunlight” and “shade” like a living thermostat. That back-and-forth rhythm is the point: movement as mere adjustment, not ambition; survival as a series of micro-surrenders.

The line lands with extra force because Lewis is writing as a modernist who despised what he saw as the era’s slack collectivism and herd thinking. In the early 20th century, mass politics, mass media, mass taste were turning “men” into an audience: responsive, reactive, easily herded by sensation. The worm isn’t only pathetic; it’s obedient to environment. Lewis implies that most people don’t choose principles, they choose temperatures.

Subtextually, it’s also a jab at the sentimental story modernity tells about progress. If the human creature’s “natural” motion is shuttling between comfort zones, then the big slogans - liberation, advancement, enlightenment - look like decorative overlays on an older, meaner biology: find a warm patch, avoid pain, repeat.

There’s a nasty elegance in the phrasing, too. “Natural position” pretends to be neutral, almost scientific, while smuggling in contempt. Lewis weaponizes determinism: if prostration is natural, then resistance is rare, artificial, and therefore costly. That’s the provocation - not that people crawl, but that they prefer crawling to standing up.