Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence comes in with the kind of metaphysical confidence that sounds less like a thesis than a dare: if consciousness is "homogeneous", then it isn’t a tidy cabinet of labeled memories so much as one continuous substance. The line rejects the modern fantasy that the self can be edited, archived, or cleanly reset. Forgetting, in this view, is cosmetic. The past doesn’t vanish; it sinks, ferments, and resurfaces as appetite, dread, attraction, mood. Lawrence is arguing for a psyche that behaves like weather, not paperwork.

The real provocation is the second sentence. "No complete forgetting, even in death" isn’t just spooky consolation. It’s an assault on two comfortable exits: first, that time heals by erasing; second, that death wipes the slate. Underneath is Lawrence’s obsession with the subterranean life of the body and the instincts - his suspicion of rational, hygienic narratives of progress. If consciousness is one fabric, then repression is a fold, not a deletion. The moral ledger never fully closes.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Lawrence is breathing the same air as Freud and Jung, while also recoiling from industrial modernity’s reduction of humans to functions and roles. "Homogeneous" reads like a rebuke to compartmentalization: the respectable public self versus the unruly private one, the civilized mind versus the "primitive" body. He’s making a case for continuity so radical it becomes ethical: what you live doesn’t disappear; it persists, changes form, haunts the organism. Even death, he implies, may be less an ending than a rearrangement of whatever we are.