sons and lovers...

When I was nineteen I traveled through Europe. I flew into Amsterdam, took a train to Paris, hitchhiked through the South of France to the Italian border where I took a train as far as Rome. It was an amazing trip, filled with strange and wonderful tales.

This trip was also when I became an avid reader. My travels lasted six weeks and I read about six novels, all in the likes of E.M. Forster, Sir Walter Scott and D.H. Lawrence. I longed for the English language unable to read billboards, newspaper or magazines. I read anywhere, on trains, in lines to museums, sitting along the Arno in Florence; no longer needing a quiet room for comprehension. I was free.

One of the books I read was D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. At the time I was in love with a man who only saw me as a friend but oh how I yearned for him while I was away, daydreaming about how one day we would marry and live “happily ever after.” Obviously this never came to light but we are still friends and I love him dearly.

Back then I carried a journal and jotted down quotes and random thoughts, sometimes describing the events of the day. (This hasn’t change.) It was during this trip on a rainy day traveling by train to Amsterdam, I noted this quote from Sons and Lovers,

“’How often have we agreed for friendship! And yes – it neither stops there, nor gets anywhere else’….

He was telling her he did not love her, and so ought to leave her a chance with another man. How foolish and blind and shamefully clumsy he was! What were other men to her at all! But he, ah! She loved his soul. Was he deficient in something? Perhaps he was…

He would come back. She held the keys to his soul. But meanwhile, how he would torture her with his battle against her...

‘Some sort of perversity in our souls,’ he said, ‘makes us not want, get away from, the very thing we want. We have to fight against that.’”

What makes me laugh is this seems to be the theme of my relationships. I wonder, sitting on that train that day at the tender age of nineteen, if I didn’t step into a relationship morphic field or paradigm I have yet to escape from...