He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how
near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how
strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times
take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But
best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were
satisfied in life.
He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested
with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she
proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of
conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of
love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the
horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive.
He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot
narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut
their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own
exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was
a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or
private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further
immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of
couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married
couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a
liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal
marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action.
On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that
turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other
broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in
herself. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites,
to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He
believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further
conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings,
each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like
two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.
He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for
unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration
should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world
of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost
unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself,
single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The
merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent
to him.