1 00:00:10,300 --> 00:00:17,460 Hello and thank you for coming to a very special guest lecture within a single or for course. 2 00:00:17,460 --> 00:00:28,460 His lawyers in the Alps. I never expected the mountains, you never expected the mountains. 3 00:00:28,460 --> 00:00:34,640 Probably, why not? They were always there, but I was never there before. 4 00:00:34,640 --> 00:00:40,580 I never knew they were there. I didn't expect it like that. 5 00:00:40,580 --> 00:00:48,620 Aaron, assistant to his host, having looked out from his garden in town at the Alps beyond, 6 00:00:48,620 --> 00:00:56,030 I don't know if all of you have ever been in mountains such as those which cover the area on your map. 7 00:00:56,030 --> 00:01:01,400 And I'll be referring to these places occasionally by date coded numbers and colours. 8 00:01:01,400 --> 00:01:05,360 By the way, although feel free to ignore these references, 9 00:01:05,360 --> 00:01:13,550 I will assume that you are all at least familiar with hills such as Surround Lawrence's native eastward. 10 00:01:13,550 --> 00:01:21,800 But according to Mr. Noone, if you do not know the tale in spring, gentle reader, you don't. 11 00:01:21,800 --> 00:01:24,200 And there's an end of it. 12 00:01:24,200 --> 00:01:34,490 And I at least think that it's true that as Gilbert Noon, Goodwin, Brangwyn, Alexander Hepburn, Hannelore and Lao, all his characters, 13 00:01:34,490 --> 00:01:42,230 D.H. Lawrence and numberless grand and not so grand tourists have discovered seeing mountains 14 00:01:42,230 --> 00:01:50,980 for the first time as an adult perforce alters one's view of even larger structures. 15 00:01:50,980 --> 00:01:56,590 The planet Earth, which is discovered to have such places in it, 16 00:01:56,590 --> 00:02:08,050 of God whose existence or non-existence must now be correlated with the existence of these things and of humanity, 17 00:02:08,050 --> 00:02:13,420 which finds itself on its smallest vertical scale as measured against them, 18 00:02:13,420 --> 00:02:20,110 and has developed a variety of aesthetic and spiritual discourses to encompass them. 19 00:02:20,110 --> 00:02:31,390 Romanticism buckled and was thrown towards its highest peaks by the Alps, and so it seems to me, was Lawrence's writing and thought. 20 00:02:31,390 --> 00:02:41,260 Which isn't to imply that he couldn't write the plane if he'd made it to Russia, as he had in mind to do, but never did, 21 00:02:41,260 --> 00:02:49,780 his prose would have stretched to its horizons, as it does to those of the plane of Lombardy in Arun's rod. 22 00:02:49,780 --> 00:02:55,240 But there is a particular aspect in which Lawrence suits mountains, 23 00:02:55,240 --> 00:03:01,690 it isn't just that he had a faculty receptive to their sublimity, though he had that. 24 00:03:01,690 --> 00:03:12,490 He was also a writer of paradoks and self-contradiction. And I would argue that mountains are themselves governed by abundant paradoxes. 25 00:03:12,490 --> 00:03:18,460 I hope you'll indulge me if I rehearse what I think are the most obvious of them. 26 00:03:18,460 --> 00:03:26,550 They exist by virtue of relief and are nothing without Vali's. 27 00:03:26,550 --> 00:03:33,310 They are places in their own right, the Urals, the Alps. 28 00:03:33,310 --> 00:03:41,920 And there are also partitions between other places, Europe and Asia, north and South Europe. 29 00:03:41,920 --> 00:03:48,730 Then again, they can unite countries as more blown unites France and Italy. 30 00:03:48,730 --> 00:03:56,560 They are paradigmatic of stability, they, quote, never move, they are always there, 31 00:03:56,560 --> 00:04:04,180 writes Lawrence in a letter of 1913, but they are the products of the Earth's convulsions. 32 00:04:04,180 --> 00:04:08,380 It seems as though some dramatic upheaval must have taken place. 33 00:04:08,380 --> 00:04:17,240 The mountains fall down into their own shadows. That's from his essay, The Return Journey of the Same Year. 34 00:04:17,240 --> 00:04:28,190 Snow epitomises both their eternal city and their seasonality, respectively, on the peaks and in the annual falls, 35 00:04:28,190 --> 00:04:38,030 melts and avalanches, their defining substances are black and white, rock and snow. 36 00:04:38,030 --> 00:04:42,140 But they can also be multicoloured with the flowers in which Lawrence took 37 00:04:42,140 --> 00:04:49,490 such delight or with the ice colours gleaming in blossom of reflecting snow. 38 00:04:49,490 --> 00:04:59,240 That's from Mr. Moon. Rock is archetypal, substantial snow, insubstantial, and so soft that Gerald can go to sleep in it. 39 00:04:59,240 --> 00:05:09,150 But in Birkins soul, when he contemplates Gerald's corpse, it produces the sharp, heavy bruise of ice. 40 00:05:09,150 --> 00:05:17,070 Mountains come close to the sun than any other terrestrial thing, but the more they approach it, the colder they become. 41 00:05:17,070 --> 00:05:24,810 They obstruct the sun's entry to valleys and they make the night darker, as Lawrence found in the villages above Lutsen, 42 00:05:24,810 --> 00:05:33,770 which have great shadows wielded over them like a menace and gleams of brief sunshine like a window. 43 00:05:33,770 --> 00:05:38,270 They are safe havens from the wars of the plains as, for example, 44 00:05:38,270 --> 00:05:45,200 for the soldiers of the Franco Prussian wars who climbed their way to refuge in Switzerland. 45 00:05:45,200 --> 00:05:56,750 But they pose dangers of their own. They give birth to rivers and cradle lakes and bring death through avalanches, rocks and falls. 46 00:05:56,750 --> 00:06:00,920 They delight the soul and they can oppress it, which for Lawrence, 47 00:06:00,920 --> 00:06:07,850 explains the emphasis on pain in the crucifixes which he found along the Imperial Road. 48 00:06:07,850 --> 00:06:17,510 They bring people into peculiar companionship. The three friends of the prologue of women in love find that in the hall it was another world, 49 00:06:17,510 --> 00:06:25,150 another life, till each found the presence of his companions like an essential flame. 50 00:06:25,150 --> 00:06:31,450 But they do this because of their capacity to make humans feel isolated. 51 00:06:31,450 --> 00:06:36,760 They can limit experience, as Lawrence found, of the alien women who, quote, 52 00:06:36,760 --> 00:06:45,010 seemed rather deadend, as if the continuing silence acted on them like a deadening drug. 53 00:06:45,010 --> 00:06:48,340 Or they can provide revivifying experience of the other. 54 00:06:48,340 --> 00:06:59,560 As for Mr. Noone, who first becomes an English when contemplating the Alps, a long rank of them right in heaven from the valley, 55 00:06:59,560 --> 00:07:09,670 they are places of peculiarly hard and pinched lives and of the leisure of bohemian writers with beards and tourists. 56 00:07:09,670 --> 00:07:21,120 Their peaks are, quote, pure, unapproachable, impossible and topped by tourist hotels, as in Women in Love. 57 00:07:21,120 --> 00:07:31,530 Tourists can scale them either by making an effort and taking a risk which might kill them or by avoiding effort and risk altogether. 58 00:07:31,530 --> 00:07:40,620 That is, they can be like the clerk from Stratham whom Lawrence met in a guest house on Lake Lucerna, half dead from exhaustion. 59 00:07:40,620 --> 00:07:50,210 Or they can ride by bus to the glacier above Caporn until, as Hepburn and Hannah do in the captain's dull. 60 00:07:50,210 --> 00:07:55,340 From a distance, mountains consist of ridges and peaks up close, 61 00:07:55,340 --> 00:08:02,510 they resolve themselves into more or less flat paths and the most dangerous surfaces are, in fact, the smoothest. 62 00:08:02,510 --> 00:08:10,280 Hepburn knows he risked serious injury in mounting a melting glacier without a stick. 63 00:08:10,280 --> 00:08:17,990 Mountains encourage unhealthy risk taking, but some people climb or live in them for the sake of their health, 64 00:08:17,990 --> 00:08:25,370 as Lawrence did in July nineteen twenty eight, when he lived in a chalet at four thousand feet in Kessell Matter near Castaic. 65 00:08:25,370 --> 00:08:30,260 And for anyone geographically interested, that's the Orange Point forty one. 66 00:08:30,260 --> 00:08:38,000 They are places of sublimity, but also of much that is antithetical to sublimity. 67 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:44,390 That is the tamed sublimity of the wrapper round milk chocolate. 68 00:08:44,390 --> 00:08:48,760 As Lawrence described the view from loud sound. 69 00:08:48,760 --> 00:08:59,980 The cheery banality of the bag hile, which Captain Hepburn so loathes, the vigorous fun of the show, plotless. 70 00:08:59,980 --> 00:09:06,490 So those of you women in love will know that the shoe plucker dance takes place at a significant moment. 71 00:09:06,490 --> 00:09:16,390 The various pictures of this dance to be found. This is one and this is an interior shot, which is therefore closer to what we have in the novel. 72 00:09:16,390 --> 00:09:23,990 So you have to imagine this is Oliver Reed dancing with the professor's daughter and is another. 73 00:09:23,990 --> 00:09:34,530 Or of skiing. And tobogganing or the prosaic misery to continue the list of a. sublime mountain elements, 74 00:09:34,530 --> 00:09:41,940 the present misery of being simply cold and wet as Frieda and Lawrence often were on their 1912 crossing, 75 00:09:41,940 --> 00:09:47,880 nothing so awful as the Alps when it rains, he wrote to Catherine Carswell. 76 00:09:47,880 --> 00:09:56,870 And finally, the rampant commercialism of the Swiss, which struck Lawrence as early as 1913. 77 00:09:56,870 --> 00:10:10,940 Mountains are the realm of God who is all in all or if they are not that, and then they and perhaps everything else, all the realm of nothing at all. 78 00:10:10,940 --> 00:10:12,200 As Shelly asks, 79 00:10:12,200 --> 00:10:22,250 in the last of his one hundred and forty four lines addressed to Montbleau with which Lawrence was familiar and what were thou and Earth and stars, 80 00:10:22,250 --> 00:10:32,550 and see if to the human mind's imagining silence and solitude were a vacancy question mark. 81 00:10:32,550 --> 00:10:38,640 There are two ways of experiencing them from afar, as from the veil of Shamone for Shirley, 82 00:10:38,640 --> 00:10:47,670 as in this contemporary picture or the Isaw Valley for the eloping Lawrence, alternatively, from their heights, 83 00:10:47,670 --> 00:10:53,100 whence you can see the rest of the world from above, unless, of course, you have not yet reached above the tree line, 84 00:10:53,100 --> 00:11:01,860 in which case you see nothing for trees as the woman who wanted to disappear discovers to her increasing discomfiture. 85 00:11:01,860 --> 00:11:06,120 They can dominate your mood and change the colour of your soul, 86 00:11:06,120 --> 00:11:16,780 or they can reflect whatever mood you happen to be in when Lawrence expresses happy love for Frida in the poem First Love written in back, 87 00:11:16,780 --> 00:11:23,550 he claims that they he and she hold mountains proud and blithe on our love. 88 00:11:23,550 --> 00:11:30,200 They stand upright on our love. We are the source. 89 00:11:30,200 --> 00:11:34,130 This inverts normal gravity in which the source is above. 90 00:11:34,130 --> 00:11:39,950 Yet when one of Frida's fictional avatars, Yohana, chooses to tell Gilbert Noone, 91 00:11:39,950 --> 00:11:44,090 the Lowrance figure that their walking companion, Stanley, has, quote, 92 00:11:44,090 --> 00:11:53,630 had her a couple of nights before and she chooses to tell this to him at a moment when they are almost lost at night and dangerously high up then, 93 00:11:53,630 --> 00:11:59,530 quote, night, loneliness, danger, all merged. 94 00:11:59,530 --> 00:12:04,150 That the same landscapes can affect different people in different situations differently is 95 00:12:04,150 --> 00:12:11,380 apparent in the different differences between Captain Hepburn's distrust of Alpine sublimity. 96 00:12:11,380 --> 00:12:21,580 Arun's nervous excitement, Buyat Gilbert's rejoicing in it, Ursula's suffocation by it at what is probably the same place. 97 00:12:21,580 --> 00:12:31,990 If we accept the speculation that haunted houses and the fictional haunt housing is the same as the expulsion of Mr. Noone and the actual meyerhofer. 98 00:12:31,990 --> 00:12:41,270 So if you want to know where the ending of of women in love takes place, our best bet is Meyerhofer, which is a yellow point three. 99 00:12:41,270 --> 00:12:49,760 Which leads to the big romantic question and concern, are they or do we project and that in turn leads on to Shellie's. 100 00:12:49,760 --> 00:13:02,150 Great question. Laurence himself strikes a tentative note when in his poem Sinner's, he states that the mountains rise above us, dreaming forever. 101 00:13:02,150 --> 00:13:13,320 One might even think they love us. But only right and only think and do they even dream? 102 00:13:13,320 --> 00:13:20,910 Given these rocky uncertainties and piled paradoxes, it's not surprising Lawrence shifts his metaphors. 103 00:13:20,910 --> 00:13:30,330 A glacier is like some great, deep furred ice bear, reaching down terrible pores of ice into the valley. 104 00:13:30,330 --> 00:13:39,060 A valley is described as the earth's cleavage with the sky from above, a sharp wedge forcing its way in. 105 00:13:39,060 --> 00:13:48,390 And the eternal ferocious water like the steel edge of the wedge mountains themselves appear as sky slopes, 106 00:13:48,390 --> 00:13:54,480 which would let one walk up into the sky as ghosts. 107 00:13:54,480 --> 00:14:00,680 As great thighs, amongst which Gilbert calls about like a dwarf. 108 00:14:00,680 --> 00:14:10,810 A queen. White found. Marvellous striped sky panthers circling round a great camp, 109 00:14:10,810 --> 00:14:22,290 tigers prowling between the north and the south and my favourite, a row of angels with flaming swords. 110 00:14:22,290 --> 00:14:28,560 I want to concentrate Lawrence's responses to the ambiguities of mountains in two areas. 111 00:14:28,560 --> 00:14:34,500 First, his understanding of the Alps as delineating the north from the south, and second, 112 00:14:34,500 --> 00:14:41,640 his understanding of the Alps as guarantors of eternal life and sources of death. 113 00:14:41,640 --> 00:14:48,400 The first is one of the best known of the many binaries through which Lawrence thought. 114 00:14:48,400 --> 00:14:56,650 The north and south, it's first developed in Twilight in Italy in 1912 in relation to Germany and Italy, 115 00:14:56,650 --> 00:15:05,320 then it's extended in Women and Love via Gerrold and the fetish in Halliday's flat to the Arctic and the African. 116 00:15:05,320 --> 00:15:13,300 On the other hand, it gets more complicated. The opening essay of studies in classic American literature, written in nineteen eighteen, 117 00:15:13,300 --> 00:15:21,070 likens the German Italian polarity in Europe to the Gallic African polarity for 118 00:15:21,070 --> 00:15:27,950 Rome and to the European American polarity which developed at the Renaissance. 119 00:15:27,950 --> 00:15:36,440 In twilights in Italy, one thesis which emerges is that when northern Europe is crying out for the Dionysian ecstasy, 120 00:15:36,440 --> 00:15:38,690 which is what he thought that it was doing, 121 00:15:38,690 --> 00:15:51,610 southern Europe is breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over death, immorality, sorry, immortality through procreation. 122 00:15:51,610 --> 00:15:56,440 Because of this, Italy is in twilight, but so is the north, 123 00:15:56,440 --> 00:16:04,000 as they both try with very limited success, to become more like each other within this binary. 124 00:16:04,000 --> 00:16:09,860 Lawrence knows exactly where he is. He always represents himself as northern. 125 00:16:09,860 --> 00:16:19,400 On reaching the south side of the Alps, he is reminded of the slummed voted on and on the land where the lemons bloom. 126 00:16:19,400 --> 00:16:27,620 That is, his self consciously adopts the German romantic perspective on Italy, voiced in Gerta Vilhelm Maistre. 127 00:16:27,620 --> 00:16:34,670 That lyric, which ends with the lines dargin dying it on the big or far to last on scene. 128 00:16:34,670 --> 00:16:39,500 The river is where our path goes. Oh Father, let us move there. 129 00:16:39,500 --> 00:16:46,050 Lawrence, as we know, did this on and off for the rest of his life. 130 00:16:46,050 --> 00:16:50,310 But there were several confusions in Lawrences north south binary, 131 00:16:50,310 --> 00:16:58,200 the Bavarians who live on the north side of the Alps are described as living in the heat of physical experience, 132 00:16:58,200 --> 00:17:10,840 which is a crucifixion, whereas the Swiss who are to their south are characterised by utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable. 133 00:17:10,840 --> 00:17:18,490 Gerald Critch is characterised as Arctic and like the mountains, is likened repeatedly to a tiger, 134 00:17:18,490 --> 00:17:25,630 but is the most sensual and least spiritually refined of the quintet of women in love. 135 00:17:25,630 --> 00:17:34,210 His Arctic aspect is in part correlated to a commercial and mechanistic spirit which Lawrence identifies in the urban Suess, 136 00:17:34,210 --> 00:17:44,230 but not in the Highlander's, who for him are the real mountain people, the Austrians he describes in ways which more fit the Italians as soft. 137 00:17:44,230 --> 00:17:50,500 Vagg easygoing, not so fierce and hostile as the Bavarian Highlanders. 138 00:17:50,500 --> 00:17:56,250 But in north Italy, Austrian territory is defined as Germanic. 139 00:17:56,250 --> 00:18:07,020 The station at Trenta was still Austrian there, one was still on Germanic ground, self-consciousness is the is one of the qualities of the North, 140 00:18:07,020 --> 00:18:14,190 but is found most of all in the vulgar or sensational crucifixes which he notices south, 141 00:18:14,190 --> 00:18:21,900 not north of the Brenner Pass and which are far from the mindlessness of Halliday's fetish. 142 00:18:21,900 --> 00:18:27,270 In addition, the very concept of the Alps as borderline is confused. 143 00:18:27,270 --> 00:18:32,580 On the one hand, the Alps are supposed to demarcate north from south to Mr Noon. 144 00:18:32,580 --> 00:18:39,090 They stand like angels with flaming swords, barring us from the paradise of the South. 145 00:18:39,090 --> 00:18:49,080 But insofar as Alps are not a line but an area, they demonstrate that the change from north to south across their latitudinal expanse, 146 00:18:49,080 --> 00:18:53,080 with the exceptions of the anomalies I've just mentioned. 147 00:18:53,080 --> 00:19:02,260 All right, within the ALP's lines, such as the Brenner Pass mark a particular point of demarcation in the return journey, 148 00:19:02,260 --> 00:19:05,350 describing Lawrence's journey over the Gotthard Pass, 149 00:19:05,350 --> 00:19:15,700 which is Redpoint 13, we were crossing in silence from the northern world to the southern over the ridge of the world in Mr Noone. 150 00:19:15,700 --> 00:19:17,960 What I'm pretty sure is the same. 151 00:19:17,960 --> 00:19:27,640 Sorry, in Mr Noone, it's called the Games, which is actually the Phitsanulok, the narrator comments even geographically one Kompass. 152 00:19:27,640 --> 00:19:33,670 So definite a turning point. So the actual turning point is different and different in different works. 153 00:19:33,670 --> 00:19:43,990 But he is very concerned with the notion of a definite turning point, since both the North and the South are presented as possessing positive value, 154 00:19:43,990 --> 00:19:53,110 and since both Arctic and African extremes in women and love are presented as disintegrated and ultimately destructive, 155 00:19:53,110 --> 00:19:59,710 these turning points might be thought of as intrinsically desirable points of balance. 156 00:19:59,710 --> 00:20:07,000 The middle and of the high two all, after all, contains the crucifix, which Lawrence considers one of the best. 157 00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:13,060 But it hangs in a valley and the peak points of transition. 158 00:20:13,060 --> 00:20:23,050 The experiences which Lawrence and his characters have there are orientated to perfection and to consummation to to the extreme, 159 00:20:23,050 --> 00:20:28,620 not to equipoise or fusion, that is. 160 00:20:28,620 --> 00:20:36,930 The Alps, yes, we want Andermatt now, the Alps, as well as representing division and transition between the north and the south, 161 00:20:36,930 --> 00:20:43,110 also epitomise the north, which is their function in women in love, 162 00:20:43,110 --> 00:20:48,120 or as is implied by the fact that southern Europeans who were trying to break free from 163 00:20:48,120 --> 00:20:55,500 Dionysus include the young Italian migrants whom Lawrence finds working in Swiss factories. 164 00:20:55,500 --> 00:21:02,940 So in coming to Switzerland, they have moved to the north, the Arctic plains, by which I mean exactly that. 165 00:21:02,940 --> 00:21:09,840 The plains of the Arctic then are conflated with the alpine peaks and the pole 166 00:21:09,840 --> 00:21:15,240 with what in another sense is the temperate zone or the other point of meeting. 167 00:21:15,240 --> 00:21:25,110 Two factors help mediate this conflation of the alpine extreme with the Arctic extreme first volcano, 168 00:21:25,110 --> 00:21:34,890 whose characters are in part taken from Norse mythology but are often seen acting in the Rhineland or the Bavarian hills. 169 00:21:34,890 --> 00:21:40,950 So, for example, Gilbert Noone associate the Alpine with both the Northern and the Bulgarian. 170 00:21:40,950 --> 00:21:52,020 When climbing between shifts and Meyerhoff, he finds himself almost transported happy in a God world of strange northern gods. 171 00:21:52,020 --> 00:21:58,060 It was hard not to believe in the old white skinned, muscular gods whom Bogner travesty. 172 00:21:58,060 --> 00:22:10,170 But surely Siegfried tramped through such spring meadows, breaking the gold, the gold blonde globe flowers against his fierce naked knees. 173 00:22:10,170 --> 00:22:17,100 Second, there was the mediating concept of the desert, both the peaks and the plains, 174 00:22:17,100 --> 00:22:23,430 if snow covered, are largely deserted of flora and fauna, human and animal. 175 00:22:23,430 --> 00:22:25,710 Shelly's description of the top of Mount Bloor, 176 00:22:25,710 --> 00:22:35,370 which in fact the paradox of seeing something that no ice sees would apply equally well to the North Pole. 177 00:22:35,370 --> 00:22:42,420 The snows descend upon that mountain. None beholds them their. 178 00:22:42,420 --> 00:22:49,710 No, when the flakes burn in the sinking sun or the star beams dart through them, wins, 179 00:22:49,710 --> 00:22:59,390 contend silently there and keep the snow with breath rapid and strong, but silently. 180 00:22:59,390 --> 00:23:05,540 I think the reason that the winds contend silently is that there is no idea that to 181 00:23:05,540 --> 00:23:10,820 hear their contention as a tree which falls in a forest which contains no ears, 182 00:23:10,820 --> 00:23:24,470 falls silently. In Women in Love and the Return Journey, respectively, the peaks are described as a terrible waste of whiteness and a desolate waste. 183 00:23:24,470 --> 00:23:35,960 The woman who lives high up in an isolated farm in the sky over the hills is described as speaking in a high screaming voice like a desert bird. 184 00:23:35,960 --> 00:23:40,370 And this desert is suspect of the Alps is one reason why I think that last year's 185 00:23:40,370 --> 00:23:45,410 William Ivory slash Maranda Bohane television adaptation of Women in Love, 186 00:23:45,410 --> 00:23:50,840 which was aired on BBC four, permissibly shifted very audaciously. 187 00:23:50,840 --> 00:24:00,080 But in that sense, permissibly shifted the location of the ending from the Alps to the South African desert. 188 00:24:00,080 --> 00:24:05,240 That move might alternatively be defended on the grounds that certain elements of Gerald's 189 00:24:05,240 --> 00:24:12,890 character suggest the disintegrator essential more than they do no abstract annihilation. 190 00:24:12,890 --> 00:24:26,220 But the desert has actually presented in the film is not African, but in its infinitude and austerity, both Alpine and Arctic. 191 00:24:26,220 --> 00:24:35,520 Lawrence was not only attracted to the more moderate versions of the north and the South, represented by South Germany and Tuscany respectively, 192 00:24:35,520 --> 00:24:39,270 and between which he oscillated through much of his life, 193 00:24:39,270 --> 00:24:47,580 he often deliberately on this oscillation, included the high Alps in 1913, 21 and twenty seven. 194 00:24:47,580 --> 00:24:57,420 He crossed the Alps in both directions in nineteen twenty eight, as you would have seen in both ways, twice overall in half of the years of his life. 195 00:24:57,420 --> 00:25:03,930 After 1912, he visited the Alps, and that's most of those in which he was able to. 196 00:25:03,930 --> 00:25:08,100 The following passage from the return journey concerning the stretch between 197 00:25:08,100 --> 00:25:14,430 the Folker Pass and the Gotthard Pass explains some part of their attraction. 198 00:25:14,430 --> 00:25:27,780 I was free in this heavy ice cold air, this upper world alone, London far away below, beyond England, Germany, France. 199 00:25:27,780 --> 00:25:35,610 They were so unreal, false, non-existent inactivity out of the silence. 200 00:25:35,610 --> 00:25:40,580 One look down on it and it seemed to have lost all importance. 201 00:25:40,580 --> 00:25:48,230 Then the next moment, sorry, the next morning, standing looking round at the mountain tops, I was jumping in my soul with delight. 202 00:25:48,230 --> 00:25:58,250 Should one ever go down to the lower world? Indeed, like the sorry, unlike the young man from Stratham whom he met exhausted. 203 00:25:58,250 --> 00:26:04,310 He knows that he perhaps never needs to return either to England or to a job. 204 00:26:04,310 --> 00:26:09,620 His work of the moment is to express precisely that sentiment in writing, 205 00:26:09,620 --> 00:26:15,870 which will sell and it did his travel writing was enough to get him and his wife through these years. 206 00:26:15,870 --> 00:26:21,140 Ursula, standing in a similar position, feels disconnected from her past. 207 00:26:21,140 --> 00:26:26,630 She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place with Birken, 208 00:26:26,630 --> 00:26:33,510 not to have toiled up out of the muck of her childhood and her upbringing. 209 00:26:33,510 --> 00:26:40,950 The contemplation of the world and its history from above should, however, Laurentian ring alarm bells. 210 00:26:40,950 --> 00:26:48,180 You may remember that the narrator of Mr. Noon calls on Dear Draftee uplift to Ballarat 211 00:26:48,180 --> 00:26:52,920 outskirts and trouser legs like Zeppelin balloons till we were up into the sky. 212 00:26:52,920 --> 00:26:56,940 When we look down on our fellow men, it's a risky thing to do. 213 00:26:56,940 --> 00:27:01,620 Of course, the metaphorical mountain to which, as I mentioned, 214 00:27:01,620 --> 00:27:09,250 Lawrence repeatedly refers from Mr Noone to Fantasia of the unconscious to climbing down Pisgah. 215 00:27:09,250 --> 00:27:10,860 The essay is, of course, Mt. 216 00:27:10,860 --> 00:27:21,180 Pisgah, from which the promised lands of various conceptions of humanity are viewed and from which he wants to slow down on his rear. 217 00:27:21,180 --> 00:27:27,780 Lawrence ever vigilant against idealism, perhaps not always including his own, 218 00:27:27,780 --> 00:27:36,360 is aware at the end of women and love of the dangers of seeing the South as a promised land from the vantage point of the Alps. 219 00:27:36,360 --> 00:27:45,300 When Birken is recalled from Verona back up into the hall by the death of Gerald and he stands contemplating the spot on which he died, 220 00:27:45,300 --> 00:27:50,130 he muses that Gerald might have gone on down to Italy. He might. 221 00:27:50,130 --> 00:27:56,490 And what then? Was it a way out? It was only a way in again. 222 00:27:56,490 --> 00:28:07,440 He and Ursula and the novel, not in Italy, of course, let alone Verona, but in disputation back in what is in fact, eastward. 223 00:28:07,440 --> 00:28:15,240 Of course, Pisgah is primarily for a metaphorical mountain, and he doesn't need to stand on an actual alpine peak, 224 00:28:15,240 --> 00:28:23,700 nor even have the experience of an extreme version of the north, which that is in order to view Italy as a promised land. 225 00:28:23,700 --> 00:28:32,700 But he doesn't choose a mountain as a metaphor for spiritual elevation and see real mountains as having spiritual significance without wanting. 226 00:28:32,700 --> 00:28:35,160 At one point in his writings and as far as I know, 227 00:28:35,160 --> 00:28:45,070 he only does it wants to try out a moment of scepticism of the mountains themselves in the captain's dull. 228 00:28:45,070 --> 00:28:58,120 Anybody read that? An important Alpine fiction for Lawrence in the captain's dog handler and Hepburn visit Iglesia above Caporn in the hall. 229 00:28:58,120 --> 00:29:04,000 Handler has a very strong response to the crystalline finality of the mountain, 230 00:29:04,000 --> 00:29:12,220 which has strong resemblances to the reaction of Will Brangwyn, who was transported by the experience of Lincoln Cathedral. 231 00:29:12,220 --> 00:29:18,760 And as you remember there in Lincoln Cathedral, it's his wife who points out to him the gargoyles, so that his ecstasy, 232 00:29:18,760 --> 00:29:25,810 his understanding of the sublimity of the cathedral collapses, just as Anna does for Will Hepburn. 233 00:29:25,810 --> 00:29:33,130 There's a gender reversal here. Hepburn spoils Handler's moment by questioning its basis. 234 00:29:33,130 --> 00:29:36,190 So she says to him, I came to see the mountains, 235 00:29:36,190 --> 00:29:44,200 which are wonderful and give me strength and I came to see the glacier, you can do nothing but find fault. 236 00:29:44,200 --> 00:29:50,320 Even with God's mountains, a dark flame suddenly went over his face. 237 00:29:50,320 --> 00:29:54,520 Yes, he said, I hate them. I hate them. 238 00:29:54,520 --> 00:30:00,550 I hate their snow and their affectation. Affectation, she laughed. 239 00:30:00,550 --> 00:30:06,010 Oh, even the mountains are affected for you, are they? Yes, he said. 240 00:30:06,010 --> 00:30:10,120 They're loftiness and they're uplift. I hate their uplift. 241 00:30:10,120 --> 00:30:14,230 I hate people prancing on mountaintops and feeling insulted. 242 00:30:14,230 --> 00:30:20,050 I'd like to make them all stop up there on their mountaintops and to chew ice to fill their stomachs. 243 00:30:20,050 --> 00:30:22,870 I wouldn't let them down again. I wouldn't. I hate it all. 244 00:30:22,870 --> 00:30:30,250 I tell you, you must be a little mad, she said superbly, to talk like that about the mountains. 245 00:30:30,250 --> 00:30:33,730 They are so much bigger than you know. 246 00:30:33,730 --> 00:30:38,620 He said, no, they are not. What? She laughed aloud. 247 00:30:38,620 --> 00:30:43,570 The mountains are not bigger than you, but you are extraordinary. 248 00:30:43,570 --> 00:30:49,900 They are not bigger than me. He cried any more than you are bigger than me if you stand on a ladder. 249 00:30:49,900 --> 00:30:58,840 They are less than me. There is an even an echo of Lawrence's conceit of the descent of Pisgah in the fact that Hepburn, 250 00:30:58,840 --> 00:31:02,860 who after having said all this then does climb the glacier very dangerously, 251 00:31:02,860 --> 00:31:07,990 has a moment of ecstasy on the top of it and then has to descend with exaggerated care. 252 00:31:07,990 --> 00:31:13,900 He doesn't quite go on his bottom. He kind of does a zigzag, but it's not a dignified, a descent. 253 00:31:13,900 --> 00:31:23,740 Back at the hotel of the glaciers foot Jews of the wrong sort, quote, are described as imparting a wholesome breath of sanity, 254 00:31:23,740 --> 00:31:31,840 disillusion and sentimentality to the excited Nordic Burkill atmosphere. 255 00:31:31,840 --> 00:31:43,650 Their dark side sardonic presence seemed to say to the maidenly necked mountain, youth don't sprout wings of the spirit too much, my dear. 256 00:31:43,650 --> 00:31:51,480 The relationship to which Hannelore soon thereafter commits with Hepburn is not certainly hopeful, 257 00:31:51,480 --> 00:32:00,600 but her mountain ecstasy is not allowed to stand as determinative in the onward stream of life. 258 00:32:00,600 --> 00:32:08,550 Lawrence wrote the story once he had been able to return to the Alps after the seven year break from them enforced by the war, 259 00:32:08,550 --> 00:32:19,590 during which during that period of break, he had presented the Alps at their most life enhancing and their most killing in Mr Noone and Women in Love, 260 00:32:19,590 --> 00:32:28,740 respectively, written almost at the same time. But neither contains this sardonic, sceptical questioning of them, 261 00:32:28,740 --> 00:32:37,590 such as it seems that Lawrence has returned to them after so many years of positive and negative speculation about them had suddenly inspired. 262 00:32:37,590 --> 00:32:46,470 After all, Lurker is a Jew who is entirely unaffected by the sublimity of the mountains by which he is surrounded. 263 00:32:46,470 --> 00:32:55,350 But he is of the wrong sort, not only in the snobbish sense in which the narrator of the captain's dull uses the phrase, 264 00:32:55,350 --> 00:33:01,080 but he is of the wrong sort, according to the desiderata of the novel as a whole. 265 00:33:01,080 --> 00:33:06,810 The deflationary critique is not that which the Tyrolean Mountains of Women in love received. 266 00:33:06,810 --> 00:33:10,560 In fact, Ursula realises that this utterly silent, 267 00:33:10,560 --> 00:33:22,350 frozen world of the mountaintops was not universal after she has had an argument with Laqueur and in leaving the mountains, she is leaving him. 268 00:33:22,350 --> 00:33:30,030 The equivalent of the will Anna and Anna Hepburn dispute in this novel is between Goodwin and Gerald. 269 00:33:30,030 --> 00:33:40,140 And as you will know, if you've read the novel, it's Goodwin who has the ecstasy and this her supposedly Arctic lover shatters. 270 00:33:40,140 --> 00:33:47,470 So you remember that when they arrive in the guest house, they go into a room which she describes as being like in the inside of a nut, 271 00:33:47,470 --> 00:33:54,150 and it's got a little window and she kneels down in front of it and she sees what is beyond to her. 272 00:33:54,150 --> 00:34:04,160 It was so beautiful. It was a delirium. She wanted to gather the glowing eternal peaks to her breast and die. 273 00:34:04,160 --> 00:34:12,920 He saw them, saw they were beautiful, but there were almost no clamour in his breast like Will in Lincoln Cathedral, 274 00:34:12,920 --> 00:34:18,470 who is furious with Ana for destroying his ecstasy. She is furious with him for doing the same. 275 00:34:18,470 --> 00:34:22,160 It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. 276 00:34:22,160 --> 00:34:34,300 Don't try to come between it and me. But he had done it brutally and peevishly asking her, why do you grovel before it, not like Hepburn, 277 00:34:34,300 --> 00:34:42,190 by doing the equivalent of pointing out the gargoyles undermining its perfection and women in love are much more complex. 278 00:34:42,190 --> 00:34:51,250 Response to the Alps is going on, one which, like most of Lawrence's writing most, takes them entirely seriously. 279 00:34:51,250 --> 00:34:57,850 And so in order to understand that, essentially in order to understand why Gerrold ends up frozen in the Alps, 280 00:34:57,850 --> 00:35:07,280 I just want to return for the last part to Twilight in Italy. In those essays, the responses to the Alps, which Lawrence identifies, 281 00:35:07,280 --> 00:35:16,550 divide into a sense of the mountains as sources of pain and death and a sense of them as eternal, 282 00:35:16,550 --> 00:35:25,070 both of these identifications are made particularly by the Terralliance, who for Lawrence are the archetypal mountain people. 283 00:35:25,070 --> 00:35:35,150 The fear of the possibility of violence, even unto death at the hands of Alpine nature is discussed, for example, in their extraordinary essay, 284 00:35:35,150 --> 00:35:46,250 A Chapel Amongst the Mountains, on the basis of his observation of votive tokens given in thanks for the survival of physical accidents, 285 00:35:46,250 --> 00:35:49,400 Lawrence conclude, concludes they. 286 00:35:49,400 --> 00:36:02,780 That's the trillions lived under the mountains where always was fear of the unknown God who crushed life at any moment and threatened it always. 287 00:36:02,780 --> 00:36:07,430 Mary, the Virgin Mary is the ostensible dedicatedly of these tokens. 288 00:36:07,430 --> 00:36:17,450 But Lawrence feels that that which had neither known nor suffered the dread unnamed, which had aimed and missed by a little. 289 00:36:17,450 --> 00:36:25,550 This must be acknowledged covertly. In other words, it's a different God that is in fact being worshipped in these votive tokens. 290 00:36:25,550 --> 00:36:31,970 Hence, in the valley of Klumb, the sculptor of crucifixes whom Lawrence particularly admires, 291 00:36:31,970 --> 00:36:38,750 is involved in propitiating death and is in fact obsessed with pain. 292 00:36:38,750 --> 00:36:44,600 There is something crude and sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting, 293 00:36:44,600 --> 00:36:56,610 turning back along the course of blood by which we have come, and almost Russian dark mysticism, a worship of cruelty and pain and torture and death. 294 00:36:56,610 --> 00:37:01,450 This mention of Russia complicates Lawrence's psychogeography still further, 295 00:37:01,450 --> 00:37:07,620 but it does suggest another allegiance between the wastes of peak and plain. 296 00:37:07,620 --> 00:37:17,190 But it also suggests a connexion between the native alpine peoples and the Arctic GERROLD in a way which I think helps to explain what is otherwise, 297 00:37:17,190 --> 00:37:28,320 I think, an enigmatic encounter between himself when he's stumbling his way towards death and a half buried crucifix, 298 00:37:28,320 --> 00:37:35,010 a little Christ under a little sloping hood at the top of a pole he shared away. 299 00:37:35,010 --> 00:37:43,220 Somebody was going to murder him. Yet why be afraid it was bound to happen to be murdered? 300 00:37:43,220 --> 00:37:48,560 He looked round in terror at the snow, the rocking, pale, shadowy slopes of the upper world. 301 00:37:48,560 --> 00:37:53,090 This was the moment when death was uplifted and there was no escape. 302 00:37:53,090 --> 00:37:58,220 Lord Jesus, was it then bound to be Lord Jesus? 303 00:37:58,220 --> 00:38:04,870 He could feel the blow descending. He knew he was murdered. 304 00:38:04,870 --> 00:38:11,800 He has, of course, already been shown to have faithfully inherited his family's sense of ill fated ness, 305 00:38:11,800 --> 00:38:16,550 but this has never been shown as having any connexion with Christ. 306 00:38:16,550 --> 00:38:21,220 I don't, in fact, think that he is here making any connexion with Christ. 307 00:38:21,220 --> 00:38:34,120 He is establishing contact with the darker mysticism of the of the of the dread unnamed, which in his case is not going to take aim and then miss. 308 00:38:34,120 --> 00:38:40,750 A sense of a terrifying mountaintop being with the power over life and death is, of course, 309 00:38:40,750 --> 00:38:48,010 also found in Lord of the Flies, although admittedly most of the variables are very different. 310 00:38:48,010 --> 00:38:55,020 Both locations are isolette and within them, the source of death lies above. 311 00:38:55,020 --> 00:38:59,970 In the return journey, Lawrence writes of the villages above Lutsen there, 312 00:38:59,970 --> 00:39:10,530 it seemed in the glamorous snow was the source of death which fell down in great waves of shadow and rock rushing to the earth. 313 00:39:10,530 --> 00:39:20,810 And all the people of the mountains on the slopes in the valleys seemed to live upon this great rushing wave of death. 314 00:39:20,810 --> 00:39:22,190 But to Lawrence, 315 00:39:22,190 --> 00:39:32,540 the mountains also are and guarantee the eternal and the rocks in Lawrence's description of the Alps are frequently described as living. 316 00:39:32,540 --> 00:39:37,060 Watch out for that living rock. Very frequent conjunction. 317 00:39:37,060 --> 00:39:46,330 This is not necessarily contradictory with the mountains is a source of deaths and sources of death like beasties, are themselves immortal. 318 00:39:46,330 --> 00:39:53,350 Moreover, the mountains emphasise, by contrast, the mortality of the humans who live on them. 319 00:39:53,350 --> 00:39:57,490 This, according to Lawrence, is felt by the Bavarian peasants. 320 00:39:57,490 --> 00:40:05,470 The ice, the operations of snow is brilliant, with timeless immunity from the flux and warmth of life overhead. 321 00:40:05,470 --> 00:40:18,090 They transcend all life and all the soft, moist fire of the blood so that a man must needs live in the radiance of his own negation. 322 00:40:18,090 --> 00:40:26,790 But this is a very different kind of connexion between death and the mountains to that acknowledged in the Alpine chapel that was bloody. 323 00:40:26,790 --> 00:40:38,370 This is crystalline. One senses that Lawrence attributes the first two others to Terralliance to the spiritual failure Jarold, 324 00:40:38,370 --> 00:40:42,990 but that he himself has directly felt the second. 325 00:40:42,990 --> 00:40:49,950 And it is also the more the more complex in the passage which I quoted before from the return journey in which the 326 00:40:49,950 --> 00:40:56,490 sides of the mountains are like the collapsing walls of the grave and the source of death rushes to the level earth. 327 00:40:56,490 --> 00:41:05,550 It's also the case that there is a flu upwards that flows from the needle point of snow to the unutterable cold and death, 328 00:41:05,550 --> 00:41:14,520 the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being. 329 00:41:14,520 --> 00:41:19,250 He's expressed this before in the crucifix across the mountains. 330 00:41:19,250 --> 00:41:27,310 He wrote this, Our life, this admixture of labour and warm experience in the flesh all the time, 331 00:41:27,310 --> 00:41:33,090 it is streaming upwards into the timeless brilliance beyond. 332 00:41:33,090 --> 00:41:37,320 This is a kind of crystalline nirvana, and therefore, for Lowrance, 333 00:41:37,320 --> 00:41:46,170 ambiguous one reaches one's personal end and one's apotheosis as a temporary experience of the Alps. 334 00:41:46,170 --> 00:41:57,070 It is felt as an ecstasy, as we've seen by various of his characters, sometimes to life enhancing effect, sometimes otherwise. 335 00:41:57,070 --> 00:42:02,590 Mr Noone, I would say, has the former when he's crossing the Ganzeer in this description, 336 00:42:02,590 --> 00:42:09,460 I would draw your attention to the way in which Lawrence Pyles, his terms, adjectives repeated with slight variations, 337 00:42:09,460 --> 00:42:18,400 metaphors taken from architecture, the animal kingdom, geology and maths on top of each other, like the rocks which lie scattered on the peaks, 338 00:42:18,400 --> 00:42:25,810 bearing a similar imperfect relationship to the crystalline as language to what he describes. 339 00:42:25,810 --> 00:42:30,070 He wanted only one thing to look across at that marvellous God, 340 00:42:30,070 --> 00:42:40,640 proud Aluf Pyramid of a peak flashing its snow stripes like some snow beast and blueing the clear beyond. 341 00:42:40,640 --> 00:42:50,540 She it's now as she lifted her marvellous dark slope's clear, a marvellous prism of substance in the Aether raid with her snow, 342 00:42:50,540 --> 00:42:58,940 as with lightning strikes beyond and crystal and almost mathematically pure. 343 00:42:58,940 --> 00:43:11,540 And he was satisfied in a perfect aloneness. This is self negation and it is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and it's taken him by surprise. 344 00:43:11,540 --> 00:43:20,150 I never expected the mountains. He was just crossing the Alps with his lover and this happened. 345 00:43:20,150 --> 00:43:24,050 The case is slightly differently. It's slightly different for the orderly. 346 00:43:24,050 --> 00:43:34,520 In the short story, the Prussian officer. This story was written and set in and near Yushan Horsin Redpoint nine, just south of Munich, 347 00:43:34,520 --> 00:43:43,190 where Lawrence and Frieda lived from August to September 1913 in a villa which probably resembled this one. 348 00:43:43,190 --> 00:43:51,980 That is unlike Women in Love and Mr Noone, it is written on location and in this at the same time as Twilight in Italy, 349 00:43:51,980 --> 00:44:02,270 throughout the action of this famous short story, the Prussian officer's company is walking south directly towards the mountains. 350 00:44:02,270 --> 00:44:11,150 Stunning, though, this photo is you can see how an approach to the mountains could be an approach to ecstatic consummation and death. 351 00:44:11,150 --> 00:44:21,410 So this orderly through whose consciousness much of this story is vocalised is focussed on them as he marches on and on in silence, 352 00:44:21,410 --> 00:44:26,960 staring at the mountains ahead that rose sheer out of the land. 353 00:44:26,960 --> 00:44:33,830 And then later on, when he's marching with an extreme thirst, the mountains seem almost supernatural. 354 00:44:33,830 --> 00:44:44,210 He murders his officer, the eponymous Prussian officer. After he's done this, the mountains, still gleaming in the sky, shone in their silence. 355 00:44:44,210 --> 00:44:51,420 He stood and looked at them. His face illuminated. The next morning he is dying. 356 00:44:51,420 --> 00:44:56,370 And again, the mountains ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky. 357 00:44:56,370 --> 00:45:03,900 He wanted them, he wanted them alone. He wanted to leave himself and be identified with them. 358 00:45:03,900 --> 00:45:08,370 He has a fit, is thrown to the ground on recovering consciousness. 359 00:45:08,370 --> 00:45:15,750 He stared at the gleaming mountains. He stared till his eyes went black and the mountains as they stood in their beauty. 360 00:45:15,750 --> 00:45:23,140 So clean and cool seemed to have it that which was lost in him. 361 00:45:23,140 --> 00:45:31,450 That's the last he sees, that's the vision of the crucifix across the mountains of a man having gone into the cold radiance 362 00:45:31,450 --> 00:45:38,140 which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being unlike Gerald, 363 00:45:38,140 --> 00:45:47,350 he actually has carried out a murder and is then consummated by is then consummated by the mountains. 364 00:45:47,350 --> 00:45:55,280 Goodman also reaches her point of strange rapture in the navel of the world as she looks out of her window or down from a peak. 365 00:45:55,280 --> 00:46:02,200 When she toboggans, she settled down like a crystal in the navel of snow and was gone. 366 00:46:02,200 --> 00:46:05,650 But her consummation, like Mr. Noon's, is not final. 367 00:46:05,650 --> 00:46:15,220 And unlike Mr. Noone, she is unable to make a successful descent from the mountains and re-entry to her re-entry to life. 368 00:46:15,220 --> 00:46:21,580 Since I would say that her passage to Dresden and life with Larker does not count as that. 369 00:46:21,580 --> 00:46:28,510 Moreover, her ecstasy is directly destructive of her relationship with Jarrold and therefore of him. 370 00:46:28,510 --> 00:46:33,310 During her first ecstasy, he feels vap around his heart. 371 00:46:33,310 --> 00:46:38,620 He saw the blind valley, the great cul de sac of snow, and there was no way out. 372 00:46:38,620 --> 00:46:43,960 The tears of her strange religion set him at Nort. 373 00:46:43,960 --> 00:46:49,120 He can neither share her ecstasy nor recover her from it once she has first experienced it, 374 00:46:49,120 --> 00:46:56,250 I would say it is the mountains far more than the sardonic lurker that takes her from him. 375 00:46:56,250 --> 00:47:00,750 Gerald's relationship with the mountains is less spiritual. 376 00:47:00,750 --> 00:47:11,370 He toboggans with great physical intensity, and on the day in which he goes out for a long ski by himself, he becomes snow burned, snow estranged. 377 00:47:11,370 --> 00:47:12,390 As I mentioned before, 378 00:47:12,390 --> 00:47:21,570 he shares with the two religions a fear of the mountains and he can't envisage any dissent from them back into quotidien lowland life. 379 00:47:21,570 --> 00:47:29,460 But when he actually turns into ice, this is a physical transformation. He doesn't have an Arctic apotheosis. 380 00:47:29,460 --> 00:47:37,260 He's the victim of Goodwins Arctic apotheosis. So it's perhaps appropriate that unlike the Prussian officers orderly, 381 00:47:37,260 --> 00:47:46,470 his body doesn't rest in the Alps, but is returned to Eastwood as a corpse, not a crystal. 382 00:47:46,470 --> 00:47:58,650 Lawrence himself, though, did rest in the Alps. He died in those Orange Point forty five in the Alps of the French Riviera and remained there at 383 00:47:58,650 --> 00:48:06,400 least until nineteen thirty five when his ashes were moved to New Mexico by Frida's third husband. 384 00:48:06,400 --> 00:48:11,800 He had gone there not to become eternal or to disappear from his former self, 385 00:48:11,800 --> 00:48:20,180 but in order to prolong warm physical life, he made over half his visits to the Alps during his last five years. 386 00:48:20,180 --> 00:48:26,980 Yet perhaps because his reasons going there were antithetical to his understanding of Alpine threat and promise, 387 00:48:26,980 --> 00:48:31,270 he wrote almost nothing about the Alps during this time. 388 00:48:31,270 --> 00:48:36,520 The one exception is the woman who wanted to disappear, not to be confused with a short story. 389 00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:39,610 The woman who rode away, which is a Mexican story, 390 00:48:39,610 --> 00:48:46,390 the woman who wanted to disappear is an unfinished story of nineteen twenty nine the year before his death. 391 00:48:46,390 --> 00:48:51,310 Here we're back in the psychological and geographic territory of 1912. 392 00:48:51,310 --> 00:49:00,820 A stifled American housewife wants to disappear from her family for a year, and she takes us out to a place that sounds very much like irrationalism. 393 00:49:00,820 --> 00:49:07,510 But from there she yearns somewhat like the Prussian officers, orderly towards the mountains. 394 00:49:07,510 --> 00:49:14,410 In this case, not for positive consummation, though, just in order to escape her previous life and her previous self. 395 00:49:14,410 --> 00:49:19,300 Given this, it's appropriate that she never reaches above the tree line. 396 00:49:19,300 --> 00:49:28,510 Like the woman who rode away. She climbs into the mountain forests and meets a male native, unlike the woman who rode away. 397 00:49:28,510 --> 00:49:34,150 She does not reach South Forgettin consummation as the sun shines through an icicle. 398 00:49:34,150 --> 00:49:45,110 And she is she's sacrificed. She is highly unlikely even to have and she is highly unlikely to have even had this story been finished. 399 00:49:45,110 --> 00:49:52,570 Rather, she gives every sign when the story breaks off that she is about to become an Alpine Lady Chatterley. 400 00:49:52,570 --> 00:50:00,460 The story breaks off as she sits in the heart of an Alpine forester, and she's probably soon to make a return to warm, connected life. 401 00:50:00,460 --> 00:50:11,470 In fact, warmer and more connected than before. Such life then sheltered from the eternal peaks and snow is possible in the mountains. 402 00:50:11,470 --> 00:50:18,700 Mr. Noon's Yohana demonstrates it at the very time that Gilbert is having his alpine ecstasy. 403 00:50:18,700 --> 00:50:26,260 Yohana, who hasn't gone on this walk with him rather than feeling easily abandoned as Hepburn is by Hannelore, 404 00:50:26,260 --> 00:50:31,210 as Gerald is by Grugeon, is back at the heart having a fling with Stanley. 405 00:50:31,210 --> 00:50:39,730 That too is possible. So it's appropriate that the landscape of Von's is not that of the high Alps. 406 00:50:39,730 --> 00:50:47,140 These are mountains which acknowledge warm life or which at least offered the hope of prolonging it. 407 00:50:47,140 --> 00:50:52,150 I don't think that Lawrence died as the Prussian officer's orderly did. 408 00:50:52,150 --> 00:50:59,620 That story, written 17 years before, makes obvious the connexion of the physical and the spiritual, 409 00:50:59,620 --> 00:51:03,040 which was the task of most of Lawrence's writing to guarantee, 410 00:51:03,040 --> 00:51:09,850 and which surely at the end of mumbler dares to question whether Lawrence's death was merely physical. 411 00:51:09,850 --> 00:51:13,720 It's beyond, obviously, my scope to decide. 412 00:51:13,720 --> 00:51:23,820 I merely suggest that whatever we supposed to have been the case must have some correlation with our understanding of what mountains are. 413 00:51:23,820 --> 00:51:31,365 Thank you.