It’s self-pity.
We are (at least recently) consumed by it.
They are not.
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself–D.H. Lawrence, Self-Pity
First, let’s get something out of the way: I’m not a great fan of D.H Lawrence. I think that his “masterpiece” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (or as Mr. Right used to call it, Lady Loverly’s Chatter) is largely nonsense, and a precursor of much other (greater) nonsense that was to come.
But even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then (a phenomenon I’ve observed for myself). As Lawrence did in today’s Quote of the Day.
I think Stella Gibbons nailed Lawrence’s regular hypocrisy, idiocy, preciousness, and self-indulgence, in her comic novel Cold Comfort Farm, published a bare four years after Chatterley, and skewering many of its pretensions.
Don’t believe me? Just read Gibbons’s “foreward” to her own novel.
And yet.
Sometimes I wonder if the forgotten Lawrence and the soldiers of self-pity have won the larger war.
To be clear again–I live on a farm, and amongst many animals. I don’t think any of them–wild or domesticated–ever exhibits a shred of self pity: The sheep who’ve decided to die because they’re too dumb to raise themselves from an uncomfortable position on the side of the hill unless I help them to do so; the dogs whose age, lameness, or arthritis prevents them from standing up; the wild birds who–despite my best efforts to alert them to the danger–have flown into the windows and knocked themselves out; the bunnies whose teeth have let them down; the chickens who’ve grown too old to either lay eggs or trot down the ramp into the run; the cats with cancer so late-stage that it impedes their ability to climb into my lap or enjoy their breakfast. And so many, many, more over the years.
Not a single one of them ever complains. Not a single one of them ever files suit. They don’t post, over and over, about their treatment, their trauma or their experiences, expecting the rest of us to sycophantically drool over or endorse what they’ve endured for the umpteenth time, as though it’s never been written before. They simply move on, deal with it, and grace us by their continued and joyful presence in our lives.
I love them for that. I’m grateful for that. I’ll remember them for that:
These, and so many more. Those, I’ve said many times who belie the old saying: “Never use the name of your pet as an online password.” Trust me. You cannot even imagine how many hundreds of unlikely characters appear in the story. Bring it on!
Bless. And, to quote Mr. Right again, in a rather less challenging manner, “Fuck Self Pity.”
He lived his life that way. And so do I.
Merry Christmas, all you darling creatures, great and small.
