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Twilight in Italy by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
page 46 of 206 (22%)

We continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great
selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great
humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He who works for
all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which
dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it
works for all humanity alike.

At the same time, we want to be warlike tigers. That is the horror: the
confusing of the two ends. We warlike tigers fit ourselves out with
machinery, and our blazing tiger wrath is emitted through a machine. It
is a horrible thing to see machines hauled about by tigers, at the mercy
of tigers, forced to express the tiger. It is a still more horrible
thing to see tigers caught up and entangled and torn in machinery. It is
horrible, a chaos beyond chaos, an unthinkable hell.

The tiger is not wrong, the machine is not wrong, but we, liars,
lip-servers, duplicate fools, we are unforgivably wrong. We say: 'I will
be a tiger because I love mankind; out of love for other people, out of
selfless service to that which is not me, I will even become a tiger.'
Which is absurd. A tiger devours because it is consummated in devouring,
it achieves its absolute self in devouring. It does not devour because
its unselfish conscience bids it do so, for the sake of the other deer
and doves, or the other tigers.

Having arrived at the one extreme of mechanical selflessness, we
immediately embrace the other extreme of the transcendent Self. But we
try to be both at once. We do not cease to be the one before we become
the other. We do not even play the roles in turn. We want to be the
tiger and the deer both in one. Which is just ghastly nothingness. We
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