All objects in nature as gifts

A Conversation on DH Lawrence, Friends of the UCLA Library, Los Angeles, 1974

Present:Aldous Huxley, Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, Majl Ewing, Laurence Clark Powell, Dorothy Mitchell Conway.

Huxley. There’s an extraordinary phrase in Eckhart, which says that when you get beyond a certain level, I mean a certain level of awareness, you perceive all objects in nature as gifts of God. But when you get to a lower level of awareness, you perceive them as Eternity, as ever and aye. I think Goethe’s “Everything transient is only a symbol,” is not true. It’s true on a certain level, but when you go beyond that, everything transient is the Infinite, is the Eternal. That, I’m sure, is the basic thing, the basic value that runs through all Lawrences’s work…