'Modern' life

I read "Sons and Lovers" by D H Lawrence at school as a teenager and loved it. It seemed profound and beautifully written even though, given the nature of its themes rather outside the realm of my experience, I didn't understand some of its deeper currents.

Recently I decided to take "Lady Chatterly's Lover" down off my bookshelf and read it for the first time. It's not much of a secret that Lawrence was not overly keen on the increasing mechanisation of society but I found a segment that I read today that, though written in 1928, seemed prescient for our way of life today, so here it is:

Forty years had made a difference in the neighbourhood. The iron and coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of material disintegration!

What will become of miners, and oil and gas workers when we can no longer burn fossil fuels because the idiocy of us destroying our own liveable environment for comfort will be seen for what it is? They will be no more necessary to life for most of us than a farrier would be today. Our fossil fuel burning extravaganza is so woven into our lives that it seems impossible that it will not always be there, but it must have seemed too that horses would always fill our streets, that most people would work on the land and that blacksmiths would have plenty of work to do, yet they have been cast aside by the reshaping power of black gold. But its time too is passing and I believe that the wheel will turn again to activities more human-scale and what seemed history may well become our future.

'Normal' postings may be resumed soon. Or not.