Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those same sparse stars made everything we know and are.
The most life-shaping choices we can make are those of our mindset — we can choose the best orientation toward the world, we can choose the best orientation toward each other, but where we seem to struggle the most is orienting with clarity and compassion toward our own lives, toward the choice we have in the dialogue between our inner world and our circumstances.
The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) took up these questions in a moving letter to his closest friend, Cynthia Asquith, found in the out-of-print treasure The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (public library).
The two had met as young writers both searching for their voice, both hungering to be heard — he was working as a kind of literary assistant to titans like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and she as a secretary to Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie. Their friendship was quick and deep and largely epistolary, their letters a sandbox for playing out the life of the mind that becomes literature, a found of mutual encouragement for the twin arts of writing and living. On these pages addressed to the other, they each became themselves.
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a year into the world’s first global war, he sent her what he called a “parting letter” — he was about to make one of the most courageous, disorienting, transformative choices a human being could make: to leave everything one knows and loves, to dismantle the superstructure of daily life that houses the life of the spirit, and begin again someplace new. He didn’t just choose another city, or another country — he chose another continent, another culture of young and untested idealism. He tells his friend:
I feel I must leave this side, this phase of life, for ever. The living part is overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it. So that life which is still fertile must take its departure, like seeds from a dead plant. I want to transplant my life. I think there is hope of a future, in America. I want if possible to grow toward that future.
He knew that Cynthia did not have this kind of freedom. He knew that, despite her talent and her passion, she felt trapped in her circumstances — a marriage too small for her, to which she felt tethered by her children, in a country still too corseted by Victorian mores to allow a woman the full freedom to claim her life. But he also knew the power of personal choice in any given set of circumstances. A generation before Viktor Frankl in his stirring memoir of surviving the concentration camps that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” Lawrence urges his friend in that way we have of giving others the pointed advice we most urgently need ourselves:
You must get the intrinsic reality clear within your soul — even if you betray it in reality, yet know it: that is everything. And know that in the end, always you keep the ultimate choice of your destiny: to abide by the intrinsic reality, or by the extrinsic: the choice is yours, do not let it slide from you, keep it always secure, reserved… Keep the choice of the right always in your own hands. Never admit that it is taken from you… Keep the choice of life… always in your hands: don’t ever relinquish it.
Couple with A Life of One’s Own — psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s pseudonymous masterpiece published just after Lawrence’s untimely death — then revisit Lawrence himself (lensed through Anaïs Nin) on the key to living fully, the strength of sensitivity, the balance of intimacy and independence in love, and how to live whole with the parts we carry.
