T. E. Lawrence

“You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.(T.E. Lawrence to artist Eric Kennington, May 1935 )”

“In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and has become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.”

“I loved you, so I drew these tides ofMen into my handsAnd wrote my will across theSky and starsTo earn you freedom, the sevenPillared worthy house,That your eyes might beShining for meWhen we cameDeath seemed my servant on theRoad, 'til we were nearAnd saw you waiting:When you smiled and in sorrowfulEnvy he outran meAnd took you apart:Into his quietnessLove, the way-weary, groped to your body,Our brief wageOurs for the momentBefore Earth's soft hand explored your shapeAnd the blindWorms grew fat uponYour substanceMen prayed me that I set our work,The inviolate house,As a memory of youBut for fit monument I shattered it,Unfinished: and nowThe little things creep out to patchThemselves hovelsIn the marred shadowOf your gift.”

“I wrote my will across the sky, in stars”

“He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life. ”

“If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.”