The white races,
having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and
snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge,
snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by
the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in
sun-destruction, the putrescent mystery of sun-rays.
Was this then all that remained? Was there left now nothing but to
break off from the happy creative being, was the time up? Is our day of
creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful
afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution, the African knowledge, but
different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?
Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful
demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And
was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of
frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of
the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?
Birkin was frightened.
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