T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 235

T.E. to R.G. - Self-Revelation 24/9/22 "I wish everyone had calmness after their storm, Perhaps because I hate noise more than any other thing in the world - and fear animal spirits most..... About myself, I came to a milestone, or rather to a crossroad, and turned off the old one. The Arab thing is finished and is passionately unwholesome in my own eyes, and I wanted a fresh direction. So I enlisted as once I laughed to you that I would, and am peaceful for the moment, a passenger in a recruits' squad. It's an odd line for me - physical activity and manual labour - but the pilgrimage is made up of such circuities and I don't suppose that I'm going to be permanently affected by anything I don't want. It makes me no longer master of my body and I can't do or write, or even read, much now-a-days." 12/xi/22 "... the routine would be beastly, if there was any; but each day brings its breathless order, and each night its breathless cessation: so that I live in a whirl. It's an animal whirl, though, and my nerves have quieted under it, in a healthy way, so nearly went off my head in London this spring, heaving at that beastly book of mine. My conscience always pricks me for not sending it you: and yet I'm proud of having had enough strength of mind to keep it to myself. It makes me miserable and angry, and I feel it a thing unfit to show to provincials or happy people." Honestly I couldn't tell you exactly why I joined up: though the night before I did (a very wonderful night by the way: I felt like a criminal waiting for daylight) I sat up and wrote out all the reasons I could see or feel in myself for it. But they came to little more than that it was a necessary step, forced on me by an inclination towards ground-level: by a desperate hope that I'd find myself on common ground with men: by a little wish to make myself a little more human than I had become in Barton Street: by an itch to make myself ordinary, in a mob of likeas: also I'm broke, so far as money goes, by an unexpected event. All these are reasons: but unless they are cumulative they are miserably inadequate. I wanted to join up, that's all: and I am still glad, sometimes, that I did. It's going to be a brain-sleep, and I'll come out less odd than I went in: or at least less odd in other men's eyes." 18/1/23 "Partly I came in here to eat dirt, till its taste is normal to me: and partly to avoid the current of other men's thinking: and in your hill-court there will be high thinking. My brain nearly went in Barton St. with the weariness of writing and re-writing that horrible book of mine: and I still am nervous and easily made frantic. So I think I'm going to stay on in the R.A.F. which has the one great merit of showing me humanity very clear and clean. I've never lived commonly before, and I think to run away from the stress of it would be a failing."