The Future of the Human Race - Catastrophe or Transformation?

Well, I've been writing about one of my heroes.

I've always been a big admirer of D.H. Lawrence.

And I started kind of spontaneously writing a book about him about two months ago.

So it's kind of overtaken me, overtaken me.

And I've been writing very intensely on this new book on D.H. Lawrence, who was also a great poet.

A lot of people know him as a novelist.

But to me, he was a great poet, particularly in the last phase of his life when he was dying of tuberculosis, from which he died at the age of 44.

In the last months of his life, he wrote a lot of really beautiful spiritual poems about death and about the spiritual fulfillment he was experiencing in the face of death and about the glory of being alive in the present moment.

So...

How interesting, isn't it, Steve, how many great creative people find greater life emerging as death beckons?

Yeah, I think that was, you know, in terms of D.H. Lawrence, that was maybe the important factor in his whole life because he was always close to death.

He almost died when he was two weeks old.

He wasn't expected to survive childhood.

I mean, a lot of children did die young, you know, in the 19th century when he was born.

And every few years he had a serious illness, like pneumonia, and almost died.

So he was always kind of hovering on the brink of death.

And I think that death awareness... was the main factor in his consciousness.

I think it was a stimulant to perceive the world in a very intense way.

Oh, really interesting because it's the same with Patti Smith, who was a very ill child.

She had tuberculosis, you know, and was always being ill as a child.

And then as she grew up, all those closest to her died.

And so she had to...

And so her great life, her poetry, came again in the shadow of death, which sort of makes us realise, Steve, how close life and death are.

Yeah, I've always thought that human beings, most human beings, take life for granted.

We don't realise that we are mortal.