Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom… The shout is a rattling of chains… Liberty in America has meant so far the breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover… the deepest whole self of man. —D. H. Lawrence, quoted in Wilfred M. McClay’s, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America
Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism. Some conservatives may look at the state of Western culture and the American Republic and see a huge dark cloud which seems ready to unleash a storm that may well wash away what we most treasure of our inherited ways. Others focus on the silver lining which may be found in the next generation of traditional conservatives who have been inspired by Dr. Kirk and his like. We hope that The Imaginative Conservative answers T.S. Eliot’s call to “redeem the time, redeem the dream.” The Imaginative Conservative offers to our families, our communities, and the Republic, a conservatism of hope, grace, charity, gratitude and prayer.
I did my master’s thesis on Lawrence. He wrote that before he experienced America. He wrote that in Studies of American Literature. What’s interesting is that shortly after that was published, he went off to New Mexico and wound up loving the freedom he experienced living up near Taos. He lived there for about two or three years. I think he went on to say that his New Mexico experience was his fondest. (I’m paraphrasing.) So I don’t know if he would have stood by that statement later on.