'For man, the vast marvel is to be alive.' -D. H. Lawrence
Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, which Lawrence wrote as he was dying of tuberculosis, is a wide-ranging examination of man's place in the universe. Here, stressing the indescribable difference between vague philosophical concerns and the immediacy of life, Lawrence writes that "what man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his 'soul.' ... The dead may look after the afterward. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time."