D. H. Lawrence on Industrialization: Work for Life BUT NOT Live for Work

Today is Labor's Day, I think it's a perfect time for me to share with you this old entry, especially for the time that the minimum wage law becomes effective today. And it's time for me(can I say for us?) to reflect what is decent life for HK people, and what's our responsibility for the decent life of those who are less benefitted from our society.(http://hk.myblog.yahoo.com/our_wch/article?mid=3153):

A friend sent me back the following paragraph which I shared with her when I was reading D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. I told her that this paragraph reminds me of the process of industrialization in China and the post-industrial life in HK.

My friend told me to keep the above thought in mind. She reminds me that I once said that if I am placed in a position with great responsibility, I will try ways to improve the unbearable human situation, because we deserve a more decent life in a rich city like HK; and because we should work for life but NOT live for work.

Thanks my friend. I still think the same way, I still hold this faith in my heart, and I will keep working hard to achieve a decent life for all of us.

I know it’s another mission impossible, but I believe it’s a noble mission that worth fighting for.

“Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realized since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an under-world. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? When connie saw the great lorries full of steel-workers from Sheffield, weird, distorted smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she was wanting a baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread.

Yet Mellors had come out of all this!---Yes, but he was as apart from it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as far as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of England: as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it. “

……from D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (P. 159-160)