As Ursula passed from girlhood towards womanhood, gradually
the cloud of self-responsibility gathered upon her. She became
aware of herself, that she was a separate entity in the midst of
an unseparated obscurity, that she must go somewhere, she must
become something. And she was afraid, troubled. Why, oh why must
one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing
responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the
nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of
herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a
direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how
stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the
responsibility of one's own life.
The religion which had been another world for her, a glorious
sort of play-world, where she lived, climbing the tree with the
short-statured man, walking shakily on the sea like the
disciple, breaking the bread into five thousand portions, like
the Lord, giving a great picnic to five thousand people, now
fell away from reality, and became a tale, a myth, an illusion,
which, however much one might assert it to be true an historical
fact, one knew was not true--at least, for this
present--day life of ours. There could, within the limits
of this life we know, be no Feeding of the Five Thousand. And
the girl had come to the point where she held that that which
one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.
So, the old duality of life, wherein there had been a weekday
world of people and trains and duties and reports, and besides
that a Sunday world of absolute truth and living mystery, of
walking upon the waters and being blinded by the face of the
Lord, of following the pillar of cloud across the desert and
watching the bush that crackled yet did not burn away, this old,
unquestioned duality suddenly was found to be broken apart. The
weekday world had triumphed over the Sunday world. The Sunday
world was not real, or at least, not actual. And one lived by
action.
Only the weekday world mattered. She herself, Ursula
Brangwen, must know how to take the weekday life. Her body must
be a weekday body, held in the world's estimate. Her soul must
have a weekday value, known according to the world's
knowledge.
Well, then, there was a weekday life to live, of action and
deeds. And so there was a necessity to choose one's action and
one's deeds. One was responsible to the world for what one
did.
Nay, one was more than responsible to the world. One was
responsible to oneself. There was some puzzling, tormenting
residue of the Sunday world within her, some persistent Sunday
self, which insisted upon a relationship with the now shed-away
vision world. How could one keep up a relationship with that
which one denied? Her task was now to learn the week-day
life.