Women in Love - Man and Nature

After Rupert Birkin's outburst denying Hermione her sentimental argument for peace, love, equality and all that, there follows a very funny moment where, as Berkin doses with his head in a book, Hermione, possessed, grabs a solid jewel paperweight ball and smacks him on the head with it.  She then collapses on the couch and herself drifts off for a moment.  The following passage then picks up as Birkin somehow unsurprised by the incident backs away from her and sublimely falls in love with nature reinforcing a disdain for humanity, magnificent stuff:

Birkin, barely conscious, and yet perfectly direct in his motion, went out of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to
the hills. The brilliant day had become overcast, spots of rain were
falling. He wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of
hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young
firtrees, budding with soft paws. It was rather wet everywhere, there
was a stream running down at the bottom of the valley, which was
gloomy, or seemed gloomy. He was aware that he could not regain his
consciousness, that he was moving in a sort of darkness.

Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hillside, that was
overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them
all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his
clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly
among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the
arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It
was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate
himself with their contact.

But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of
young fir-trees, that were no higher than a man. The soft sharp boughs
beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little
cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their
clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him
vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too
discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young
hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of
fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more
beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh
against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel
the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to
clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one's breast, its smoothness, its
hardness, its vital knots and ridges--this was good, this was all very
good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would
satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling
into one's blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely,
subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it;
how fulfilled he was, how happy!

As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he thought about
Hermione and the blow. He could feel a pain on the side of his head.
But after all, what did it matter? What did Hermione matter, what did
people matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness, so
lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really, what a mistake he had made,
thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want
a woman--not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees,
they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into
the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably,
and so glad.

It was quite right of Hermione to want to kill him. What had he to do
with her? Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human
beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the
lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living
self.

It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did
not matter, so one knew where one belonged. He knew now where he
belonged. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was
extraneous.

He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he
preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his
own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world,
which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of
his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

As for the certain grief he felt at the same time, in his soul, that
was only the remains of an old ethic, that bade a human being adhere to
humanity. But he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of
humanity. He loved now the soft, delicate vegetation, that was so cool
and perfect. He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old
ethic, he would be free in his new state.

He was aware of the pain in his head becoming more and more difficult
every minute. He was walking now along the road to the nearest station.
It was raining and he had no hat. But then plenty of cranks went out
nowadays without hats, in the rain.

He wondered again how much of his heaviness of heart, a certain
depression, was due to fear, fear lest anybody should have seen him
naked lying against the vegetation. What a dread he had of mankind, of
other people! It amounted almost to horror, to a sort of dream
terror--his horror of being observed by some other people. If he were
on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the
trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this
heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegetation and be quite
happy and unquestioned, by himself. -pp.90-92