The living hand

'Why the Novel Matters' is by D. H. Lawrence, a miner's son who became a major English novelist. He rebelled against puritanism, mediocrity, and the dehumanising industrial world.

We have a strange habit, he says: we picture ourselves as a body that holds a soul or a mind, like a bottle holding wine. The old Latin saying 'Mens sana in corpore sano' (a sound mind in a sound body) treats the body like a container.

But look at his writing hand. It is alive: it glides along the page, hops up to dot the i's, feels the cold of the table, gets a little bored of writing. It is as much 'me' as his brain is.

His pen, on the other hand, is not alive. 'Me alive' ends at his fingertips. When his finger-nails touch the pen, they cross the Rubicon (a point of no return) into the lifeless world.

So to call the body a tin can, or a vessel of clay, is 'bunk' (nonsense). And a novelist knows this.