Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine

"Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine" opens as a personal narrative from D.H. Lawrence's New Mexico ranch and pivots into a philosophical meditation on life, hierarchy, and vitality. Lawrence begins by describing porcupines gnawing the bark off young pine trees, killing them from the top down, and notes that everyone—Indian, Mexican, and American neighbors alike—agrees the animals should be destroyed. He recounts a moonlit encounter with a large porcupine that raises its quills into a strange, demon-like aureole as it waddles toward the timber and climbs a tree. Though duty says he should kill it, his revulsion at the act outweighs his revulsion at the creature itself, and he lets it go. Days later a neighbor's dog appears with its muzzle bristling with porcupine quills, clearly having attacked one in the night. Lawrence and "Madame" (his wife) spend hours trying to extract the quills, an ordeal marked by the dog's terror and pain, blood, and repeated failed attempts with pliers and a blindfold. Exhausted after extracting most but not all the quills, Lawrence eventually drives the suffering, unwanted dog away with a stick, accidentally striking its sore nose, and feels a pang of regret as it flees. Under a later moon, Madame spots another large porcupine drinking from the irrigation ditch, mistaking it at first for a bear. This time, after some hesitation, she affirms that it should be killed. Lawrence fetches his.22 rifle, noting that he has never before shot a living thing and finds guns personally repugnant. With trembling hands and after a jammed trigger, he fires several shots, finally killing the porcupine with a shot to the back and a finishing blow with a cedar pole. Standing over his first kill, he asks Madame whether the act seems mean; she says no, and he agrees—concluding that one must be able to kill when necessity demands it, a reversal of his lifelong preference to simply walk around such creatures. The porcupine is buried but later dug up and eaten by a scavenger, leaving only quills, bones, and the oddly human-like little hand-prints of its feet. He notes another, larger porcupine still living in the timber, also marked for death, as part of the ordinary business of ranching. This episode becomes the springboard for Lawrence's broader reflection on the necessity of struggle in nature. He observes how every creature on the ranch—cows cropping grass, chickens snapping up beetles, the cat Timsy hunting chipmunks in a scene of both delicate beauty and lethal precision—survives only by consuming other life. He rejects sentimental or Buddhist-style nonviolence as self-deceiving, since even minimal existence requires devouring other life; the fact that all creation rests on one form of life consuming another is not to be lamented or reformed but simply acknowledged. From here Lawrence develops a cosmology of "existence" versus "being." Existence involves comparative vitality: ants best pine trees, snakes overcome insects, birds overcome reptiles, cats overcome birds, men subdue animals and other men, and so on, each level distinguished not by love or virtue but by which one can ultimately "overcome" the other in a real contest—an idea he frames as a variant of survival of the fittest. But existence is not the final word: each individual creature, fully realized in its own nature—the dandelion in bloom, a coiled snake, a woman in her full desirability—achieves "being," a timeless, incomparable perfection that belongs to a "fourth dimension" beyond space-time struggle, akin to what earlier ages called heaven. Lawrence elaborates a quasi-mystical allegory of the dandelion seed, in which the "Holy Ghost" as indwelling vital spark unites sun and earth-death within the seed, driving it to dance into leaf, root, and flower, and finally to bloom outward with a joyous cry of incarnation. This seed-spirit symbolizes vitality itself, a force that seeks ever-new incarnations, subordinating lower forms into higher ones. Mankind, Lawrence argues, is only half-grown, "all leaves and roots" without yet having produced its flower or fulfilled its clue of vitality. Civilization risks losing its inner "clue" of aliveness, becoming spiritually inert like the ichthyosaurus that went extinct. He insists true vitality requires ongoing conquest—not cruelty, but the achievement of mastery over lower orders combined with fidelity to still-higher, as-yet-unrealized forms of life, in a perpetual passing of the "torch" of revelation from one creature, era, or race to the next. Freedom and self-sacrifice, in his account, are illusions; what matters is the "self-contribution" of fulfilling one's own nature to the utmost and thereby kindling new possibilities beyond oneself. Equality, too, is dismissed as false: each being that achieves its perfected relationship to the cosmos is unique and incomparable, yet in the realm of existence there remains an unavoidable hierarchy of conquerors and conquered. The essay closes with a warning about modern money-based civilization, which Lawrence sees as erecting the most fatal wall yet against real vitality—cutting humanity off from the sun, the earth, and inspiration more completely than any dogma could. He predicts that this loss of vitality will leave the propertied classes vulnerable: those without money, still capable of receiving the "flame" of true life, will eventually consume the moneyed classes "like old rags" unless the wealthy relinquish their attachment to money and reclaim authentic vital purpose. The porcupine's death, then, serves as the concrete, visceral occasion for a sweeping argument that killing, hierarchy, and conquest are not moral failures but the inescapable mechanics of a universe in which vitality must perpetually assert itself against lower and stagnant forms of life.

By D.H. Lawrence · First published 1925 · Genre: Essay, Nature Writing, Philosophical Writing · 7,646 words

First lines

There are many bare places on the little pine trees, towards the top, where the porcupines have gnawed the bark away and left the white flesh showing. And some trees are dying from the top.

Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans, Americans all say the same.

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essays · philosophy · nature writing · animal observation · death · mortality · existential · introspection · reflective · modernist · social criticism · human nature

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