In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Lawrence lived his entire life in a transition. Hence his painful and irascible temper: hence also his illuminations, exquisite and unbearable as direct contact with a nerve.

One world he had left: the world of plural "facts. " He was no dupe of the parade of detailed separatenesses that clutter mortal eye. He knew that this world of things, this matter-of-fact and practical world of commonplace, was false; for he had left it for a truer. But that other world he never quite attained: the world of unity and wholeness, whereof all things are momentary foci. He was close enough to this world to be pulling away from the other: but he was not of it sufficiently to accept the world of "things" in the transfigured sense that makes things real. He was close enough to the true to win from it vision and power to illumine the "things" he fought; close enough to create a vision of them as an artist. Yet he was not of the true world of organic oneness so deeply as to incorporate himself within it and thereby to be at peace with the many.