He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure night, with shadows of trees like realities of other, nightly being. He threw a rug on to the bracken, and they sat in stillness and mindless silence. There were faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance, no possible disturbance, the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.

“Women in Love” by D.H. Lawrence

With rich British prose, the author described two lovers’ sexual encounter in a forest in the early twentieth century. The engaging prose shows the modesty prevalent in that period, “He gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence.”
I like Lawrence’s description, but I like Hemingway’s in “For Whom the Bells Toll” even more. Robert Jordan makes love to Maria in a meadow: “Then there was the smell of the heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat and her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing , the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color.”
Both authors convey the fusion of spiritual stasis and physical passion that characterizes the act of making love to someone one loves–a respite in a world full of porno.

Happy Holidays to all my friends and readers!