Books

1/ Reading and reflecting on HP Lovecraft while on a plane. I’ve kept going back to him every now and then since my teenage years. I usually can’t read more than one short tale at a time, but I can’t go for too long without reading one either.

One of the themes that I enjoy most in his writings is this idea —foundational to the cosmic horror genre— that the universe is incomprehensible to us puny humans.

Not that I believe it to be true (I am confident in science’s explanatory power) but I find it a compelling literary device.

It creates tension in the unknown unknowns, which are infinitely many, lurking beyond our limited experiential horizon. By contrast, classic horror (e.g., Stephen King’s) circumscribes evil to a mundane object or monster (a car, a clown, a dog, etc.).

PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Aviator, diver, ETH maxi, nexialist | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

2/ In doing so, Lovecraft arguably pioneered what I call the “horror of the gaps” (borrowing from the “god of the gaps”). That horror is present everywhere past the proverbial curtain of our narrow existences: in the higher dimensions of spacetime, in the unfathomed depths of the southern oceans, in the unexplored ridges of Antarctica, in sealed subterranean caves, in the dunes of remote deserts, in the sickly hue of the fog, in a non-Euclidian space, on distant worlds, in strange glyphs inscribed on dark monoliths, in a nonsensical sequence of consonants, in the Cyclopean architecture of forgotten citadels, and everywhere else your nocturnal dreams might take you.

Said differently, if you mapped your own finite knowledge on an infinite sheet of paper, everything outside of that circle would be marked “here be dragons”. That’s Lovecraft’s playground.

4/ The second is from a Reddit comment on true eldritch madness that I once bookmarked:

“An ant doesn't start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then...

It's an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.”

3/ A couple of quotes to illustrate.

The first is the opening passage from The Call of Cthulhu (1926):

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

It is the situation of man in the face of mortal danger that interested Lovecraft the most. All of his horrible creatures are an attempt to protect man from himself by directing his fear to the source of the external threat. In doing so, he gives some clues to the essence of man, which in turn makes it possible to get rid of the feeling of fear.