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.).

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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.”

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.”

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.

i’m perpetually surprised and impressed that despite the profound unknowableness of a universe so fundamentally unlike the mental models our evolved cognition tend toward, humans do manage to exert will and achieve results (albeit temporary results) and some individuals do manage to (albeit very temporarily) assert their mental models upon the world and see practical results. i am envious.

There is nothing more powerful in this world than words.

It’s a couple of things.

One is that each tale is world-building: it has its own characters, non-continuing plot, unique setting, etc so reading too many at once becomes a bit exhausting.

The other is his style. He rarely alternates short and long sentences, and has a clear preference for the latter. So reading him requires concentration and effort, especially as he uses slightly antiquated and academic language, much like how an anthropologist might describe his observations.

Any reason you can only cope with a short amount at a time? Is it the existential dread the work conjures in your mind, or simply his style? This kind of horror, the unimaginable, is incredibly emotive, and absolutely terrifying when employed well. I've not read Lovecraft, but this technique is so ingrained in the T Davies episodes of Dr Who he must have been a huge fan.

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I wonder if Gödel and Cantor both became mad at the end of their lives from pondering the mind- and reality-breaking concepts of theirs (incompleteness, infinities)

John Vervaeke talks similarly abt horror: 'classic' horror merely startles with fear but true horror is when your sense of contact w/ reality is undermined, which occurs when you meet the incomprehensibility of the universe or the finiteness of your knowledge. So horror isn't primarily associated w/ fear but instead insanity or madness

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Thomas, to be honest, reading you is more interesting than many authors. I'm sure others would agree with me.

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Double tipping! Thank you very much! An apt number too 💕 🐐 🤟