Max Vernovsky🔮 on Warpcast

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@aviationdoctor.eth

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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@aviationdoctor.eth

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.

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Max Vernovsky🔮

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.

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