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The Poetical Tendency Of The Present And Of The Preceding Century Has Been Divided In A Manner Singularly Curious. One Loud And Conspicuous Faction Of Bards, Giving Way To The Corrupt Influences Of A Decaying General Culture, Seems To Have Abandoned All The Properties Of Versification And Reason In Its Mad Scramble After Sensational Novelty; Whilst The Other And Quieter School Constituting A More Logical Evolution From The Poesy Of The Georgian Period, Demands An Accuracy Of Rhyme And Metre Unknown Even To The Polished Artists Of The Age Of Pope.

-H. P. Lovecraft

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The Poetical Tendency Of

H. P. Lovecraft

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The Poetical Tendency Of The Present And Of The Preceding Century Has Been Divided In A Manner Singularly Curious. One Loud And Conspicuous Faction Of Bards, Giving Way To The Corrupt Influences Of A Decaying General Culture, Seems To Have Abandoned All The Properties Of Versification And Reason In Its Mad Scramble After Sensational Novelty; Whilst The Other And Quieter School Constituting A More Logical Evolution From The Poesy Of The Georgian Period, Demands An Accuracy Of Rhyme And Metre Unknown Even To The Polished Artists Of The Age Of Pope.

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But Are Not The Dreams Of Poets And The Tales Of Travellers Notoriously False?

Uncertainty And Danger Are Always Closely Allied, Thus Making Any Kind Of An Unknown World A World Of Peril And Evil Possibilities.

The Very Fact That Religions Are Not Content To Stand On Their Own Feet, But Insist On Crippling Or Warping The Flexible Minds Of Children In Their Favour, Forms A Sufficient Proof That There Is No Truth In Them. If There Were Any Truth In Religion, It Would Be Even More Acceptable To A Mature Mind Than To An Infant Mind--yet No Mature Mind Ever Accepts Religion Unless It Has Been Crippled In Infancy.

As Human Beings, Our Only Sensible Scale Of Values Is One Based On Lessening The Agony Of Existence.

I Could Not Help Feeling That They Were Evil Things -- Mountains Of Madness Whose Farther Slopes Looked Out Over Some Accursed Ultimate Abyss.

West Of Arkham The Hills Rise Wild, And There Are Valleys With Deep Woods That No Axe Has Ever Cut.

Truly, There Are Terrible Primal Arcana Of Earth Which Had Better Be Left Unknown And Unevoked; Dread Secrets Which Have Nothing To Do With Man, And Which Man May Learn Only In Exchange For Peace And Sanity; Cryptic Truths Which Make The Knower Evermore An Alien Among His Kind, And Cause Him To Walk Alone On Earth.

I Couldn't Live A Week Without A Private Library - Indeed, I'd Part With All My Furniture And Squat And Sleep On The Floor Before I'd Let Go Of The 1500 Or So Books I Possess.

An Isolated Person Requires Correspondence As A Means Of Seeing His Ideas As Others See Them, And Thus Guarding Against The Dogmatisms And Extravagances Of Solitary And Uncorrected Speculation.

Nothing Really Known Can Continue To Be Acutely Fascinating.

Memory Sometimes Makes Merciful Deletions.

Intellectually, The Republican Idea Deserves The Tolerance And Respect One Gives To The Dead.

I Have Never Been Able To Soothe Myself With The Sugary Delusions Of Religion; For These Things Stand Convicted Of The Utmost Absurdity In Light Of Modern Scientific Knowledge.

Two Widely Dissimilar Races, Whether Equal Or Not, Cannot Peaceably Coexist In The Same Territory Until They Are Either Uniformly Mongrelised Or Cast In Folkways Of Permanent And Traditional Personal Aloofness.

If Religion Were True, Its Followers Would Not Try To Bludgeon Their Young Into An Artificial Conformity; But Would Merely Insist On Their Unbending Quest For Truth, Irrespective Of Artificial Backgrounds Or Practical Consequences.

In Theory I Am An Agnostic, But Pending The Appearance Of Rational Evidence I Must Be Classed, Practically And Provisionally, As An Atheist. The Chance's Of Theism's Truth Being To My Mind So Microscopically Small, I Would Be A Pedant And A Hypocrite To Call Myself Anything Else.

Searchers After Horror Haunt Strange, Far Places.

Every Limited Mind Demands A Certain Freedom Of Expression, And The Man Who Cannot Express Himself Satisfactorily Without The Stimulation Derived From The Spirited Mode Of Two Centuries Ago Should Certainly Be Permitted To Follow Without Undue Restraint A Practice So Harmless, So Free From Essential Error, And So Sanctioned By Precedent, As That Of Employing In His Poetical Compositions The Smooth And Inoffensive Allowable Rhyme.

The World Is Indeed Comic, But The Joke Is On Mankind.

I Never Cheat Or Steal. Also, I Never Wear A Top-hat With A Sack Coat Or Munch Bananas In Public On The Streets, Because A Gentleman Does Not Do Those Things Either. I Would As Soon Do The One As The Other Sort Of Thing--it Is All A Matter Of Harmony And Good Taste.

The Unknown ... Became For Our Primitive Forefathers A Terrible And Omnipotent Source Of Boons And Calamities Visited Upon Mankind For Cryptic And Wholly Extra-terrestrial Reasons, And Thus Clearly Belonging To Spheres Of Existence Whereof We Know Nothing And Wherein We Have No Part.

All Life Is Only A Set Of Pictures In The Brain, Among Which There Is No Difference Betwixt Those Born Of Real Things And Those Born Of Inward Dreamings, And No Cause To Value The One Above The Other.

While My Chosen Form Of Story-writing Is Obviously A Special And Perhaps A Narrow One, It Is None The Less A Persistent And Permanent Type Of Expression, As Old As Literature Itself. There Will Always Be A Certain Small Percentage Of Persons Who Feel A Burning Curiosity About Unknown Outer Space, And A Burning Desire To Escape From The Prison-house Of The Known And The Real Into Those Enchanted Lands Of Incredible Adventure And Infinite Possibilities Which Dreams Open Up To Us, And Which Things Like Deep Woods, Fantastic Urban Towers, And Flaming Sunsets Momentarily Suggest.

There Is No Field Other Than The Weird In Which I Have Any Aptitude Or Inclination For Fictional Composition. Life Has Never Interested Me So Much As The Escape From Life.

Our Means Of Receiving Impressions Are Absurdly Few, And Our Notions Of Surrounding Objects Infinitely Narrow. We See Things Only As We Are Constructed To See Them, And Can Gain No Idea Of Their Absolute Nature. With Five Feeble Senses We Pretend To Comprehend The Boundlessly Complex Cosmos.

In His House At R'lyeh, Dead Cthulu Waits Dreaming

There Be Those Who Say That Things And Places Have Souls, And There Be Those Who Say They Have Not; I Dare Not Say, Myself, But I Will Tell Of The Street.

I Have Seen The Dark Universe Yawning Where The Black Planets Roll Without Aim, Where They Roll In Their Horror Unheeded, Without Knowledge, Or Lustre, Or Name.

The Cat Is Cryptic, And Close To Strange Things Which Men Cannot See.

It Was From The Artists And Poets That The Pertinent Answers Came, And I Know That Panic Would Have Broken Loose Had They Been Able To Compare Notes.

All I Want Is To Know Things. The Black Gulph Of The Infinite Is Before Me.

Creative Minds Are Uneven, And The Best Of Fabrics Have Their Dull Spots.

No Amount Of Rationalisation, Reform, Or Freudian Analysis Can Quite Annul The Thrill Of The Chimney-corner Whisper Or The Lonely Wood.

Nyarlathotep . . . The Crawling Chaos . . . I Am The Last . . . I Will Tell The Audient Void. . . .

There Are Not Many Persons Who Know What Wonders Are Opened To Them In The Stories And Visions Of Their Youth; For When As Children We Listen And Dream, We Think But Half-formed Thoughts, And When As Men We Try To Remember, We Are Dulled And Prosaic With The Poison Of Life.

When I Say That I Can Write Nothing But Weird Fiction, I Am Not Trying To Exalt That Medium But Am Merely Confessing My Own Weakness. The Reason I Can't Write Other Kinds Is Not That I Don't Value & Respect Them, But Merely That My Slender Set Of Endowments Does Not Enable Me To Extract A Compellingly Acute Personal Sense Of Interest & Drama From The Natural Phenomena Of Life.

The Basis Of All True Cosmic Horror Is Violation Of The Order Of Nature, And The Profoundest Violations Are Always The Least Concrete And Describable.

I Am A Student Of Life, And Don't Want To Miss Any Experience. There's Poetry In This Sort Of Thing, You Know--or Perhaps You Don't Know, But It's All The Same.

It Is Because The Cosmos Is Meaningless That We Must Secure Our Individual Illusions Of Values, Direction, And Interest By Upholding The Artificial Streams Which Give Us Such Worlds Of Salutary Illusion. That Is - Since Nothing Means Anything In Itself, We Must Preserve The Proximate And Arbitrary Background Which Makes Things Around Us Seem As If They Did Mean Something.

Nothing Matters, But It's Perhaps More Comfortable To Keep Calm And Not Interfere With Other People.

Blue, Green, Grey, White, Or Black; Smooth, Ruffled, Or Mountainous; That Ocean Is Not Silent.

All My Tales Are Based On The Fundamental Premise That Common Human Laws And Interests And Emotions Have No Validity Or Significance In The Vast Cosmos-at-large.

For Although Nepenthe Has Calmed Me, I Know Always That I Am An Outsider; A Stranger In This Century And Among Those Who Are Still Men. This I Have Known Ever Since I Stretched Out My Fingers To The Abomination Within That Great Gilded Frame; Stretched Out My Fingers And Touched A Cold And Unyielding Surface Of Polished Glass.

Good Art Means The Ability Of Any One Man To Pin Down In Some Permanent And Intelligible Medium A Sort Of Idea Of What He Sees In Nature That Nobody Else Sees. In Other Words, To Make The Other Fellow Grasp, Through Skilled Selective Care In Interpretative Reproduction Or Symbolism, Some Inkling Of What Only The Artist Himself Could Possibly See In The Actual Objective Scene Itself.

I Fear My Enthusiasm Flags When Real Work Is Demanded Of Me.

The Moon Is Dark, And The Gods Dance In The Night; There Is Terror In The Sky, For Upon The Moon Hath Sunk An Eclipse Foretold In No Books Of Men Or Of Earth's Gods.

Do Not Call Up Any That You Can Not Put Down.

Pessimists Are Just As Illogical As Optimists; Insomuch As Both Envisage The Aims Of Mankind As Unified, And As Having A Direct Relationship (either Of Frustration Or Of Fulfilment) To The Inevitable Flow Of Terrestrial Motivation And Events. That Is - Both Schools Retain In A Vestigial Way The Primitive Concept Of A Conscious Teleology - Of A Cosmos Which Gives A Damn One Way Or The Other About The Especial Wants And Ultimate Welfare Of Mosquitos, Rats, Lice, Dogs, Men, Horses, Pterodactyls, Trees, Fungi, Dodos, Or Other Forms Of Biological Energy.

No New Horror Can Be More Terrible Than The Daily Torture Of The Commonplace.

Toil Without Song Is Like A Weary Journey Without An End.

It Is Good To Be A Cynic - It Is Better To Be A Contented Cat - And It Is Best Not To Exist At All.

You See Them? You See The Things That Float And Flop About You And Through You Ever Moment Of Your Life? You See The Creatures That Form What Men Call The Pure Air And The Blue Sky? Have I Not Succeeded In Breaking Down The Barrier; Have I Not Shown You Worlds That No Other Living Men Have Seen?

Men Of Broader Intellect Know That There Is No Sharp Distinction Betwixt The Real And The Unreal

Maybe, Just Maybe, I Should Not Have Used The Word "eldritch" So Many Times Now That I Think About It.

Most Of My Monsters Fail Altogether To Satisfy My Sense Of The Cosmic - The Abnormally Chromatic Entity In The Colour Out Of Space Being The Only One Of The Lot Which I Take Any Pride In.

In My Dreams I Found A Little Of The Beauty I Had Vainly Sought In Life, And Wandered Through Old Gardens And Enchanted Woods.

It Is The Night-black Massachusetts Legendry Which Packs The Really Macabre "kick". Here Is Material For A Really Profound Study In Group-neuroticism; For Certainly, No One Can Deny The Existence Of A Profoundly Morbid Streak In The Puritan Imagination.

Heaven Knows Where I'll End Up - But It's A Safe Bet That I'll Never Be At The Top Of Anything! Nor Do I Particularly Care To Be.

It Might, Too, Have Been The Singular Cold That Alienated Me; For Such Chilliness Was Abnormal On So Hot A Day, And The Abnormal Always Excites Aversion, Distrust, And Fear.

It Is Only The Inferior Thinker Who Hastens To Explain The Singular And The Complex By The Primitive Shortcut Of Supernaturalism.

With Five Feeble Senses We Pretend To Comprehend The Boundlessly Complex Cosmos, Yet Other Beings With Wider, Stronger, Or Different Range Of Senses Might Not Only See Very Differently The Things We See, But Might See And Study Whole Worlds Of Matter, Energy, And Life Which Lie Close At Hand Yet Can Never Be Detected With The Senses We Have.

What A Man Does For Pay Is Of Little Significance. What He Is, As A Sensitive Instrument Responsive To The World's Beauty, Is Everything!

I Could Not Help Feeling That They Were Evil Things-- Mountains Of Madness Whose Farther Slopes Looked Out Over Some Accursed Ultimate Abyss. That Seething , Half-luminous Cloud-background Held Ineffable Suggestions Of A Vague, Ethereal Beyondness Far More Than Terrestrially Spatial; And Gave Appalling Reminders Of The Utter Remoteness, Separateness, Desolation, And Aeon-long Death Of This Untrodden And Unfathomed Austral World.

May The Merciful God, If Indeed There Be Such, Guard Those Hours When No Power Of The Will, Or Drug That The Cunning Of Man Devises, Can Keep Me From The Chasm Of Sleep. Death Is Merciful, For There Is No Return Therefrom, But With Him Who Has Come Back Out Of The Nethermost Chambers Of Night, Haggard And Knowing, Peace Rests Nevermore.

No One Ever Wrote A Story Yet Without Some Real Emotional Drive Behind It--and I Have Not That Drive Except Where Violations Of The Natural Order ... Defiances And Evasions Of Time, Space, And Cosmic Law ... Are Concerned.

So Far As English Versification Is Concerned, Pope Was The World, And All The World Was Pope.

Almost Nobody Dances Sober, Unless They Happen To Be Insane.

I Am Distinctly Opposed To Visibly Arrogant And Arbitrary Extremes Of Government--but This Is Simply Because I Wish The Safety Of An Artistic And Intellectual Civilisation To Be Secure, Not Because I Have Any Sympathy With The Coarse-grained Herd Who Would Menace The Civilisation If Not Placated By Sops.

Never Explain Anything

All Great Humorists Are Sad... I Cannot Help Seeing Beyond The Tinsel Of Humour, And Recognising The Pitiful Basis Of Jest - The World Is Indeed Comic, But The Joke Is On Mankind.

And Where Nyarlathotep Went, Rest Vanished, For The Small Hours Were Rent With The Screams Of Nightmare.

In Relating The Circumstances Which Have Led To My Confinement Within This Refuge For The Demented, I Am Aware That My Present Position Will Create A Natural Doubt Of The Authenticity Of My Narrative.

I Am Perfectly Confident That I Could Never Adequately Convey To Any Other Human Being The Precise Reasons Why I Continue To Refrain From Suicide - The Reasons, That Is, Why I Still Find Existence Enough Of A Compensation To Atone For Its Dominantly Burthensome Quality.

Of What Use Is It To Please The Herd? They Are Simply Coarse Animals - For All That Is Admirable In Man Is The Artificial Product Of Special Breeding.

When Randolph Carter Was Thirty He Lost The Key Of The Gate Of Dreams.

The Monotony Of A Long Heroic Poem May Often Be Pleasantly Relieved By Judicious Interruptions In The Perfect Successions Of Rhymes, Just As The Metre May Sometimes Be Adorned With Occasional Triplets And Alexandrines.

The Only Saving Grace Of The Present Is That It's Too Damned Stupid To Question The Past Very Closely.

It Is True That I Have Sent Six Bullets Through The Head Of My Best Friend, And Yet I Hope To Show By This Statement That I Am Not His Murderer.

That Is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie, And With Strange Aeons Even Death May Die.

I Could Not Write About "ordinary People" Because I Am Not In The Least Interested In Them.

As For The Republicans -- How Can One Regard Seriously A Frightened, Greedy, Nostalgic Huddle Of Tradesmen And Lucky Idlers Who Shut Their Eyes To History And Science, [and] Steel Their Emotions Against Decent Human Sympathy.

Yog-sothoth Knows The Gate. Yog-sothoth Is The Gate. Yog-sothoth Is The Key And Guardian Of The Gate. Past, Present, Future, All Are One In Yog-sothoth.

With Hidden Powers Of Unknown Extent Apparently At His Disposal, Curwen Was Not A Man Who Could Safely Be Warned To Leave Town.

Vigorous Let Us Be In Attaining Our Ends, And Mild In Our Method Of Attainment.

We Love Kitties, Gawd Bless Their Little Whiskers, And We Don't Give A Damn Whether They Or We Are Superior Or Inferior! They're Confounded Pretty, And That's All We Know And All We Need To Know!

To Be Bitter Is To Attribute Intent And Personality To The Formless, Infinite, Unchanging And Unchangeable Void. We Drift On A Chartless, Resistless Sea. Let Us Sing When We Can, And Forget The Rest.

I Am, Indeed, An Absolute Materialist So Far As Actual Belief Goes; With Not A Shred Of Credence In Any Form Of Supernaturalism—religion, Spiritualism, Transcendentalism, Metempsychosis, Or Immortality.

The Most Merciful Thing In The World... Is The Inability Of The Human Mind To Correlate All Its Contents.

One Can't Write A Weird Story Of Real Power Without Perfect Psychological Detachment From The Human Scene, And A Magic Prism Of Imagination Which Suffuses Them And Style Alike With That Grotesquerie And Disquieting Distortion Characteristic Of Morbid Vision. Only A Cynic Can Create Horror - For Behind Every Masterpiece Of The Sort Must Reside A Driving Daemonic Force That Despises The Human Race And Its Illusions, And Longs To Pull Them To Pieces And Mock Them.

Life Is A Hideous Thing.

It Is In Dreams That I Have Known The Real Clutch Of Stark, Hideous, Maddening, Paralysing Fear. My Infant Nightmares Were Classics, & In Them There Is Not An Abyss Of Agonising Cosmic Horror That I Have Not Explored. I Don't Have Such Dreams Now - But The Memory Of Them Will Never Leave Me. It Is Undoubtedly From Them That The Darkest & Most Gruesome Side Of My Fictional Imagination Is Derived.

Religion Itself Is An Absurdity And An Anomaly, And Paganism Is Acceptable Only Because It Represents That Purely Orgiastic Phase Of Religion Farthest From Reality.

The Human Race Will Disappear. Other Races Will Appear And Disappear In Turn. The Sky Will Become Icy And Void, Pierced By The Feeble Light Of Half-dead Stars. Which Will Also Disappear. Everything Will Disappear. And What Human Beings Do Is Just As Free Of Sense As The Free Motion Of Elementary Particles. Good, Evil, Morality, Feelings? Pure 'victorian Fictions'. Only Egotism Exists.

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 The Infinity, And It Was Not Meant That We Should Voyage Far.

I Know Always That I Am An Outsider; A Stranger In This Century And Among Those Who Are Still Men.

I Have Dwelt Ever In Realms Apart From The Visible World; Spending My Youth And Adolescence In Ancient And Little-known Books, And In Roaming The Fields And Groves Of The Region Near My Ancestral Home. I Do Not Think That What I Read In These Books Or Saw In These Fields And Groves Was Exactly What Other Boys Read And Saw There; But Of This I Must Say Little, Since Detailed Speech Would But Confirm Those Cruel Slanders Upon My Intellect Which I Sometimes Overhear From The Whispers Of The Stealthy Attendants Around Me.

I Am So Beastly Tired Of Mankind And The World That Nothing Can Interest Me Unless It Contains A Couple Of Murders On Each Page Or Deals With The Horrors Unnameable And Unaccountable That Leer Down From The External Universes.

My Opinion Of My Whole Experience Varies From Time To Time.

I Have Looked Upon All The Universe Has To Hold Of Horror,and Even The Skies Of Spring And Flowers Of Summer Must Ever Afterward Be Poison To Me.

A Page Of Addison Or Of Irving Will Teach More Of Style Than A Whole Manual Of Rules, Whilst A Story Of Poe's Will Impress Upon The Mind A More Vivid Notion Of Powerful And Correct Description And Narration Than Will Ten Dry Chapters Of A Bulky Textbook.

It Is Absolutely Necessary, For The Peace And Safety Of Mankind, That Some Of Earth's Dark, Dead Corners And Unplumbed Depths Be Left Alone; Lest Sleeping Abnormalities Wake To Resurgent Life, And Blasphemously Surviving Nightmares Squirm And Splash Out Of Their Black Lairs To Newer And Wider Conquests.

Unhappy Is He To Whom The Memories Of Childhood Bring Only Fear And Sadness.

Rome Was So Mighty That It Could Not Fall. It Had To Vanish In A Cloud, Like So Many Of The Mythical Heros Of Antiquity, And To Receive Its Apotheosis Among The Stars Before Men Became Fully Aware That It Had Vanished From The Earth!

Disintegration Is Quite Painless, I Assure You.

We Must Recognise The Essential Underlaying Savagery In The Animal Called Man, And Return To Older And Sounder Principles Of National Life And Defense. We Must Realise That Man's Nature Will Remain The Same So Long As He Remains Man; That Civilisation Is But A Slight Coverlet Beneath Which The Dominant Beast Sleeps Lightly And Ever Ready To Awake.

There Was Really Nothing For Serious Men To Do In Cases Of Wild Gossip, For Superstitious Rustics Will Say And Believe Anything.

All I Say Is That I Think It Is Damned Unlikely That Anything Like A Central Cosmic Will, A Spirit World, Or An Eternal Survival Of Personality Exist. They Are The Most Preposterous And Unjustified Of All The Guesses Which Can Be Made About The Universe, And I Am Not Enough Of A Hair-splitter To Pretend That I Don't Regard Them As Arrant And Negligible Moonshine. In Theory I Am An Agnostic, But Pending The Appearance Of Radical Evidence I Must Be Classed, Practically And Provisionally, As An Atheist.

Religion Struck Me So Vague A Thing At Best, That I Could Perceive No Advantage Of Any One System Over Any Other.

I Expect Nothing Of Man, And Disown The Race. The Only Folly Is Expecting What Is Never Attained; Man Is Most Contemptible When Compared With His Own Pretensions. It Is Better To Laugh At Man From Outside The Universe, Than To Weep For Him Within.

It Is Better To Laugh At Man From Outside The Universe, Than To Weep For Him Within.

My Reason For Writing Stories Is To Give Myself The Satisfaction Of Visualising More Clearly And Detailedly And Stably The Vague, Elusive, Fragmentary Impressions Of Wonder, Beauty, And Adventurous Expectancy Which Are Conveyed To Me By Certain Sights (scenic, Architectural, Atmospheric, Etc.), Ideas, Occurrences, And Images Encountered In Art And Literature.

Who Knows The End? What Has Risen May Sink, And What Has Sunk May Rise.

I Was Nearly Unnerved At My Proximity To A Nameless Thing At The Bottom Of A Pit.

Contrary To What You May Assume, I Am Not A Pessimist But An Indifferentist- That Is, I Don't Make The Mistake Of Thinking That The... Cosmos... Gives A Damn One Way Or The The Other About The Especial Wants And Ultimate Welfare Of Mosquitoes, Rats, Lice, Dogs, Men, Horses, Pterodactyls, Trees, Fungi, Dodos, Or Other Forms Of Biological Energy.

I Do Not Regard The Rise Of Woman As A Bad Sign. Rather Do I Fancy That Her Traditional Subordination Was Itself An Artificial And Undesirable Condition Based On Oriental Influences. Our Virile Teutonic Ancestors Did Not Think Their Wives Unworthy To Follow Them Into Battle, Or Scorn To Dream Of Winged Valkyries Bearing Them To Valhalla.

It Must Be Remembered That There Is No Real Reason To Expect Anything In Particular From Mankind; Good And Evil Are Local Expedients - Or Their Lack - And Not In Any Sense Cosmic Truths Or Laws.

Race Prejudice Is A Gift Of Nature, Intended To Preserve In Purity The Various Divisions Of Mankind Which The Ages Have Evolved.

I Can Look Back . . . At Two Distinct Periods Of Opinion Whose Foundations I Have Successively Come To Distrust - A Period Before 1919 Or So, When The Weight Of Classic Authority Unduly Influenced Me, And Another Period From 1919 To About 1925, When I Placed Too High A Value On The Elements Of Revolt, Florid Colour, And Emotional Extravagance Or Intensity.

I Am Disillusioned Enough To Know That No Man's Opinion On Any Subject Is Worth A Damn Unless Backed Up With Enough Genuine Information To Make Him Really Know What He's Talking About.

Despite My Solitary Life, I Have Found Infinite Joy In Books And Writing, And Am By Far Too Much Interested In The Affairs Of The World To Quit The Scene Before Nature Shall Claim Me.

In My Actual Imaginative Contact With Life, I Am Vastly More Responsive To Beauty Than To Horror - Indeed, I Never Experience Real Cosmic Horror Except In Infrequent Nightmares. However, When I Come To Record My Various Imaginative Experiences, I Generally Find That Only The Horror Items Have Any Uniqueness Or Originality. Others Have Seen The Same Beautiful Things That I Have Seen, & Have Sung Them More Nobly.

If I Could Create An Ideal World, It Would Be An England With The Fire Of The Elizabethans, The Correct Taste Of The Georgians, And The Refinement And Pure Ideals Of The Victorians.

To Me There Is Nothing More Fraught With Mystery & Terror Than A Remote Massachusetts Farmhouse Against A Lonely Hill. Where Else Could An Outbreak Like The Salem Witchcraft Have Occurred?

That Which We Call Substance And Reality Is Shadow And Illusion, And That Which We Call Shadow And Illusion Is Substance And Reality.

Though Not A Participant In The Business Of Life; I Am, Like The Character Of Addison And Steele, An Impartial (or More Or Less Impartial) Spectator, Who Finds Not A Little Recreation In Watching The Antics Of Those Strange And Puny Puppets Called Men.

The Phenomenon Of Dreaming ... Helped To Build Up The Notion Of An Unreal Or Spiritual World; And In General, All The Conditions Of Savage Dawn-life So Strongly Conduced Toward A Feeling Of The Supernatural, That We Need Not Wonder At The Thoroughness With Which Man's Very Hereditary Essence Has Become Saturated With Religion And Superstition.

The Ignorant And The Deluded Are, I Think, In A Strange Way To Be Envied. That Which Is Not Known Of Does Not Trouble Us, While An Imagined But Insubstantial Peril Does Not Harm Us. To Know The Truths Behind Reality Is A Far Greater Burden.

If I Am Mad, It Is Mercy! May The Gods Pity The Man Who In His Callousness Can Remain Sane To The Hideous End!

I Felt Myself On The Edge Of The World; Peering Over The Rim Into A Fathomless Chaos Of Eternal Night.

Man Is An Essentially Superstitious And Fearful Animal. Take Away The Herd's Christian Gods And Saints And They Will Without Failing Come To Worship...something Else.

It Is Easy To Remove The Mind From Harping On The Lost Illusion Of Immortality. The Disciplined Intellect Fears Nothing And Craves No Sugar-plum At The Day's End, But Is Content To Accept Life And Serve Society As Best It May. Personally I Would Not Care For Immortality In The Least. There Is Nothing Better Than Oblivion, Since In Oblivion There Is No Wish Unfulfilled. We Had It Before We Were Born, Yet Did Not Complain. Shall We Whine Because We Know It Will Return? It Is Elysium Enough For Me, At Any Rate.

There Were Nameless Horrors Abroad; And No Matter How Little One Might Be Able To Get At Them, One Ought Tp Stand Prepared For Any Sort Of Action At Any Time.

My Opinion Of My Whole Experience Varies From Time To Time. In Broad Daylight, And At Most Seasons I Am Apt To Think The Greater Part Of It A Mere Dream; But Sometimes In The Autumn, About Two In The Morning When Winds And Animals Howl Dismally, There Comes From Inconceivable Depths Below A Damnable Suggestions Of Rhythmical Throbbing ... And I Feel That The Transition Of Juan Romero Was A Terrible One Indeed.

Life Has Never Interested Me So Much As The Escape From Life.

But More Wonderful Than The Lore Of Old Men And The Lore Of Books Is The Secret Lore Of Ocean.

Any Magazine-cover Hack Can Splash Paint Around Wildly And Call It A Nightmare, Or A Witches Sabbath Or A Portrait Of The Devil; But Only A Great Painter Can Make Such A Thing Really Scare Or Ring True. That's Because Only A Real Artist Knows The Anatomy Of The Terrible, Or The Physiology Of Fear.

The End Is Near. I Hear A Noise At The Door, As Of Some Immense Slippery Body Lumbering Against It. It Shall Not Find Me. God, That Hand! The Window! The Window!

An Isolated Person Requires Correspondence As A Means Of Seeing His Ideas As Others See Them, And Thus Guarding Against The Dogmatisms And Extravagances Of Solitary And Uncorrected Speculation. No Man Can Learn To Reason And Appraise From A Mere Perusal Of The Writing Of Others. If He Live Not In The World, Where He Can Observe The Public At First Hand And Be Directed Toward Solid Reality By The Force Of Conversation And Spoken Debate, Then He Must Sharpen His Discrimination And Regulate His Perceptive Balance By An Equivalent Exchange Of Ideas In Epistolary Form.

I Am Providence, And Providence Is Myself - Together, Indissolubly As One, We Stand Thro' The Ages; A Fixt Monument Set Aeternally In The Shadow Of Durfee's Ice-clad Peak!

I Am Writing This Under An Appreciable Mental Strain, Since By Tonight I Shall Be No More. Penniless, And At The End Of My Supply Of The Drug Which Alone Makes Life Endurable, I Can Bear The Torture No Longer; And Shall Cast Myself From This Garret Window Into The Squalid Street Below.

The Process Of Delving Into The Black Abyss Is To Me The Keenest Form Of Fascination.

Slowly But Inexorably Crawling Upon My Consciousness And Rising Above Every Other Impression, Came A Dizzying Fear Of The Unknown; A Fear All The Greater Because I Could Not Analyse It, And Seeming To Concern A Stealthily Approaching Menace; Not Death, But Some Nameless, Unheard-of Thing Inexpressibly More Ghastly And Abhorrent.

For I Have Always Been A Seeker, A Dreamer, And A Ponderer On Seeking And Dreaming.

I Shall Never Sleep Calmly Again When I Think Of The Horrors That Lurk Ceaselessly Behind Life In Time And In Space, And Of Those Unhallowed Blasphemies From Elder Stars Which Dream Beneath The Sea, Known And Favoured By A Nightmare Cult Ready And Eager To Loose Them Upon The World Whenever Another Earthquake Shall Heave Their Monstrous Stone City Again To The Sun And Air.

That's Because Only A Real Artist Knows The Actual Anatomy Of The Terrible Or The Physiology Of Fear - The Exact Sort Of Lines And Proportions That Connect Up With Latent Instincts Or Hereditary Memories Of Fright, And The Proper Colour Contrasts And Lighting Effects To Stir The Dormant Sense Of Strangeness.

Bunch Together A Group Of People Deliberately Chosen For Strong Religious Feelings, And You Have A Practical Guarantee Of Dark Morbidities Expressed In Crime, Perversion, And Insanity.

There Are Black Zones Of Shadow Close To Our Daily Paths, And Now And Then Some Evil Soul Breaks A Passage Through. When That Happens, The Man Who Knows Must Strike Before Reckoning The Consequences.

Mid-summer ... When The Alchemy Of Nature Transmutes The Sylvan Landscape To One Vivid And Almost Homogeneous Mass Of Green; When The Senses Are Well-nigh Intoxicated With The Surging Seas Of Moist Verdure And The Subtly Indefinable Odours Of The Soil And The Vegetation. In Such Surroundings The Mind Loses Its Perspective; Time And Space Become Trivial And Unreal, And Echoes Of A Forgotten Prehistoric Past Beat Insistently Upon The Enthralled Consciousness.

Life Is Not The Unique Property Of Earth. Nor Is Life In The Shape Of Human Beings. Life Takes Many Forms On Other Planets And Far Stars, Forms That Would Seem Bizarre To Humans, As Human Life Is Bizarre To Other Life-forms.

Ultimate Horror Often Paralyses Memory In A Merciful Way.

The Oldest And Strongest Emotion Of Mankind Is Fear.

Strong Emotions

The Appeal Of The Spectrally Macabre Is Generally Narrow Because It Demands From The Reader A Certain Degree Of Imagination And A Capacity For Detachment From Everyday Life.

Incurable Lover Of The Grotesque

I Never Ask A Man What His Business Is, For It Never Interests Me. What I Ask Him About Are His Thoughts And Dreams.

More Wonderful Than The Lore Of Old Men And The Lore Of Books Is The Secret Lore Of The Ocean. Blue, Green, Grey, White, Or Black; Smooth, Ruffled, Or Mountainous; That Ocean Is Not Silent. All My Days I Have Watched It And Listened To It, And I Know It Well. At First It Told To Me Only The Plain Little Tales Of Calm Beaches And Near Ports, But With The Years It Grew More Friendly And Spoke Of Other Things; Of Things More Strange And More Distant In Space And Time.

Man's Relations To Man Do Not Captivate My Fancy. It Is Man's Relation To The Cosmos--to The Unknown--which Alone Arouses In Me The Spark Of Creative Imagination.

After Man There Would Be The Mighty Beetle Civilisation, The Bodies Of Whose Members The Cream Of The Great Race Would Seize When The Monstrous Doom Overtook The Elder World. Later, As The Earth's Span Closed, The Transferred Minds Would Again Migrate Through Time And Space -- To Another Stopping Place In The Bodies Of The Bulbous Vegetable Entities Of Mercury. But There Would Be Races After Them, Clinging Pathetically To The Cold Planet And Burrowing To Its Horror-filled Core, Before The Utter End.

Humour Is But The Faint Terrestrial Echo Of The Hideous Laughter Of The Blind Mad Gods That Squat Leeringly And Sardonically In Caverns Beyond The Milky Way. It Is A Hollow Thing, Sweet On The Outside, But Filled With The Pathos Of Fruitless Aspiration.

In London There Is A Man Who Screams When The Church Bells Ring.

There Now Ensued A Series Of Incidents Which Transported Me To The Opposite Extremes Of Ecstasy And Horror; Incidents Which I Tremble To Recall And Dare Not Seek To Interpret.

I'll Tell You Something Of The Forbidden Horrors She Led Me Into - Something Of The Age-old Horrors That Even Now Are Festering In Out-of-the-way Corners With A Few Monstrous Priests To Keep Them Alive. Some People Know Things About The Universe That Nobody Ought To Know, And Can Do Things That Nobody Ought To Be Able To Do.

Naturally One Would Rather Be A Broad Artist With Power To Evoke Beauty From Every Phase Of Experience--but When One Unmistakably Isn't Such An Artist, There's No Sense In Bluffing And Faking And Pretending That One Is.

Wise Men Have Interpreted Dreams, And The Gods Have Laughed.

Through All This Horror My Cat Stalked Unperturbed. Once I Saw Him Monstrously Perched Atop A Mountain Of Bones, And Wondered At The Secrets That Might Lie Behind His Yellow Eyes.

The Glorious Dryden, Refiner And Purifier Of English Verse, Did Less For Rhyme Than He Did For Metre.

I Recognise A Distinction Between Dream Life And Real Life, Between Appearances And Actualities. I Confess To An Over-powering Desire To Know Whether I Am Asleep Or Awake--whether The Environment And Laws Which Affect Me Are External And Permanent, Or The Transitory Products Of My Own Brain.

Our Brains Deliberately Make Us Forget Things, To Prevent Insanity

The Dog Is A Peasant And The Cat Is A Gentleman.

Time, Space, And Natural Law Hold For Me Suggestions Of Intolerable Bondage, And I Can Form No Picture Of Emotional Satisfaction Which Does Not Involve Their Defeat - Especially The Defeat Of Time, So That One May Merge Oneself With The Whole Historic Stream And Be Wholly Emancipated From The Transient And The Ephemeral.

Someday Our Piecing Together Of Knowledge Will Open Up Such Terrifying Vistas We Shall Either Go Mad Or Flee Into The Safety Of A New Dark Age.

Behold Great Whitman, Whose Licentious Line Delights The Rake, And Warms The Souls Of Swine; Whose Fever'd Fancy Shuns The Measur'd Pace, And Copies Ovid's Filth Without His Grace. In His Rough Brain A Genius Might Have Grown, Had He Not Sought To Play The Brute Alone; But Void Of Shame, He Let His Wit Run Wild, And Liv'd And Wrote As Adam's Bestial Child.

Zoologists Seem To Consider The Cerebration Of Cats And Dogs About 50-50 -- But My Respect Always Goes To The Cool, Sure, Impersonal, Delicately Poised Feline Who Minds His Business And Never Slobbers.

Science, Already Oppressive With Its Shocking Revelations, Will Perhaps Be The Ultimate Exterminator Of Our Human Species - If Separate Species We Be - For Its Reserve Of Unguessed Horrors Could Never Be Borne By Mortal Brains If Loossed Upon The World.

I Have Harnessed The Shadows That Stride From World To World To Sow Death And Madness.

When The Last Days Were Upon Me, And The Ugly Trifles Of Existence Began To Drive Me To Madness Like The Small Drops Of Water Torturers Let Fall Ceaselessly Upon One Spot Of Their Victim's Body, I Loved The Irradiate Refuge Of Sleep. In My Dreams I Found A Little Of The Beauty I Had Vainly Sought In Life, And Wandered Through Old Gardens And Enchanted Woods.

The One Test Of The Really Weird (story) Is Simply This--whether Or Not There Be Excited In The Reader A Profound Sense Of Dread, And Of Contact With Unknown Spheres And Powers; A Subtle Attitude Of Awed Listening, As If For The Beating Of Black Wings Or The Scratching Of Outside Shapes And Entities On The Known Universe's Utmost Rim.

Who Knows The End? What Has Risen May Sink, And What Has Sunk May Rise. Loathsomeness Waits And Dreams In The Deep, And Decay Spreads Over The Tottering Cities Of Men.

In Its Flawless Grace And Superior Self-sufficiency I Have Seen A Symbol Of The Perfect Beauty And Bland Impersonality Of The Universe Itself, Objectively Considered, And In Its Air Of Silent Mystery There Resides For Me All The Wonder And Fascination Of The Unknown.

Some Of Us Awake In The Night With Strange Phantasms Of Enchanted Hills And Gardens, Of Fountains That Sing In The Sun, Of Golden Cliffs Overhanging Murmuring Seas, Of Plains That Stretch Down To Sleeping Cities Of Bronze Andstone, And Of Shadowy Companies Of Heroes That Ride Caparisoned White Horsesalong The Edges Of Thick Forests, And Then We Know That We Have Looked Backthrough The Ivory Gates Into That World Of Wonder That Was Ours, Before We Were Wise And Unhappy.

Everything I Loved Had Been Dead For Two Centuries - Or, As In The Case Of Graeco-roman Classicism, For Two Milenniums. I Am Never A Part Of Anything Around Me - In Everything I Am An Outsider. Should I Find It Possible To Crawl Backward Through The Halls Of Time To That Age Which Is Nearest My Own Fancy, I Should Doubtless Be Bawled Out Of The Coffee-houses For Heresy In Religion, Or Else Lampooned By John Dennis Till I Found Refuge In The Deep, Silent Thames, That Covers Many Another Unfortunate.

In Search Of Truth The Hopeful Zealot Goes,but All The Sadder Tums, The More He Knows!

Yog-sothoth Knows The Gate. Yog-sothoth Is The Gate. Yog-sothoth Is The Key And Guardian Of The Gate. Past, Present, Future, All Are One In Yog-sothoth. He Knows Where The Old Ones Broke Through Of Old, And Where They Shall Break Through Again. He Knows Where They Have Trod Earth's Fields, And Where They Still Tread Them, And Why No One Can Behold Them As They Tread.

Children Will Always Be Afraid Of The Dark, And Men With Minds Sensitive To Hereditary Impulse Will Always Tremble At The Thought Of The Hidden And Fathomless Worlds Of Strange Life Which May Pulsate In The Gulfs Beyond The Stars, Or Press Hideously Upon Our Own Globe In Unholy Dimensions Which Only The Dead And The Moonstruck Can Glimpse.

The Poetical Tendency Of The Present And Of The Preceding Century Has Been Divided In A Manner Singularly Curious. One Loud And Conspicuous Faction Of Bards, Giving Way To The Corrupt Influences Of A Decaying General Culture, Seems To Have Abandoned All The Properties Of Versification And Reason In Its Mad Scramble After Sensational Novelty; Whilst The Other And Quieter School Constituting A More Logical Evolution From The Poesy Of The Georgian Period, Demands An Accuracy Of Rhyme And Metre Unknown Even To The Polished Artists Of The Age Of Pope.

Religion Is Still Useful Among The Herd - That It Helps Their Orderly Conduct As Nothing Else Could. The Crude Human Animal Is In-eradicably Superstitious, And There Is Every Biological Reason Why They Should Be. Take Away His Christian God And Saints, And He Will Worship Something Else.

The Sea Can Bind Us To Her Many Moods, Whispering To Us By The Subtle Token Of A Shadow Or A Gleam Upon The Waves, And Hinting In These Ways Of Her Mournfulness Or Rejoicing. Always She Is Remembering Old Things, And These Memories, Though We May Not Grasp Them, Are Imparted To Us, So That We Share Her Gaiety Or Remorse.

The Greatest Human Achievements Have Never Been For Profit.

Only Poetry Or Madness Could Do Justice To The Noises.

The Appeal Of The Spectrally Macabre Is Generally Narrow Because It Demands From The Reader A Certain Degree Of Imagination And A Capacity For Detachment From Every-day Life. Relatively Few Are Free Enough From The Spell Of The Daily Routine To Respond To Rappings From Outside, And Tales Of Ordinary Feelings And Events, Or Of Common Sentimental Distortions Of Such Feelings And Events, Will Always Take First Place In The Taste Of The Majority; Rightly, Perhaps, Since Of Course These Ordinary Matters Make Up The Greater Part Of Human Experience.

From Even The Greatest Of Horrors Irony Is Seldom Absent.

I Love To Dream, But I Never Try To Dream And Think At The Same Time.

Pleasure To Me Is Wonder—the Unexplored, The Unexpected, The Thing That Is Hidden And The Changeless Thing That Lurks Behind Superficial Mutability.

The Most Merciful Thing In The World, I Think, Is The Inability Of The Human Mind To Correlate All Its Contents... 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 Light Into The Peace And Safety Of A New Dark Age.

Sometimes I Believe That This Less Material Life Is Our Truer Life, And That Our Vain Presence On The Terraqueous Globe Is Itself The Secondary Or Merely Virtual Phenomenon.

The Oldest And Strongest Emotion Of Mankind Is Fear, And The Oldest And Strongest Kind Of Fear Is Fear Of The Unknown

The Darkness Always Teemed With Unexplained Sound - And Yet He Sometimes Shook With Fear Lest The Noises He Heard Subside And Allow Him To Hear Certain Other Fainter Noises Which He Suspected Were Lurking Behind Them.

Pleasure To Me Is Wonder—the Unexplored, The Unexpected, The Thing That Is Hidden And The Changeless Thing That Lurks Behind Superficial Mutability. To Trace The Remote In The Immediate; The Eternal In The Ephemeral; The Past In The Present; The Infinite In The Finite; These Are To Me The Springs Of Delight And Beauty.

It's Not A Bad Idea To Call This Cthulhuism & Yog-sothothery Of Mine "the Mythology Of Hastur" - Although It Was Really From Machen & Dunsany & Others, Rather Than Through The Bierce-chambers Line, That I Picked Up My Gradually Developing Hash Of Theogony - Or Daimonogony. Come To Think Of It, I Guess I Sling This Stuff More As Chambers Does Than As Machen & Dunsany Do - Though I Had Written A Good Deal Of It Before I Ever Suspected That Chambers Ever Wrote A Weird Story!

The Trees Grew Too Thickly, And Their Trunks Were Too Big For Any Healthy New England Wood. There Was Too Much Silence In The Dim Alleys Between Them.

Thus I Began My Systematic Though Half-bewildered Tour Of Innsmouth's Narrow, Shadow-blighted Ways. Crossing The Bridge And Turning Toward The Roar Of The Lower Falls, I Passed Close To The Marsh Refinery, Which Seemed To Be Oddly Free From The Noise Of Industry. The Building Stood On The Steep River Bluff Near A Bridge And An Open Confluence Of Streets Which I Took To Be The Earliest Civic Center, Displaced After The Revolution By The Present Town Square.

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Nadine Gordimer

George Bernard Shaw

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