More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Radcliffe describes terror as a feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens and horror as a feeling of revulsion or disgust after said event has occurred.
My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.
Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less what fears and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had been any fears or avoidances.
If you can account for it normally, very well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.
There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.
What the whisperer implied was beyond all human belief—yet were not the other things still farther beyond, and less preposterous only because of their remoteness from tangible concrete proof?
but Nature has shewn herself capable of many freakish performances.
After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth—and
It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind.
Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries.
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are
...more
This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age.
I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth.
It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west,
Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.
Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?
How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities—like the famous Giants’ Causeway in Ireland—but
Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.
Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot’s wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance.
After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet’s love for the sight,
Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him;
Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
It is no business of mine if any man seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space.”
a man can’t tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will rise up to wipe you out.”
When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.
And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities.
He was too much of an animal, too little a man;
Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance.
and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
There is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world.
and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
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 loosed upon the world.
“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? 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, yet other beings with a 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
...more
This kept my soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far within me cried out.
He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects;
I could glimpse that pandaemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.
Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.
There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude.
And so the prisoner toiled in the twilight, heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little ceremony as his miniature Tower of Babel rose course by course.
his fingers clawing the black mould in brainless haste, and his body responding with that maddening slowness from which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of nightmare.
He always remained lame, for the great tendons had been severed; but I think the greatest lameness was in his soul.
And within the depths of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meant to be beheld.
Vast are the stones which sleep beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the grey toad makes his habitation.
the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.
