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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’
So true
Lovecraft also likes to play with the idea of fate. In many of Lovecraft’s stories the protagonist is not in control of his own actions but must follow the path of fate. Many of his characters would be free from danger if they were simply able to run away but this is not possible as the course of their fate must be followed.
Religion is at the core of a lot of Lovecraft’s writing. Many of his stories focus around deities, sometimes taking on the role of aliens who are worshipped by humans as deities, who are either indifferent or actively hostile to humans. This is all particularly interesting as Lovecraft marked himself as either atheist or agnostic during his life.
When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed.
The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon,
fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor—a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent; devils of a race no man might mistake—the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered.
Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious stone altar older than the Indians.
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.
