Renegade
Blissfully Ignorant
Posts: 20
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« Reply #15 on: July 05, 2010, 06:51:38 PM » |
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I personally love the flavors of his almost Nihilistic view of the human race. the Existential Horror that he can so beautifully put into words.
I think best summed up in the following line from The Silver Key:
"Wise men had told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist on fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness"
before Reading Lovecraft, I had never met anyone with the same kind of cosmic view as I had (Carl Sagan being too optimistic).
and thinking about how ahead of his time he was in this belief is just mind-boggling to me.
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We live on a placid island of ignorance on the shores of the cosmic ocean...
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Chris Lackey
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« Reply #16 on: July 07, 2010, 08:27:39 AM » |
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This week we really get into the Silver Key with Ken Hite guesting again. It's a pretty rousing conversation!
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old book
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« Reply #17 on: July 15, 2010, 02:03:29 PM » |
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I guess I can't think of any recurring motif I like, except places that get lost and streets that can never be found again, a cosmic and overwhelming topoagnosia/atopognosia. What I like, if I understand motif correctly, are several details that do not recur. I like the "oily river" in the fragment The Book I think, I like the purple ray device in The Evil Clergyman... I do like that the endings of Statement of Randolph Carter and Evil Clergyman still do not make sense to me. They are dream-koans. They carry the emotional charge of the original dream by the original dreamer just under the surface, not despite but because the endings don't make sense.
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We live on a placid Rhode Island and Providence Plantations of ignorance in the midst of the black seas of an infinity of dark foreigners, and it was not meant that we should voyage too far.
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Jake W
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« Reply #18 on: July 29, 2010, 11:03:52 AM » |
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My favourite motif is possibly the deep time aspect, where the protagonist discovers things that are too old to have been made/written by human hands yet clearly were fashioned by some Earthbound intelligence. I love how the scale of space is coupled with the scale of time; monsters from unimaginable distances beyond our solar system co-exist with home-grown monsters from uncountable eons past.
Despite his frequent failure to describe the details satisfactorily Lovecraft always manages to convey a sense of things utterly alien.
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Newton Applefig
Blissfully Ignorant
Posts: 26
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« Reply #19 on: June 09, 2012, 07:56:43 PM » |
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The horror of cosmic infinities. Pheh. The madness of one's degenerate lineage of monstrosity turning you into what you hate. Meh. The sense of creepy elder secrets better left to the deeps of inhuman time, rotten stinking tomes of worm eaten ( or written ) blasphemies, sleeping malevolent gOdS of the Outer Spheres finally returning to mock humanity in orgiastic torment. Insipid! Mediocrities! The only true Lovecraftian theme worth talking about is obvious. It's influence is on today's culture looms over all others. We must face the truth he taught us, his real legacy to our doomed race. Translunar Armies of Cats! They are real, I have seen them!   |
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Ruth - CthulhuChick
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« Reply #20 on: June 10, 2012, 10:39:04 AM » |
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It strikes me that this must be the only crowd where you can say "translunar armies of cats" and we all nod.
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Bob Lovecraft
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« Reply #21 on: June 11, 2012, 08:18:32 AM » |
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It strikes me that this must be the only crowd where you can say "translunar armies of cats" and we all nod.
I actually nodded as I read that statement, Ruth. Huh, kind of weird...  Bob |
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If someone ever dares you to read the Necronomicon out loud... just say no.
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CMcCormack
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« Reply #22 on: June 11, 2012, 08:42:22 PM » |
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The magic, mysterious tome is by far my favorite motif in Lovecraft or any other horror story. Love it. I can't even really tell you why, but I just do.
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T. Kelly Lee
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« Reply #23 on: June 12, 2012, 08:16:37 AM » |
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The lonely scholar thirsting for knowledge gets more than he bargained for. It's an age old metaphor - from the Garden of Eden to Dr. Faustus - for the evolution of the human race. If you think to much and quest to hard to uncover the secrets of the universe, you might not like what you find! I love that stuff.
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Inner Prop
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« Reply #24 on: June 12, 2012, 08:58:08 AM » |
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I agree that the search for forbidden knowledge before you know it's forbidden is my favorite. Also, the point at which the "investigator" realizes that it may be a bad idea to go any deeper, but he just can't help himself.
Along with the description of the indescribable I like when they write down what should never be known by anyone. Wouldn't it be easier to keep the secret if you didn't write it down and share it?
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T. Kelly Lee
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« Reply #25 on: June 12, 2012, 10:34:40 AM » |
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I agree that the search for forbidden knowledge before you know it's forbidden is my favorite. Also, the point at which the "investigator" realizes that it may be a bad idea to go any deeper, but he just can't help himself.
Along with the description of the indescribable I like when they write down what should never be known by anyone. Wouldn't it be easier to keep the secret if you didn't write it down and share it?
I have argued for a long time that HPL's universe is basically gnostic...there is left behind for the seeker a path to enlightenment (madness) and a means for its revelation. As Ken Hite says, if in the Bible man is lost and redeemed in a garden, then in HPL's world man is lost and redeemed in a library. |
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catamount
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« Reply #26 on: June 12, 2012, 11:36:42 AM » |
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The mad artist is another great motif that Lovecraft uses effectively, such as Pickman (I would argue Zann falls in this category as well).
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'Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.'
Robert E. Howard, "The Tower of the Elephant"
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Bob Lovecraft
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« Reply #27 on: June 13, 2012, 08:22:32 AM » |
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I don't know if you would call it a motif per se', but I love the moment in which the researcher/investigator/hero realizes he has learned too much. That one frozen moment of clarity when it all comes to him that he is in WAY too deep is great. You see it in so many of Lovecraft's stories, but again I am not sure it is a motif but maybe more of a trope. Anyway, the "oh shit" moment gets my vote.
Bob
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If someone ever dares you to read the Necronomicon out loud... just say no.
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Konrad Hartmann
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« Reply #28 on: June 16, 2012, 03:19:14 PM » |
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I like the concept in his stories that public ignorance is the only thing that makes life as we know it possible. A recurrent theme is that human culture exists as a sort of comfortable construct played to prevent people from learning too much. All civilization would crumble if the world knew what invisible things float through the air around them, what hidden cults do underground, what things lurk at the boundaries of space and time, and what creatures exist frozen in Antarctica. There is popular consensus reality and then there is the layer underneath, and everything is fine until someone is foolish enough to probe the edges.
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Konrad Hartmann-Now with more Evil!
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T. Kelly Lee
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« Reply #29 on: June 18, 2012, 08:30:59 AM » |
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But don't you think, in some respects, this is true? Our mythologies seem to be - especially in the modern context - just a means of shielding us from uncomfortable reality. They keep us safe inside our institutions. In a way, I think HPL used the weird tale as a metaphor for what's really going on in greater society.
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