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2003-08-06 Lovecraft Knew It Even Then I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, thanks to my friend lending me a collection of his works. So far I haven't found any of the stories particularly frightening, but they're good nonetheless. And he was a great observer of the times: Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that 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. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions... They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. ("The Silver Key") He goes on for awhile about this, but you get the idea. I'm not sure when he wrote this, but I'm assuming from certain references that it wasn't long before his death in the 1930s. Even then, the mystery of the world was disappearing, or so we like to think, anyway, we who live in the sickingly "rational" and "scientific" West. It was good timing for me to read that story, I guess, because it was just yesterday that I was thinking how much we've lost. I think that as a writer, this fact is especially poignant. I'm a lover of horror, and although my current book that I'm working on doesn't fall within the genre, it's still a subject area that I would love to write about. It's unbelievably difficult to come up with an idea for a horror novel that speaks of the classical horror story - the Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley type of horror. The kind that makes your skin crawl and a shiver run up and down your spine. Why? you ask. Because, as a child of this society, I have been bred upon rationality. I think of an idea and think to myself, But that's stupid, as if anything like that is even remotely believable. As a writer, you want to convince the reader that it is plausible, but if you can't even convince yourself... Then there is religion, and how much it has lost in this world of science and reason, at least in the western hemisphere. Many of your theologians and ministers/priests wave away the superstition that shrouded religion for centuries. Does it remain religion then, or is it only philosophy? With science and reason, we have discovered many wonderful things, and even some that are frightening. We have made advances that no one could have dreamed of a century ago. But I still miss the spirits, the ghosts, the trolls. Instead of lying awake at night worrying about those supernatural beings, we are frightened by the possibilities of man. |
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