Before We Were Wise And Unhappy
Before We Were Wise And Unhappy
Originally shared by Dirk Puehl
“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. But 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 and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; 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.“ (H.P. Lovecraft, “Celephais”)
#onthisday, 125 years ago, H.P. Lovecraft was born in Providence, R.I.
Time for my annual Lovecraft remembrance, as it seems, this time with a repost from last year out of the ongoing #onthisday -series. Maybe with the exception of Tolkien himself, few 20th century authors of the fantastic exercised a more thorough influence on the genre than Lovecraft. Being his own most fantastical creation all by himself, the Recluse of Providence, reduced nowadays to the tip of the iceberg of his homespun myths, creatures that look like a plate of frutti di mare gone berserk and, of course, the dreaded “Necronomicon” tried his best to live a life of a pre-revolutionary country squire dabbling in literature, philosophy and the occult, was unbelievably narrow-minded, racist to a point of xenophobia, an atheistic Puritan who despised everything that had to do with money-making. There is more, of course, since the process of mythmaking, if taken serious, usually involves more than coming up with tales of a few be-tentacled deities and a forbidden book. But read for yourself on:
http://wunderkammertales.blogspot.de/2015/02/an-icon-of-weird-fiction-hp-lovecraft.html
Depicted below is an imagination of H.P. Lovecraft with probably an Elder Thing in the background, the first extraterrestrial species to come to the Earth, colonising the planet about one billion years ago and breeding the infamous shoggoths (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Thing - picture found onhttp://seanthesorcerer.blogspot.de/2011/06/prophet-lovecraft.html )
#americanliterature #classicalhorror #cthulhumythos #hplovecraft #literature
Originally shared by Dirk Puehl
“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. But 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 and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; 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.“ (H.P. Lovecraft, “Celephais”)
#onthisday, 125 years ago, H.P. Lovecraft was born in Providence, R.I.
Time for my annual Lovecraft remembrance, as it seems, this time with a repost from last year out of the ongoing #onthisday -series. Maybe with the exception of Tolkien himself, few 20th century authors of the fantastic exercised a more thorough influence on the genre than Lovecraft. Being his own most fantastical creation all by himself, the Recluse of Providence, reduced nowadays to the tip of the iceberg of his homespun myths, creatures that look like a plate of frutti di mare gone berserk and, of course, the dreaded “Necronomicon” tried his best to live a life of a pre-revolutionary country squire dabbling in literature, philosophy and the occult, was unbelievably narrow-minded, racist to a point of xenophobia, an atheistic Puritan who despised everything that had to do with money-making. There is more, of course, since the process of mythmaking, if taken serious, usually involves more than coming up with tales of a few be-tentacled deities and a forbidden book. But read for yourself on:
http://wunderkammertales.blogspot.de/2015/02/an-icon-of-weird-fiction-hp-lovecraft.html
Depicted below is an imagination of H.P. Lovecraft with probably an Elder Thing in the background, the first extraterrestrial species to come to the Earth, colonising the planet about one billion years ago and breeding the infamous shoggoths (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Thing - picture found onhttp://seanthesorcerer.blogspot.de/2011/06/prophet-lovecraft.html )
#americanliterature #classicalhorror #cthulhumythos #hplovecraft #literature
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