I remember the first time I read Emerson. It was in an American Lit. class and I'd read about ten words of his first essay of his when I realized he was the best writer I was going to read that semester.
Well, I just had a similar experience with H. P. Lovecraft. I'd never read anything by him before picking up a book of short fiction (edited by Joyce Carol Oates) at the library. "The Call of Cthulhu" begins thusly:
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.
In a paragraph he crystalized the dichotomy of our desire to discover new truths and our unwillingness to discard ideas destroyed by those truths. Lovecraft intuits that scientific exploration will always be anchored in and by the myths and fears and past science that built our culture and our society. Amazing to think that in 1926 he presaged the current state of affairs, where 9/11 somehow makes people want *more* religion and the intelligent design crowd desperately tries to beat science into a shape that keeps their gods in the center of the universe.
I'm only a few stories in, but already I think Lovecraft might be the best author I read this year.
- Scott
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