Lovecraft and Me – How cosmic horror gave me hope (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Lovecraft and Me – How cosmic horror gave me hope (2020)

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67 pointsbikenaga35 comments

I can relate to the author's frustration of forgetting large chunks of their childhood. My memory has always been poor, and I'm often envious of people who seem to know their upbringing like the back of their hand - as without it some acts of introspection ("knowing yourself") are more difficult.

At least he had some letters! Bring born post-internet I have no letters, and the modern equivalent of IM or whatever internet communities are too easily lost.

Speaking for myself I think through childhood I have just been too damn busy all the time with school and my own projects, never actually taking time to be bored and recall the past. And by not continually remembering myself the recent past, I eventually forgot about it when it became a distant past.

> Speaking for myself I think through childhood I have just been too damn busy all the time with school and my own projects

Me too, but I remember playing with my neighbor. The details are gone but I remember about some specific moments and experience too.

> And by not continually remembering myself the recent past, I eventually forgot about it when it became a distant past.

Why is it important to remember the past from such a long time ago?

I remember what happened last week more clearly than what happen last year.

I remember my final months in university a bit more clearly that the first year, which itself is clearer than my childhood.

Actually I had to count how long ago were my final months, it's been 6 years.

However, some key points and formula from the first year are still extremely clear in my head, because I've been using them frequently.

Forgetting about the distant path may be a feature, not a bug: it's like a garbage collector running in the background taking care of memories that haven't been retrieved in a long time, to make room for new ones that may be more useful. Old but useful memories aren't touched by the GC.

I'd say that's good: I care way more about the board game I played last week that some obscure details about childhood toys that have 0 utility in the present.

Nostalgia is just a preference for the well know, causing desire to revive the past masquerading as utility, making us wrongly discount present day innovations by lack of familiarity with them.

It was a reflection I had after realizing how much others remember their childhood and I forgot most of it. It made me think on how I got there. But in the end I tend to draw the same conclusion as you do: I forgot because it had no value besides a nostalgic one. And I like you tend to rationalize nostalgy. I don't give much value to the past, except maybe an educational one.

As a longtime Cthulhu cultist, I've always thought that the mythology is much more interesting that Lovecraft's actual writing. I consider Alan Moore's Providence to be the ultimate interpretation of Lovecraft's mythology.

Cthulu the Titan like god thing, from South Park?

Yes - He features in a lot of different popular media and was first portrayed in H.P.Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu (published 1928).

The mythology of Great Old Ones etc. is usually referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos, though Cthulhu is definitely not the most powerful being. (That honour would probably go to Azathoth - a blind, mad sleeping god who happened to create our universe as part of his dreams - don't wake him up!)

Im def a fan after South Park XD

Horses for courses. When I had my Lovecraft kick as a teenager, I had zero interest in going on to read the stuff that later authors set in the same universe. Derleth et al. seemed like mediocre talents just riding on Lovecraft's coattails.

Yeah, I haven't read any Derleth, though I am a fan of Charles Stross' Laundry Files series. Also The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers is in my opinion an essential addition to Lovecraft's mythology.

I'm the opposite. One of the things I love about Lovecraft is how oblique the mythology is in his writings. I don't know much about Azathoth, save that he's somehow "Lord of all Things", while being a "Blind Idiot God." That seeming contradiction is tantalising and the last thing I want is to see it fleshed out.

It's fear of the unknown, after all, not fear of the things that have detailed wiki pages.

I find the extra detail adds to the horror, though I'd generally agree. The scariest horror films are the ones that hint rather than depicting everything.

With Azathoth, I find it more disturbing to consider that our entire universe is just a fragment of a dream by Azathoth, and the pipers play a tune to keep him asleep, as what happens to a dream when the dreamer awakes?

What I find most disturbing is that it makes more sense than most creation myths, at least from my modern point of view; and it paints humanity hanging by a thread, like 20th century fears of being hit by a supernova, or a meteor, etc (of course we had apocalyptic themes through all of history though)

Or rather, anyone that had a dream with a person that said "don't wake up, or I will die" can relate

I love the idea of hanging by a thread, of complete existential and cosmic precarity. To again quote the opening of Call of Cthulhu, science will reveal "our frightful position [in reality]". I like the fact that, for Lovecraft, the answer to such terrifying revelations is mostly to draw the curtains and ideally brick up the window and insist "nothing to see here." The opening quote offers that as one solution, but it's recurrent in his stories. It's what the protagonists end up doing in the Dunwich horror mentioned in the blogpost.

Also this specific tidbit explains how he can be lord of all things (he created the universe anyway) but still be a blind idiot fool (he apparently doesn't even realizes what's happening)

I like the description "monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space" as it implies that Azathoth isn't a reasoning, thinking being, but something that is totally beyond human comprehension. As an atheist, one thing that annoys me about the depictions of various deities is when they have petty human reasoning and desires. I like to think the relationship is more akin to ants thinking about humans - the ants have no way to even grasp the nature of humans and humans have no interest (or at least most people don't) in what an ant believes or worships.

> I like to think the relationship is more akin to ants thinking about humans - the ants have no way to even grasp the nature of humans and humans have no interest (or at least most people don't) in what an ant believes or worships.

That's, incidentally, why I don't kill ants, but instead blow them gently so they fly away if they are in my body; or why I don't trample their mounds and look carefully at the ground when I'm walking, etc. I like to think that if some powerful being looked at Earth like we looked at ants, they wouldn't "trample" us mindlessly (like in the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy)

For me that's a deeply religious thought somehow (and from there, veganism is an obvious consequence)

Agree. In Lovecraft’s hands, I regard it as maybe the most-honest and -accurate depiction of cosmic reality—of that horror-adjacent feeling one may experience trying to actually imagine the universe—in fiction, but the effect falls apart if you start filling in the gaps. Most of the broader “mythos” stuff since Lovecraft can still be fun in about the same way that Catholic mythology’s fertile ground for horror, but it’s not the same thing and it’s not as interesting.

You’re probably already aware of it, but I think his take on Swamp Thing was also rare and incredible.

I am a longtime devotee of Lovecraft. For a deep dive into the man's life, I direct your attention to the Voluminous podcast [1], which covers a bit of H.P. Lovecraft's extensive correspondence. He was a fascinating character, simultaneously infuriating, repugnant, intellectual, sympathetic, and kind. When he wrote at his best, he was exceptionally good.

I lean more towards the belief that what was created between Lovecraft and his friends regarding their shared universe while Lovecraft was alive is superior to what came later. Subsequent revisions introduced elements like order, good vs. evil, etc., which, in my opinion, are fundamentally at odds with the incomprehensibility of cosmic horror.

These days, of course, Cthulhu seems more suited to a pair of plush slippers.

[1] https://www.hplhs.org/voluminous.php

As you mention a podcast, I'd better mention BBC's The Lovecraft Investigations as they are a modern interpretation and most excellent.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06spb8w

I thought the most recent season fell off a little, but you're not wrong that it's quite good overall, and very much in the "mythos" character given Simpson's prior work in audio drama.

The article mentions ST Joshi a few times, who I think deserves credit not just as the foremost scholar of Lovecraft, but possibly for bringing attention to Lovecraft in the 60s and 70s. I thoroughly enjoyed his "Decline of the West", which pores over Lovecraft's correspondences trying to get a broad handle on his philosophy and aesthetics. He strikes me as a pretty complicated individual, with his early bigotry and his later slightly less malignant cultural chauvinism always being at odds with his cosmicism. And I think his nostalgic, escapist fantasy might generally have been at odds with his uncompromisingly scientific realism, perhaps contributing to his somewhat bitter and bleak view of the sciences (each straining in their own direction).

(I once owned one of those cute green Cthulhu plushies)

S.T. Joshi is well known in cultist circles. He features in the Exegesis Lovecraft documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20869650/

What a fantastic writer Kieran is (and H.P. Lovecraft, I did read a few of those old books as a teenager).

A very well written article, with interesting personal anecdotes. Lovecraft is certainly iconic, with a writing style that seems to belong more to the 19th than the 20th century - but which was heavily influenced by more modern scientific concepts, such as non-Euclidean geometry and the size of the known universe. One additional fact not mentioned in the article is that Lovecraft was an ardent atheist, and produced at least one searing criticism of religion in general, in particular of 'utilitarianism', i.e. the notion that even if not true, religion has societal benefits:

https://www.skeptical-science.com/essays/letter-religion-lov...

As far as the question of Lovecraft's prejudices and the 2016 decision to remove his image from the World Fantasy Award, well, one might as well cancel most if not all of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence over their support for slavery and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. Cancel culture and book burning is redolant of authoritarian ideology and shouldn't be tolerated in any modern society - as more and more people have come to realize, so there's some hope.

Many of the derivative works published by various authors have instead poked fun at Lovecraft's prejudices ("Lovecraft & Carter" by Johnathan Howard has an alternative timeline in which Lovecraft has children who engage in race mixing, etc.), which is a much better way to address the issue. There are a great many such derivative works spanning sci-fi and fantasy genres, which shows how influential Lovecraft has been.

Whether or not a private organization chooses to award people a bust of HP Lovecraft or a trophy of a spooky tree has really not much at all to do with the article we're reading and discussing. This isn't an article about "the Howard" award.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you go through the list of all the awardees of the World Fantasy Awards and subject them to the same criticisms, then I'm pretty sure they'd have to retroactively remove many of those awards because of the objectional content in some of those author's works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Fantasy_Award%E2%80%94No...

Also, in today's political climate, I'd guess Lovecraft's stance on religion is more controversial than the above issue.

I'm not interested, and neither is the author of the article, or, thankfully, most of this thread, which managed to be about Lovecraft's work.

I rather doubt that a devout believer in one of the Abrahamic religions (or any other) would have spent so much time and effort portraying a cosmic picture of human insignificance - a picture where humans are litte more than a tiny species of ants trying to survive in a world of Tyrannosaurus Rex, where a casual accidental stomp might just wipe us all out.

Really, you don't think Lovecraft's diehard atheism contributed anything to his worldview or to his literary work?

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