Happy Birthday, H.P, the man who changed my academic life once and forever.
Your dark, deeply troubling, challenging stories with their supposedly simple plots and predictable characters’ arcs turned out to have a much stronger sense of verisimilitude for a modern human (homo sacer, following Agamben’s terminology) than those of a coherently constructed classical narration.
Your prose style, whenever mocked for its incongruity and forced “heaviness” and despite all odds, has become a trope of its own, a symbol of weirdness par excellence, a perfect mixture of uncanny, macabre, existential dread and exquisite sorrow of ineffable solitude. In your works, you practically defined Dasein in your own terms, as a contingent life in an indifferent universe, and the mere awareness of this can give your readers an odd feeling of comfort.
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. ©
And you did. And we have followed. Happy Birthday, Old Gent. I am glad to be in your place now, because you are truly Providence.
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