HPL: 88th anniversary of death

Lovecraft died on this day 88 years ago.

He met his death stoically and was granted a peaceful departure from all his torments and the anguish of the final years of his life, filled with unbearable cancerous pain. It’s somewhat consoling to think that the 1937 Lovecraft was not the same as the Lovecraft of the 1910s or 1920s—he had become less and less rigid and deplorably prejudiced in his societal views than before, his milieu had got more diverse, but we will never know for a fact about the ultimate result of it all.

He was challenged by life yet persevered through his works: not exactly a cautionary tale for any resentful hypochondriac, but a complex (for the lack of a better word) story of a mighty talent that emerged and grew against all odds. And, of course, his own narration of what later was called by Ligotti “The Nightmare of Being” is a seminal continuation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism, Mainländer-Nietzschean Deicide and “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches” frustration in the face of cosmic indifference.

I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim;

Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name. ©

Planets will roll; casting aside aloofness, we will remember.