India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
On life, and HP Lovecraft
Michel Houellebecq in the Guardian:
's piece is an extract from his book, "HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
." He quotes Lovecraft as saying:
? If not, you must. The only remedies to existential fatigue are otherworldly horror and...
Update (October 25): Rishi writes in:
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined notations, situations, anecdotes ... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our "real life" days.Yes, yes, yes. Houellebecq
's piece is an extract from his book, "HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life." He quotes Lovecraft as saying:I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.Yes, yes, yes. And surely you have read The Call of Cthulhu
? If not, you must. The only remedies to existential fatigue are otherworldly horror and...Update (October 25): Rishi writes in:
The alternative to the monstrously mundane is....a monster. Preferably, lots of them. But I like Lovecraft's attitude: there may well be superior intelligences in this universe, but they are probably viciously evil or, at least, casually cruel to the lesser races.Quite. Indeed, if God existed, She'd certainly be fairly cruel, indifferent to humans and, perhaps, bemused by their vanity and their silly offers of bribes in the form of prayers and behaviour. Pfaw.
