7 ms·

I will almost certainly never tire of re-reading this essay. For all his flaws as a writer and as a person, Lovecraft really knew how to manipulate fear.

armitron 11y ago
Flaws? Certainly, but surely insignificant compared to the magnitude of his thought. Lovecraft was a genius at least a century ahead of his time (Nietzsche is the only other figure that springs to mind). People still haven't come to terms or even realized what he was talking about, but if there's something we're blindly racing towards it's that "ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth".
- cjslep 11y ago
  I wouldn't say insignificant. To fully appreciate some of his works, the reader needs to understand the racist mindset he had and the larger fears he was playing off of that stemmed from racism. Do dismiss his flaws would be a disservice for readers and his works alike.
  - panzagl 11y ago
    Lovecraft's genius was in taking science at face value and stripping away the sentimentality. You want an infinite universe? Then don't be surprised when some random cosmic event wipes humanity away. You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. In many ways his views remind me of PG's 'Taboos' essay- we can't really come to grips with the thought of a super-volcano wiping us out tomorrow so we just kind of keep going with our lives.
    - lawpoop 11y ago
      > You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. Why not? Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. And anyways, his Bible believing audience section would have believed that God created humankind from dirt, yet still loved them, equally.
      - hackercomplex 11y ago
        > Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. I think it scales, but it's not always obvious how to deploy into production. It takes patience, practice, determination, and the willingness to read the docs. I recommend compiling from source with the Buddhist "Pali Cannon".
        panzagl 11y ago
        I think thermodynamics would state that it doesn't scale.
      - aaronem 11y ago
        > Why not? Because "we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator" requires a Creator. Take that away and you end up with Hobbes: "nasty, brutish, and short". Anything beyond that requires a sustained miracle of human ingenuity, along with an extremely congenial environment which grows ever more obviously improbable as our knowledge of the universe advances, and which is almost as fragile and delicate as we are and could easily, by random coincidence of forces set in motion long before our first forebears came into existence, be upset entirely and spill everything we were, are, and could ever hope to be, by the wayside, without even noticing. Mostly we choose to concentrate on the miracle, which is how it should be, not least because our believing in it is the only reason it exists. But there's value in someone seeing it clearly for what it is, if only because there's no other way for us to really understand how improbably amazing we are.
        lawpoop 11y ago
        I wasn't thinking so much as the 'creator' aspect of it, thanks for pointing that out. But as far as equality, nastiness, brutishness, shortness, and amazingness, they are value judgements that originate from human beings. Insofar as the universe being a nightmarish phantasmagoria in most places and continued human existence a 'good' thing on the order of a miracle, those are perceptions of mind, not objective realities. That is, if the scientific revolution in the West has disabused us of fairy-tale notions of love, mercy, equality from a Creator, simply by doing away with the creator, it does not follow that that leaves only misery, horror, desolation, etc. in their absence. The Eastern philosophers remind us that such dualities of good/bad, love/hate, bliss/horror, are projections of mind onto reality, not states of the universe. If you get rid of one, you have necessarily gotten rid of the other, because they are interdependent, like two sides of a coin. The actual reality is neutral.
  - philh 11y ago
    What does it even mean to say someone's flaws are "insignificant compared to the magnitude of his thought"? Those two things don't seem like they can be put on the same scale in order to compare them. What are you two disagreeing about? I kind of feel like it's "he had flaws, and he thought well; I like him" versus "he had more flaws than you make it sound".
    - panzagl 11y ago
      The common flaws listed for Lovecraft are his writing style and his racism, and it's usually the latter that people tend to bring up to discredit him. The applicability of his flaws to his ideas is usually a tar pit that unfortunately has become associated with the "feminism/SJW/gamergate" conflict within sci fi fandom, which means people often jump to bash/defend him prematurely.
    - cjslep 11y ago
      > What are you two disagreeing about? I think we are both supporters of Lovecraft, but I just wanted to say that sometimes when his racism shows it isn't insignificant: to understand the fear he is applying the reader needs to know what racist people of that time feared (ex: voodo). EDIT: To be clear, I am not trying to say ALL of his fear-invoking was through racism. In some stories during some of the buildup of terror, the reader might miss out if unaware.
      - armitron 11y ago
        Totally misguided assumption and also entirely wrong. Read through his letters published by Arkham house instead of making up stories out of thin air. I suggest you start with Volume IV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Lovecraft_IV_(1932%E2%80%931934) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Love...)
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    Everyone has flaws. Viewing the entirity of one's accomplishments constrained through the lens of one flaw is absurd and unsupported by evidence. In other words, there is no evidential reason whatsoever to suppose that the larger fears he played off of categorically stemmed from racism. Criticism of that nature is unscientific and irrational, based on nothing more than arguments of the form, "it seems to me.." Further, making such an argument is inherently a moral absolutist position. You are imposing the cultural mores of your own society on a very different society from another time and place -- and ironically, condemning Lovecraft for having done exactly that. It is, at the very least, hypocrisy.
    - cjslep 11y ago
      Wow, so I think you must have really set up a really flammable strawman for me, really tried to read into what I said, or mistaken me for someone else. All I was trying to say is his racism is occasionally (story-dependent) not insignificant because for a reader to fully appreciate the fears Lovecraft is invoking, the reader needs the capability to understand the fears racists had (such as voodoo). You are trying to make me sound like I am saying Lovecraft was some sort of propaganda machine for the KKK; I am not. Lovecraft is about the slowly creeping rise of terror and horror in his stories; to miss a step along the way is to miss a subtle piece that makes his works enjoyable. I am suggesting the very thing you are accusing me of not doing: saying readers need to put aside their own cultural mores of their own society to view a very different society from another time and place.
      - armitron 11y ago
        You are projecting here. Lovecraft's "racism" has nothing to do with silly superstitions. He was a cultured, educated man and knew better than what you're assuming. You'd know that had you read even a small percentage of his letters. Which was also parent's point.
  - rafaeltorres 11y ago
    Agreed, not insignificant. Some context if you haven't read the details about Lovecreft's racism: http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/ http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-th...
krylon 11y ago
I very much agree. Compared to Lovecraft, most "horror authors" would have a hard time trying to scare a baby into giving up its candy.

armitron 11y ago

Flaws? Certainly, but surely insignificant compared to the magnitude of his thought. Lovecraft was a genius at least a century ahead of his time (Nietzsche is the only other figure that springs to mind). People still haven't come to terms or even realized what he was talking about, but if there's something we're blindly racing towards it's that "ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth".

cjslep 11y ago
I wouldn't say insignificant. To fully appreciate some of his works, the reader needs to understand the racist mindset he had and the larger fears he was playing off of that stemmed from racism. Do dismiss his flaws would be a disservice for readers and his works alike.
- panzagl 11y ago
  Lovecraft's genius was in taking science at face value and stripping away the sentimentality. You want an infinite universe? Then don't be surprised when some random cosmic event wipes humanity away. You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. In many ways his views remind me of PG's 'Taboos' essay- we can't really come to grips with the thought of a super-volcano wiping us out tomorrow so we just kind of keep going with our lives.
  - lawpoop 11y ago
    > You want to say humans came from the ooze? Then you can't really say we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator. Why not? Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. And anyways, his Bible believing audience section would have believed that God created humankind from dirt, yet still loved them, equally.
    - hackercomplex 11y ago
      > Surely an infinite universe that contained infinite horror would also contain infinite bliss, ecstasy, and love on scales only previously imagined by the Brahmin. I think it scales, but it's not always obvious how to deploy into production. It takes patience, practice, determination, and the willingness to read the docs. I recommend compiling from source with the Buddhist "Pali Cannon".
      - panzagl 11y ago
        I think thermodynamics would state that it doesn't scale.
    - aaronem 11y ago
      > Why not? Because "we're all equal in the eyes of the Creator" requires a Creator. Take that away and you end up with Hobbes: "nasty, brutish, and short". Anything beyond that requires a sustained miracle of human ingenuity, along with an extremely congenial environment which grows ever more obviously improbable as our knowledge of the universe advances, and which is almost as fragile and delicate as we are and could easily, by random coincidence of forces set in motion long before our first forebears came into existence, be upset entirely and spill everything we were, are, and could ever hope to be, by the wayside, without even noticing. Mostly we choose to concentrate on the miracle, which is how it should be, not least because our believing in it is the only reason it exists. But there's value in someone seeing it clearly for what it is, if only because there's no other way for us to really understand how improbably amazing we are.
      - lawpoop 11y ago
        I wasn't thinking so much as the 'creator' aspect of it, thanks for pointing that out. But as far as equality, nastiness, brutishness, shortness, and amazingness, they are value judgements that originate from human beings. Insofar as the universe being a nightmarish phantasmagoria in most places and continued human existence a 'good' thing on the order of a miracle, those are perceptions of mind, not objective realities. That is, if the scientific revolution in the West has disabused us of fairy-tale notions of love, mercy, equality from a Creator, simply by doing away with the creator, it does not follow that that leaves only misery, horror, desolation, etc. in their absence. The Eastern philosophers remind us that such dualities of good/bad, love/hate, bliss/horror, are projections of mind onto reality, not states of the universe. If you get rid of one, you have necessarily gotten rid of the other, because they are interdependent, like two sides of a coin. The actual reality is neutral.
- philh 11y ago
  What does it even mean to say someone's flaws are "insignificant compared to the magnitude of his thought"? Those two things don't seem like they can be put on the same scale in order to compare them. What are you two disagreeing about? I kind of feel like it's "he had flaws, and he thought well; I like him" versus "he had more flaws than you make it sound".
  - panzagl 11y ago
    The common flaws listed for Lovecraft are his writing style and his racism, and it's usually the latter that people tend to bring up to discredit him. The applicability of his flaws to his ideas is usually a tar pit that unfortunately has become associated with the "feminism/SJW/gamergate" conflict within sci fi fandom, which means people often jump to bash/defend him prematurely.
  - cjslep 11y ago
    > What are you two disagreeing about? I think we are both supporters of Lovecraft, but I just wanted to say that sometimes when his racism shows it isn't insignificant: to understand the fear he is applying the reader needs to know what racist people of that time feared (ex: voodo). EDIT: To be clear, I am not trying to say ALL of his fear-invoking was through racism. In some stories during some of the buildup of terror, the reader might miss out if unaware.
    - armitron 11y ago
      Totally misguided assumption and also entirely wrong. Read through his letters published by Arkham house instead of making up stories out of thin air. I suggest you start with Volume IV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Lovecraft_IV_(1932%E2%80%931934) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Letters_of_H._P._Love...)
- pjlegato 11y ago
  Everyone has flaws. Viewing the entirity of one's accomplishments constrained through the lens of one flaw is absurd and unsupported by evidence. In other words, there is no evidential reason whatsoever to suppose that the larger fears he played off of categorically stemmed from racism. Criticism of that nature is unscientific and irrational, based on nothing more than arguments of the form, "it seems to me.." Further, making such an argument is inherently a moral absolutist position. You are imposing the cultural mores of your own society on a very different society from another time and place -- and ironically, condemning Lovecraft for having done exactly that. It is, at the very least, hypocrisy.
  - cjslep 11y ago
    Wow, so I think you must have really set up a really flammable strawman for me, really tried to read into what I said, or mistaken me for someone else. All I was trying to say is his racism is occasionally (story-dependent) not insignificant because for a reader to fully appreciate the fears Lovecraft is invoking, the reader needs the capability to understand the fears racists had (such as voodoo). You are trying to make me sound like I am saying Lovecraft was some sort of propaganda machine for the KKK; I am not. Lovecraft is about the slowly creeping rise of terror and horror in his stories; to miss a step along the way is to miss a subtle piece that makes his works enjoyable. I am suggesting the very thing you are accusing me of not doing: saying readers need to put aside their own cultural mores of their own society to view a very different society from another time and place.
    - armitron 11y ago
      You are projecting here. Lovecraft's "racism" has nothing to do with silly superstitions. He was a cultured, educated man and knew better than what you're assuming. You'd know that had you read even a small percentage of his letters. Which was also parent's point.
- rafaeltorres 11y ago
  Agreed, not insignificant. Some context if you haven't read the details about Lovecreft's racism: http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/ http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-th...

krylon 11y ago

I very much agree. Compared to Lovecraft, most "horror authors" would have a hard time trying to scare a baby into giving up its candy.