Miscellany No. 2

Here is a quote from The Lurker at the Threshold (Ballantine Books, 1971, 1976), which August Derleth wrote mostly on his own but tried to pass off as a collaboration with his master, the recently deceased H.P. Lovecraft. The character Dr. Lapham speaks:

I often think [. . .] how fortunate most men are in their inability to correlate all the knowledge at their disposal. [. . .] If the common man were even to suspect the cosmic grandeur of the universe, if he were to have a glimpse of the awesome depths of outer space, he would very likely either go mad or reject such knowledge in preference to superstation. (p. 152)

This passage very obviously echoes the opening paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu":

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. [. . .] but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I guess Derleth loved Lovecraft's words so much that he wanted to make them his own. There are some problems with the thinking of both men, however. For one, we already "suspect the cosmic grandeur of the universe" and we already "have a glimpse of the awesome depths of outer space." After all, we have minds and imaginations. Moreover, we have eyes in which to look into the night sky, something we have done since the beginning of time. How little confidence Derleth, a man of faith, seems to have had in us. Likewise Lovecraft, a man of no faith, or, alternatively, of a faith in nothing. We don't actually go mad looking into the depths of space or contemplating the nature of reality or our place in the universe. We instead feel awe and wonder. We reach into the heavens and touch the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute. We come in contact with the great mystery. You could have seen that for yourself a few weeks back when the first photograph of a black hole came out. Here is a thing scarier than Cthulhu and bigger than our solar system, its accretion cloud like a fiery iris and the hole itself an immense pupil through which we might gaze into the essential facts of the physical universe. In contemplating this thing, nobody went insane. Instead we laughed and smiled and wondered and felt awe.

Conspiracy theorists think the same thing about humanity: that if we were to know the truth, we would go mad. And so the shadow government of their imaginations hides from us the truth about flying saucers. (I know of a Squatcher who believes the U.S. Army is hiding the truth about Bigfoot. Why would it? What would be the point?) I guess they imagine that we would react in the same way that listeners of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" or the people in Earle Bergey's cover illustration for Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully react, with fear and panic (the names of the moons of Mars). Again, I think these people underestimate us. After all, the one recorded signal that some people believe to have been evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization is called the "Wow! Signal," not the "Run For Your Lives! Signal."

Anyway, there have been so, so many articles lately about flying saucers, extraterrestrial life, and aliens zipping around the universe, but, alas, nobody has showed up yet. I suspect nobody will anytime soon. Believers in Nothing and the religion of Scientism seem ready to cry about it. If only there were some comfort for them. I also think that we should consider the possibility that we are completely alone in the universe. I know that idea bothers a lot of people. In fact, it may be the more likely thing that would drive them into madness, a madness of despair. But are we really alone? Or do we feel awe and wonder and contemplate mysteries because we are not?

Text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley