Okay so in the fictional story Azathoth can’t write, can’t sing, can’t do anything, can’t dance, can’t walk, can’t even try to talk. And dreamed up this disgusting space-time continuum probably better known as Yog-Sothoth. And we have to live in that purposeless mess while being picked apart by Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathothep and Cthulhu, i.e. by life and by death and by dreams of the world’s end.
That worked as a metaphor for how the naturalistic early modern worldview was shocking to the traditional interventionist theology and culture. The perfect Lovecraft quote:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Other writers who have tackled the absurdity of how we’re just a speck among specks of rotten milk staining the abyssal canvas include Kierkegaard, who decided that the challenge of believing in a purpose just made it all the more precious, and Camus, who reckoned that the rocks tumbling us to mush day after day in hell were a precious source of joy.
Lovecraft’s quote continues:
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Yeah, we went mad is what we did. Death camps and atom bombs and frequent flyer miles. We’re living in a mad world that makes century-old pulp horror stories look like a quaint and cozy diversion by comparison.
Time to sober up and make things right and treat each other well.