Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Page #2

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to live as a gentleman with dignity and honesty and integrity

he read the literature of the 18th century and the early 19th century and said

"I want to be like those people I want to be like Alexander Pope"

who wrote poetry just for the love of it"

I've always had this subconscious feeling

that, everything since the 18th century is unreal or illusory

a sort of grotesque nightmare or a caricature"

Lovecraft learned a lot in his grandfather's house

in fact that all the learning that he had I think came from there

his schooling was intermittent at best apparently he had various of

nervous melody that had kept him out of school

this was a time before education was mandatory

you didn't have to send your child to school if you didn't want to

at the age of 8 he would became filled with burning love of chemistry

shortly there after that he discovered astronomy, which I think was an even more important influence he says

it was through astronomy that he gained a sense of the boundlessness of the universe

and the insignificance of humanity within the cosmos

there's a phrase that generally I only encountered it when talking when reading or talking with people like paleontologist or geologist

the kinds of "Deep Time" which is pretty alien to most people, most people tend to

think of history and terms ofyears

"Deep Time" is that time before, before the comprehension of man

the geological time

is a way of thinking about it where you are working on a time scale where you talk about things like mountains are pushed up in row, continent shift

spices evolve and became extinct

but it is not something you could process

humanity was limited to earth

which made humanity itself small and threatened and fragile, so because

he was a frightened and fragile being himself

he populated that emptiness with monsters

frequent visits to the attic gave Susie the impression that

her son was trying to hide from the world and others

that he was a vulnerable child and comfortable with himself

the relationship of Susie Lovecraft with her son was problematical at best

clearly she loved him but I think because of what had happened to her husband, Lovecraft's father who had died of syphilis

I think she developed some weird love-hate relationship with Lovecraft

called him hideous, said to a neighbor that he had hideous face and that's why

he wouldn't go outdoors much

Susie repeated these opinions enough times that her son actually grew to believe them

insecurity mixed with classical tendencies

segregated young Lovecraft from others his age

but this solitary childhood, only kindled his imagination

I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare

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