#27 The Silver Key- H.P. Lovecraft
This wonderful story by Lovecraft, narrated as many of his
tales are, by the fictitious occultist Randolph Carter. Carter is either caught in or waking up from
a deep dream state (the details of his dreams while interesting are only
important if you read the longer companion piece). He waxes philosophic about the differences
between reality and imagination and within those realms truth and falsehoods. What’s more real, earthly myths or ethereal
dreams?
Carter “could not escape from the delusion that life has a
meaning apart from that which men dream into it.”
Many believe that there is a level of reality I dreams that
science has yet to adequately explore. In
fact our brains react identically to dreaming of an image and actually seeing
that image. If our brains believe what we see in our dreams is as real as what
we see with our eyes, then why can’t we visit, in our dreams, the past or
worlds in other dimensions? Why cant
dreams be just as tangible as our awakened experiences? And to true dreamers, reality is actually
more false and hollow than the “reality” of our nightly nocturnal
wanderings…“with the dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not
believe in anything…”
According to Randolph Carter, all we need to provide is
context, as no thought or idea can exist in an absolute vacuum. “…even humor is
empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or
inconsistency”
As always Lovecraft’s use of language is intoxicating and
the philosophical questions he poses are far more interesting to me than some stories
steeped in uncreative realism or the mundane slices-of-life many authors
present as fiction.
What better way to describe Lovecraft’s style than to use
his own description:
“…he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the
notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace.”
Notable Passages: “Wonder had gone away, and he had
forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which
there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of
inward dreamings.”
“calm lasting beauty
comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its
worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.”
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