Once again touching back to former posts I just wanna briefly express my appreciation and fascination for what has become one of my absolute favourite authors; H.P. Lovecraft. Moving my way through his complete works on my Kindle, I came across a short story yesterday, one of many that I am re-reading, which is definitely one of my favourite of his tales; The Colour Out of Space. As in many of his other tales it involves ordinary people who come into contact with cosmic forces and entities beyond grasping and control and as a result, are usually in gruesome and hideous fashion both mentally and physically destroyed. A key feature of Lovecraft's, is that he only always hints at what these forces are and what their effects are on us, leaving a lot of stuff open to the interpretation of the reader.
What Lovecraft and I share is an intense fascination of the unknown, most notably the deep oceans and outer space. In earlier posts I touched briefly on this fascination, as in the scene from Life of Pi, where the camera dives into the deep ocean and provides a brief glimpse into this astonishing world of mysteries, a journey my mind occasionally undertakes as well when staring into an ocean horizon. Or more tangibly in Kaikoura, New Zealand, when I was fortunate to observe two sperm whales resting on the surface before once again heading into the depths to feed in the darkness several kilometres below. To think of all the things that is going on right now so far away from the sunlight in untouched and unexplored chasms and abysses can really tickle the mind. Time that by infinity and you get a sense of what outer space is about. Here it is not even a joke, only a small, even ridicoulous amount of what's out there have been observed and documented by humans. So much could be out living personal legends that are far beyond the comprehension of us feeble beings. Touching back on the previous post about why even rocks can potentially be interesting, think about all the rocks that are currently floating around in the vast sections of space between planets, maybe after previously have been a part of one or several planets that have now long gone. Hell, our own planet is made up of precisely such rocks, they are the ones that allegedly brought life to earth. But where did they come from? What journey brought them across the space into our solar system? What could they potentially be bringing with them?
Are you fascinated yet? If not, I will quote Lovecraft. In The Colour Out of Space he tells the story of precisely one such rock, a meteorite carrying something unknown, something out of space that ends up spelling disaster for the inhabitants of the plot where it lands. The way Lovecraft describes the meteorite excellently summarizes our mutual fascination with outer space:
"...that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside: that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force and entity.",
and again towards the end of the story:
"a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."
Although Lovecraft's examples are always highly dramatic, I too can sense the fathomlessness that space offers. The distances and objects out there are really beyond comprehension for us cosmically insignificant creatures, which only serves to make these "extra-cosmic gulfs" all the more fascinating.
