There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which my compatriot and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness ...We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.
Great holes secretly are digged to cover up that which is to be forgotten or unearth that which waits to be discovered, where earth's pores ought to suffice, things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. I digress however as memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal... But unmoved, he cried: "If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. That man should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. For destiny is only that we are promised to one day see that from beyond which dogs howl at after dark, and cats pick up their ears after midnight for. Therefore i ask wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? ... Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?" When the last days bored down and in and were upon me, and the ugly trifles of undirected, unassisted, and disadvantaged existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered to mineself on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.
History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and "unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author.
- H.P.Lovecraft
