• Enkrod@feddit.org
    44·
    1 month ago

    If you look at Polaris

    still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.

    you might see The Colour Out of Space,

    The colour, […] was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.
    […]
    No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way.

    and hear The Music of Erich Zann.

    Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

    • redhorsejacket@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 month ago

      Heh, glad someone else immediately thought, “Well, that’s Lovecraftian”. Also, man, I should dust off my collection of his fiction. Abominable human being, but his writing sure is evocative, if a touch on the purple side.

      • Enkrod@feddit.org
        3·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, no, bad writer, great writing. I never realized how immensely quotable and eloquent short excerpts of his works are, until I looked up those specific quotes.

        If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all known comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes—and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently.

        The language is just… sublime, his vocabulary is such a vast vessel that I - as a non-native speaker - am happy enough to understand when read but will likely never be able to command myself.