![]() For Lovecraft, his mother and his aunts, the years that followed were a long decline from what they liked to think had been an aristocratic lifestyle. His wealthy grandfather lost most of the family fortune in a business failure in 1900. Some of his attitudes may have come from his experience of downward social mobility. Lovecraft’s life was spent on the margins of society, eking out a small inheritance and scraping an uncertain living from journalism and amateur publishing. After years of mental illness, Sarah spent time in the same hospital, where in May 1921 she also died. A precocious, high-strung child, he was often unwell and suffered from attacks of nervous anxiety. Lovecraft’s early life was shaped by his grandfather, two maiden aunts,and his mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, with whom he formed what may have been his most enduring relationship. When Howard was three years old his father was confined in a psychiatric institution after a breakdown, probably linked to advancing syphilis, and died there five years later. Sometimes called “weird realism,” it is a disturbing vision with which Lovecraft would struggle throughout his life.īorn in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was well acquainted with the fragility of the human mind. The final result of scientific inquiry could well be that the universe is a lawless chaos. We can have no view of the scheme of things or our place in it, because there may be no such scheme. Lovecraft set out a view of things that animates pretty well everything he wrote thereafter: The human mind is an accident in the universe, which is indifferent to the welfare of the species. In this opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” first published in the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales in 1928, H.P. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ![]()
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