The Call of Cthulhu

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. 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 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.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.

I Have a Special Plan for This World

I first learned the facts from a lunatic
In a dark and quiet room that smelled of
stale time and space
There are no people--nothing at all like that--
The human phenomenon is but the sum
Of densely coiled layers of illusion
Each of which winds itself upon the supreme insanity
That there are persons of any kind
When all there can be is mindless mirrors
Laughing and screaming as they parade about
in an endless dream

But when I asked the lunatic what it was
That saw itself within these mirrors
As they marched endlessly in stale time and space
He only rocked and smiled
Then he laughed and screamed
And in his black and empty eyes
I saw for a moment--as in a mirror--
A formless shade of divinity
In flight from its stale infinity
Of time and space and the worst of all
of this world's dreams--
My special plan for the laughter and the screams