Depression and Art

[andrewducker]

A fantastic piece in The Guardian by Michel Houellebecq about HP Lovecraft, his life and how it affected his writing.  Worth reading if you have any interest in Lovecraft, depression or writing in general.

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

Now, here is Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937): "I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." We need a supreme antidote against all forms of realism.

Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure "Victorian fictions". All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.

Lovecraft was well aware of the distinctly depressing nature of his conclusions. As he wrote in 1918, "all rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life, and to decrease the sum total of human happiness. In some cases the truth may cause suicidal or nearly suicidal depression."

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I did come out of that piece feeling I'd learnt more about Houellebecq than I had about Lovecraft. Interesting piece, nonetheless, though other accounts lead me to believe that he's wrong, or at least misleading, on some points, e.g. Lovecraft's attitude to sex. H. says that L. 'evidently found all "direct erotic manifestations" repulsive', yet Lovecraft's wife described him as 'an adequately excellent lover'. This is probably an example of what H. goes on to talk about, Lovecraft's general misanthropy not replicating itself in the particular of his dealings with individuals.

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

Since the Library of America published its collection of Lovecraft recently, there's been a fair bit of mainstream consideration or re-consideration of HPL. I remember when I was a teeager and read him for the first time. I spent an afternoon at my local library trying to discover if any of the ancient civilizations HPL mentioned in "At the Mountains of Madness" had any reality in fact, in myth, or anywhere else.

As for suicide, I saw a quote years ago, from Nietzche I think, that went something like, "The thought of suicide has helped many a person through a bad night."

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I think it's possible to have a rational view and still maintain happiness. Most people get too caught up in the game that people matter though....

[sibelian.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. Good old HP Lovesauce and his existential hoopla. I might dust off a tome or two and delve...

:-)