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oneirophreniaI recently picked up the new Penguin Classics edition of the selected works of Lord Dunsany, as edited by noted Lovecraft/fantasy scholar S. T. Joshi. Despite the fact that Dunsany had such a profound influence on HPL, it's kind of surprising that heretofore I hadn't read all that much by the man--just "The Gods of Pegana" and related myth-cycle works which one simply must read if one is a Lovecraft scholar. Fortunately, this lovely new book is available, and I quote to you now in its entirety one of the loveliest little prose poems I have ever encountered. No better account of the writer's attitude toward life can ever be found.
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquillity deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things--small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings--and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.
====
What a truly melancholy, yet truly Classical, piece of writing. Reading that makes one feel the same helplessness before the immensity of time and the universe that Lovecraft so often evoked, with a much more vicious rather than wistful or melancholic turn of phrase, in his own fiction...and yet, unlike HPL, Dunsany holds that even in the face of Oblivion something, however small and fragile, may survive to wash ashore on some future shingle, and bring with it the faintest legend of the tiny ship from which it broke loose. A rather beautiful sentiment, and one definitely touched with the necessary brushstrokes of doom to make it all the more poignant. God, it's so fucking goth it makes Robert Smith look like Justin Timberlake! I really should stop reading the Baudelaire when feeling overly-stressed from work....
I'm bloody tired as hell right now, but I think I must remix this piece sometime in the near future.
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquillity deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things--small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings--and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.
====
What a truly melancholy, yet truly Classical, piece of writing. Reading that makes one feel the same helplessness before the immensity of time and the universe that Lovecraft so often evoked, with a much more vicious rather than wistful or melancholic turn of phrase, in his own fiction...and yet, unlike HPL, Dunsany holds that even in the face of Oblivion something, however small and fragile, may survive to wash ashore on some future shingle, and bring with it the faintest legend of the tiny ship from which it broke loose. A rather beautiful sentiment, and one definitely touched with the necessary brushstrokes of doom to make it all the more poignant. God, it's so fucking goth it makes Robert Smith look like Justin Timberlake! I really should stop reading the Baudelaire when feeling overly-stressed from work....
I'm bloody tired as hell right now, but I think I must remix this piece sometime in the near future.
