Messrs. Lovecraft and Burns
I.
My love is like a red, red rose ...
For many people - indeed, we can almost certainly say most people - this will be the line written by the 18th-century Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns with which they are most familiar [1].
But for fans of the 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft, whose fiction can best be described as a form of weird realism [2] founded upon a philosophy known as cosmicism [3], it's a later line from the same poem that most resonates: Till a' the seas gang dry.
For this line inspired (and provided a title for) one of Lovecraft's best short stories, written in collaboration with his (then teenage) friend R. H. Barlow in 1935 [4].
II.
The story consists of two parts:
The first describes events that took place on Earth from a few millennia to a few million years after the present day. As the global climate becomes increasingly warm, oceans and bodies of fresh water are slowly disappearing and groups of semi-barbarous people, faced with extinction, are retreating towards the poles in order to try and survive.
The second part starts in a small village in the desert. There is only one man left in the village; the old woman who had been his only companion, having recently passed away. The young man, named Ull, journeys in search of other people using his knowledge of old legends.
After a few days, exhausted and dehydrated, he finds a small settlement.
Ull enters one of the houses, but finds nothing but a dusty old skeleton. Despondent, he starts searching for water and comes across a well that, miraculously, hasn't completely dried up. Trying to reach the rope so as to pull up the bucket, he falls into the well and dies.
After his death - and it transpires that he was, in fact, the last man on Earth - all record of human presence is completely erased. Two of the final passages of the story encapsulate Lovecraft's cosmicism and are worth reproducing in full here:
"And now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form - and how titanically meaningless it all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity - how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools of the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions - or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever.
The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led."
As a reader of Nietzsche, I obviously love this and it reminds me, of course, of the famous fable in which the latter "perfectly distils nihilism's
most disquieting suggestion: that from the original emergence of
organic sentience to the ultimate extinction of human sapience 'nothing
will have happened'" [5].
Man is a clever beast - no doubt about it - but our cleverness won't save us and human knowledge remains just a passing phenomenon when considered cosmically. As Lovecraft is repeatedly at pains to stress, the vast empty universe is entirely indifferent to our existence and we are entirely at the mercy of forces that are beyond our control and full understanding.
Notes
[1] Robert Burns, 'A Red, Red Rose' (1794). Originally a song based on traditional sources, it is often referred to as 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose' and published as a poem. Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.
[2] The term weird fiction refers to a sub-genre of speculative literature originating in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, which either rejects or radically reinterprets the traditional elements of supernatural horror writing in an attempt to inspire more than merely fear. Lovecraft is closely associated with this sub-genre.
The object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman used the term Weird Realism for the title of his study on Lovecraft and philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).
[3] Cosmicism - about which I shall say more later in the post - is a philosophy developed by Lovecraft in his fiction. In brief, it is both an antitheism and an antihumanism, promoting the idea that there is no loving divine presence in the universe and that mankind's temporary existence upon the Earth has zero significance.
[4] H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow, 'Till A' the Seas', in The Californian (1935). The story can be read online at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive: click here.
[5] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 205.
Brassier, like me, refers to Nietzsche's fable in the essay 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense', which can be found in Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press, 1979), p. 79.
