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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6256923" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think we are largely on the same page, but I have trouble understanding what you are saying here.   The reference to Bertrand Russell I think I get, because I have elsewhere cited Russell as giving voice to Lovecraft's horrors in some of the fullest and powerful ways possible: "Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness."   Lovecraft was himself a big admirer of Russell, and you can see in Russell attempts to cope - in a way that Lovecraft's heroes try to cope - with the fantastic universe.As for not seeing what Russell and Lovecraft saw, and not being able to sympathize with it, I have a hard time thinking anything is at fault but a failure of imagination.  I don't think that the works lose power with time.  I remember encountering Lovecraft as a young adolescent, and contemplating the vast distances between the proton and the electron and the enormous spaces within my own body - things which I already intellectually knew but had never contemplated in an emotional context - and thinking what a thin wisp I was, hardly to have any substance at all, and immensely empty beyond all scope of my imagination and I felt as if I myself were dissolving, for there was a vast gulf opened up between what I knew myself to be on the basis of science, and the way I treated myself in my dysfunctional simian pride.   That vista remains available to any monkey that looks over the rim of the cosmos and sees what it actually is, and it will never stop being there and never I think be any less powerful as long as we remain human.I think I largely agree with this, though I think that you have to put it in context.  Lovecraft personifies Cthulhu in the particular way he does because himself had a deep and profound phobia of sea life.  Fish on a plate put him a state of horrors.   If you are the sort that can eat calamari, then perhaps a squid headed, dragon beast man is not fantastical enough to invoke the terror that it did for the writer himself and you'll need to substitute something you really are afraid of to capture that numinous and yet (for Lovecraft literally) gut wrenching horror.It's interesting though how well the concept of Ice Giants has been integrated into Lovecraftian horrors, by writers like say Stross, when as the embodiment of the heat death of the universe and writing them up to a far more cosmic scale than 'mere' fear of a long Winter (terrifying and relevant though that may be).As for Tolkien, the word 'magic' in Tolkien means something rather different than in Lovecraft.  It's possible in Tolkien to have a native power that doesn't originate from the 'The Enemy'.   In Tolkien there is a power and force of good as well as evil.   Tolkien's magic is also a form of 'sufficiently advanced technology' (witness how elves don't even understand the word 'magic', and correctly identify mankind's usage of it as labeling simply 'things I don't understand), but its not all inherently evil.   When Aragorn undergoes a dream journey to rescue Merry, Eowen, and Faramir - he's not putting himself under the power of darkness, but bringing light into the domain of darkness and conquering it.   Tolkien's heroes are often and can be superhuman, but their native power arises form their virtue and does not run entirely counter to being virtuous.  Though obliviously, and you might say this was the point, as in the case of Melkor and Sauron and Galadriel, having native power represents a danger and temptation in and of itself, and the Hobbits therefore find a peculiar but essential strength in weakness.  That is precisely my point.  In no sense is it really a triumph, save in the sense that Bertrand Russell appeals to, that it is better to go bravely into the gate of night than cowardly - though the same result ultimately is obtained by the valorous and the coward both.</blockquote>

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