The Maddening Need

H.P. Lovecraft -- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

When Randolph Carter sees a fabulous city in his dreams... it is empty.  There are descriptions of gardens and gables, of roofs and temples, but there is no mention of habitation.  Carter might consider himself the master of this metropolis, but it is a solitary sort of possession.  That which should be most solid in a city -- its physical architecture -- is here rendered as ephemeral, and that which should be fleeting and intangible (its rhythms of life and activity) is entirely absent.  Nevertheless, the vision has a powerful effect: "there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place."

Thus an exceedingly strange story begins with a description of beauty, loneliness, and the power of memory.  And it begins, too, with a challenge to the gods, though in some ways a subtle one.  Carter plans to go to Kadath -- the home of the gods -- and ask for more visions of his beautiful city, but he is warned by the priests "that not only had no man ever been to unknown Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhuat or Aldebaran."  And in attempting that journey he will risk encountering "that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach... the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth... who gnaws hungrily in conceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time..."

It is curious how Lovecraft gives Azathoth a title and implicit supernatural-political authority as "daemon sultan" yet simultaneously implies that he is an unstructured, insane, and almost random presence -- "that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity."  Perhaps this constitutes Lovecraft's attempt to negotiate the ultimate implications of an amoral universe.  If randomness is fundamental to the structure of the universe (and quantum physics provides all sorts of intriguing possibilities here) then is the universe, in a sense, insane?  Or does it merely obey laws that are unfathomable to the human mind, allowing daemon kings to rule over randomness in an ultimate paradox made to torment people like Randolph Carter?

But it's not all doom and gloom in this story... the zoogs are waiting in the enchanted wood!