Lovecraft, H P - The Silver Key

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The Silver Key

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1926

Published January 1929 in Weird Tales, Vol. 13, No. 1, p. 41-49, 144.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time

he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient

cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as

middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at

last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past

the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in

Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken

under the moon.

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning

philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the

processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had

forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no

difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no

cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious

reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly

ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and

childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of

meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something

and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or

existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of

those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to

escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized

associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight,

they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find

wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had failed

to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he

lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the

illusions of our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and

emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate

souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or

dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with

its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his

dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.

The Silver Key

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless

all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those

pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter

they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw

that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less

worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own

lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see

that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of

consistency or inconsistency.

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him

by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to

promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty,

the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth

which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to

the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown

fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how

solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their

boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might

have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites and

emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even

more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and

that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony

with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little

spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and

ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage

to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for

every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred

them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that

their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled

with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that

which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of

license and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor

sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with

which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the

idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off

priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that

which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and

obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness

and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted

with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore

and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those

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摘要：

TheSilverKeyTheSilverKeybyH.P.LovecraftWritten1926PublishedJanuary1929inWeirdTales,Vol.13,No.1,p.41-49,144.WhenRandolphCarterwasthirtyhelostthekeyofthegateofdreams.Priortothattimehehadmadeupfortheprosinessoflifebynightlyexcursionstostrangeandancientcitiesbeyondspace,andlovely,unbelievablegardenlands...

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Lovecraft, H P - The Silver Key

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