Lovecraft, H P - The Unnamable

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The Unnamable

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Sept 1923

Published July 1925 in Weird Tales, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 78-82.

We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an

autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable.

Looking toward the giant willow in the cemetery, whose trunk had nearly engulfed an

ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and

unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking from that hoary,

charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no

interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish

the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about

"unnamable" and "unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with

my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds

which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage, words, or

associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our

five senses or our intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or

spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct

doctrines of theology - preferably those of the Congregationalist, with whatever

modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.

With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the

East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's self-satisfied

deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective

experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not

so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a

placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs.

Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for

although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it

is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest

pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic recombinations

of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual

existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect.

With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects;

and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of

far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in

drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and

understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really

"unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to him.

Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the

complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon

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Lovecraft, H P - The Unnamable

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