Lovecraft, H P - He

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by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 11 Aug 1925

Published September 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3, P. 373-80.

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my

vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for

poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist

endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and

waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that

rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror

and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in

the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids

rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds

and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the

shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird

harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music,

and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious

and half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so

dear to my fancy-narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick

blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded

sedans and paneled coaches - and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished

things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time a poet.

But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor and

alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had

hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the

flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes,

shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who

could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green

lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and

ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to

breathe before - the unwhisperable secret of secrets - the fact that this city of stone and

stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and

Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly

embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it

was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something

of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the

streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of

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Lovecraft, H P - He

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