Lovecraft, H P - Celephais

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 97.6KB 4 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Celephais

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written early Nov 1920

Published May 1922 in The Rainbow, No. 2, p. 10-12.

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy

peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward

distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his

name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural

for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the

indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind

him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways

of the people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote

was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to

himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the

more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe

them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst

they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness

the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience

failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep,

amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories

and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-

formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with

the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted

hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging

murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of

shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick

forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that

world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of

the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen

generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. It was moonlight,

and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the

terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the village. The

village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to

wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or

death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side

broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though

summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove

an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal.

Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lovecraft, H P - Celephais.pdf

共4页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - Celephais

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: