On the train lately, I've been reading MR James stories but I mixed it up a little bit a few days ago and read HP Lovecraft's "The Festival" again. I'd totally forgotten it's a Christmas story.
As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, but kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea-taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted, unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.
This is one of several stories, most famously The Shadow Over Innsmouth, in which the horror is intimately related to the narrator. Revelations of his own heritage slowly increase his anxiety and give meaning to his actions beyond those directly ascribed by the narrator.
As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.
He hangs back, yes, but what drew him this far? The real horror is unstated, that he may not be in control of himself, or he may not understand his own motives and essential nature. It's a tormenting, existential problem.
I suppose the story would be a good example to present to someone who wants to know why HP Lovecraft is considered great. The simultaneous love and fear he evidently felt for old New England is endlessly compelling.
. . . endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.
I get that feeling often where I live now in Nara, Japan. There's no shortage of old buildings around here, some hundreds of years old, "scattered at all angles". I don't quite get the same impression of malevolence that comes through in the impressions in Lovecraft's fiction. I haven't been everywhere in Japan, so there may well be such places, but mostly the places in Japan feel sleepy and sedate, a contrast to the always hustling and caffeinated people. I've been thinking lately of how much this place will change once the diminishing population and economy will finally loosen immigration policies. When I came to Japan, I felt happy to be leaving a dying U.S. to come to a place resting on a more solid foundation. Yet, even then I suspected my perception wasn't accurate and now I can see how this place is dying, too. I think a lot about the tragedy of Japan's weak English education system, how necessary the language will probably be to these kids who are dissecting English grammar like frogs in a science lab; a weird, alien curiosity. To-morrow that frog will be Cthulhu.
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