Quotes from Homo Faber

The reader creates the writer, the writer creates the reader; between them they construct a cosmos that suits them best, and by so doing they overcome, in Manguel’s words, “the obstacles of geography, the finality of death.” Their joint enterprise is the making of the two worlds we inhabit as human beings, one in the flesh, the other in mind.

Man, says Thomas Carlyle, is symbol maker made conscious of himself as symbol maker, the only one of earth’s creatures (or at least the only one we know about) capable of traveling in time in a cosmos that suits him.

Einstein: "Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do…Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."

Cthulhu madness, Lovecratian magic

Phil Hine

• Cthulhu is all around us. It is a squid-thing, bestial, dragon-winged - a theriomorphic image, but such things are all around us, as trees, insects, plant life, and within us as bacterium, brooding viruses; born momentarily through the alchemical transformations taking place in my body even as I write....Unknown beings, with unknown purposes

• There's something gut-wrenching, exciting, awe-ful - romantic - about Lovecratian magic. .. Symbols everywhere - everything has become a symbol, and somehow, (to my mind at least), less real. Awesome experiences have had all the feeling boiled out of them, into short descriptions and lists - always more lists, charts, and attempts to banish the unknown with explanations, equations, abstract structures for other people to play in.

• Lovecratian magic is elemental. It has an immediate presence, and resonates with buried fears, longings, aspirations and dreams. The Great Old Ones and their kin can only ever be fragments of the mysterious, never to be codified or dried out for scholars to pick over