Michel Houellebecq

Was I capable of being happy in solitude? I didn’t think so. Was I capable of being happy in general? That’s the kind of question, I think, that is best not asked.

I will end my life unhappy, cantankerous and alone, and I will have deserved it.

happiness today is nothing but an old dream, the past conditions for its existence are simply no longer being fulfilled.

My own professional aspirations were less clearly defined, and that meant failure was less visible, but I still had a quite distinct feeling that I was a failure by now.

To tell the truth I was in the same situation, apart from the fact that my workload wasn’t excessive, and basically everyone was in the same situation; our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut. That’s probably also why the friendships of our youth, the ones we make during our time as students and which are our only true friendships, never survive into adulthood: we avoid seeing them so as not to be confronted by witnesses to our crushed hopes, the evidence of our defeat.

Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. And this is another thing that curdles the blood when one discovers Lovecraft’s universe. The deaths of his heroes have no meaning.

Lovecraft’s terror is rigorously material. But, it is quite possible, given the free interplay of cosmic forces, that Great Cthulhu possesses abilities and powers to act that far exceed ours. Which, a priori, is not particularly reassuring at all.

by introducing
materialism into the heart of fear and fantasy, HPL created a new genre. It is no longer a question of believing or not believing, as in certain vampire or werewolf tales; there is no possible reinterpretation, there is no escape. There exists no horror less psychological, less debatable.

And if he refused all sexual allusions in his work, it was first and foremost because he felt such allusions had no place in his aesthetic universe.

HPL’s writings have but one aim: to bring the reader to a state of fascination. The only human sentiments he is interested in are wonderment and fear. He constructs his universe upon these and these alone. It is clearly a limitation, but a conscious, deliberate one. And authentic creativity cannot exist without a certain degree of self-imposed blindness.