Quintessential

Everything in the universe is running down, falling away, disappearing: childhood, meaning, time: entropy. Knowledge increaseth our sorrow. Are there other beings, with wider sympathies, deeper insights, than our own limited range of perceptions? Does it matter? To us, to them? As flies to wanton boys. As we possess more unity and truth, more esse, than a stone, so may it not be the case that there are other belongs whose reality escapes us, whose truth transcends our own. whose knowledge of the cosmos and her laws is greater than ours…mankind: just a stage in, not the pinnacle of, creation?

In every place where human activity is interrupted, where there is a blank on the map, those ancient gods crouch huddled waiting to take back their place.  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up  such terrifying  vistas of reality, and of our frightening position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deathly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.  

We have finally been able to locate ourselves, set our co-ordinates with some degree of precision. But at the same time we oscillate on the edge of an abyss. Our increased awareness of our finitude has not lessened any the sense of infinite horizons. The same holds true for time, and not just for space: things millions of years old exist side-by-side with us; through the fissures in the architecture of time we obliquely note the presence of different timescapes. And this we find compelling, monstrous, fascinating, bizarre, and repulsive in equal measure.    

—-from H.P. Lovecraft

Something can represent multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. We intuit unity. Pure multiplicity, absolute contingency, is something the mind abhors. We must find a pattern to things and yet we do not know where this compulsion comes from. Is it a form of psychosis or our highest achievement?