That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things-in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. They have hinted at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

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. (Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston) Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival… a survival of a hugely remote period when… consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity… forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds… -Algernon Blackwood The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

The tale of cthulhu