this decay of cities

''on one of my early travels in the libyan sahara, i nearly passed by an abandoned and nameless city which i would never have known had existed if my guide, a tuareg camel-man had not pointed it out. it was a rock-built city enclosed within a high wall buttressed with round turrets and pierced by a single gate way. ...

''i was unable to find a single clue as to who built this place, for there was nothing resembling a domestic artefact to be seen, ... my experiance in the fezzan goes to show that there are still corners of this teeming world where the modern traveler can share, if only in a modest manner, the personal thrill of those early explorers who first saw the magnificent lost cities of antiquity; ...

''whether this decay of cities and of the civilizations they represented is an inevitable law of history is, of course debatable, and it would be rash to jump to conclusions, although where there is a contemporary account of what life was like at the end of an era, we are in a better position to see the forces of change and decay at work. ...

''this book is largely the result of my travels, which have in many cases been journeys of exploration. what struck me most forcibly on the very earliest of my expeditions and what eventually led me to read the works of my predecessors was the strangeness of large and manifestly once populous cities standing in ruins in the middle of nowhere. ...

''these are questions which the thoughtful traveller, whether standing in the midst of the ruins of timgad in algeria, or of verulainium britian, is bound to ask himself; ...

''it is in this spirit of a search rather than of an archaeological tour that i have tried to describe the following ten cities, two each in the five main historic areas of the world and each typifying the rise and fall of a vanished civilization.''

james wellard, the search for lost cities.

abandoned and nameless city via dailygrail.

skull of zenig

''you have come to see the great ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. ... when barzai the wise climbed hatheg-kla to see the greater ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. the other gods were there, and they did what was expected. zenig of aphorat sought to reach unknown kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom i need not name."

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

musical spheres

''trembling in waves that golden whisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. ... it was a song, but not the song of any voice. night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and nyarlathotep and the other gods were born. ''

h.p.lovecraft, the dream quest of unknown kadath.

autumn poison

''dear a.w.:--what you say of the fascination of autumn is very true--and i have always felt it despite the menace of physical discomfort it brings ... the woods, the fields, the hillside orchards laden with fruit, the fields of sheaved corn, the old stone walls overgrown with flaming vines, ... at this second i am sitting on an old new england stone wall under an ancient elm, with a squirrel chattering nearby and a lovely profusion of poison ivy [to which i am oddly immune despite a cuticular hypersensitiveness in other directions] climbing among the mossy rocks. ... it has been this way for 250 years--and may the gods keep it so [by virtue of ownership by large, conservative institutions] as many more.''


h.p.lovecraft, selected letters--iii.

fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admited on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


''when you design a garden, it raises basic questions. what is nature, how do we fit into it, and how should we shape it where we can, both physically and visually. some of these questions are practical, others are philosophical, and the latter may not occur to us while laying out a garden, but they are implied...

''thus the garden as a microcosm of the universe as a whole is quite a familiar idea ... hence the "garden of cosmic speculation." a set of five areas which have been shaped to celebrate some aspects of what we now know about the underlying forces and forms of nature. ...

''but i start with a constant inspiration, the universe as guide and measure, because that was the idea that initiated the design. cosmic passion the desire both to know and to relate to the universe, is one of the strongest drives in sentient creatures, on a par with those which exercise novelists: sex, money, and power ...

''an art fitting to the cosmos, what i would call "cosmogenic art", does not always take nature as beneficient or beyond improvement. ... for instance, instead of measuring days and minutes by wobbly turns of the earth, time has been put on a cosmic footing and one second in is now measured at 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium atom. feet, inches, meters--all weights will soon go the this way, as the universe, not man [as protagoras claimed], becomes "the measure of all things!"

''recently more and more black holes have been found, and some physicists hold the uncanny idea that the universe as a whole can be conceived as one. ... swallowing, destroying, black invisible, creating like a mother? "because she brings all large bodies into being might her appropriate name, and metaphor, be not "black hole" but "invisibilia"?

''it could be invisibilia, the nourishing eater of all things, whose stream of energizing particles has been seen to shoot out into space a plasma jet some ten thousand light years long.''

charles jencks, the garden of cosmic speculations.

landscape piece

''the scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain.

''beyond the scarred trunks in the background illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw full daylight.

''and nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, i could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.''

h.p.lovecraft, the lurking fear.

demeaculumn

[john pawson]

"and i saw that all the travellers were converging ... at the top of a high hill, ... where perched a great white church ... the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church ... to the trap door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit ... i followed dumbly down the foot worn steps and into the dark suffocating crypt ... into a venerable tomb ... and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase ... a narrow spiral staircase ... that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill ... it was a silent shocking descent ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the festival.