The fear of unknown from the abyss of the soul to cosmic chaos
by Sandro D. Fossemò
Translation by Rossella Cirigliano
“Life and dreams are leaves of the same book:
reading them in order is living,
skimming through them is dreaming”.
reading them in order is living,
skimming through them is dreaming”.
(Arthur Schopenhauer)
When the master of the
ghost story M.R. James reads Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural
Horror in Literature”, he does not make out the deep meaning of the
term “cosmic” and naively ends up by ridiculing it to a friend of
his[1]. James makes a sensational mistake, for he does not realize
that adjective is the access key to the core of the fantastic
literature where man is often to face, with his own might only, an
awfully chaotic world and, for this, unlikely to be understood by
human rationality.
