#cathr

We are crazed mimics of the natural prowling about for a peace that will never be ours. And the medium in which we circulate is that of the supernatural, a dusky element of horror that obtains for those who believe in what should be and should not be. This is our secret quarter. This is where we rave with insanity on the level of metaphysics, fracturing reality and breaking the laws of life

To awaken from such a dream is to lose your freedom from yourself and return to an onerous embodiment where consciousness is a tragedy and you cannot soar unscathed within an atmosphere of death. You can only die.

“Thomas Ligotti has some soul-scourging stuff to say about this in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race — raising the question: What would an abandonment of the intuitive certainty that man is metaphysically free really entail? It’s an easy thing to deny glibly and intellectually, but to really believe oneself to be a perfect puppet — which unspeakable depths of psychotic strangeness would that plumb?”

I don’t know if it matters whether I’m ultimately known for the stories or the notorious breviary of nihilism. Oddly enough, I’ve always thought of The Conspiracy against the Human Race as a kind of inspirational, quasi-self-help book. Seriously. And for my pains, a number of readers and reviewers have blithely said that having written The Conspiracy Against the Human I would be a hypocrite and all around inauthentic being not to kill myself. Something similar was said about J.-K. Huysmans following the publication of his novel A rebours. I believe it was Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly who, in a newspaper review of A rebours, wrote that Huysmans had but two options after publishing that book: the muzzle of a gun or the foot of the cross. Huysmans choose the foot of the cross, but not until he published a novel focusing on Satanism. Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote the same thing about Baudelaire in an earlier essay, but the author of Fleurs du mal didn’t make a move either way. Naturally, plenty of critics and biographers have asserted a deathbed confession of Catholic faith by Baudelaire. They were wise to the fact that no one could prove them wrong, of course. In nineteenth-century France, Catholic writers were given considerable latitude in purveying what otherwise might be considered fairly degenerate subject matter. They were Catholic, after all, so they had license to depict the ravages of the most titillating sinfulness. Of all the French Catholics, I admire the horror writer Petrus Borel, also known as The Lycanthrope, who said he was a papist because he couldn’t be a cannibal. I’m not sure if those who said that as the author of Conspiracy I should commit suicide knew that such a statement was long famed. However, I did know the game, so their observation or demand failed to faze me.