The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including “everything happen… - Thomas Ligotti

But we isolate the nightmare by calling it imaginary and denying it a place in our real life; we anchor ourselves in a place far away from it, where such “realities” as God and Country rule the wavelengths; we distract ourselves from it by confining our minds to places where it is not; and we sublimate the nightmare by placing it in stories and paintings and other devisings that we may put away at will. If we neglected to do this, we would be living at all times in a world of nightmare... a world that was not meant to be and yet is so. And thus we conspire with ourselves and against ourselves to deny the most obvious facts of the nightmare—death, disease, damage, and derangement. The horror story, by obeying the terms of the nightmare, is a way that, deviously, some people use to think about the unthinkable, to face what we otherwise would not choose to look upon, and, more importantly, to control and give meaning to that which can neither be controlled nor harbors any meaning. It is a perverted mode of defending ourselves from what would demean and destroy us, from what cannot be helped and should never have been—life itself in all its inane grotesquerie. However, for all our efforts to overwrite what has been written, to remake what had been made, to change what cannot be changed, and accept what is unacceptable, we have succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. No matter how many paper monsters we face down, no matter how many nightmares we shake off, the best we can do is open the pages of Poe and recite—with a resigned and sardonic calm, if we can manage it—those words from “The Conqueror Worm” that tell us a story in which there is “much of Madness, and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot.”

The problem is this: Nature has assembled all these species on this planet. The human species is no more important than any other species on this planet. For some reason, man accorded himself a superior place in this scheme of things. He thinks that he is created for some grander purpose than, if I could give a crude example, the mosquito that is sucking his blood. What is responsible for this is the value system that we have created. And the value system has come out of the religious thinking of man. Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.

Some critics of the pessimist often think they have his back to the wall when they blithely jeer, “If that is how this fellow feels, he should either kill himself or be decried as a hypocrite.” That the pessimist should kill himself in order to live up to his ideas may be counterattacked as betraying such a crass intellect that it does not deserve a response. Yet it is not much of a chore to produce one. Simply because someone has reached the conclusion that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born does not mean that by force of logic or sincerity he must kill himself. It only means he has concluded that the amount of suffering in this world is enough that anyone would be better off never having been born. Others may disagree on this point as it pleases them, but they must accept that if they believe themselves to have a stronger case than the pessimist, then they are mistaken.