To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted… - H. P. Lovecraft

Moreover, humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible—the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. All great humorists are sad—Mark Twain was a cynic and agnostic, and wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What Is Man?" When I was younger I wrote humorous matter—satire and light verse—and was known to many as a jester and parodist. ... But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

The Silver Key:
I.
In the first days
of his bondage
he had turned
to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him
by the naive
trust of his fathers,
for thence stretched
mystic avenues
which seemed to promise
escape from life.
II.

Only on closer view
did he mark the starved
fancy and beauty, the
stale and prosy
triteness, and the
owlish gravity
and grotesque
claims of solid truth
which reigned bore somely
and overwhelmingly
among most
of its professors;
or feel
to the full
the awkwardness
with which
it sought to keep
alive as literal
fact the outgrown
fears and guesses
of a primal
race confronting

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.