Hoy me leyeron esto.

. (Michel Houellebecq on H.P. Lovecraft)

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined notations, situations, anecdotes... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our "real life" days.

Now, here is Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937): "I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." We need a supreme antidote against all forms of realism.

* * *

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

As for Lovecraft, he was more than a little fed up. In 1908 at the age of 18, he suffered what has been described as a "nervous breakdown" and plummeted into a lethargy that lasted about 10 years. At the age when his old classmates were hurriedly turning their backs on childhood and diving into life as into some marvellous, uncensored adventure, he cloistered himself at home, speaking only to his mother, refusing to get up all day, wandering about in a dressing gown all night.

What's more, he wasn't even writing.

What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can't even be sure of this. In fact, his biographers have had to admit they don't know much at all, and that, judging from appearances - at least between the ages of 18 and 23 - he did absolutely nothing.

(...)