Hypnos - HP Lovecraft

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft, Apropos of sleep, that sinister
adventure of all our knights. We may say that men
go to bed daily with an audacity that would be
incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the
result of ignorance of the danger bodlair. May the merciful Gods,

(00:21):
if indeed there be such guard those hours where no
power of will or drug, that the cunning of man
devises can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death
is merciful, for there's no return therefrom but with him
who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night,
haggard and knowing peace rests. Never more fool that I
was to plunge in with such unsanctioned frenzy into mysteries

(00:43):
no man was meant to penetrate. Fooler God, that he
was my only friend, who led me and went before me,
and who in the end passed into terrors which may
yet be mine. We met, I recall, in a railway
station where he was the center of a crowd of
the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a
kind of convulsion which imparted to his slight, black clad

(01:06):
body a strange rigidity. I think he was then approaching
forty years of age. For there were deep lines in
the face, wan and hollow, cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful,
and touches of gray in the thick waving hair, and small,
full beard which had once been of the deepest raven black.
His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and

(01:28):
of a height and breadth almost godlike. I said to myself,
with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man
was a fond statue out of antique Ella's dug from
a temple's ruins, and brought somehow to life in our
stifling age, only to feel the chill and pressure of
devastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken and
wildly luminous black eyes, I knew he would thenceforth be

(01:51):
my only friend, the only friend of one who had
never possessed a friend before. For I saw that such
eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur and the
terror of realms beyond normal consciousness and reality, realms which
I had cherished in fancy but vainly sought. So as
I drove the crowd away. I told him he must
come with me and be my teacher and leader in

(02:11):
unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward,
I found that his voice was music, the music of
deep vials and crystalline spheres. We talked often in the
night and in the day, when I chiseled busts of him,
and carved miniature heads and ivory to immortalize his different
expressions of our studies. It is impossible to speak, since

(02:32):
they held so slight a connection with anything of the
world as living men conceive it. They were of that
vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness,
which lies deeper than matter, time and space, and whose
existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep, those
rare dreams beyond dreams, which come never to common men,
but once or twice in a lifetime of imaginative men.

(02:55):
The cosmos of our waking knowledge born from such a universe,
as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester,
touches it only as such a bubble may touch its
sargonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men
of learning suspect it little and ignore it mostly wise
men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One
man with oriental eyes has said that all time and

(03:17):
space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that
man with oriental eyes has done no more than suspect.
I had wished and tried to do more than suspect
and my friend had tried and partly succeeded. Then we
both tried together, and with exotic drugs, courted terrible and
forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old

(03:37):
Manor House in Hoary, Kent. Among the agonies of these
after days is that chief of torments and articulateness. What
I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration
can never be told for want of symbols or suggestions
in any language. I say this because, from first to last,
our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations, sensations

(03:59):
co related with no impression which the nervous system of
normal humanity is capable of receiving. There were sensations, yet
within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space, things
which at bottom possessed no distinct and definite existence. Human
utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences
by calling them plungings or soarings. For in every period

(04:21):
of revelation, some part of our minds broke boldly away
from all that is real and present, rushing aerially along, shocking,
unenlightened and fear haunted abyss, and occasionally tearing through certain
well marked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth
clouds of vapors. In these black and bodiless flights, we

(04:42):
were sometimes alone and sometimes together. When we were together,
my friend was always far ahead. I could comprehend his presence,
despite the absence of form, by a species of pictorial memory,
whereby his face appeared to me golden from a strange light,
and frightful in its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks,
its burning eyes, its olympian brow, and its shadowing hair

(05:06):
and growth of beard. Of the progress of time, we
kept no record, for time had become to us the
merest delusion. I know only that there must have been
something very singular involved. Since we came at length to marvel.
Why we did not grow old? Our discourse was unholy
and always hideously ambitious. No God or demon could have
aspired to discoveries in conquest like those which we planned

(05:28):
in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and
dare not be explicit, though I will say that my
friend once wrote on paper a wish he dared not
utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the
paper and look affrightedly out of the window at the
spangled night sky. I will hint, only hint, that he
had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe,
and more designs whereby the Earth and the stars would

(05:51):
move at his command, and the destinies of all living
things be his. I affirm, I swear that I had
no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may
have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous,
for I am no man of strength to risk the
unmentionable spheres by which alone one might achieve success. There

(06:12):
was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us
irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions
of the most maddeningly untransmittable sort thronged upon us perceptions
of infinity, which at the time convulsed us with joy,
yet which are now partly lost to my memory and
partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed

(06:36):
through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that
we had been born to realms of greater remoteness than
any we had previously known. My friend was vastly in
advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin ether,
and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating,
luminous to youthful memory face. Suddenly that face became dim

(06:58):
and quickly disappeared a space. I found myself projected against
an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like
the others, yet incalculably denser, a sticky clammy mass, if
such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a
non material sphere I had. I felt been halted by
a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed.

(07:20):
Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug
dream and opened my physical eyes to the tower studio,
in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious
form of my fellow dreamer. Weirdly, haggard and wildly beautiful
as the moon shed golden green light on his marble features. Then,
after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred,

(07:41):
and may, pitying Heaven, keep from my sight and sound
another thing like that which took place before me. I
can tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of
unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in those black eyes
crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted
and did not stir till he himself recovered, and shook
me and his friends for someone to keep away the

(08:02):
horror and the desolation. That was the end of our
voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken and pretentious,
my friend, who had been beyond the barrier, warned me
that we must never venture within those realms again. What
he had seen he dared not tell me, but he
said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little
as possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake.

(08:23):
That he was right, I soon learned, from the inutterable
fear which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed after each short
and inevitable sleep, I seemed older, whilst my friend aged
with a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see
wrinkle's form and hair whiten almost before one's eyes. Our
mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse,

(08:45):
so far as I know his true name and origin.
Never having passed his lips, my friend now became frantic
in his fear of solitude. At night, he would not
be alone, nor would the company of a few persons
calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of
the most general and boisterous sort, so that few assemblies
of the young and gay were unknown to us. Our

(09:06):
appearance and age seemed to excite, in most cases, a
ridicule which I keenly resented, but which my friend considered
a lesser evil than solitude. Especially, was he afraid to
be out of doors alone when the stars were shining,
and if forced to this condition, he would often glance
furtively at the sky, as if hunted by some monstrous
thing therein. He did not always glance at the same
place in the sky. It seemed to be a different

(09:28):
place at different times. On spring evenings, it would be
low in the northeast in summer, it would be nearly overhead.
In the autumn, it would be in the northwest. In
winter it would be in the east. But mostly if
in the small hours of the morning. Midwinter evenings seemed
less dreadful to him. Only after two years did I
connect this fear with anything in particular. But then I

(09:50):
began to see that he must be looking at a
special spot on the celestial vault, whose position, at different
times correspondent to the direction of his glance, a spot
rough marked by the constellation Corona borealis. We now had
a studio in London, never separating but never discussing the
days when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of
the unreal world. We were aged and weak from our drugs,

(10:13):
dissipations and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard
of my friend had become snow white. Our freedom from
long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more
than an hour or two at a time to the shadow,
which had now grown so frightful. A menace then came
one January of fog and rain, when money ran low
and drugs were hard to buy. My statues and ivory

(10:35):
heads were all sold, and I had no means to
purchase new materials or energy to fashion them, even had
I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain
night my friends sank into a deep breathing sleep from
which I could not awaken him. I can recall the
scene now, the desolate, pitch black garret studio under the eaves,
with the rain beating down, the ticking of our lone clock,

(10:58):
the fancied ticking of our watches as they rested on
the dressing table, the creaking of some swaying shudder in
a remote part of the house, certain distant city noises
muffled by fog and space. And worst of all, the deep, steady,
sinister breathing of my friend on the couch, a rhythmical
breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernial fear and
agony for his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined,

(11:22):
and hideously remote. The tensions of my vigil became oppressive,
and a wild train of trivial impressions and associations thronged
through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike
somewhere not ours, for that was not a striking clock,
and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting
point for idle wanderings clocks, time, space, infinity. And then

(11:44):
my fancy reverted to the locale, as I reflected that
even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the
rain and the atmosphere, Corona borealis was rising in the northeast,
Corona borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and
whose scintillent semicircle of stars must even now be glowing
unseen through the measureless abyss of ether. All at once

(12:04):
my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and
wholly distinct component in the soft metaly of drug magnifying sounds,
a low and damnably insistent whine from very far away
drone and clamoring mocking calling from the northeast. But it
was not that distant wine which robbed me of my
faculties and set upon my soul such seal of fright

(12:26):
as may never in life be removed, not that which
drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions, which caused lodgers
and police to break down the door. It was not
what I heard, but what I saw from that dark, locked, shuddered,
and curtained room, there appeared from the black northeast corner
a shaft of horrible red gold light, a shaft which
bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but

(12:49):
which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper,
bringing out in hideous duplication, the luminous and strangely youthful
memory faces. I had known it in dream of abysmal
space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed beyond
the barrier to those secret, innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.

(13:10):
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black,
liquid and deep sunken eyes open in terror, and the
thin shadowed lips part as if for a scream too
frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and
flexible face as it shone, bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in
the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain shattering fear than

(13:31):
all the rest of heaven and Earth has ever revealed
to me. No word was spoken amidst the distant sound
that grew nearer and nearer. But as I followed the
memory face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light
to its source, the source, whence all the whining came,
I too saw for an instant what it saw, and
fell with ringing years in that fit of shrieking epilepsy

(13:53):
which brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell,
try as I might, what it actually was that I saw.
Nor could the still fays tell, For although it must
have seen more than I did, it will never speak again.
But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate
hypnos lord of sleep, against the night's sky, and against
the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy. Just what happened

(14:16):
is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated
by the strange and hideous thing, but others were tainted
with a forgetfulness, which can mean nothing if not madness.
They have said, I know not for what reason that
I never had a friend, but that art, philosophy, and
insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and
police on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered

(14:38):
something to quiet me. Nor did anyone see what a
nightmare event had taken place my stricken friend moved them
to no pity. But what they found on the couch
in the studio made them give me a praise which
sickened me, and now a fame which I spurn and
despair as I set for hours bald, graybeard, shriveled, palsied,
drug crazed, and broken, adore, ring and praying to the

(15:01):
object they found. For they deny that I sold the
last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the
thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified,
and unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend,
the friend who led mey ond a madness and wreckage,
A godlike head of such marble as only old hell
As could yield young, with a youth that is outside time,

(15:22):
and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow,
and dense locks waving and poppy crowned. They say that
the haunting memory face is modeled from my own, as
it was at twenty five. But upon the marble base
is carving a single name in the letters of Attica, Hypnos.
This is the end of Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft