H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional narrator begins the story The Call of Cthulhu, by writing:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of
the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in
its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the
piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying
vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace
and safety of a new dark age.
Well, that situation has just gone kablooey.
I mean, Google has been eating away at the fact that there are so many disparate bits of knowledge that no one person can piece them all together, but then there’s this:
From one perspective, this is wicked awesome–amazing!–but from another perspective it is really, really frightening (and like a good horror story, it starts normal–cool even–and gets scarier as it goes).
Somewhere, Lovecraft’s narrator is screaming.
(CHT to the readers who have e-mailed!)
