the silver key part 1

When Randolph Carter turned thirty, he lost the key to the door of dreams. Previously he had combined the insipidity of everyday life with nocturnal excursions to strange and ancient cities located beyond space, and to beautiful and incredible regions of land reached by crossing ethereal seas. But when reaching the mature age he felt that he was losing little by little this capacity of evasion, until finally it disappeared him completely. They were no longer able to set sail their galleys to climb the Oukranos River, beyond the golden spiers of Thran's steeple, or wander their elephant caravans through the fragrant jungles of Kled, where they sleep under the moon, beautiful and unalterable, palaces of marbled columns of ivory. I had read a lot about real things, and had talked to too many people.

The philosophers, with their best intention, had taught him to look at things in their mutual logical relations, and to analyze the processes that originated his thoughts and his delusions. The charm had disappeared, and I had forgotten that all life is nothing more than a set of images existing in our brain, without any difference between those born of real things and those generated by dreams that only take place in the privacy, or any reason to consider the one above the other. Custom had crammed his ears with a superstitious respect for all that is tangible and physically exists.

The wise men had told him that their ingenuous figurations were insipid and puerile, and even more absurd, since the dreamers insist on considering them full of meaning and intention, while the blind universe goes round without purpose, from nothing to things, and from things to nothingness again, without worrying or being interested in existence or in the pleadings of fleeting spirits that shine and consume themselves like a fleeting spark in the darkness. They had chained him to the things of reality, and then they had explained to him the functioning of those things, until all mystery had disappeared from the world.

When he lamented and felt an imperious desire to flee to the crepuscular regions where magic molded even the smallest details of life, and converted his mere mental associations into a landscape of astonishing and inextinguishable delight, they channeled him instead to the last prodigies of the science, inviting you to discover the marvelous in the vortices of the atom and the mystery in the dimensions of the sky. And when he had failed, and did not find what he was looking for in an area where everything was known and capable of being measured according to concrete laws, he was told that he lacked imagination and that he was not yet mature, since he preferred the illusion of dreams to the world of our physical creation.

In this way, Carter had tried to do what the others, striving to convince themselves that the events and emotions of ordinary life were more important than the fantasies of the most exquisite and delicate spirits. He admitted, when told, that the animal pain of a beaten pig, or of a real-life dyspeptic farmer, is more important than the incomparable beauty of Narath, the city of a hundred carved doors, with its chalcedony domes, that he remembered confusedly of his dreams; and under the guidance of such wise gentlemen he laboriously fostered his sense of compassion and tragedy. From time to time, however, it was inevitable to consider how trivial, volatile and meaningless all human aspirations were, and how contradictorily they contrasted the impulses of our real life with the pompous ideals that those worthy gentlemen proclaimed to defend.

Other times he looked with irony at the principles with which he had been taught to combat the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; because he saw that the daily life of our world is in every way as extravagant and artificial, and far less valuable in this respect, because of its poor beauty and its stupid obstinacy in not wanting to admit its own lack of reasons and purposes. In this way, he became a kind of bitter humorist, not realizing that even humor has no meaning in a stupid universe and deprived of any kind of authenticity.

In the first days of this servitude, he took refuge in the gentle and sanctimonious faith that his parents had instilled in him with naive confidence, since it seemed to him that from her were born mystical paths that offered him some possibility of escaping from this life. Only a more careful observation made him understand the lack of fantasy and beauty, the rank and prosaic vulgarity, the gravity of the owl and the grotesque pretensions of unshakeable faith that reigned overwhelmingly and oppressively among most of those who professed it; or made him feel completely the clumsiness with which they tried to keep it alive, as if it were still the attempt of a primordial race to combat the terrors of the unknown.

Carter was bored by the solemnity with which people tried to interpret earthly reality from old myths, which at every step were refuted by their own boastful science. And this untimely and out of place seriousness killed the interest that could have been felt by the old beliefs, of having limited itself to offer sound rites and emotional expansions with its authentic meaning of pure fantasy. But when he began to study the philosophers who had overthrown the old myths, he found them even more detestable than those who had respected them. These philosophers did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that the charm of life does not obey any rule in this cosmos without an object, but only in consonance with the dreams and feelings that have blindly shaped our small spheres from of chaos.

 They did not see that good and evil, and happiness and beauty, are only ornamental products of our point of view, that their only value lies in their relationship with what our parents thought and felt; and that its characteristics, even the most subtle, are different in each race and in each culture. Instead, they denied all these things outright, or explained them by the vague and primitive instincts that we all share with beasts and louts; in this way, their lives dragged painfully through pain, ugliness and imbalance; although, yes, full of the ridiculous pride of having escaped from a world that was actually no less solid than the one that now sustained them. All they had done was change the false gods of fear and blind faith for those of license and anarchy.

Carter barely enjoyed these modern freedoms, because they were mean and unclean to his spirit lover of unique beauty; On the other hand, his reason rebelled against the feeble logic by which his paladins pretended to adorn the brutal human impulses with the sanctity snatched from the idols they had just deposited. He saw that most of the people, like the discredited clergy themselves, still could not escape the illusion that life has a different meaning from that which men attribute to it, or establish a difference between the notions of ethics and beauty, even when, according to his scientific discoveries, all nature proclaims its irrationality and impersonal amorality to the four winds.

Predisposed and fanatical by the preconceived illusions of justice, freedom and conformism, they had deposited the old knowledge, the old ways and the old beliefs; and they had never stopped to think that this knowledge and those ways remained the only basis of current thoughts and criteria, the only guides and the only norms of a universe lacking in meaning, of stable objectives and fixed milestones. Once these artificial frames of reference were lost, their lives were deprived of direction and interest, until finally they had to drown the tedium in the bustle and in the pretended utility of the haste, in the daze and in the excitement, in barbaric expansions. and in bestial pleasures. And when they were tired of all this, or disappointed, or the nausea made them react, then they gave themselves up to irony and biting, and blamed everything on the social order.

They never realized that their principles were as unstable and contradictory as the gods of their elders, or that the satisfaction of one moment is the ruin of the next. The serene and lasting beauty is only found in dreams; but this consolation has been rejected by the world when, in its adoration of the real. He threw away the secrets of childhood. In the midst of this chaos of falsehoods and anxieties, Carter tried to live as befits a worthy man, with common sense and a good family.

 When his dreams were paled by age and his sense of ridicule, he could not replace them with any belief; but his love for harmony prevented him from departing from the paths proper to his race and condition. He walked impassively through the cities of men, and he sighed because no scenario seemed entirely real to him, because every time he saw the red flashes of the sun reflected on the high roofs, or the first lights of dusk on the solitary squares, he remembered the dreams that I had lived as a child, and I longed for the ethereal countries that I could no longer find. Traveling was just a joke; not even the World War touched him much, although he participated in it from the beginning in the Foreign Legion of France.

For some time he tried to find friends, but he soon realized that they were all rude, banal and monotonous, and too attached to earthly things. He was vaguely glad he had no dealings with his relatives, because none of them would have understood him, except, perhaps, his grandfather and his great-uncle Christopher; but both had long since died. Then he began to write books again, which he had not done since dreams had abandoned him. But he did not find any satisfaction or relief in it either, because even his thoughts were too mundane, and he could not think of beautiful things, as before. The flashes of ironic humor cast down the ghostly minarets that his imagination erected, and his earthly aversion to everything improbable withered the most delicate and fascinating flowers of its marvelous gardens.

The conventional religiosity that he attributed to his characters impregnated them with a cloying sentimentality, while the myth of realism and the need to paint events and emotions vulgarly human degraded all their high fantasy, turning it into a farrago of ill-concealed and superficial allegories satires of society. Thus, his new novels reached a success that they had never known before; but when he understood how vain they must be to please the vain crowd, he burned them all and stopped writing. They were trivial and elegant novels, in which he smiled politely at his own dreams that he barely described above; but he realized that they were contrived and false, and lacked life.

After these attempts he dedicated himself to cultivate the deliberate dream, and delved into the grotesque and eccentric, as if looking for an antidote against the previous common places.

These fields did not take long, however, to reveal their poverty and sterility; and soon he realized that the usual occultist beliefs are as scanty and inflexible as the scientific ones, though devoid of all plausibility. The gross stupidity, the trickery and the incoherence of the ideas are not dreams, nor offer to a superior spirit any possibility of escaping from real life. Thus, Carter bought even stranger books, and sought out deeper and more terrible writers, of fantastic erudition; He immersed himself in the less studied arcana of consciousness, delved into the deep secrets of life, of legend and remote antiquity, and learned things that left him marked forever. He decided to live his own way and furnished his Boston home in a way that would harmonize with his mood swings.

He consecrated a room to each one of them, and painted them with the appropriate colors, arranging in them the suitable books and endowing them with objects and apparatuses that would provide him with the sensations required in terms of light, heat, sounds, flavors and aromas. Once he heard about a man who, in the South, shied away from him and feared him for the blasphemous things he read in archaic books and clay tablets that he had smuggled out of India and Arabia. And he went to visit him, and lived with him, and he shared his studies for seven years, it is enough that one night they were surprised by the horror in an old unknown cemetery, of which, of the two that had entered, only one returned.

Then he returned to Arkham, the terrible and haunted city of New England, where his ancestors had lived, and there he made experiences in the darkness, among venerable willows and ruined roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages of the diary of one of his predecessors. , of an exceptionally scary mentality. But these horrors only took him to the limits of reality; and not being able to penetrate them, he did not reach the authentic region of dreams for which he had wandered during his youth. In this way, when he turned fifty, he lost all hope of peace or happiness, in a world too busy to perceive beauty and too intellectual to tolerate dreams. Having finally understood the fatality of all real things, Carter spent his days in solitude, remembering with longing the lost dreams of his youth.

He considered it stupid to continue living in that way, and through a South American, known to him, got a very unique potion, able to plunge without suffering in the oblivion of death. The neglect and force of habit, however, made him postpone this decision, and continued to languish without resolving to end his life, and wandering the world of his memories. He removed the strange hangings from the walls and repaired the house as in his early youth: he replaced the purple curtains, the Victorian furniture and everything else.

With the passage of time, he almost came to rejoice at having deferred his determination, since his memories of youth and his break with the world made life and his sophistries seem very distant and unreal, especially since it was added to a touch of magic and hope that now began to slip in their nightly breaks. For years, in his dreamy nights, he had only seen the distorted reflections of everyday things, as the most vulgar dreamers saw them; but now he was beginning to glimpse again the glow of a strange and fantastic world, of a confused but frighteningly imminent nature, which took the form of clear scenes from his childhood days and reminded him of irrelevant, long-forgotten facts and things.

You can see part 2 on my blog https://steemit.com/@joelgonz1982