Ascending the house of reason

[cimorene]

As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.

—GK Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday


I admire the lyricism and construction of this paragraph, and indeed of the whole book, although I do feel that GK Chesterton is oddly over-frightened by things like math and logic. On the other hand, a man whose primary sleuth is a priest and who made a late in life conversion to Catholicism is bound to have some singular ideas of some kind about religion and hence philosophy; I guess the ideas in play at this passage are edging closer to his personal Ideas.

It does remind me a bit of HP Lovecraft and so-called 'cosmic' terror, where the horror is like, "and some people are NOT EXACTLY LIKE ME" (and it even applies to class, it's not even just race that viscerally revolts him!), and it's like... yes, welcome to being a living human with a brain, gentlemen. I see you finally finished reading page 1?

Comments

[mecurtin]

I think what makes Chesterton feel the house of reason is hideous is that it is so cold and large that it makes human life look unimportant.

It's the loss of protagonist privilege, which I think is something that gets to Lovecraft as well.

I recently read Earth's Deep History, which points out that all traditional creation stories (including the Bible's) assume that human existence is not all that much shorter than the existence of a habitable world, and that the habitable world is a significant subset of the universe.

Science and reason had made it quite clear, by the time he was writing, that neither was true: humans are unimaginably late to the party, and the party is unimaginably large. When he tries to image those unimaginables, his mind goes meeeeep & whites out with horror.

[cimorene]

I think you're right! I have gotten that impression before, although it's hard to put my finger on where it comes from.

But precisely because science was already very clear by the time he was writing, I still find it difficult at times to get my head around the fact that he managed to find the immensity of reality and the insignificance of humanity that novel at that time. I mean, the idea that you can accidentally turn around and come nose-to-nose with reality and faint from surprise because you forgot it was there implies a disturbing lack of attention to reality on a daily basis, you know?

And it does seem that their style of existential horror, or whatever the proper word is, has faded pretty far out of popularity these days and mostly seems quaint... even though as I was writing the above paragraph I quickly realized that there are plenty of people whom it continues to apply to now. Perhaps that's more because it takes another level of effort to live in denial about it now, so the denial has to look different...