Atdtda23: [46.1i] A passionate heart, 653

[Monte Davis]

 Laura sez:

> In 2001, the object was deliberately placed.  Pynchon's is a natural,
indigenous 
> object -- very different.

The description is ambiguous. All the strokes tending toward tomb, burial,
sculpture are qualified with "as if," but it's also set up as seeming like a
_nunatak_ (a projection of bedrock through the ice) but not being one.

I'd extend the ambiguity to "malevolence," here and in Lovecraft's ancient
artifacts. Yes, in Lovecraft everything pertaining to the Old Ones, Elder
Gods etc has evil effects on people. But part of his power is the
simultaneous hint that they're "beyond good and evil" -- i.e., any contact
opens up vistas so ancient and immense as to drive us mad, simply because we
are so insignificant on that scale.

Think, too, of the mood Wells sets at the begiing of _The War of the
Worlds_, with "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the
beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic..." That's
all in play here.