"Cool Air" philosophically considered: How to Animate a Corpse

One thing that occurred to me, reading "Cool Air" again -- The story is, I suppose, usually compared to Poe's "M. Valdemar" story, but one could compare it to Machen's "Inmost Light." In that story, you have a character who says, "...I feel sometimes positively overwhelmed with the thought of the vastness and complexity of London. Paris a man may get to understand thoroughly with a reasonable amount of study; but London is always a mystery. In Paris you may say: 'Here live the actresses, here the Bohemians, and the Ratés'; but it is different in London. You may point out a street, correctly enough, as the abode of washerwomen; but, in that second floor, a man may be studying Chaldee roots, and in the garret over the way a forgotten artist is dying by inches." There's a similar sense, in "Cool Air," of New York as a place in which you might happen to encounter something very strange going on, on the other side of an ordinary dwelling-place. Lovecraft's narrator writes, "I found [horror] in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York; and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings, and very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled." The narrator says he "found" horror -- but he wasn't looking for it, he was just looking for an affordable place to stay in New York, while Machen's narrator wasn't looking for horror, but was rambling about in a London suburb, when he happened to see a dreadful face.
 
I haven't yet had a chance to read the piece you linked to (hope to this weekend), but thought I'd drop this little note in response to the opening of your more recent post. Apparently, when the similarity to "Valdemar" was brought to HPL's attention, he was rather surprised, as he had in mind instead another Machen story -- "The Novel of the White Powder"....

On the rest of your point there... yes, there is that similarity. I think, though, that this became more and more then case with HPL in most of his later stories (with exceptions such as "The Haunter of the Dark", which was a deliberate response to Bloch's story, hence played by different rules). Whereas he had his Decadent phase wherein he had protagonists such as the two in "The Hound", by the last decade or more of his life, his protagonists seldom went looking for anything in the way of horror, but rather had it erupt into their lives in the midst of quite ordinary occupations, such as studying mathematics ("The Dreams in the Witch House"), teaching economics ("The Shadow Out of Time"), debating the validity of rumors in a new story ("The Whisperer in Darkness"), surveying for a proposed reservoir ("The Colour Out of Space"), etc.
 

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