I began to give serious thought of starting a blog some eighteen years ago. I had plenty of grist for the mill: I was reading a shit-ton of fantasy, playing RPGs, and listening to heavy metal, and wanted to share my thoughts on it all. Blogging was a thing; I did some research, settled on blogspot as my platform of choice, and was eager to begin.
But I paused: I was lacking a name, and didn’t want to rush the decision. I wanted something that aligned with what I planned to write about—all things fantastic, with an S&S and horror and heavy metal bent. But I also wanted something which revealed something personal about me, and my beliefs.
And so was born “The Silver Key,” after the Lovecraft story set in his Dreamlands cycle. A somewhat obscure entry, but one of which I’m inordinately fond. The quote I’ve borne on the masthead remains as true today as the day he wrote it:
"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
The quote describes the plight of Randolph Carter, who once wandered his illimitable imagination until age 30, when some combination of obligation and science and the cowed insistence of the masses begin to harden him, fossilizing his ability to dream. The story is loaded with great quotes about Carter’s plight, here’s one I like, because I recognize myself in Carter’s reaction:
“He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic plowman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose.”
I too recoil at the “truth bros” who think life can be reduced to the movement of atoms or chemical reactions in the brain … yet never think to question why they place such high value on their own opinion and proving everyone else wrong. Isn’t it all meaningless, truth bros? And what of our curious need to dream?
Feeling the hollowness at the center of life, Carter seeks out the occult and strange books of lore (here the story tips into the Lovecraftian). Finding these empty too he briefly contemplates suicide, but presses on. And eventually begins to dream again, though not as deeply as he did during his youth. During one of these dreams, his long-dead grandfather tells him of a strange and mysteriously engraved silver key in his attic. Carter finds the key and takes it on a trip to his boyhood home in the backwoods of northeastern Massachusetts, enters a mysterious cave, and is never seen again.
His story remains for us to ponder, back here on earth.
My focus here has changed over the years, in conjunction with changes in my own life. It’s broadened. I’ve gotten more personal, biographical, sentimental with the passing of years and some momentous, life-changing events.
But I’m recommitting to the work of exploring the fantastic, guided by the principle that there is no cause to value real things over that which we imagine.
Yes, there is firm ground under out feet. We need to perform work, however ordinary and prosaic it may be. We still need to farm and build, code and heal, teach and serve. The material world is a real, impersonal thing, and likes to remind us of this. Full retreat is not an option, at least for me.
But we also need to dream. We need fantasy. I need it like the very air or water. "The Silver Key" reminds us of that.
Others on my wavelength seem to respond to this story with similar enthusiasm. James at Grognardia recently wrote about The Silver Key as part of his Pulp Fantasy Library series, stating “When I was younger, I didn't hold this particular story in very high esteem. However, as I trudge toward old age, I judge it much more favorably. I suspect that those attuned to the imaginative currents that run between early fantasy fiction and tabletop roleplaying games will likewise find that “The Silver Key” offers a potent metaphor.”
A couple other interesting notes.
Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright initially rejected the story in 1927 but later asked to see it again and it eventually ran in the January 1929 issue. Wright later stated it was “violently disliked” by readers. Why, I wonder? Probably because it has no action, no external conflict. Not a lot happens … and yet everything happens. Might it be readers hated it because it revealed some void in their own lives? People hate having mirrors turned upon them.
I live in Northeastern Massachusetts, and have encountered odd spaces in the woods. Who knows, perhaps I too shall disappear into dream as Carter once did, and meet him, and if I do:
I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumored in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumor. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolized all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.
Read "The Silver Key" on Gutenberg.
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