In The Night Lands

 The Watcher of the South
 

If you have not read William Hope Hodgson's The Night Lands, well, it's too bad, because it is out of print, and it is written in a pseudo-archaic style that endears it to no one. It is a 1912 work, so its sensibilities pre-date World War I, and its horrors are horrors of the time past, the Victorian age and before; the evils are antique, but none the less appalling in form.
There are good books coming all the time. If you graduate from college and have a friend or relative in the publishing business, you have at least one book. Every graduate has a book in them, whether they write it or not. Every graduate has a screenplay for Porkie's or Animal House, but for the most part they do not write it down, and it becomes reminiscences to be repeated before the children who will think their father was quite the wild party animal in his day.

Why do I read The Night Lands? To be very brief, for the book itself is rather prolix, The Night Lands is set in a time when the Sun has gone out, and humanity has dwindled to remnants in two outposts. The world where these last stands of man are located has been infested by monsters and Ab-human creatures who prey upon man when man ventures outside his two safe zones.
The most impressive of these monsters is The Watcher of the South, a entity of the shape and bulk of a mountain of crushing magnitude that appeared upon the southern horizon a million years past and has crept progressively closer, measurably, though hardly noticeable within a year or ten, but terrifying over the course of thousands of years during which the remains of humanity charted its progress. Yet it reached a point where appeared a glowing dome of light. This seemingly halted its progress.
The last men wondered that this force for Good still existed and gave them safety, and they were glad of it. So we see we are in a world where the paradigm of God the Almighty has been broken like a little Hello Kitty mirror, and its shards still reflect the Holy, yet not unified, not seamless, not unbroken.

The power of the Holy has not been destroyed, but the evil of the age to which man has progressed is such that it has rendered the power of the Holy intermittent and parochial. Think now, what would it be like to live in a world where the power of God became futile as a cold morning's battery; you pray and have to keep your fingers crossed and mutter "I think He can, I think He can!" ? It is the present, only with the men and women of Faith removed. That's all.
Our belief in the continuity of God's love is a paradigm based on reason. Faith is living, action, not opining, not inspecting propositions. When we have created enough havoc in the world, would it not appear to us that God has withdrawn His love? When the desert takes over, when the super-hurricanes hit, when the drought strangles, would it not seem as if the Holy had gone away? But, what has happened?
We created an idol from our Reason. Then we handed it over to the professional theologians to take care of, ignoring it in our daily lives, in our daily works and business. We executed our depredations upon the world and our fellow men with plans based on Reason, not Faith.
When everything falls apart, the paradigm created by Reason, created by the bastard sons of Voltaire, breaks down, and into the vacuum Reason - a horrible, inpotent and wretched Reason now- inserts a new paradigm: God is dead, God is gone, God's love is only intermittent. Reason has a multitude of faces, and it plays all sides; reason is attention to detail, and detail is infinite, and there is Reason's strength and its weakness.

Look where we are now: a Doomsday Vault. In Dr. Strangelove, its was a Doomsday Machine. The word Doomsday has been resurrected. It is not restricted to Terminator. Apocalypse if the work of God; Doomsday is the work of Mankind.  

The final design for a "doomsday" vault that will house seeds from all known varieties of food crops has been unveiled by the Norwegian government. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6335899.stm and Under Swiss law, local governments are required to provide shelter spaces for everyone, and in the early 1970s Lucerne was short by several thousand. The new Sonnenberg motorway tunnel, just being built, seemed a neat solution: kit it out as a nuclear shelter as well and it could hold 20,000 people. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6347519.stm

The Svalbard International Seed Vault may be a Last Redoubt. The Swiss bunkers will be among the last outposts of mankind. Perhaps. I think we have to turn from the Christian Wiseguys on TV and radio and come back to a true Christianity.
I think we must turn from the obscure and violent Islamic Wiseguys and come back to true Islam.
I think we must cast out the Jews who embrace hatred, and come back to the God who led us all from slavery and from the wilderness. links: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/10/christiano-wiseguys.html http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/08/get-pat.html http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/08/christian-jihad.html