Lovecraft and the Triumph Over Nothing

What Lovecraft teaches us, oddly enough, is that the universe is okay. Things are gonna be alright, if you take the broader view that embraces not only humankind but all mindkind. The Elder Things may have looked utterly monstrous but we are assured by the narrator of At the Mountains of Madness that "whatever they were, they were men." Nathaniel Peaslee's Yithian impersonator in The Shadow Out of Time did an alright job of insinuating itself into human society, encountering only the difficulties that any human time traveler would encounter in going to a completely different era, and Peaselee himself found it not impossible to similarly understand the Yithians (not to mention all the time-displaced representatives of other species that were there with him).

Individual civilizations rise and fall as species do, but we rejoice in the overall triumphs of humanity. In the same way we are privileged to be a chapter in that story which is the flourishing of all mindkind, each segment of it given its own era. Before us were the Elder Things, Yithians, mi-go, "arachnid denizens," serpent-people of Valusia, flying polyps, and "black-snouted, winged creatures," among others. Some still survive into our day, and after us are the coleopterans, and then even later other races that will burrow close to the core as temperatures become abominably low. The myths of K'n-yan say that humans came from some other world but even if this is untrue (or if we are the only extant branch of humanity) we are guaranteed to survive into the year AD 16,000, if not beyond. And surely some might reach past even that far-off era, preserved in brain cylinders as fellowservants with the mi-go, whose own civilization is millions of years old in that year and extends into other dimensions but who were, even in their own eldritch age, preceded by yet other civilizations. 

And when or if all human life should be made extinct, there is still no cause to despair, for we are told in The Shadow Out of Time that we will not be forgotten. Our history and cultures, our most bitter failures and most glorious accomplishments, all that we ever loved, feared, and hoped for- every inch of the human experience- will survive eternally among the Great Race of Yith, whose time travel capabilities give their own civilization immortality, as every disaster is foreseen and escaped. Moreover, the Great Race do not only record but take the best of what humanity and ever other species has to offer and make it their own. What was most noble about us will surely not perish but will become the treasured inheritance of a blazing-bright culture whose domain extends through all eternity. 

Life arises everywhere. On Mercury, on Earth, on Neptune, on Pluto, and on many other planets, from their surfaces to their fiery cores, and the Great Race of Yith knows and loves it all. What Lovecraft tells us is that, despite Cthulhu, despite Azathoth and other horrors, life wins. Mind wins. 

Far from telling us that there is no hope, Lovecraft tells us to laugh in the dark and know that dawn is always right around the corner (and for the children of Yith, dawn is eternal, for what threat can night hold to those that have mastered time and skip from daylight to daylight like stones on the surface of a lake?).