The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
These opening lines, arguably the most famous words H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote, work to frame the fear- and awe-inspiring cosmological scale of the Cthulhu mythos revelations that are to follow. The unfathomable power, remoteness, and magnitude of Lovecraft's beasts remind Thurston of mankind's insignificance as nascent colonizers of a planet hanging "in the midst of black seas of infinity." Thurston's nihilistic tone betrays the gravity of his findings, even before he has related them to the reader.
The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.
Here Thurston endeavors to explain the imprecision of Johansen's words in his diary, as Johansen attempts to describe what cannot be described: the physical reality of Cthulhu. The scale of Cthulhu is likened to a "mountain," but the other aspects of his being are incapable of being conveyed through human language.
It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.
This is Thurston's description of the ceramic sculpture of Cthulhu that his granduncle possessed. Contradicting Johansen's description of it—that it cannot be described —Thurston holds in his hands a rendering of the image of Chthulu that came to one of his granduncle's students in a dream. Despite the fact that Thurston can see what the creature looks like, its appearance is still baffling and otherworldly. In fact, the statue is so strange that Thurston feels the needs to justify what he sees by blaming his "extravagant imagination."
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
"Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn" translates to "In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." In the second section of Lovecraft's short story, police break up a cult meeting involving human sacrifice. The cult members chant this phrase in worship to Cthulhu.
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere change which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper.
Thurston begins the third section of the story with these words, which express his deep regret that he ever found the Sydney Bulletin article that led him to Johansen's diary. After finding Johansen's diary, Thurston realizes he has discovered more than he can sanely withstand, and fears he has become a target for assassination by Cthulhu cultists.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me til I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise.
Thurston writes these lines after apprehending Johansen's diary, the revelations of which disturb Thurston so greatly that he fears he will never be the same person he was before he read them. He also seriously considers the possibility that he may meet the same fate of an "accidental" death that befell Angell and Johansen.
No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."
Thurston recounts this when relating the testimony of Old Castro, a Cthulhuh cultist rounded up on Legrasse's raid. The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire—or book of curses—that appears in several of Lovecraft's tales. Old Castro's testimony is perhaps the most authentic source of Cthulhu mythological history that any of the story's characters encounter.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky.
This line, also originally attributed to Old Castro, reveals the fact that Cthulhu and the other "Old Ones" are from the outer reaches of space. This fact becomes significant when Thurston visits Australia and remembers the geologically foreign nature of Legrasse and Johansen's stone idols.
I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
Thurston writes pessimistically that he will never be the same person again after having pieced together the various narratives and accounts that have revealed to him the full extent of the Cthulhu cult. He fears that he will lose his mind after knowing the cosmological underpinnings of the universe.
Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
This line, the final sentence of the story, is ironic because it indicates that Thurston does not believe that his manuscript is fit for publication anywhere. It implies that the reader, too, has now become cursed, by knowing too much about the Cthulhu cult.
