Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Although Yeats wrote that in 1920 doesn’t it sound as though it could have been written yesterday? Some of that may be due to a deliberately mysterious and portentous, numinous character. Some may be that our times, like Yeats’s, convey a sense of something ending while what may replace it is infuriatingly beyond reach, on the horizon.
Who are “the best”? Are the best always without conviction? Robert Louis Stevenson, for one, certainly thought so. His attractive, fascinating characters are his villains. No one would read a book about the dull Dr. Jekyll; it is Hyde that is irresistible to the reader as much as he is to Jekyll. Squire Trelawney’s bland virtue pales in comparison with Long John Silvers’s wonderful villainy.
So did Milton, apparently. Lucifer in Paradise Lost is certainly more interesting than the schoolmasterish Jehovah.
“So did Milton, apparently. Lucifer in Paradise Lost is certainly more interesting than the schoolmasterish Jehovah.”
Yeah, it falls apart after Book Three, I think. As Blake put it somewhere, Milton was of the Devil’s own party but didn’t know it.
The bad guys always have the best uniforms. Nazis, Imperial Storm Troopers, the Humongous crew from Mad Max. Evil is great for costume design, set design, props, and certainly dialog.
Villains are more fun to write. They generally know what they want. The good guys are usually forced to defend something vague and are required to do it with a degree of ambivalence without which they would cease to be good. It’s much easier to write a compelling bad guy (or girl.)
A million acts of simple decency, civility, ethical behavior go unnoticed. What stands out is the single bit of bad behavior.
By the way the answer to the question what rough beast? Cthulhu. Obviously.
“Villains are more fun to write.”
More fun to act, too.
Yeah, and the villian typically has the easier task. It’s much easier to be the kid in the back of class shooting spitballs than the schollmaster trying to (a) keep order, (b) teach the little hooligans what they need to know academically, (c) teach the little hooligans how to be decent people and (d) do it all on budget. And that completely ignores the schollmaster’s own private life.
…
For a fun Cthulhu story, read (or better yet, listen) to Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald. It’s a literary mash-up of the Sherlock Holmes Universe and the Universe of the Old Ones. Gaiman’s reading is especially brilliant.
And for God’s sake, if you have read it don’t give away any spoilers to those who haven’t! It’s a freakin’ detective story after all….