I was just thinking about something from the Douglas Adams book Life, The Universe, And Everything. There's a part about a guy named Prak who was supposed to be some kind of witness in a big legal case. They gave him a truth serum to ensure that he didn't BS them, and they made him swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." But, the problem was, someone bumped into the medic administering the truth serum, so he got WAAAYYYYY too big of a dose.

Somehow, the truth serum did something to his "doors of perception," and he was able to perceive the entire Truth about the whole universe. So, when they told him to start telling the truth, he just started talking, and revealing the darkest secrets about the true nature of the universe, and he JUST COULDN'T STOP. The people who were in the courtroom with him mostly went crazy, or killed themselves, from the shock and horror of all that Truth.

I was just thinking, what a Lovecraftian story that is! How does that Lovecraft quote go... it's something like "the most merciful thing in the universe is the inability of the tiny human mind to correlate and understand the true reality of the cosmos." Lovecraft had a real thing about the possible age of the universe, as many of us here know. Instead of it being five or six thousand years old, as it says in the Bible, Lovecraft was very interested in the universe being "vigintillions" of years old. I'm pretty sure no one thinks it's that old today, the consensus seems to be that it's about thirteen billion years old.

But, the thing is, that idea that knowledge of the true insignificance of mankind would be enough to drive us all absolutely out of our minds, if we spent much time thinking about it.... it's just a very Lovecraftian idea. I don't think I've ever really thought about that before.

If you want to google this, try googling Prak Argabuthon truth, not in quotes. That should do it.