On Stuff I'm Reading (What, Again!!??)

So, I just re-read Maupassant's 'Le Horla.' I freakin' love that story. Maupassant is obsessed with the invisible. He's always talking about invisible things that exist, powerful things like electricity and wind and all that sort of stuff. He usually uses those examples to set up this question: if we don't see those things yet they exist, aren't there other things out there that we don't see but that also exist? Ohhhh, I'm scared! Stuff like ghosts and monsters and everything. I'm gonna eat some meow mix to calm myself because that's too scary to think about.

Maupassant also thinks our senses are very weak so he's always going on and on about all the stuff we can't see or hear or even comprehend because our senses are too weak. For example, he mentions how weak our sense of smell is, say, in comparison to a dog's sense of smell. Whatever, I still think I'm cooler than a dog. Maupassant just wants to make me feel worthless... I think he was a very unhappy person, he did go mental in the end. He also always talks about how the senses we do have cannot perceive the very large and the very small. He wasn't around for Quantum Mechanics, poor guy, maybe things would've made a lot more sense, well, I dunno, maybe they would've made less sense?

I really dig his fascination with illness (another 'invisible' thing). I wrote about illness and the invisible a while back in my blog, and I wasn't reading Maupassant at the time, but I was thinking along similar lines. I wasn't specifically concerned with the supernatural, I was just fascinated by the idea that lots of 'invisible' things play a huge role in our life, not only illness, but things like gravity. Weird you know, all these invisible forces and things that exist...

I'd read Maupassant years ago, but his thinking and writing really didn't captivate me all that much. Since I've had to struggle with this illness, I've really come to appreciate his thinking a lot more. In the story of 'Le Horla,' the character becomes haunted by an invisible creature, the creature is sort of like a vampire and sucks your soul out and takes control of your body. I honestly think this creature is somewhat symbolic of illness, there are a couple references in the story to boats coming from Brazil (possibly with people carrying the disease that causes the insanity of the main character). There's also continual references to the main character's coachman being very sick and being unable to sleep due to some unmentioned illness. I also know Maupassant struggled with illness in his life (syphilis), so a lot his stories tend to deal with disease and illness, and an assortment of themes that goes along with those things.

I read the 'Masque of the Red Death' by Poe a while back, and there seems to be a lot of similarities between Poe's story and 'Le Horla.' Some similarities I can think of include the idea of seclusion, being trapped, an inability to escape, the fear of illness, fear of the unknown and the invisible, attempts to avoid reality...