Written in Cantor Dust

Here's a question for you, to begin with. What, exactly, is the end of the world?
Is it heralded by natural disasters? Supernatural omens? Plagues? Wars? The extinction of species? Philosophical decadence? The fall of nations, empires? Because all of those have happened, countless times over--even within the lifetime of any given person reading this, no matter who or when (after all, we do live in the proverbial "interesting times")--and to all appearances, we're still here. Planets can be destroyed, stars can go nova, the contents of entire regions of space can be consumed by black holes, but the broader universe itself just keeps on ticking despite it all, the magnum opus Timex of Newton's watchmaker.
The real answer, or at least real enough to be practically useful, is of course given to us by the band REM--It's The End Of The World As We Know It, with the operative part of the phrase being its second half. Arguably, the world of ancient Rome ended with the fall of its empire, the world of non-avian dinosaurs with the Chicxulub impact, the pre-atomic world with the success of the Manhattan Project. Numbers of deaths are not necessarily a direct commonality between all three, nor political upheaval, nor the modification of the physical world. Rather, the closest thing we can observe to a shared characteristic between all of these is a fundamental, irreversible change in the broader intangible conscious milieu of what it is to exist on this planet within a space and time that was formerly subject to one set of circumstances, but has now fallen irretrievably into the jurisdiction of another. (Some of you may protest that "conscious" can't very well apply to the dinosaur example due to its place in prehistory rather than ever being contemporaneous with modern humanity. If your view of consciousness and its implications is truly that narrow, I question the extent to which you've explored the rest of this site, and gently suggest that you do that before proceeding. You exist in a time only tangentially related to that of this essay, and as such it will not move on without you should you not will it so.)
Taking this as our definition, then, we see that worlds end all the time, as all the harbingers of doom enumerated previously would suggest. Each, indeed, could be seen as the end of a world in itself, of a sort--the end of a world in which it had not yet happened, and the beginning of a new one in which it has. Of course, for those worlds to become elevated to the lofty status of the capital-W World, the human authorship and audience of the overwhelming majority of the discussions of this sort of thing institutes the additional implicit requirement that it be one centered largely around the human experience and perception, whether it acknowledges the validity of other ones or not. (History is written by those with opposable thumbs and the capacity to invent pencils, as they say.) "The End Of The World As We Know It" hinges not only on the definitions of "end" and "world", but just as crucially on the definition of "we", which can already be a massively thorny matter for any of us excluded categorically from the implied "we" doing the "knowing" of this "world".

1. Preaching the End of the World

With this context in mind, then, we can begin to talk about the role of the "end of the world" in fiction. Obviously, the possibilities for the manner in which a thing comes to pass are far broader and more fantastical than anything in consensus reality, so in an effort to both narrow the scope sufficiently and find an excuse to segue into the part of it where we were going anyway, we can focus on a particular trope within a particular genre--namely, that of the eldritch apocalypse in cosmic horror. Perhaps it's cultists raising Cthulhu from where he dreams in R'lyeh to drown the world in seawater and void, perhaps it's manifestations of pure conceptual fear reshaping the world in their image to feed through their chosen avatars, perhaps it's consensus reality being replaced with dadaist gobbledygook by a triangle wearing a top hat, perhaps it's the universe being mindlessly consumed by gods-only-know-what as part of its natural life cycle on a scale too vast to even lightly graze the breadth of human comprehension...you get the idea. No matter the specifics, the general rules are that 1. it breaks everything through sheer weirdness, and 2. it doesn't end well for humanity's status quo--or the rest of the planet, for that matter, but that's not the part that gets stories written about it, usually. (Again, opposable thumbs and pencils.) We could also arguably add 3. it's the main focus of the plot, as a sort of throwaway acknowledgement of the fact that this is all fundamentally within the context of genre fiction--but far from being a throwaway, this actually becomes pivotal to our argument (once we get to the point of actually making one, in an indeterminate number of paragraphs). There are, in fact, plenty of cosmic horror stories where the end of the world never once makes an appearance in anyone's mind, enough that I could rattle off a list but won't bother to because it would likely be old news to everyone. Hell, even Lovecraft himself usually just stuck to spooky structures and scary math and thinly veiled racism allegories and the like--but The Call Of Cthulhu is the one pop culture as a whole latched onto (despite it not even really being that good in comparison to the rest of his ouvre--but again, a digression for another time), at once evocative and apocalyptic.
Of course, there's also the fact that points 2 and 3 are by no means exclusive to cosmic horror apocalypses--indeed, they'd have made fine candidates for criteria by which to define the end of the world in general earlier, were we limiting ourselves solely to the fictional sort. Point 1, on the other frightful appendage, is where we get into the meat of our discussion, because the very notion of "weird" in itself is a contentious one, and one very much dependent upon a combination of individual inclinations and genre-wide tropes--the latter of which are, themselves, often rooted in the former for the popularizers of the genre. The sinking feeling in your gut is, unfortunately, 100% correct here, for we have come to the inevitable point where we discuss HP Lovecraft.

2. Let's just get this over with

I'll spare the both of us from slogging through the backstory of the man himself; suffice it to say, in an era where practically the only way to be a career author in the West was to be a culturally-Christian cishet white man from a background of some means, he sure as hell was one. In turn, this seeded him with all the various prejudices one would expect from a specimen of such, and even a few more obscure ones that modern readers may not even realize existed. (The man wrote an entire horror novella about his realization that he was part Welsh, for gods' sake.) This, in fact, is our key point--I come here today not to praise Lovecraft, but to bury him, and also sharply criticize him as is my solemn duty as both a cosmic horror fan and someone who endeavors not to be a flaming bigot. If you'd rather not follow me into these particular weeds--which I honestly can't blame you for, fetid and unsettlingly slimy as they are--just skim the bolded phrases to get a general idea of what kind of status quo is being interrogated here without getting bogged down in dubiously-remembered details from an incomplete subset of his works (i.e. canonical accuracy not 100% guaranteed because I haven't read everything of his, and my memory isn't what it used to be. Not for reasons of eldritch madness or anything, just good old-fashioned mundane mental illness, like Mama used to make).

Religious normality--which is to say, white American Protestant Christianity and nothing else--contrasted by the specifically sacrilegious nature of the various cults present in any number of stories--see The Call Of Cthulhu, The Dream In The Witch-House, Dagon, etc.
Psychological normality--which is to say, sanism, pure and simple, and the early 1900s flavor of it to boot, as contrasted by...I can't actually think of a single one of this man's stories that doesn't involve forbidden knowledge only able to be experienced at the cost of irreversible gibbering madness or something of the sort. In the instances where we get more elaboration than that, what's described is often a sort of nonverbal, quasi-synesthetic form of thought and communication that, curiously, happens to be quite similar to the neurodivergent experiences of both myself and some of my peers.
Racial normality--which is to say, Anglo white folks and nothing else--contrasted by traits, worldviews, and origins of other cultures and species being explicitly described as "savage", "exotic", and other such terminology rooted in the horrendously biased "anthropology" of the time (see also: hybrids e.g. Dunwich, Innsmouth as miscegenation allegories)
- This is seen as one and the same as species normality--direct comparisons are made to miscegenation in the focus on human-eldritch "hybrids" in The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror, and more broadly speaking, the more fearful the reader is meant to be of any given entity, the less anatomically resembling a human it's described as--we go all the way up the chain of horror from Nyarlathotep as a black man with extra surrealism as the closest to a comprehensible presence the eldritch ever gets, to the vaguely mammalian Brown Jenkin who's at least a human's familiar but otherwise still unambiguously malicious, to Cthulhu who's kind of anthropoid but then there's wings and tentacles and everything, to Yog-Sothoth who's only described as...orbs? Kind of? I guess? Not even biological-seeming at all, much less mammalian, much less humanoid.
- We also get geopolitical normality from this, as well--the further Randolph Carter goes from the familiar and benign parts of the Dreamlands to the darker and more treacherous ones under more obvious eldritch control in The Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath, the world starts resembling Lovecraft's native New England less and less, and foreign lands like China more and more, before it finally gives up on Earth geography altogether upon reaching Kadath itself. (Of course, there's a very specific reason for this in both the Watsonian and Doyalist senses, in this particular instance, but I won't spoil it for you.)
  - When we've exhausted the at least vaguely comprehensible breadth of Earth's geography, there's always good old space. Once again, proximity is key when determining the relative friendliness of any given realm--you can see the moon with the naked eye almost every night, so why shouldn't it be home to the cats of Ulthar, who are perfectly agreeable to anyone who pays them the proper respect? Pluto--or Yuggoth, if you want to get technical--meanwhile, was barely even understood conclusively to exist at this point, and as such it was a truly unknown place fit for the parasitic and decidedly unearthly Mi-Go.
  - There are, of course, tons of Lovecraft stories set right in New England, no geographical nonsense necessary, as familiar as familiar can be. Of course, no nonsense is needed geographically speaking when the weirdness comes to you--it's no accident that the stories focusing most on the ideas of humanity being infiltrated happen on his home turf.
Normality of time--which is to say, an era at least vaguely comprehensible to early 20th-century white Americans, as contrasted by how every spooky civilization--from the lizard-things of The Nameless City, to the possibly-human-but-still-definitely-ancient society that worshipped Dagon, to In The Mountains Of Madness and whatever the hell was going on there with the shoggoths and the cave penguins--is unimaginably ancient, to the point where Lovecraft probably wore out the section of his thesaurus around the entry for "old". (The Deep Ones of Innsmouth would appear to be a notable exception here, but their congress with humans was implied to stem from a sea captain finding a lost tribe on some Pacific isle implied to now be either colonized out of existence or at least no longer relevant to the broader world, which really isn't that many more degrees of separation within this paradigm.)
- When some era between "unbelievably far in the past" and "could have happened the week before it was written" does exist in Lovecraft's works, it's usually only for a brief moment, and usually just a glimpse of Nyarlathotep's meddling, be it through catalyzing scientific progress or leaving shiny rocks lying around. Which, once again, the figure of "human but still unmistakably Other"--making the whole science thing particularly interesting when you recall that the Muslim world was how science and math stayed alive between the fall of the classical world and Europe finally getting its act together in the Renaissance.
  - This additional normality of knowledge also shows up a weird amount in just how frequently the products of the eldritch are described as mathematically impossible--wrong angles, shifting shapes, self-intersections, extra dimensions, you know how it goes. Obviously this is a very efficient shorthand for describing reality as being fundamentally broken, since geometry is arguably one of the most intuitive forms of math there is by virtue of, well, Things Having Shapes, but it's hard not to also read a bit of intellectual classism into this--knowing how exactly these things are disobeying formal logic and reason implies a familiarity with said formal logic and reason in the first place, which was historically only largely available to the wealthy ruling class that had the leisure to study more abstract and less immediately useful topics rather than having to labor for the benefit of their feudal or economic superiors, let alone their own subsistence. This, of course, melds almost seamlessly with how heavily associated cosmic horror is with the aesthetic of "dark academia", which matches its vibes in terms of both intellectual engagement--often at the expense of one's own wellbeing--and upholding of the status quo.
    - ...hold on, what was that last bit?

3. Wait, where did the class commentary come from

From exactly what we've been talking about this entire time, dear reader.
Even just scrolling right past the above tirade on Lovecraft's many, many forms of prejudice will have given you the vague gist of all the elements of the power structure he was part of--funny how bold text subconsciously does that to you, isn't it? It's almost impressive how we're hitting all the big ones here, the only really notable ones we're missing are misogyny and queerphobia--and the latter arguably only if you haven't read The Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath (if you're looking for the subtext, it's absolutely there--don't take my word for it, just ask AO3). These omissions, too, can still be used to serve our point, for the simple fact that they largely exist because Lovecraft was really only capable of writing characters--proper characters, as opposed to unknowable cosmic forces or vague flat villains--just like himself. Hell, the closest thing to a cohesive chronology his work has follows a protagonist who's widely accepted to be his very own self-insert OC, and even that one is...largely interchangeable with all the rest of them, aside from the addition of attached lore.
So, throughout all of this genre-defining body of work, we have a largely consistent set of "bad/weird/wrong" traits to be scared of, and a largely consistent trend of fairly generic protagonists for the audience to project onto as they grapple with the aforementioned horrors. From this, it's fairly safe to say at this point that this is the fundamental, original cosmic horror narrative: the paragon of normalcy versus the bewildering Other. Even, and indeed especially, when that Other is things like...people of color, and the mentally ill, and the existence of other religious paradigms, and other countries, and species that aren't warm-blooded or air-breathing or possessed of intuitive limb configurations, and new scientific paradigms, and literally just higher math. Every one of those things that's outside the average early-20th-century upper-middle-class cishet white American man's sphere of immediate understanding?
Lovecraft was fucking terrified of them.
And, so his reasoning went, everyone else would be, too, because that was also conveniently (not at all accidentally) the demographic of the broader reading public at that point in time. And to the extent necessary, he was right--other people started writing stuff in his universe too, and still other people read it, and then even when the initial fervor had died down, people still kept reading and writing it, otherwise we wouldn't be having any of this conversation in the first place. And largely, the genre branched out to explore more themes than just being scared of absolutely everything you didn't recognize or personally relate to, and it picked up some absolute bangers in terms of additional themes and tropes and stylistic conventions along the way--and somewhat ironically, in doing so, started to attract the very kinds of people that Lovecraft would've fainted at the sight of. Which, on the most superficial face of it, may seem a bit counterintuitive--why would this genre end up gaining an audience and a creative community composed of its worst nightmares?

4. Finally, the point

One of the problems with how we talk about genres is that, on some level or another, it fundamentally colors what we expect to get out of any given work that has that category applied to it--if something is described as "action/adventure", the idea is that it's going to be exciting and fast-paced and whatnot, or at least attempt to. If something is called a "romance", it's a reasonable assumption that there's going to be a focus on interpersonal relationships on both an individual and societal level. And if something is filed under "horror", the idea is that you're going to be scared by it, or at the very least made uncomfortable. This was all very well and good for Lovecraft, because for him and his ilk, that was exactly what they were going for. The Unknown and the Other were terrifying, and so they expressed that in ways intended to communicate that terror to others like them. It was often vast to the point of inhuman in scale, and it scared the daylights out of them, so "cosmic horror" was perfect.
And then, that intent went all to pieces, because one day someone picked up one of his books, or those of his contemporaries, and went "oh damn, this is actually a fantastic vibe though." Not "eek!" or "eugh..." or "oh god, the horrors", but "oh hell yes. This is what I like. I need more of this in my brain. This...
...this feels like home."
Cosmic "horror" isn't just about fear, you see. The fear isn't because you're dealing with someone or something you know is malicious. It's because it's something you can't understand, and that in and of itself is terrifying...and awe-inspiring. There's plenty of fear, but there's also reverence. Wonder, even, in all senses of the word.
Do you know what it feels like to see something that flies so flagrantly in the face of established power structures being described with such awe, being seen with such power...as someone whose existence also flouts that very same status quo? It's...beautiful. Validating. Enlightening. Inspiring. Soul-salving, in a way.
For us, these aren't eldritch horrors. They're eldritch comforts. They're everything we've been shunned and hated for, given form and power so vast and incomprehensible that the only possible reaction from those who called it anathema is a mixture of confusion, terror, and awe. Awe.
Do you know what it feels like, to be the object of awe for the first time?
It's the closest thing to appreciation that this world has ever given us, and damned if we're going to let that go. We are the things that go bump in the night, and we are frightening, and we are beautiful, and we cannot be destroyed or restrained any longer. We are free.

5. Did you forget about the apocalypse?

No, I didn't. But I want you to take a moment to internalize the previous section, to understand the mechanism by which someone can take these stories and arrive at joy rather than terror, and then go read section 1 again with that in mind, with the context that this is what it means when something is described as "weird" or "unnatural" or "eldritch" here. This is the kind of alterity that, according to Lovecraft, just might be shocking enough to end the world--"the" world, in this case, meaning specifically his world--one of privilege built on the backs of others; one of fundamental inequality ossified over hundreds upon hundreds of years; one that refused to share its bounty with anyone who didn't look just like him, and justified this parsimony by decrying them as subhuman.
If that's The archetypical World As We Know It that's being Ended, and the great horrifying weirdness that's ending it is literally just the natural diversity of conscious existence...honestly? Good riddance.
Those of you who read too many genre analyses and such might have noticed by now that there's one more trait that's seen as fundamental to cosmic horror, but hasn't been so much as acknowledged so far in this essay--namely, the insignificance of humanity, the idea that no matter the grandeur of human civilizations or achievements or anything like that, no matter the harrowing depths of human misery or the deep complexity of human history, it all ultimately means approximately diddly squat in the grand scheme of the entire universe. If you squint your mind just right, it's not at all hard to see the echoes of the death throes of geocentrism here, the uppermost echelons of the most powerful society at that point in history being dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that everything, quite literally, does not revolve around them. (The parallels are borne out by the chronology as well--astronomy was absolutely burgeoning at this point in time, with Hubble's "island universes" only having just barely started to prove that even the vast galaxy that contained the entirety of humanity's wildest imaginings up to that point was actually just one of so many, many others.)
In the words of a wise man: "I'M SIGNIFICANT!...screamed the dust speck."
However, we must give humanity credit where it's due--not everyone in the species harbors such delusions of grandeur. Being knocked from one's existential throne at the top of one's worldview means that you fall an awfully long way down, all the way to the ground, and the impact is likely not going to be a pleasant one. But the bottom of the pile of philosophies and histories and societies upon which that golden seat now towers so far above your head is, as is necessitated by simple physics, much broader than the top upon which you so recently teetered. And when you hit that ground and see, for the first time, the world on its own level, those of us at the bottom of that pile--the disabled, the POC, the queer, the poor, the pagans--will glance over, and smirk, and say: "Ah, nice of you to finally join us down here." We've made no impact craters of our own in the dust, we've sustained no agonizing bruises from the overwhelming thud of our dramatic humbling...because really, we've fallen from no height at all. We were born to this ground, and every single layer of that pile on up has made sure we've never forgotten it.
As you stumble to your feet, still trembling and frantically trying to brush away the dust that's finally found you, its wayward child, you point in terror to the tempest that's now scattering the pile to the wind, the unseen corners whither every norm and protocol are tossed with abandon, the unfathomable creatures finally emerging from where they've been buried for eons under the crushing weight of convention, the rubble collapsing into the spaces that once held them fast...and you see our faces change, and lighten, overtaken by a relief and joy of a sort all but impossible to comprehend for one so recently fallen from your artificial self-proclaimed grace. Backs once bowed in subjection now spasm with the thrilling new ache of standing tall, supported by the winds and edified by the flying dust even as these same tear at the flesh and bones of what once kept them down--your flesh and bones. The clouds roiling overhead bear our faces--or perhaps our faces have twisted and flowed to match the clouds? Lightning flashes as charges equalized or souls freed--it's getting harder to tell which is which by the second. Human forms are now mere suggestions, for they've never treated us particularly kindly anyway.
As we dance with the dust and whirl with the wind in celebration, you realize the choice you now face.
Are you paralyzed by the loss of your station, now only so much flotsam strewn far and wide? Or do you release that which has fallen away, and join us in the ecstasy of insignificance?

6. The World Revolving

I understand I may have gotten a bit carried away just now, and couched the point a bit too deeply, rather to the point of potential obfuscation. So, in an effort to provide a more proper, formal, rhetorical translation, let us revisit the initial question that led us here: What, exactly, is the end of the world?
We've established a general form of an answer. We've established the need for the definition of "the world" in order for this question to have any meaning. We've established that definition as Lovecraft and his contemporaries would have meant, simultaneously with the mechanisms for the ending of said world and their backtraced allegorical implications. All these establishments point to one thing as the answer to the question of the archetypical cosmic horror apocalypse: the downfall of the establishment--in short, the Revolution.
Not any specific revolution, mind you--beings from outside time and space generally have little use for such a narrow scope. Rather, when speaking about the end of "the" capital-W World, what we arrive at is "the" capital-R Revolution, the Platonic ideal of such, the one somewhere in the nebulous-but-hopefully-near future spoken of by every radical, the irreversible crisis point beyond which everything is different, when hundreds or thousands of years' worth of wrongs are finally made right, in a sense utopian by its very definition (at least to those doing the revolting) but no less compelling for it, a point of light on the dark sea of contemporary confusion that may be a star or a lighthouse or an optical illusion, but most importantly marks a direction to strive for, and a reminder that somewhere out there, something can still burn with the light and heat of life itself.
To those being revolted against, of course--the wealthy, the gatekeepers, those who trumpet democracy and then crown themselves king--this is an utter shambles. Everything they hold near and dear has been laid to ruin, scattered and scavenged in preparation to build something completely new. They, too, now understand subjection, being at the mercy of that which they do not understand--even if it has no awareness of them personally, and would in fact really just prefer to get on with its life free of their meddling. They have, once and for all, been stripped of the freedom to inflict themselves on anyone as they please.
But we, we are now free of that affliction, turned loose without the constraints imposed upon us for what we are. Perhaps we soar high and drink deeply of the vista of the true breadth of things kept from us for so long; perhaps we run and run without fences or walls or borders to confine us; perhaps we simply find a nice place behind the rocks or between the trees and finally lay down to sleep, no longer dreading what will be taken from us when we wake. Our forms are no longer cages or instruments of punishment, but fluid things able to be melded to our whims, for a price we already paid long ago to those who claimed the right to us. This is nihilism not as wasteland, but as sandbox, the difference between a desert for a glimmering rootless lawn already turning to dust, and for a gnarled cactus whose spines kept it alive long enough to finally see its home.