# On “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti  ## Metadata - Author: [[Moreau Vazh]] - Full Title: On “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: "The Last Feast of Harlequin" by Thomas Ligotti is a well-known story with unsettling imagery and accessible themes, making it a good introduction to Ligotti's work. The narrative follows a protagonist obsessed with clowns, leading to a mysterious and ambiguous festival experience that delves into dark symbolism. Despite some slower sections, the story's ending delivers a chilling and impactful conclusion. - URL: https://tasker.land/2024/05/07/on-the-last-feast-of-harlequin-by-thomas-ligotti/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > The parts of the town did not look as if they adhered very well to one another. This conjunction might be blamed on the irregular topography of the town. Behind some of the old stories in the business district, steeply roofed houses had been erected on a sudden inclie, their peaks appearing at an extraordinary elevation above the lower buildings. And because the foundations of these buildings could not be glimpsed, they conveyed the illusion of bing either precariously suspended in air, threatening to topple down, or else constructed with unnatural loftiness in relation to their width and mass. This situation also created a a weird distortion of perspective. The two levels of structures overlapped each other without giving a sense of depth, so that the houses, because of their higher elevation and nearness to the foreground buildings, did not appear to diminish in size as background objects should. Consequently, a look of flatness, as in a photograph, predominated in the area” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hx92626pr9a6k9k7r59dzmvm)) > Umberto Eco once observed that the difference between a regular film and an erotic film is that while normal films will mention trips to the shops, erotic films will go out of their way to show them. I’m not sure that’s true of erotic films, just poorly-written ones and this whole section feels uncharacteristically ham-fisted ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hx92fxntjy7gfy5z9ch5m473)) > They were singing to the ‘unborn in paradise,’ to the ‘pure unlived lives’. They sang a dirge for existence, for all its vital forms and seasons. Their ideal was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all the many shapes of death and dissolution. A sea of thin, bloodless face trembled and screamed their antipathy to being itself ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxace9cfq7t1hkhb9z0p9tvw)) > Ligotti is now broadly understood to be a form of anti-natalist in the sense that he sees consciousness as a terrible curse. While this curse means that it is sensible for the living to envy the unliving, the envy is not suicidal in nature: We do not envy those who have ceased to be alive, we envy those who have never been alive, or at least conscious. Puppets feature prominently in the work of Ligotti as Puppets are twice-cursed in the sense that they are blissfully unconscious entities who are forced to perform consciousness for the sake of the alive ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxacpw1742smkys65tf4nfbs))