There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today - I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl.
Skip this post if you're still planning to read H P Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth. Otherwise, stand by for another horror story.
I joined DACE in 1991. It was an exciting move for me: a new role, of a sort that seemed intrinsically valuable, but one that would make real use of the sort of expertise I represented. I would still be a research-active astronomer, but with a job that looked out from the university, that aimed to provide something useful to people in the wider community. The Access course in particular seemed like - and is! - something that could make an enormous difference to its students' lives.
It was more of a change than I'd realised. Not the teaching, but the conversations that take place in the academic discussion of Education. The nature of those discussions, the sort of questions that are asked and the sorts of answers offered, are very different from physical science. It took me ten years to begin to appreciate some of those conversations. I still remember the precise meeting in which I found myself thinking, "Good grief, I understand what (person X) is talking about."
It seemed to me that many of those conversations would make little use of my talents, and that I lacked other talents needed to contribute to them. For almost all of that time I thought of myself as an astronomer working in adult education. I thought it was important that I kept my research life alive, that I kept working at being a proper university expert in my subject. I went only rarely to meetings on the subject of adult education. Nonetheless the years rolled on and I became something different from a Physics department academic.
The narrator of The Shadow Over Innsmouth has laid eyes on creatures that nobody should see and live. An atmosphere of decay and unease grows to a climactic parade of horrors. But it's the twist at the end that makes that story something special: the narrator himself is one of the creatures, and he begins to perceive the inevitability of a future rather different from the one he imagined. Initially only madness and degeneration lie ahead but at last he is reconciled to the only possible course of action: embrace his true nature, evil to men possibly but authentic to him. Flee the sanatorium! Plunge into the ocean! Live with your fellows among the Cyclopean wonders of the sunken city! "Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me — yet perhaps a greater horror — or a greater marvel — is reaching out."
Three redundancy situations in six years have taught me: I cannot escape my true nature. Perhaps once I could have been like other university academics but the streak of adult education runs too deep now. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror.
