H.P. Lovecraft: The Quest of Iranon - short story review

What a beautiful and enduring short story. It dwells on the naiveté and sense of wonder of the youth that always seeks the unreachable; that which seems so close, yet with age is revealed to be a fantasy.

Iranon, a singer of songs whose calling is "to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood", is on a quest to find the city of Aira, in which he vaguely recalls growing up in, where he was a prince, the son of the king.

"My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotos-buds." (Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, p. 141)

He travels to faraway lands for years and years, singing his songs and wanting admiration, whilst all he gets is laughs, yawns, and slight interest from locals. His childish naiveté is put to test, and is ultimately adjusted by the real world, which was there all along, if only he tempered his dreaming and accepted his faith of being born in the city of Teloth, a city that he didn't (or pretended not to) recognize, where "all men most toil, for that is the law."

Was the city of Aira a figment of his imagination, a desire for an easy life with no toil where he would be destined to be a prince, or was it a past that he longed for and that could never be relived again, a time of childlike innocence when he thought of life as an easy endeavor?

"And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with withered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world." (p. 146)

Rating: 4/5