Madness, Horror, Idiocy, Rage

“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other.” –C. S. Lewis



Lewis is right, of course. And the sobering truth he expressed in a BBC radio talk during the Second World War had been masterfully illuminated some fifty-odd years earlier in this short fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson. In fact, Stevenson takes it farther. His story reminds us that there comes a point at which choice is no longer possible.



Like you, I read this book many years ago and only bought it because it was offered as a Daily Deal sometime late last spring. As it turns out, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is another one of those books which you think you know—until you encounter it again. In the light of a couple decades of experience in the world, Stevenson’s work only gains in stature. I suspect innumerable film treatments have helped to blind us to the terrifying truth that lurks amid all the grease paint and dry ice. But it is still there, accessible to anyone through this well done performance.

