I spent the morning reading a bit more about Robert Louis Stevenson, who, it turns out, moved to Samoa due to chronic health problems. It seems to me that it was a common thing in the past to suggest that people suffering from bronchitis or other respiratory infections were told to go someplace else “for their health.” Not only did Stevenson live in Samoa for his health, he also spent time living in France.
Imagine! Your doctor pulls a thermometer out from under your tongue, looks at it, sighs, and says, “You’d better move to Paris.” He says it “Pair-ee.”
The nineteenth century really was a different world. Seriously, though, when did doctors stop telling people to get some “sea air” or “more sun?” And was that all quackery, or does it actually help sick people to move half-way across the globe? I wish doctors still did that. “You’ve got a cold. Here’s some heroin and a ticket to Hawaii.“
With the healthcare system we have in America, though, your GP would probably tell you to go somewhere shitty, like Texas. Or Georgia.
Now that I’ve finished up Treasure Island, I’ll be switching gears a bit and tackling a seminal work of Russian literature, Dead Souls by Nokolai Gogol.
This is a book that I know next-to-nothing about, and I’m looking forward to “going in blind.” I can already guess that I’m going to get confused by the characters’ names — Russian names all sort-of blend together when I read Russian novels, and this book has been described as “Dickensian,” which means there’s going to be a britzka-load of characters.
Still. Russian literature has always been surprising. When I read The Brothers Karamazov way back in the day, I was amazed at both the humor and the characterization. I’ve always had a bit of a preconception that Russian literature is as dry and bland and a frozen parsnip, but there’s always something that winds up amazing me.
I hope Dead Souls does the same.
Mornings for the past few days have been filled with dense fog and unearthly quiet. The days between Christmas and New Years are a kind of temporal limbo, and I’m afraid its affect the weather patterns.
Here’s a poem called “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Requiem
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
If you think that’s morbid: The poem is also the epitaph on his grave stone where he lies buried on a mountainside in Samoa. It honestly reads as if he wrote it specifically for the purpose, doesn’t it? Like he knew he was going to die and thought, “Better have some fire-ass lyrics ready!”
Here’s what his grave looks like:
If you had to write a poem for your tombstone, what sort of poem would it be?
Reading Treasure Island (#870 on the list) has been an absolute treat so far. A lot of the books I’m going to be tackling for this project aren’t what you’d call “fun.” Some of them, I know, are going to be a lot more like “work” than the actual work I do.(Looking at you, Proust!)
Treasure Island is a straight-up adventure story, though, and I’ve honestly wanted to keep the story rolling, staying up late in some instances to listen to it. I feel…young again (?) when I’m tucked into bed listening to the adventures of young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver.
I’ve been both reading a physical copy of the book and listening to the audiobook version, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of with books I’ve read recently. I mostly listen to audiobooks when I’m falling asleep, or, as happens with stark regularity, when I randomly wake up at 3 AM and can’t get back to sleep.
I kind of enjoy reading in multiple formats. I particularly like it when I wake up in the morning and find out how many “pages” I listened to at night — it gives me a strange sense of accomplishment.
I’ll never understand people who don’t like audiobooks or say that listening to audiobooks is not “reading,”but I know they exist. The argument seems to be that media aren’t interchangeable and can’t be labeled as “reading,” which is just semantics. I wonder if the clown who wrote that article thinks reading in “braille” doesn’t count because you don’t use your eyes?
Like many people probably told Robert Louis Stevenson towards the end of his life, “That’s a strange hill to die on.”
“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson, #869 on the list of Books to Read Before You Die, has been a welcome respite from the literary labyrinth I’ve recently been trudging through.
Chased not so much by a Minotaur as by a Woolf, I’ve been far off the well-worn path, in the deep woods, surrounded by sky-high hedges and tormented by a distant howl.
I’ve escaped, though, and I wanted something a little less literary for my next book, so I figured an old fashioned adventure story would fit the bill.
“Hey there I write stories.” – Robert L. Stevenson, esq.
Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those authors whose works are regarded as “classics” by nearly everyone who can read. Any list of popular books will feature one of his works — his most famous are probably “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped,” but Jekyll and Hyde also shares a secure place in the literary canon. And, despite being mostly aimed at children, his books are enjoyed by people of all ages.
Who am I kidding? It’s mostly old people at this point. The “Fourth Wing” crowd aren’t getting their rocks off to “Treasure Island.”
Sick! Sick! Sick! Don’t Resist!
Published in 1886, Jekyll and Hyde was one of several famous Stevenson works that were written while he was bedridden in a seaside town in the south of England, doing a whole bunch of laudanum and writing writing writing — in every sense of the word — feverishly. (My sort of vacation!) Thus adding to my anecdotal theory that all the best books are written by people who either A) Aren’t writers, or B) Are in some way sick.
“Fetch me the laudanum, Timmy! My bones are atremble.”
A Proper Toad’s Proper Grandmother
I read Jekyll and Hyde for the first time after my Proper Grandmother took me aside to say, “When I was a little girl, I had nightmares that Mr. Hyde was at my window.”
This meant something coming from her. She talked about her emotions in the Minnesotan Episcopal fashion — begrudgingly, and only ever in places where no one could overhear.
So, naturally, I found a copy and read it right away, thinking this Jekyll and Hyde thing must have been truly horrific.
You’d better run and … Hyde.
It wasn’t. Not the tiniest bit. Even as a 12 year-old I could see that the horror genre had grown by leaps and bounds since Proper Grandmother had read whatever quaint little novellas she’d been able to smuggle into her central-European hovel and fawn over by candlelight.
I was coming from a background of not only Stephen King, but A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th and Hellraiser. A British doctor with a split personality didn’t exactly pump my horror-loving nads, and having grown up thinking Cenobites were hiding under my bed, I wasn’t too worried about some dandy and his fancy ego-bending concoctions.
I had real worries: Guys with bloody lines all over their faces.
At the height of hell’s fashion.
A Double Existence
Modern retelling of the Jekyll/Hyde story have seen the character of Mr. Hyde ballooned into something of an Incredible Hulk, which might be more exciting, but is wildly off base. The actual story sees a prim-and-proper doctor develop a potion that makes him smaller in stature, not some hulking monstrosity. The horror is that he’s an entirely different person; a person who gives in to and revels in his darkest desires.
The idea being that every person has these two sides. One presentable, stable, and of good social standing. The other hideous, heinous, and capable of committing the kinds of atrocities of which our “normal selves” can only daydream.
If you could become a different person, would you? To switch not only bodies but desires and purpose? Become a person who could drink or gamble or screw their way across town, a person who could get in fights, a person who could murder the guy you don’t like rather than just grumble about him when you’re all alone on a stairwell?
Bear in mind that you WOULD BE a different person — such are the workings of Jekyll’s potion. When you switched back (by consuming the same potion), you’d look entirely different and, presumably, would never be punished for your wrongdoings. The other you — the evil you — would simply vanish.
I’m guessing a lot of us would consider it and consider it strongly.
“Hey, it’s my turn to use the body today.”
Concocting a Metaphor
I’ve often wondered if Proper Grandmother saw the image of Mr. Hyde in someone she knew. That is to say, was there a person in her life that had a double, a more sinister counterpart?
The effect of the potion the titular doctor drinks isn’t all that different than the effects of alcohol or other drugs(laudanum, perhaps?), and I feel safe in assuming it is some kind of metaphor for the “double life” a lot of addicts lead. I honestly don’t know if Proper Grandmother had someone like that in her life, but it certainly isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Hell, maybe she led a double life.
I’ve definitely felt that “call of darkness” Dr. Jekyll feels.
Once, in Ubud, on the island of Bali in Indonesia, I tried in a drunken state to convince several compatriots to pile four bodies onto a tiny motorized scooter and drive through the rice fields during a torrential downpour so we could get hamburgers. The road on which we would have traveled looked like this:
“We’ll crash in the storm!” I told everyone. “We’ll absolutely crash and it’ll be ABSOLUTELY GLORIOUS. And if we DON’T, we’ll get HAMBURGERS.”
Calmer heads prevailed that night, thankfully, and to this day I have no idea why I felt the desire I did — a desire, almost a need, to crash a scooter into a rice field during a tropical storm. It was like that feeling you get when you imagine driving your car off the road: “The Call of the Void.” Only I was absolutely, completely, 100% ready to do it. It wasn’t hypothetical; I hoped it would happen.
I was afraid, maybe — those roads are narrow and horrifying — and wanted to face that fear head-on. Not just face it, but embrace it, revel in it. Enjoy the experience! Why dread these things? Why be afraid of pain and anguish? Can’t we embrace our tragedies and meet them as friends?
I may have been a fool to think so. Or, as I prefer to believe, my love of those rice fields was a pure and tragic sort of love that could only ever end in pain.
Doublethink
If I were a betting man, I’d suppose that the laudanum Robert Louis Stevenson was taking at the time he wrote Jekyll and Hyde had put into his mind this dual-consciousness many people espouse when they are inebriated. Anybody who’s been drunk knows what it’s like to feel like a different person, and while I’ve never done laudanum, it’s a pretty safe bet that it whacks you out of your gourd.
I think this impacted the style of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” It’s less a horror story or adventure than it is a mystery, with the “twist” (everyone knows Jekyll and Hyde are the same guy now, but they didn’t when it first came out) being the revelation of who the murderer actually was.
What’s really wacky to me is trying to imagine what it would have been like to first realize that Jekyll and Hyde were the same guy. It must have been like the first time everyone saw Fight Club! I bet a bunch of twats met up at the pub afterwards to brag about how “they knew they were the same guy the whole time no really I did I saw the subliminal flashes and I figured it out.”
“And I figured it out before I even saw the trailer!”
But the lasting impact of this tiny little book isn’t the mystery aspect — there are better, tighter mysteries out there — or even the glorified Hulkamaniac that Mr. Hyde has become in modern media, but rather the notion that you might not be who you think you are. “Know thyself,” says the Oracle to Neo, but is that really possible?
Or is there, in some shape or form, hidden in a cabinet in some dingy doctor’s office, a phial of liquid that’ll release all those thoughts and desires you’ve been too afraid to look at?
Can you imagine something, anything, that would make you crash your proverbial scooter into the rice fields of Ubud?
