Summer Vacation Day 12: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Hello, Tim!

This wind is almost howling at this point, and it has rained non-stop since morning.

It is said that tomorrow we will have a bigger rainfall and the whole force of the typhoon, and there will be no school and no work tomorrow for New Taipei City residents.

7/10, Tuesday

Yesterday, I stayed up until 2:30 in the morning. Not for anything sinister, nor was it for the World Cup, it wasn’t even a movie night. I did something simple and nice.

I stayed up reading my novel.

This is the only place where the lights would be on in the midnight: The doorway of my house.

This is, I believe, a classics for many people: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson. This is a science fiction that tells the story of a well-natured scientist with the name of Henry Jekyll. Henry is friend to many people, for his temperate and mild personality won him the heart of many people. However, as he perceived, there had always been a different version of him lurking in the recesses of his mind. With a vial he created, he unleashed his dark side, which was composed of, as stated in the book, pure evilness. This side of our Dr. Jekyll was so madly odious that the transformation also gave him a brand new, evil-aura-surrounding visage and stature. At the beginning, feeling free and liberated at last, Henry rejoiced in this new personage which he named Edward Hyde, but as time passed, he found that he had less and less control of the process of transforming to and fro, and even more of an ordeal to rein in the disturbing morbid thoughts Edward has, he had to find a way to end all this before more harm is done.

I didn’t know about this story at first. My first time coming across the characters Jekyll and Hyde were from another novel, in which a protagonist was said to be like ‘a case of Jekyll and Hyde.’  Being confused by this analogy, I naturally went on the Internet for some answer. I found out the origin of this reference and was further drawn to the plot of the story. I bought the book right away, about two or three years ago, but it was soon forgotten, for I have just too many books to choose from. It was only that Lawrence brought up about this book when we were just chatting about sci-fi novels the last time we met, I felt the impulse and the obligation to read it as soon as possible. The outcome of the story was not surprising since I knew the whole plot of the story long ago; I feel the same when reading about Greek mythology- you know what the ending will be, but you still can’t help but feel immensely drawn to the story.

This story was written in 1886, and the wording they use is quite different, for example, instead of the word ‘vial’ we use in our lives, Mr. Stevenson spelled it with ‘ph’ in place of ‘v’. There were tons of words I didn’t get, but when you read closely, it is still rather easy to comprehend pretty much of the book.

‘All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.’ Dr. Jekyll said in his statement, and I think some people who say Jekyll and Hyde were absolutely the opposite, are not quite correct. True that Edward Hyde was made out of pure evilness, but does that imply Henry Jekyll is made with pure kindness? No, it doesn’t. The Hyde in him was simply ‘hiding’ (I think this is the pun-intended name the author chose) in Jekyll, and the evilness has to be there in the beginning so that it could, later on, be unleashed. You have the control over how much you are willing to show how you are as a human, and I believe it is something we all need to consider. I heard there is a musical of the story, and I think I will want to watch it.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a bone-chilling and intriguing short novel that has a constant effect, and I am pretty sure I will be picking it up again for re-read.

 

It is pouring outside, but I still trekked out for the bookstore.

(Half an housr later) A book bought out of impulse.

This is all for today.