Pervert!

I was recently reading a children’s adaptation of Poe’s “The Black Cat” to my son. He has an affinity for the creepy (like old Pop). I was intrigued while reading and later went to my grown-up copy to enjoy with a libation. I came across this passage and was thrown by the keen insight into the human condition displayed by Mr. Poe.


“And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart --one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself --to offer violence to its own nature --to do wrong for the wrong's sake only --that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.”

C. S. Lewis puts it thusly:

“When you say that Nature is governed by certain laws, this only means that nature does in fact behave in a certain way. The so called laws may not be anything real-anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in the case of man this will not do. The Law of Human Nature, Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior. In this case, besides actual facts, you have something else-a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey and yet we do not!”

I was shocked that two men, so different could pen with such similitude. Perhaps they had more in common then I realized...perhaps we all do.