Markheim

Good versus evil: one of the oldest duels of all time, disciplines, and cultures. It is the stuff of fiction and philosophy and faith. It is the stuff of the humanities and the arts, the social sciences and the law, and survival. It is ethics. It is right and wrong. It has created some of our greatest heroes and our most despised villains. There are rules set in stone, there are lines drawn in the sand, and there are little devils and angels playing tug-of-war on our shoulders.

Okay, easy enough. We can tell the bad guys from the good guys, right? But what makes bad and what makes right? A thought? An action? A habit? An effort? A desire? A motive?

Further still, who decides, who chooses, and can it all change?

I would not begin to claim to have the answers to all these questions, or even one. And spoiler alert: I don’t think Robert Louis Stevenson did either. (Or if he did, he was holding out, and we are the better for it!) No, the questions would not be timeless if they were all so easily answered. Or asked. But indeed, it begs yet another question: are Markheim’s steps through the stages of self-awareness and acceptance ones that we walk as well — are his questions our questions? It could be that the line in the sand is easily straddled, the mirror in our hand may show more than we see, and the voice in our head might very well be our own.

—Karen Strachan