6.

Soon after that uncanny experience, though, I abandoned the gym for Weird Town. I sought out my dark room and the disturbing fantasies it produced. I read the disquieting parables of Kafka. I fell into Poe’s labyrinths. I listened obsessively to Springsteen’s Nebraska, with its wasted cornfields and broken wanderers. I wrote lyrics of my own, surreal and quite ridiculous, usually involving rats. I risked becoming a parody of teen angst. (Bart Simpson once said, upon hearing a Smashing Pumpkins song, “Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.”)

Thus began the awkward split—one that most of us suffer—between socially acceptable façade and interior strangeness. The exterior is a useful mask, necessary for survival and success. Those lacking such an appearance are misanthropes, losers, or lunatics. But we all understand, those times we are honest, late on an insomniac night, the limits of the veil. The engrossing action is inside, where our appetites run rampant: lust for power and erotic pleasure, fantasies of failure and sometimes death.

Poe calls this urge for destruction the “imp of the perverse.” Imagine, he asks, standing on the brink of a precipice. “We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain.” The more our reason “violently deters us from the brink … the more we impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.” This unsettling scene and the many that resemble it—yelling profanity at a funeral, being tempted by the one mistake that will wreck our careers—arise from the “spirit of the Perverse,” the hunger to do exactly what we should not.

The battle between reasonableness and delinquency is the likely source of our fascination with split personalities. Mr. Hyde bedevils Dr. Jekyll. The attic picture of his hideous sins troubles beautiful Dorian Gray. Batman is the dark double of Bruce Wayne, as Spider-Man is of Peter Parker. We see ourselves mirrored in these cracked characters. We fantasize about a separate life, hidden, in which we can indulge our destructive obsessions.