A celebration of temptation
Temptation isn’t a topic to be treated lightly – it is, after all, the darker side of desire, that sensation of wanting something that we know we shouldn’t have. It struggles with our conscience, mocks our good intentions, and it’s a stronger man than I who has never succumbed.
I’m obviously not talking about the temptation that ice-cream commercials bandy around recklessly or which people use when they say “Gee, I’m tempted to have another coffee,” but rather the ungovernable force of nature that leads to illicit affairs, broken dreams and disillusionment. The temptation that, at the very least, leads us down a dark path we later wish we had never found.
Few have expressed the conflicting emotions of temptation better than Neil Finn. When, in his tortured song Into Temptation, he sings: “The guilty get no sleep / in the last slow hours of morning / Experience is cheap / I should’ve listened to the warning…” you get the feeling that he’s been there himself.
Not many songs can compete with this honesty. In the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun, for example, Eric Burdon may caution against visiting whorehouses but when he smoothly intones how the experience ruined him it somehow lacks conviction.
A festival on temptation must then turn to literature which, ever since the Bible recounted the misadventures of Adam and Eve, has never been short of examples. One of the most famous, of course, is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which posed the notion that everyone possesses an evil side which, once tapped into, can overwhelm their conscience with the giddy delight of vicarious debauchery. (more…)
