“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” So said Robert Louis Stevenson explaining the artists’ ideal: to be forever en-route. However, as anyone who’s trekked the mountain path to his grave knows, he wasn’t merely expressing artistic character.

On reaching the summit I’d often wondered, between deep breaths, how it was exactly that a Scotsman – one who suffered from chronic tuberculosis since childhood no less – was laid to rest on a mountaintop on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I assume the answer is what has drawn so many readers to Stevenson’s works: his adventurous spirit and lust for life.

Echoes of his works still permeate popular culture. Any modern depiction of adventure on the high seas (including the ‘Caribbean’ variety) owes a debt to Treasure Island and the perceptions of pirates codified therein. A personal favorite, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, covers many themes: the dichotomy of good vs. evil, the social vs. the private selves (the schisms in society), the ambiguity of identity, the marauding persona…to see modern adaptations of an angry green-behemoth who rampages uncontrollably but seeks his weaker persona when his identity is threatened…or a costumed hero swinging, pendulum-acrobatics, through a metropolis balancing power vs. responsibility…or a sun-king from another world at a moral crossroad, to see these stories is to see the wider echoes of Stevenson’s work in popular culture.

The School that bears his name

A widely heard sentiment, from young people not associated with the school, is that Robert Louis Stevenson High School is attended by ‘uppity-arrogant little rich kids’ (this being one of the more flattering quotes). When asked about this view, a friend once explained that exclusivity (high tuition) played a role as did the fact that the school traditionally takes in many of the foreign-national kids whose parents are financially well-off. He may have had a point. However he never attended RLSS, and I did.

Having gone through both the Government and then Religious school systems in Samoa, attending RLSS for my final two years provided quite the contrast. While I recognized the cornerstones of repetition, punctuality, and obedience in the modern curriculum, there is also the necessity of the creative space wherein a student would be allowed to find their ‘optimal persona’- the continually developing-self, the en-route. In my experience, RLSS most closely approximated this ideal. For all those involved with RLSS over the years, congratulation on your 20th Anniversary. As a certain Scottish poet put it “judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.”

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