The Dark of the Dark Side

    I probably should avoid late night reading at this point in my life.  It conjures up the deeply buried angst from all the metaphysical delvings wrought by the years of studying the masters of insight into the human mind.
    Most of the time, in today's world, the term "dark side" is used in a comic sense, though the derivation of the phrase referred to the light and dark side of God.  The Dark Side being the evil and malevolent side of human personality or society.  Early psychiatry sought to detach man from his shadow, the unconscious, and then one can see much of what gleams out from the collective unconscious. 
     One of Edgar Allen Poe's early and more obscure tales centers on a character who early in his youth is confronted by another youth with  the same name and birthdate who, over the years, becomes his antagonist, and eventually his nemesis.  The stress and duress results, inevitably, in the only possible conclusion:  the character battles his tormentor and kills him but is haunted by the words that he has thus murdered himself. 
   We all are familiar with "Each man kills the thing he loves,"  and a thousand different applications of why a person engages in murderous behavior. Let us forget all that for the moment and contemplate this:   Aging is a kind of death, subtle at its onset, but inevitably a  ferocious and evil process.  And, we all engage in it voluntarily, to a degree we think of  at first as humorously conciliatory, but which festers and degrades into a deadly dance.  (To be continued---or not)
      TUESDAY, 4:00 A.M.                              The death of life may seem to be a gradual process, but it is really quite abrupt, considering the span of years.  The definitive marker is the realization that you have separated who you are from who you once were.  No longer does life course on in a flow of events with the past an active player in molding your development.  A barrier is set up, or sets itself up, depending on your outlook.  You become separated from the present by the events of the past.  Isolation reigns, in the sense that current happenings exclude yourself.  Because no one exists who remembers your entrance into the world, or the days of  your wine and roses, that part of your life is on the other side of the barrier.  The doppelganger vision of good and evil transmutes into youth and age----life and impending death.  Every aspect of existence is qualified by the taint of transience.  Any investment in your future comes to a halt, with only sporadic tribute being tossed across the barrier.  A comedian (from the past) used to comment that he no longer bought bananas by the bunch, but singly.  He was killing himself with that line, in acknowledgment of  the great divide.  (It is late.  I mean early, 5:00 a.m., and time to start the day.  I'm going back to bed.)