Lachrymae.
II.
Down, vain lights! shine you no more.
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their last fortunes deplore;
Light doth but shame disclose.
…
You were still a young man when you first donned the mask. It was the easy pride of youth that allowed you to deflect blame, hiding as you did behind an armor of sullenness bound to willing blindness. At first you railed and struck out against any who tried, however cruelly, to help you. Accusations fell from your mouth in a voice unrecognized and unconvincing, helpless to convey the petulance with which the words should have been laced. Not for you a single scapegoat: the Order made you inhuman, while the Wars made you inhumane. You fixed both the old master and the new one with an accusing eye. Once you even managed to blame her—though that did not last long, the thought soon banished as blasphemy.
Such reassuring falsehoods filled a useful function. Your teacher was willing enough to weave another unreality for your consumption. Long practice had already made you adept at tracing the interconnections of accountability that he constructed to satisfy your hungry gaze. They kept you sane and striving; revenge gave you reason to stay alive. In those first precarious weeks, such a pragmatic deception was not to be discounted. It is always easier when one knows whom to hate.
Only with the march of bitter years have you allowed yourself the complication of truth. If age has not exactly lent you humility, you have at least learned your limitations. In a sea of new sensations, self-honesty proved newest. Tinted vision or cotton-muffled hearing may disorient, but they are only the shadows of aestheses that you still can—if with increasing difficulty—remember. You did not relearn this, did not discover it as a familiar object peripherally seen. You had never trod this path before. The task proved painful, and you had no guide in its pursuit.
Memory itself distorts, but here it could not interfere. This new honesty was no simulacrum of an old, but instead the removal of the veil, the lighting of the scrim. By now you have grown out of self-pity.
Your pride survived its immolation. You would never admit culpability, even to the one confidante who has not yet abandoned you. Alone, however, you can afford to be honest, or can no longer afford to lie. This is what you have come to know: while you may not have wholly understood what you were doing, you did it nonetheless. You were used by no one, subject to no one. You had no corrupter whom you did not willingly follow. When your world fell down around you, it was because you had crushed its foundations, had made a devastation of everything you once were. All that has soured in your life was curdled by your own corrupting touch. You masterminded this hecatomb of possibilities, irreparably trapping yourself within terrors of your own creation. This is what you have chosen, o Chosen.
Once again, you know whom to hate.
...
(The Star Wars franchise, as I am only too painfully aware, is not mine. Criticism is welcomed. The next section will be ready for posting in roughly a week.)
