Feeling in the dark

This morning I was thinking about an incident that happened a long time ago, when I was maybe six or seven and at the library one Saturday with my dad. He had this rule: I could only check out one comic book at a time. (The other books I'd get were usually about planes or birds.) My favorites were the slim, hardbound Peanuts collections, but this particular Saturday all of the Peanuts books were out, save for one. It was lying out in the open, and I took it.

I brought it up to the counter and immediately a boy standing next to me said, "Hey, that was mine!". I remembered seeing him in the comic book aisle but didn't think much of it at the time. Legitimately the book was mine, but the pull on my moral tendrils was telling me otherwise.

In the end I let him have the book, but this morning I was wondering, would I have done the same today?

I've been thinking about the dark side of the persona, mine and everyone else's. Robert Bly calls it the shadow. The Chinese call it yin. The Christians might call it evil, or Satan. Do we try to get rid of it, escape it, or make peace with it? The question's not just academic with me -- it seems to dog me whenever I'm by myself, which is to say, pretty frequently lately.

I started reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger by way of Robert Bly's translation. It's a bit like Catcher in the Rye or Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a first-person account of a very bad day. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it later, but for now here's an excerpt:

"These people I met on the streets, how gaily and lightly they rolled their shining heads and swung through life as if through a ballroom! Not a single eye had grief in it, no shoulders had burdens, in these happy minds there was not a clouded thought, not even a tiny hidden pain. I walked there, alongside these creatures, young myself, hardly leafed out, and I had already forgotten what happiness was!"