Several years ago I came across The Darth Side, a really funny blog purporting to be the private journal of Lord Darth Vader. At the time, the blog was in progress. I stumbled upon it again the other day and the project is now complete, the blog ending just before Vader delivers his son to the den of the Emperor. And it turns out that the project became much more than funny.

The humor is still there in Vader’s winter, but it’s just a bonus. The blog’s real gift is to infuse the Star Wars story with the kind of metaphysical meaning that the original trilogy hinted at and the prequels utterly obliterated. It’s so brilliant that it kind of makes me care about Star Wars again, something I had thought to be impossible. You want examples?

Here’s Vader explaining the Force and the Sith view of the difference between the Light and Dark side:

It must be understood that the Force is, above all, singular. The so-called “sides” arise from differing matters of perspective. (If you study the way of the Sith you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on one’s point of view.)

The opposite of the singular Force is the all-encompassing void of death. Time began with the Force, and will end in desolation. This is the way of things, and an inevitable consequence of the flow of events from the past into the future.

Without the inertia of the fall toward the abyss, the Force would have nowhere to go.

For in the chaotic tumble toward doom the stuff of the worlds enact loops of complexity that change the grade from life to death, introducing valleys, peaks and cycles. Between creation and destruction comes a flutter of improbability, a brief sonnet of meaning against the noise of time. Life!

It is the causal contagion that ties every ounce of us together through the network of the Force, our actions resonating against our almost-actions and our non-actions in a web of fleeting possibility that spans this galaxy and beyond. The beat of a child’s heart detonates supernovae, the beat of a bug’s wing tilts the orbit of worlds.

We are all connected.

Anyone who awakens to the Force knows this. The divisive issue is what to do with this knowledge.

When you can run the mechanism of the universe forward or backward, scrubbing through possible histories with a thought, a theme develops. You cannot escape it. Death, death, death. It is the final destiny of all things, great or small, matter or idea. But there is astounding beauty in the arts of the not-death, the filigree dances of life’s loops as it spins from light to void. If you are human, it moves you.

It should move you. But this is what the Jedi Order denies. They preach that the heart of a beast cannot judge the destiny of a galaxy. They preach dispassion and detachment, a condescending compassionfor the damned. They stand by the sidelines and watch history happen, intervening only in trivia that offends their effete sensibilities.

Every Jedi knew the cycles of civilization, and every Jedi knew an age of barbarism was nigh. And yet they did nothing.

In contrast, the way of the Sith is predicated on a love for man. We have inherited the godhead of the galaxy by colonizing its every world. Though lesser species might have flourished given infinite time, it was our kind who got there first. We have won this galaxy with thousands of generations of our blood and our dreams. We call the others “primitives” because we are their kings.

And we will not sit idly by as it all careens toward a morbid interregnum. Inspired by our passions we will act to bridge the gulf between civilizations, shortening the period of disorder by decisively maintaining connections between societies from one side of the galaxy to the other. We will weather the storm.

Hate! Love! Misery! Joy! These are paths to the dark side, for to invest in the emotional life of civilization is to care about its fate. To care is to suffer, and suffering is real.

The Jedi were mere spectators.

This is Silmarillion-levels of awesome.

The final post, in which Vader explores the reality that his entire life has been spent in slavery–from Waddo to Qui Gon to Sidious, Skywalker was never his own master–is the deepest and most consequential reading of the character, and the most dramatic and morally satisfying view of the climax in Return of the Jedi.

If you ever cared for Star Wars, take a look-see. I’ll go on at length next week.