Dark values often loom in the shadows of desire. When they do, frustrated hopes and ambitions can lead to desperation only to reemerge to take a disguised but fatal form. Sometimes old lovers can make good friends, but often the attempt to simulate friendship where passion is lurking in one but not the other is just a desperate attempt to hang on and not let go of something that is past its time. When the truth sets in, things can then get ugly and mean before the loss is accepted for what it is. In this regard, there is a sense in which the rise and fall of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism is like the rise and fall of Macbeth. It is a witches' fable of blind ambition, leading inexorably to the birth of nihilism, a bastard child of extravagance and despair.