Greatness is a monstrous thing. Many of us will be blessed to know greatness. All of us are condemned to be weighed against greatness. It is comfort to think that greatness is available to everyone, and a true optimist, although fictional, might smilingly seep words to the effect that everyone is great to someone.
To that, I respond a firm Applesauce.
I have brushed greatness. I have known greatness. I have had petty, venal arguments with greatness about stupid things that I would regret if I still could. Greatness is a ass, so speaks the dirt. What, please, you breathlessly ask, is the proper attitude of deference when confronted with greatness?
Heck-town, I don’t know.
Do I wish I’d treated the great and powerful with more kindness? No more so than I wish I’d treated everyone with more kindness. Do I regret and question my every interaction with the great and terrible? No more so than I regret and question how I tied my shoes this morning: constantly, with every fiber of my being.
No, I am a perpetually small person. It pleases me so to be, because it is easy. When greatness looks back at the speed bumps and hurdles along the path to change the world, there I am in the rearview, shaking my head and clucking my tongue. I am a passive doorstop to progress because I lack every quality necessary to become any sort of change in the world. A petty wag might say, by way of piquing me, there is a kind of greatness in my passive obstructionism.
The applesauce has fermented to a smelly bushwa.
| Ruth Gibbs | Reading |
| Ben Gibbs | &c. |