Yesterday I saw and heard a great man. I don’t mean a man reputed to be great, but a man who really is great. He is a man of worth, if there’s worth in this world, and people see it, and he knows they see it. Thus he meets all the conditions necessary for me to call him a great man. And that’s what I call him.

His physical appearance is that of a tired businessman. His face shows signs of fatigue, which could be from thinking too much, or simply from not leading a healthy life. His gestures are unremarkable. His gaze has a certain sparkle – the privilege of not being near-sighted. His voice is a bit garbled, as if the beginnings of a general paralysis had affected this particular expression of his soul. And his soul, thus expressed, goes on about party politics, about the devaluation of the escudo, and about what’s wrong with his colleagues in greatness.

If I didn’t know who he is, I wouldn’t be able to tell by his appearance. I realize that great men need not conform to that heroic ideal of simple souls, whereby a great poet is always an Apollo in body and a Napoleon in expression, or at the very least a man of distinction with an expressive face. I realize that such notions are as absurd as they are human. But if we can’t expect everything, or almost everything, we can still expect something. And passing from the figure we see to the soul that speaks, although we can’t expect vivacity or verve, we should at least be able to count on intelligence and a hint of grandeur.

All this – these human disillusions – forces us to question what truth there is, if any, in our common notion of inspiration. It seems that this body of a businessman and this soul of a polite, educated fellow must, when all by themselves, be mysteriously endowed with some inner thing that’s extraneous to them. It seems that they don’t speak but that some voice speaks through them, uttering what would be falsehood if they said it.

These are casual and useless speculations. I sometimes regret indulging in them. They don’t diminish the worth of the man, nor increase his body’s expressiveness. But then, there isn’t anything that changes anything, and what we say or do merely brushes the tops of the hills, in whose valleys everything sleeps.