Looking back at Narcissus

The narcissist, personified by Icarus, seeks to pierce heaven yet invariably crashes to earth. Yet heaven in its grace often hides the crash from the eyes of most mortals. The narcissist races off a cliff and for a brief moment appears to fly. Most of us see only the image of the airborne hero, and that image remains in our mind forever. Perhaps this overly exalted memory, rather than the painful reality of the subsequent crash, is heaven's debt to the narcissist. After all, it is the agitated and deluded narcissist who seems to move humanity in ways beyond the capacity or the interest of the humble and self-actualized person. There must, in the end, be some payoff for the exhausting effort made by the person who thinks himself a god and who often accomplishes some social good through his exhausting effort.