24 Myron SharafFury On Earth
can then be carried further without having to wait for the next “genius” to continue the line
of development.
Whether we do so or not depends a good deal on our “attitude toward greatness.”^23
It depends upon whether we can cease to isolate exceptional individuals by defamation, glori-
fication, or even the kind of accuracy that studies only their depth, their talent, their psy-
chopathology, and the outcome of their struggle with competing inner forces, all the while
neglecting these same issues within ourselves. There is much to unite us with great individu-
als, especially our common emotional depth and the effort we can make as they made to free
it from distortion. In his address to the “Little Man”, Reich made this point forcefully:
You [the little man] are different from the really great man in only one thing: the great
man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed oneimportant ability:
he learned to see where he was small in his thinking and action. Under the pressure
of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat
that came from his smallness and pettiness.The great man, then, knows when and in what
he is a little man. The little man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. 24Reich here is stating an unconventional truth about how great men differ from the
rest of us, a truth that helps to lessen the pernicious distance established between extraordi-
nary individuals and other people. But Reich gives only part of the truth. Knowledge of our
littleness can pave the way to removing the various methods by which we dispose of great men
and their work. Used positively, it can help us to give a real response to their contributions.
However, the distance between “them” and “us” consists of more than their awareness of
their smallness and our denial of ours. It takes a rare combination of emotional depth,
courage, and penetrating intellect to make the great leap forward in human awareness. The crit-
ic George Steiner has beautifully appreciated the right kind of distance one should feel toward
individuals like Reich, a distance I shall do my best to maintain in dealing with his life and work:
Where criticism and scholarship invoke instances of the reach of a Shakespeare ... or
a Pushkin, they have to exhibit imperatives of delicacy. They must reflect at every
point ofstyle and proposal their sense ofthe relevant dimensions. They must fall
short of their object, but do so by a distance of incomplete perceptionso honestly defined
that the object is left at once clarified and intact.The inner lives of Shakespeare and
Michelangelo are our heritage;we feed our smaller sensibilities on their donations and excess.
There can be no other thanks than extreme precision, than the patient, provisional,
always inadequate attempt to get each case right, to map its commanding wealth.
(Italics mine.)^25