Nothing Like the Sun

It was a most satisfying accomplishment, if only because the results were so far above either effort or expectation. I had appended a singularly pedestrian comment unto a blog posting.

It was altogether quite reasonable, maybe a bit so sensible as to appear banal. (A trivial remark on second mortgages, say, will abstract to profundity quite well, as: "A citizen's Liberty is not owed, but paid to his nation's military.") The point I have forgotten, as have all who ever knew of it, because the sole paragraph I had supplied was strangely unmoored from the particular and cast into the general, as a boat in a storm.

My comment was copied, shared, passed on, until it went viral. From large-scale news sites to small neighborhood blogs, my lines appeared, were read, commented upon, repeat.

I personally saw no benefit because only my alias was attached to the newborn wisdom of the paragraph. Then, over time, my by-line disappeared, and a variety of famous names was substituted, from Aristotle to Hume.

Hey, I wrote that, I said in the small forum in which I was able to appear. But, as one or two asked the circumstance, and I was unable to supply without cheapening the whole enterprise, I soon gave up all attempts to mount the bandwagon I had launched.

Well ... not really launched, except as the pebble to the landslide, because my own small candle flame spark to the project was nothing like the sun it became. So I was left to muse whether all fame were like this.