One of the subtler pieces of wisdom ever, precisely because it must seem so difficult to understand to those who have not felt it — and felt it often:
The disappointed one speaks: “I listened for an echo, but I heard only praise.”
A question is suggested: is it more painful to endure a solitude created by one’s superiority or that created by one’s inferiority? The latter stifles through envy, the former through pride — “being good, do I not deserve equals as company?” Perhaps a better question — are the two not somehow mutually connected: does a superiority not create an inferiority and an inferiority a superiority?
One cannot be primus inter pares save that one is horribly unhappy with this condition — that one longs only to be something other than primus for a while. But by that point one has gotten oneself involved in questions for which there is no real solution — into the ranking of human beings, a burden that cannot be thrown off and also ultimately must crush the one underneath it.