Mr. B was a giant of a man.  He was a doctor at age 23, he traveled the world, was a paragon of any community he made his own and had a knack of always being the man ‘they’ went to when no other would do.  He could play any instrument, compose, paint, write – documents, sonnets and love letters with equal ease.  Mr. B married an exotic, talented and beautiful woman despite the fact he was a man of rather short stature and modest physical feature.
Mr. B had many children and he loved them very much but always – always there was his presence – his immensity.  In his every smile there was defaulted expectation – that his children should inherit his legacy; they tried – they tried with all of their might but evolution is a fickle thing – paced to some methodical plodding rhythm.  The children were bright, all, but none so brilliant as their father.  One, no two, were amazing musicians, but nothing more; they practiced – night and day, became narrowly exceptional, one even acquired some level of acclaim.  Another child became a doctor – graduated at age 26 – started a modest practice – brought healing to a small corner of humanity.  Another child was a dreamer – dabbled across the arts and ran away to see the world quite young, saw many sites, had many experiences, but nothing much really stuck, or, perhaps it did – of this child little was heard.
The final child, not in age, but perhaps in capacity, was tortured from the earliest age by his inability to meet the tacit expectations.  What he could not accomplish with sheer thought he sought to overcome with intense memorization.  He fast mastered the skills of assurance and stereotype identification.  He could make seemingly brilliant mental leaps through the connection of ostensible details to a deep catalogue of stereotypes.  Yet to Mr. B, a paragon of intellect, the subterfuge was painfully obvious and father and son felt mutual, implicit, shame.  The boy then sought extenuation to failure – he became a stereotype himself – a bottle of self-destructive energy.  He was self-defeating, he fought other boys, disregarded all authority without his home and then even there.  He was misunderstood – a brooding intellect – special in his own inexplicably angry and tortured way – he was too obscure for comparison.
He had a practiced and perfected eye for the brilliant and he was careful to respect and befriend it wherever it appeared – he was, himself, quite bright.  Yet there was, always, that inability to understand it and gain admission to the forbidden organization.  As he aged, grew worldly and experienced, he could claim indignant superiority – wisdom is experience, a superceding of logic – reasoning, real intellectual reasoning is something supplemented by age – this is what he told himself – this, what a hundred thousand like-minded men had purported for two millennia.