Like a spy you strive to be the easily forgotten face in the crowd, the perfectly ordinary man. To some degree you succeed in this, it can never be perfect, there must be a number of people with whom you are more or less close and a broader web of those to who you are connected by karmic linkages - for want of a better term for something very real - for whom you cannot be ordinary since you play a unique role in their lives, a role that you playfully and more than playfully deprecate. But if you do succeed in being a nondescript gentleman, un homme quelconque, as you like to say to yourself, from whom an occasional penetrating look flashes forth, with or without the mandatory twinkle, this also serves to mask the ongoing dialogue within your mind in which you are by turns something special in the department of either mediocrity or greatness - this being a mechanism by which you digest whatever comes in in the form of either flattery or threat - and there's no prior telling which side any such incoming is going to bolster. And so this ego, or egoity, or whatever the correct term might be, grows quite firm under benign neglect, like an unpruned tree, really quite surprisingly firm and wooden and all too serviceable. Because the minute you start to wonder to whom this is all appearing the colours change and all of that, the outerface of the interface, recedes into comical  insignificance.