never odd or even

Small is great if the smallness is taken as a challenge.

Rizal’s career illustrates the theory of challenge-and-response as the secret of progress. He started out timid and insecure; he ended up bold and confident. Rizal soared because his every response overshot the challenge. With each achievement, whether in science or letters or scholarship, he added one more cubit to his stature, until he could no longer decry himself as little. Even in the most intimate incapacity of all, Rizal managed to achieve a measure of success. His last emotional involvement, with Josephine Bracken, is no longer just an affair but stands asa mature relationship, a marriage. In this, too, he overcame inadequacy and gained a satisfactory prize. And so he, despite the dread ending at Bagumbayan, lives happily ever after: a great man, the grandest of Filipinos.

Born diminutive, he made himself magnificent.