One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do

I started writing this about a month ago, and only just rediscovered it while brutally thinning out all the Almosts lingering in my Word folder. I'd finish it, but I've lost the mental thread, forgotten where I was going with it. You know how it is *grins*

You’d be forgiven for thinking, upon first meeting him that this is a man who’s never listened to, never heard; with his habit of standing just that bit too close for comfort and talking just slightly too loud and with too harsh an edge to his voice. He is the first agnostic man I ever met; his agnosticism, in its ceaseless drive to avoid being noticed, to remain unknown borders on being a religion in itself. Again, you’d be forgiven for thinking this man has taken the lesson of Sunday school to heart – his deferential pose seems to echo through the ages the old, old message of Fear of God. Yet this isn’t it; he strives to remain unnoticed and to seem unimportant with the overall aim of avoiding bringing himself to the notice of whom, what, whatever, languishes Up There.

He seems unimportant. You’d be forgiven, by him with his slightly overbearing laugh and maybe by greater powers who applaud the ingenuity of his approach in a similar way to myself, for thinking this on first meeting him.
Yet he calls forth an odd sort of grudging respect from me, being the most spiritual, nay, religious, man I have ever met, despite all the oddities, the passing up of golden opportunities just to avoid notice – he didn’t, he assures me with an air of one making an obvious point to a slightly slow pupil, marry the love of his life. Why, I asked him quietly, sitting at his feet while he drew heavily on his pipe and stared into the blackened fireplace. Because, he said, she was too beautiful not to be noticed. It was what she was. I couldn’t ask her to change that.
One word gambols to the forefront of my mind when I spend time with him. Hubris. In The Persian Boy by the super Mary Renault the Greek gods are described as [roughly] being so full of arrogance and jealousy because they are modelled on arrogant and jealous men.