This piece has several inspirations. The first and most obvious is the fact that so many people spend their entire lives constructing a persona around themselves, and doing everything in their power to make sure that no one ever sees the true person underneath.

All too often, however, this mask will fall away at the most inconvenient times, such as when we are wounded, vulnerable, or, perhaps most loathsome of all, when we are faced with need, anguish or sorrow in another.

And I make no claims of being any better than anyone else in this regard: I too am a mortal person, with all the same failings as most other mortal men. Hence, this is not some sort of hypocritical Jeremiad on my part, so much as recognising the same failings in myself, and often lamenting them.

A second inspiration for this piece is the old Billy Joel song 'The Stranger', which I still think is one of the best songs he ever wrote, even though I always believed that the truth is the opposite of what he claimed: I believe that what he called 'The Stranger' is, in fact, our true face that we keep hidden behind the mask.

Finally, a third inspiration for this piece was the old saw about how the true measure of a man is in how he treats his inferiors. While plenty of people have said it, most recently J.K. Rowling (via Sirius Black) in "The Goblet of Fire", my favourite version has always been a version attributed to Reverend Charles Bayard Miliken of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Chicago in 1910, when he said:

"It is the way one treats his inferiors more than the way he treats his equals which reveals one’s real character."