King believed, Levison stressed, that he simply was an actor in history at a particular moment that called for a personality, and he had simply been selected as that personality … but he had not done enough to deserve it. He felt keenly that people who had done as much as he had or more got no such tribute. This troubled him deeply, and he could find no way of dealing with it because there’s no way of sharing that kind of tribute with anyone else: you can’t give it away; you have to accept it.
