narcissism

There was a youth named Narcissus who was so beautiful that everyone who saw him fell in love with him, and he loved none of them back. Nymphs and maidens sighed for him and he passed them by without a glance. One of them, the nymph Echo, loved him so hopelessly that when he spurned her she wasted away until only her voice was left, repeating the last words of anyone who spoke.

For all the hearts he had broken, a punishment was decreed: Narcissus would love, and love in vain, as others had loved him. So one hot day, tired from hunting, he knelt at the edge of a still, silver pool to drink.

And there in the water he saw a face, the most perfect face he had ever beheld, gazing back up at him. He did not understand that it was his own reflection. He reached for it and the water broke and the face scattered; he waited, and it returned. He leaned to kiss it and met only cold water. He begged it to stay, and it moved its lips but made no sound.

He could not tear himself away. He forgot to eat, forgot to drink, forgot everything but the beautiful stranger in the pool who was himself. And so, bent over his own image, gazing at what he could never hold, he pined away and died on the bank, and where he had lain there grew a nodding white flower that still bears his name.

From Narcissus and his fatal love of his own reflection we get narcissism: an excessive, absorbing love of oneself, so consuming that it shuts out everyone else and, in the end, harms no one so much as the person caught in it.