The sands of time absorb all greatness.
Or...
The vast majority of people have no idea where their great grandfather is even buried.
While potentially fatalistic observations, they may actually enable true greatness more than anything else.
Greatness is often times the cultural appropriation of admiration. And, therefore, it is quite temporal and evolutionary, even in retrospect. But, true greatness has a transcendent quality that ultimately supersedes the fashionability often associated with it. Bound as it often is by its times, greatness retains the better virtues of humanity and provides, therefore, the opportunity for all of us to participate in its perpetuation (whether we are especially known for that contribution or not).
Another way to put it might be that what is great about something is our ability to perpetuate it. And, this framing often creates the very tilt that is both distracting and the essence of it. We tend to think of greatness as something in the order of ability — something you do or can do or should do. It's not that this is untrue, it's just that this is more likely one of the smaller features of it. This is why focusing on ability, often is more distracting than helpful.
The higher greatness of greatness is likely closer to our participation in it (rather than our ability to be it). The difference is the locus of what makes something great. When it is primarily about us, it becomes more...about us. But, when something is truly great, it has less to do with the our part and more to do with the what is great about it.
Take love, for example. What is great about love is...love. People who love well aren't often considered "great". Such an attribution seems to fly in the face of the basic ideals about love — it isn't about the person doing it, it is about the loving itself. Love is a great thing, a transcendent thing. It takes someone to do it, and to receive it. But, it's greatness is more about it, than the people involved in it.
More things are probably like that than we realize. And, it is those things that perpetuate great things — manifested in both timeless and new ways all throughout history. We can participate in that greatness by being the personification of those things. This is what makes those things both persist and great. We, on the other hand, melt into time...even as the great things we can participate in continue.
People who try to be great are often playing in categories that don't really transcend much beyond the local time and space they occupy. Some names do rise above in the annuls of history, but it is often what they did that is the great thing about them. It is the transcendent thing they joined and perpetuated that creates the acclaim or recognition; not as much themselves, that are the essence of that greatness. Obviously, there is a blend involved — our true humanity expressed in great things. But, those who are after the celebrity of something great often fail miserably because they themselves are not the essence of what IS great about great things.
By joining the greater things of human existence, we perpetuate what is truly great about them throughout time...even as we more often are simply absorbed into the trajectory of that greatness.
In that way, perhaps, the sands of time are generous to include us.
