To sum up, then, since you're the impatient type: he took to the stage in part to regain the attentions of those who he'd wronged in the past. And with the entire world watching, he gave up all the secret knowledge he'd used to bind the ones he loved to him. He was greedy, of course, or he wouldn't have wanted the eyes of millions — a tragic flaw, he's never satisfied — but the love of the masses was never really what it was all about.

[ Well, it's no back-of-the-book summary, but it's not too bad for something improvised, he thinks. Self-aggrandizing and not at all the entire picture, but there's truth to the romantic core of it, and that's the part that he's choosing to focus on right now. ]

The tension, you see, lay in waiting to find out whether anyone would return to him when all he had left to offer was himself.