When we love a celebrity, what is it we actually love — the person, or the fame? Put it this way: if you had no idea someone was famous, meeting them would stir nothing in you. They’d register as just another ordinary person, and you’d walk on. But say someone tells you this person is a big deal, or you watch a crowd rush over for photos and figure it out yourself — would your heart stay quiet then? Probably not. You’d catch the excitement too. You’d want another look at them, want them to look back at you, want to say something, get an autograph, take a photo together.
So here’s the question: is it the person you love, or the fame they carry on their back — and the bare fact that everyone else loves them too? I’d wager that what you love is, quite simply, the fact that they’re famous. This is why we say a celebrity is, at bottom, a commodity — a display piece. What you love was never the person. It’s the fame, plus a persona that capital and the star have carefully fabricated together, a manufactured fantasy designed to capture your heart and make you willing to spend your money and energy on them.
In Chinese, the word for fame ends in the character for “air” — fitting, because fame is a gust of wind: it blows for a while and then it’s gone. And it can turn on you. Disgrace, when it comes, hits the famous hardest — the bigger the name, the harder the fall.
What we should pursue is the eternal, not the fleeting. The pleasures of smoking, drinking, and cards are all momentary, and they too exact their revenge. Only the activities that cleanse the soul — exercise, thought, time in nature — hold lasting beauty and truth, and those are what deserve our pursuit.
Comments
Fame is carried on the back, because fame is heavy — like the load a camel bears: other people's baggage, none of it its own.
Didn't Jackson Wang say in an interview that he has no real friends? Because he knows that the people chasing and admiring him are chasing the fame he projects, not the person he actually is.
God is fair: even a big star can't escape the fact that no one loves them for themselves — and for them it's even worse than for ordinary people.
Be a star long enough and even people's enthusiasm starts to wear on you. At first you think all that warmth is for you; in time you realize it isn't. The endless photos and videos of you get tiresome, and you'd rather not go out at all, because honestly it's exhausting. Meanwhile ordinary people spend their days dreaming of how wonderful it would be to be famous — recognized every time they step out the door.