Subway Walls, Tenement Halls

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
— Stephen Crane

I've been thinking about fame lately. Not just fame — celebrity. Celebrity is like a shiny, sparkly disease: an illness within society and an addiction within the individual. At the level of the general public, it's an obsession with icons and demons, heroes and villains. At the level of the person who seeks mass-recognition, it's a neurotic desire for some kind of affirmation. It's the same impulse that causes people to scribble graffiti in bathrooms. It's a way of saying: "at some point in history, I was here. I was real. I was alive."

In modern popular Western culture, being famous for any reason — or for no reason at all — seems to be a highly sought-after prize in itself. People are more than willing to be humiliated on television in exchange for the "privilege" of millions of people seeing their faces and hearing their names, even if they are being openly mocked for their lack of talent. Apparently, to them it's worth it.

To become a celebrity is to make a dreadful Faustian bargain. Once your identity is known to some portion of the world, you will come under attack. It is inevitable. Consider any well known actor or politician, any well known singer or business figure. The Internet is flooded with cruel and hateful jabs towards them, many of them dishonorable and with no rational basis whatsoever. You know, if you become famous, this will happen to you too. And yet the desire to achieve celebrity status wins out over the desire to avoid this kind of relentless harassment and antagonism.

Sometimes being a celebrity is directly linked to having a successful career, as in Hollywood. Other times, however, becoming a celebrity appears to be the end goal. And often it's a complete accident. These are the situations that make me flinch. Some regular, ordinary human being gets inadvertently caught up in some national drama like a disaster, a rescue, or a courtroom battle. He or she gets trapped, gets saved, or has to give testimony in a high-profile case. The next thing you know, trolls are using words like "stupid" and "ugly" and "pathetic" to describe him or her. This is a person who never chased the spotlight. But it doesn't matter. Once the spotlight is thrust upon you, like it or not, it's open season and you're fair game.

It's also a trap: you can never just stop being famous. Instead, if your light dims, you become a has-been, a footnote, a D-lister. And being famous is a lot of work. You must promote yourself incessantly, and you're always "on," no matter where you go. You have no privacy. You can never relax. You are observed and judged at all times. You are followed by crazy stalkers, ruthless pararazzi and nosy, unethical, uncharitable reporters looking for a juicy story. We all do foolish things and have moments of questionable or inappropriate behavior, but if you're a celebrity it becomes tabloid "news" the next day. People shamelessly make up outrageous lies and start vicious rumours about you all the time, and other people believe them because they don't know any better. People attribute statements to you that you never made, or take statements you did make wildly out of context. You wind up with an entourage of parasites, and you never know how many of them are real friends and how many are just there because you're famous. You never know who to trust. You get caught up in silly public feuds with other famous people. People may admire you or look up to you, and expect you to set a positive example. When you make a mistake, thousands of people will feel personally betrayed, as if you let them down. The whole thing sounds exhausting.

Not being a celebrity, on the other hand, is quite nice. It means you can come and go as you please, and go about your normal daily business. Obscurity is like a comfortable pair of shoes.

One of the nice things about being a novelist, I suppose, is that it is possible to achieve success without being a celebrity. There are writers who have published dozens of books and are making a perfectly agreeable living for themselves, achieving both creative and financial freedom, without being recognized and hassled on the street. They can go out to a restaurant or a bar and remain anonymous. They can go to the grocery story without it becoming an event.

One thing you can't avoid is criticism, both of yourself and of your work. But that's something you can't avoid anywhere, no matter where you go in the world or what you do with your life.

So to circle back to my original point, I think writing satisfies the same primal impulse as fame-seeking (to say, "I exist!"). Instead of seeking immortality through increasing the number of people who know who you are, as a writer you come to terms with your limits in time and space, and make peace with it through the act of synthesis. Writing a book is all about capturing the experiential essence of this temporary mortal incarnation, crystallizing it, slicing it up, and arranging it in a display case. It may be seen and enjoyed by a hundred other people (or a thousand or a million) or it may not, but that isn't the point. The point was the act of doing it.