Ray's Blog

Disillusionment

“The minute a person becomes a celebrity is the same minute he/she becomes a monster.  [A, B and C] were once perfectly pleasant human beings with whom you might lunch on a slow Tuesday afternoon.  But now they have become supreme beings, and their wrath is awful.  It’s not what they had in mind. . . . The night each of them became famous they wanted to shriek with relief.  Finally!  Now they were adored!  Invincible!  Magic!  The morning after the night each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose of barbiturates.  All their fantasies had been realized, yet the reality was still the same.  If they were miserable before, they were twice as miserable now, because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything okay, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and (ha ha) happiness, had happened.  And nothing changed.  They were still them.  The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable.”

Cynthia Heimel, If you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead yet? (New York, 1991), pages 13-14.

This post was originally published on The Gospel Coalition