My social media feeds have been swamped by remembrances of, and shared grief for the death of Robin Williams. His heart-breaking suicide was of sufficient significance that the President of the United States issued a statement on it, implicitly suggesting that the exterior, projected life of a celebrity is perhaps more real and relevant to the populace than what\u2019s taking place in Israel or Ukraine. It\u2019s kind of strange to think of it this way, but there seems some truth to it.<\/p>\n
One of the repeating themes I\u2019ve encountered is that people cannot believe that somebody who made them laugh so much could possibly have such a sad and broken interior. There’s an obvious lack of empathy in such a position, in that these people cannot see a life beyond the surface one that they so greedily absorbed. To be a celebrity in our culture is to give up one\u2019s interior, becoming a vessel in which the schizophrenic projections of the public push everything else out. It must get awfully stormy in there, and in the end celebrities exist as sacrifices to our need, the actual person (or self) tossed beautiful and adored into the raging, all-consuming volcano of our culture.<\/p>\n