A NASTY FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

The tale came to a close in one of those rituals of shared planetary theater: a joining of tragedy and gossip in universal soap opera. But whatever emotional residue lingered as the world dried its eyes, two slightly hard-edged questions presented themselves in another part of the brain. The questions were not necessarily unkind. They were churned up by the undercurrent of sadness and disgust and fatalism that ran through one's thoughts on hearing the news from Paris that night, and in the days that followed.

The first question was this: Why on earth would anyone want to be famous, especially now? (What a nightmare! What a disaster!)

And the second question (the obverse of the first): Why do masses of men and women feel such intense emotion about the life and death of people who are strangers to them--strangers, that is, except to the extent that masses of people have been deceived by the tabloids into an illusion of intimacy with the famous?

If the intimacy was an illusion, is the grief an illusion as well? Or how exactly do we assess the emotional truth of these outpourings? A moment of poignant communion in the Family of Man? A cheap exploitation of sympathies one centimeter deep? Or is there a third possibility? Something to do with mortals and gods and goddesses?

To be famous is among the basic human ambitions, of course, an all but universal fantasy. Who--except for nuns and monks, say, who are content with God's radiant attention--sets out in life to remain obscure? Fame is fun--and vindication. One need never be lonely, anywhere, ever. Fame has style, glamour, money, attention; ignites the sudden light of recognition in strangers' eyes, commands the comic deference of headwaiters as they sweep you past the serfs and hoi polloi to the best table.

Some who have come to be famous see in retrospect that the daydream may have been touchingly adolescent, self-inflating in the style of Mr. Toad. In some personalities, the need for attention is darker and more retrograde: neurotic, infantile, a sort of baby's unappeasable love craving, a raw, screaming hunger.

In any case, one should beware of answered prayers. Those with hard experience at being famous know that while celebrity can occasionally be delightful, it may become a burden, an arduous and menacing bore. Just how menacing it can be we saw in the middle of that recent night in Paris.

It was always a primitive terror to be cast out of the tribe and made to wander as a stranger. Today a famous person--Arnold Schwarzenegger, say, or Sylvester Stallone, those universal action figures whose films require the fewest subtitles and therefore address masses most eloquently in remote cultures--might go anywhere on earth and never be a stranger. Is that desirable? Or a horror? Such planetary recognition may be as dangerous, in a different way, as being an unknown alien once was.