The result is myth. But we have to ask ourselves what myth is. Myths, after all, tell us little about anything that really happened in the universe ever, and yet they do tell us almost everything about ourselves. They tell us the grim truths about humanity that we would struggle to express otherwise—those desires so unspeakable that we have to evolve a kind of code.#2774•
Put this way, it looks like a metaphor that could sum up our own relationship with famous people, from whom we demand so much. But the more we look at our acts of collective cruelty and puzzle at the generosity—ironically enough, at the selflessness—of these famous characters, this becomes something much more than a metaphor: It becomes the ritual that lies behind what we are doing.#2750•
It was the idea of "killing the god" that appealed so much both to James Frazer and to Sigmund Freud. Indeed, for Freud, this idea lay at the root of the Oedipus complex; or at least it helped explain to him why boys would want to kill their fathers. He imagined that primates and primitive people would be driven out of a community by its eventual leader; then they would gang up together and return to eliminate the top ape.
Frazer, too, has lots to tell us about how divine kings are killed in this way.#2763•
Chapter 2
Envy could well account for the kind of mass action called an ostracism—when a whole city decides they can do without you for ten years. It could equally account for the "Linford's lunchbox" tag. But it is merely a symptom of our deeper relationship with the famous—the pact by which it is agreed that, when they disappoint us, we will dispense with them.
After all, heroes need renewing; we can dismiss them, and even dispatch them, and, once their bloom has faded, or they are under the ground, we can garner more with ever-returning spring.#2757•
Achilles is on a roll. In Greek, this is called an aristeia—when you're performing at your peak and slaying so many men you can't always remember their names. But the pattern of aristeiai is that they come to an end.#2778•
The poet tries to explain why men must always toil. In the time of Cronos, the father of Zeus, we lived in a golden age. Fruit and crops grew for us without us having to do anything about it (Ovid adds that it would all be in a plentiful heap in the middle of a field), and when death finally came, we never really noticed it.
Then came the silver age, which had the advantage that children took a hundred years to grow up, but the disadvantage that they developed from being not very bright to not very good.
Then came the bronze age, which was a time of war; the bronze people harried themselves to extinction.#2747•
So now we can dismiss anybody seeking honor on two counts: Either they're not as impressive as the greats who came before them, or else they're going to be past their own prime at any minute. It means that there is an built-in mechanism for tossing and renewing famous people.#2752•
Ultimately he tells us that if we are alive, and will one day die, the choice isn't so much death or glory as death with glory or death without glory. The glory has its perks, but those who want it have to struggle for it. That last line reminds us that there is no second place. A warrior must kill or be killed.#2741•
As Sarpedon says, you either gain glory or you give it to someone else.#2754•
The Olympic motto, "Citius, Altius, Fortius"—faster, higher, stronger—promises that we will never be disappointed, and that each triumph will surpass the last. The problem is that we want to be disappointed.#2771•
Achilles is the acme of heroism and valor, but not of virtue—he slaughters countless men in a torrent of unforgiving rage. Even so, his style of fighting makes him the most feared and famous warrior imaginable, and from him we can deduce what sort of war earns fame and what earns infamy. Face-to-face, hand-to-hand combat, good; spear, less good because you're farther away, but still admirable because it takes some skill to throw it; arrows, ignoble.#2777•
It's worth bearing in mind the words of a Vietnamese general who, when asked why he rejected Chinese military advice, replied, "They were ignoring a fundamental rule of Vietnamese military science, if not the most important rule of Vietnamese military science: you must always win.#2758•
If we look at the heroes of battle who try to serve their nations in peacetime, we're more likely to remember the bad things: Eisenhower's dullness, evoked in Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; Wellington's failure to help the people who weren't him, which Byron laments in Don Juan; or the utter shame of Marshal Philippe Pétain#2740•
Chapter 3
For all their inclination to link beauty with another sort of goodness, the Greeks would keep reminding each other that the most beautiful woman ever, Helen, was an adulterer whose actions led to slaughter.#2770•
Aristotle found a more exciting way of putting this when he divided a man's beauty into three different age groups: "In the young man, beauty consists in having a body that can endure all sorts of exertion in running or in violent force, and one that is delightful to gaze on…. For men in their prime, beauty belongs to those prepared for the toils of active service: such types are good-looking and awe-inspiring at the same time.
As for the old man, beauty here means being physically able to deal with inevitable tasks, and not be a nuisance to others."#2772•
Chapter 4
(Hence the phrase "hocus pocus," a corruption of hoc est corpus.) The Faust story was meant to be a lesson to the reader: If you mess with things you don't understand, those things could destroy you.#2749•
The German philosophers whose theories lay behind the intellectual revolution of the time showed us that, in fact, we all know what no man knows, because nobody else can see the world exactly as we see it. As Immanuel Kant argued, the mind has a hard time turning abstract, intellectual ideas into images that we can put into someone else's mind; and Kant wanted us to be clear that this was down to "the limitations of the human faculties" rather than "the limits of things as they really exist." One of the things that make it so hard for our faculties is that they can't keep up with actual things: No sooner have we started to contemplate one thing than another pops up, and the mind is wearied by the hurly-burly of Romantic age life.#2765•
It's a commonplace that the best mathematicians "burn themselves out" young. The truths they discover, and their equations, which are elegant or even beautiful to those who can understand them, can help us postulate the shape of the universe.#2745•
Einstein stopped making progress after a while, and struggled in vain to disprove that subatomic particles moved in random waves. And Isaac Newton, the calm, rational member of Parliament for Cambridge University and president of the Royal Society, attempted alchemy and was taken up with occult ideas on how bodies can attract one another—ideas that are hardly as scientific as we associate with him (though they might well have influenced the theory of gravity).#2739•
Amy Winehouse's career fits the Faust pattern of allowing us to "wonder at unlawful things." Like Billie Holiday before her, she articulates a pain that goes far enough beyond ordinary experience to offer a kind of consolation to anyone who shares any measure of it. When she sings, "Tears dry on their own," it's such a neat line that it seems found rather than planned, as though she has been given a unique understanding of tears; and it's an understanding we can now share whenever we cry.#2779•
You don't need the devil to be an artist; you just need to make sense of your own crazy life.#2775•
Byron's life, his work, and now his corpse were telling the Faust story: There is a sort of sensual indulgence for which people envy you, and so long as you suffer for it, that's fine.#2756•
The Faust myth is maintained. Observers can think that famous people are having the time of their lives, while the famous know that their lives have less time to run. It is hard to gauge which comes first in this chicken-egg cycle: Does the lifestyle come as a bonus to people who win fame, or do people seek that fame because they want the lifestyle? Either way, the link between earthly fulfillment and heavenly comeuppance holds firm.#2755•
Chapter 5
But if we are allowed to find the divine among mortals, then surely Marilyn Monroe is the acme. This became true because we allowed it to become true. It wasn't that she was beautiful or a great singer or a fine actor (although she was all of these); it was that somehow she came to look like somebody who came from a better world.
She married a man better at sports than other men, and then she married a man who was cleverer than most other men.
In the excellent play Insignificance, Terry Johnson has her explaining the 1905 theory of relativity to Einstein and then seducing him#2764•
In his Symposium, Plato shows how all humans do this, and, as Plato tends to, he puts us on a ladder. Most of us, he says, leave something to posterity in the form of children. Others go a step further by writing things that will survive us. But the very best sort of fame, Plato tells us, is to be earned by making laws.
The problem is that this last category of fame becomes warped in the hands of the most immortality-seeking rulers, for whom the best sort of monument is evidence that their subjects damn well did what they were told.#2738•
Chapter 6
It's worth remembering Paul Veyne's observation, mentioned earlier, that fights between people who were forced to fight would be no fun at all: The conscripts would look scared and perform badly. The twist is that the martyrs thought that they were fighting, and fighting willingly. It's just that they had a different definition of victory.
When Perpetua and Felicity survived the cow, the crowd called them back to the Porta Sanavivaria, the Gate of the Healthy and Alive, by which victorious gladiators would leave.
But they went back to receive their martyrdom.#2748•
Chapter 7
Fame and education have always been linked, and people have always worried about it. Plato did, anyway. In The Republic he was seeking to define the best kind of education for philosopher kings, and he had a special problem with Homer.#2781•
Earlier in the book, he blames Homer for offering feeble-minded heroes and feckless gods. He sounds harsh even now, and must have sounded outrageous to readers who had looked to these characters as guides and beacons. He blames Achilles for weeping too much: "We can give [these lines] to the less reputable women characters or the bad men" he is cross with him for addressing Agamemnon, his king, as "a drunken sot, with the eyes of a dog and the courage of a doe" nor does he enjoy the passages in which gods couple.
The passage in which the cuckolded Hephaestus makes a trap for his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover Ares raises no smirks from Plato.
All these high-profile expressions of feeling and snippets of divine gossip were worth banning for the good of children.#2769•
In his book Le Suicide, he looked at that most individual of actions and tried to see if society can account for that, too. He concluded that a range of social circumstances could make people more or less likely to kill themselves, and one of the factors he looked at was imitation. He examined imitation in its own right, and divided it into three sorts.
The first he called "mutual transformation," by which there is a kind of "leveling" among a social group; the second accounts for how we follow fashions and customs, so that we can harmonize with society; and the third is the murkier idea of copying for its own sake.#2746•
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard felt it necessary to make something like this point when he was writing about Hollywood: "The screen idols are immanent in the unfolding of life as a series of images. They are a system of luxury prefabrication, brilliant syntheses of the stereotypes of life and love.
They embody one single passion only: the passion for images….
They are not something to dream about; they are the dream….
Fetishes, fetish objects, that have nothing to do with the world of the imagination, but everything to do with the material fiction of the image."#2773•
Chapter 8
Big Brother, as he appears in Nineteen Eighty-four, is the brooding, omniscient presence with a friendly, familiar name. He becomes a metaphor for the sort of control a government can have over us, without us ever having to know who or what is exercising that control. The analogy is to Comrade Stalin: His title suggests that he's one of us, looking after us just as we look after each other.#2768•
The more a politician trades on personality, the more intense our feelings are either way. It might make us want them, but in the end, as it is with lovers who in time find the causes of attraction repellent, it's what makes us dump them#2760•
If you're going to be representative, then you'll need to do some work on yourself. Howe's studies of individuals show just how carefully figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln constructed their identities, with Franklin crafting his memoirs, and including his mistakes, into what Howe calls "one of the classic 'how-to' books," and with Lincoln cutting his family completely out of his own self-construction: He didn't invite any of them to his wedding, for example.#2759•
As Simon Schama writes of him, "Franklin was, of course, the designer of his own particular celebrity…. Aware that the French idealized America as a place of natural innocence, candor and freedom, he milked that stereotype for all it was worth."#2753•
Hogarth's Humours of an Election is a series of paintings, of which the crammed canvas An Election Entertainment is the first. It shows the lengths to which politicians had to go to win a seat in Parliament. The bitter humor of it comes from the clash that arises when grandees suddenly have to make themselves agreeable to hoi polloi, and it depicts the kind of snafu that was the election banquet.#2776•
Chapter 9
This is to use the logic of structuralist linguistics, which could be seen as a way to prove all sorts of things. The idea, when applied to language, explains how words come to have meanings. "Cucumber" means what it does because all the other words in the language don't mean "cucumber." There is a cucumber-shaped gap in our linguistic system, and we know the very thing to put in it.
These ideas were expounded by the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure (only without the cucumber) around the time of his death in 1913.
Later, Claude Lévi-Strauss would use the same thinking to examine social units such as families and tribes: To put it at its most basic, somebody is a son because he has a father.
Somebody is an aunt because she has a nephew.
Our relationships with each other define who we are, and we fit into our communities as words do into a language.#2767•
And anyway, it isn't such a leap, if Marcel Mauss is right about Native Americans:
Everything contains and confuses itself; things have a personality and the personalities are in some way the permanent things of the clan. Titles, talismans, coins and the spirits of chiefs are homonyms and synonyms, with the same nature and the same function.
From this exhilaratingly French rhetoric, we can begin to see how interconnected we all are, in the sense that John Donne meant by saying that no man is an island, or that George Harrison had in mind in his song "Within You Without You."#2742•