aesmael

Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view -- even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.
- Closer, Greg Egan

    In Stephen Fry's latest post (that would be his second) he talks about fame. Here, have some quotes to persuade you it is worth reading:

Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate the fame that their knowledge engenders.

It is no good everyone repeating that tiresome cliché about x, y and z ‘only being famous for being famous’ – their fame exists in our heads and it is therefore our fault, not theirs, if fault there is. I can’t blame Jade Goody for the fact that I know her name.

    Go on, it is quite long and this is just a small repetitive sample I happened to especially like. He does illustrate among other things that fame is an even more dreadful experience than I imagined.
    Potentially I am left in the uncomfortable position of not knowing what to wish for. Ideally I mean to make my living as a writer and if I am good at that, some level of fame naturally attaches (on the assumption that fame and quality of work go together, where the post in question illustrates they do not). Quite frankly I want neither the problems nor the benefits, whatever they are that fame brings (although closer inspection may reveal that statement to be not entirely true) but the only way to be assured of avoiding that is to cut out the heart from my life.
    The truth is, though, that wishing does nothing and what happens, happens. Certainly I need not fear attaining the level of fame Stephen Fry has and of course my writing may never attract any notice at all. It is not up to me (see above) but the mere fact of having such worries may be a demonstration of what The Road to Mars' has to say about the insidious nature of fame.
    Indeed, why read Stephen Fry's blog at all, otherwise? The articles, all two of 'em so far, are quite good, but why take interest long enough to discover this without the pull of fame in the first place?
    I could try to talk about glamour here, but as I so often say, that is beyond my expertise. Besides, better than me have gone ahead.