Stars of the mortal & eternal varieties

I spent a lot of today watching television and following the reactions of friends on Facebook to the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. As I walked to the gym, I had an insight into our fascination with celebrity, and even into why we call celebrities "stars."

The ancients saw the stars in the sky and tried to make some sense of their earthly lives by looking up. They created a whole universe of characters, and myths about them, and projected it all into the night sky, along with their hopes, their fears, their yearnings.

We do the same with our celebrities. They're not simply bright, shiny objects like the real stellar bodies; they embody our dreams, and they offer escape from a daily reality which all too often seems to wear us down.

But there's more: unlike the stars, celebrities are human. And like us, they grow old. They grow old with us. And they die. Somehow in that shared mortality we manage to maintain a connection to our youth. We remember--and recreate--our capacity for dreaming of the improbable.

There is much that is cheap in a culture of celebrity. But there is something eternal, too, something deeply human.