“You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Why again exactly, now?”
“I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.”
“Why?”
“Why? I guess to give my life some sort of meaning, Lyle.”
“And how would this do this again?”
“Lyle,
I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn
like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?”
“You
feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about
having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.”
“I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?”
“The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.”
“Lyle, don’t they?”
“LaMont,
perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine,
the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the
hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After
that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for.
After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem
awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing
you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated.
Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine,
the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as
they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They
are trapped, just as you are.”
“Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.”
“LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?”
“Okey-dokey.”
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
“Maybe I ought to be getting back.”
“LaMont,
the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You
are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion
that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to
your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable
feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.”
“Animal?”
“You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.”
“This is good news?”
“It
is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a
feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are
any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.”
“The burning doesn’t go away?”
“What
fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you
here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear
to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off
you until you weigh enough to pull toward yourself.”
“Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?”
“LaMont,
the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably
old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest
lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any
cage.”
“So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.”
“You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.”
― Infinite Jest
