Fun_People Archive
31 Aug
Quotes of the day - Diana

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 98 19:37:28 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: Quotes of the day - Diana

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649
Forwarded-by: nev@bostic.com
Forwarded-by: Terry Labach
Forwarded-by: qotd-request@ensu.ucalgary.ca (Quote of the day)

Her appeal was largely visual, not textual, nor even contextual.  She was
eye candy of the first water: It took $7,500 a week in beauty treatments
(her hairdresser, Sam McKnight, charges $5,000 a day, though presumably she
only used an hour of his time each morning) to maintain her by the end of
her life, according to a story leaked to the tabloids in 1994 by Prince
Charles, and picked up by [biographer Julie] Burchill.  She needed colonics,
acupuncture, aromatherapy, astrologist, manicures, pedicures, hypnotherapy,
holistic massages and one of the top make-up artists in the world to make
her glow the way she did.  And by the end of her marriage, it was a
necessity, her job, and the only way we would allow her to be.
	-- Elizabeth Nickson, former Life magazine European bureau chief,
	   on the down-to-earth lifestyle of Diana, the "People's Princess".

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Subject: Quote of the day

Forwarded-by: nev@bostic.com
Forwarded-by: Terry Labach
Forwarded-by: qotd-request@ensu.ucalgary.ca (Quote of the day)

Two questions arose.  Outside the personal sorrow of those who knew the
princess, what kind of grief were people feeling?  And how many people were
feeling it?  To judge the quality of other people's grief may be a risky
enterprise, but my guess about the first is this: that it was recreational
grieving ('look-at-me grief' was how the writer Julian Barnes described it),
that it was enjoyable, that it promoted the griever from the audience to an
on-stage part in the final act of the opera, which lasted six days.  The
dead heroine had provided the most marvellous story, and the grief of her
spectators may have been genuine in the sense of unfaked.  But it was grief
with the pain removed, grief-lite.  When people telephoned each other that
Sunday morning, they spoke eagerly -- 'Have you heard that...?' -- and not
with the dread -- 'How can I tell him that...?' -- familiar to bearers of
seriously wounding news, which the hearer may recover from only in months
or years or sometimes never at all.  It was possible, after all, for the
readers of Dickens to weep at the death of Little Nell, whom they too felt
they knew.
	-- Ian Jack, on the public displays of grief after the death of
	   Diana, Princess of Wales in August 1998, in Granta 60 (Winter 1997)

© 1998 Peter Langston