Word: diana
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...along with 450 brothers in a separate men's order. Mother Teresa created a network of 569 missions spread across 120 nations that operate workshops for the unemployed, food centers, orphanages, leprosariums, and refuges for the insane, retarded and aged. She won access to global leaders; she counted Princess Diana a personal friend; Pope John Paul II valued her as a revered colleague...
Literature has better consolations than either life or tabloids. After Diana's funeral one wistfully looks up the quote at the end of George Eliot's Middlemarch and reads: "... For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs...
...subtitle on CNN was suddenly saying Princess Diana dead. And for just an hour or so, it felt like November 1963. "This will be a fixing moment in your lives," I intoned to my two sons (I was thinking, naturally, about her two sons). "You will always remember where you were and who you were with when you heard this news." Princess Diana dead: it seemed brutally inordinate. Because Diana had never been hard news, until then. Diana, in every sense, had always been soft. For once I found myself longing for a euphemism: passed away, perhaps, or succumbed...
...being relinquished. And so it was. It makes your shins shudder to imagine the atrocious physics of the impact, as the Mercedes transformed itself into a weapon of blunt force. Next, the swat team of photographers and the final photo shoot. Whether or not the paparazzi helped cause Diana's death, they undoubtedly defiled its setting. They took pictures of the dying woman. How could they? But they did. And now the two sons, the princes, face not only the loss of a loving and lovable mother but also a bereavement uniquely contaminated by the market forces of fame...
...moment examine the nature of Diana's fame. One might call it a collateral celebrity, because it relied on no discernible contribution (except to the gaiety, and now the grief, of nations). Lady Diana Spencer attracted the love of the introverted heir to the English throne. And that was all. Brightness of eye, whiteness of tooth, a colluding smile, a certain transparency, a vividness, an exposed vulnerability: it was enough for him, and it was enough for us. Madonna sings. Grace Kelly acted. Diana simply breathed. She was a social-page figure who became a cover girl. One can soberly...