Word: dianas
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This has been a year of big stories. The death of Princess Diana tapped a wellspring of modern emotions and highlighted a change in the way we define news. The cloning of an adult sheep raised the specter of science outpacing our moral processing power and had a historic significance that will ripple through the next century. But the story that had the most impact on 1997 was the one that had the most impact throughout this decade: the growth of a new economy, global in scope but brought home in the glad tidings of personal portfolios, that has been...
...said at the time that women especially identified with Diana, and that that accounted for the volume of the mourning. Every woman mistreated by a man--that is, every woman--could relate to moments in Diana's life that should have led to bliss and instead wound up in sorrow, humiliation and estrangement. Never mind that hers was a particular story wholly out of reach of common comprehension; it was easily translated to bad marriages and cold in-laws everywhere...
...explained the mass sadness, why were all the men weeping? And why were Americans weeping--we who could not care less about Britain's monarchy except in quaint memories of the literature of Kings and Queens? It may be simply that people make gods of selected celebrities and that Diana had to die to achieve godhead. Then, like Elvis, she became accessible after death; the public could leave flowers and personal messages at the gate of the Spencers' country estate, her Graceland...
...battleground, a field of overt tension in which mass emotions might rise to an occasion. Instead, there was the presence of absence, which eats at the mind quietly and which can, when touched by one last straw, incite a riot. It may be that the death of Diana came simply as one loss and absence too many. Whatever else Diana was in the world, she effected a lovely presence, and who could not weep for the loss of that? Gone, Diana seemed to emblemize the word; she was everything gone. One grief stood for all. As in any epiphany, many...
...then there is Diana, the woman who was, all by herself, the punctum of the late 20th century. She was, for one thing, the princess and the pauper, the improbably lustrous creature who also carried her (our?) mere humanity into the throne room. Sometimes the grief at her death seemed out of proportion, but only if you forgot the real question it presented: If the most luminous woman in the world can die, what hope is there for the rest...