fame大学英语综合教程四课文

Fame

Fame is very much like an animal chasing its own tail who, when he captures it, does not know what else to do but to continue chasing it. Fame and the exhilarating celebrity that accompanies it, force the famous person to participate in his or her own destruction. Ironic isn't it?

Those who gain fame most often gain it as a result of possessing a single talent or skill: singing, dancing, painting, or writing, etc. The successful performer develops a style that is marketed aggressively and gains some popularity, and it is this popularity that usually convinces the performer to continue performing in the same style, since that is what the public seems to want and to enjow. But in time, the performer becomes bored singing the same songs in the same way year after year, or the painter becomes bored painting similar scenes or portraite, or the actor is tired of playing the same character repeatedly. The demand of the public holds the artist hostage to his or her own success, fame. If the artist attempts to change his or her style of writing or dancing or singing, etc., the audience may turn away and look to confer fleeting fickle fame on another and then, in time, on another , and so on and so on.

Who cannot recognize a Tennessee Williams play or a novel by John Updike or Ernest Hemingway or a poem by Robert Frost or W. H. Auden or T. S. Eliot? The same is true of painters like Monet, Renoir, Dali or Picasso and it is true of movie makers like Hitchcock, Fellini, Spielberg, Chen Kai-ge or Zhang Yimou. Their distinctive styles marked a significant change in the traditional forms and granted them fame and forturn, but they

were not free to develop other styles or forms because their audience demanded of each of them what they originally presented. Hemingway cannot even now be confused with Henry James or anyone else, nor can Forst be confused with Yeats, etc. The unique forms each of them created, created them. No artist or performer can entirely escape the lure of fame and its promise of endless admiration and respect, but there is a heavy price one must pay for it.

Fame brings celebrity and high regard from adoring and loyal fans in each field of endeavor and it is heady stuff. A performer can easily come to believe that he or she is as good as his or her press. But most people, most artists do not gain fame and fortune. What about those performers who fail, or anyone who fails? Curiously enough, failure often serves as its own reward for many people! It brings sympathy from others who are delighted not to be you, and it allows family and friends to lower their expectation of you so that you need not compete with those who have more talent and who secceed. And they find excuses and explanations for your inability to succeed and become famous: you are too sensitive, you are not interested in money, you are not interested in the power that fame brings and you are not interested in the loss of privacy it demands, etc. ---all excuses, but comforting to those who fail and those who pretend not to notice the failure. History has amply proven that some failure for some people at certain times in their lives does indeed motivate them to strive even harder to succeed and to continue believing in themselves. Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist, had his first novel Look Homeward, Anger rejected 39 times before it was finally published and launched his