How to Make a Celebrity Death All About YOU — Page 2

But what is complaining about Rickman being more than Snape other than staking a deeper claim on him and calling attention to one's self?

#MoreThanHansGruber

I agree with this article. I definitely do not have problems with people remembering a celebrity fondly from something they enjoyed or even just something you remember them from. I basically roll my eyes at what seems to be fake sadness. My friend in high school didn't talk to me for a day because I was "laughing" about Mr. Rogers dying. The reality was, I was laughing about what some classmates and a teacher were talking about that did have to do with him, but not about his death. But, to this friend, you were only allowed to say positive things and mourn. Some people are too touchy.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect... E.M Forster

Within the world of Howards End, Forster and his characters struggle with the dilemmas of making connections in a Victorian liberal-humanist period that preceded the First World War. While the epigraph "only connect" suggests a positive imperative for making ties, it also implies despair for the difficulties of making those connections. His story weaves in and out of the tension between ideological visions of connection and the obstacles created by an often hostile world.

I wonder what Forster would have made with the interweb and its CONSTANT connections- the Facebook,the Twitter etal. The sharing and frankly, over sharing that goes on and on and on. I have come to believe we need to dis- connect at least to some extent ( one of the reasons I refuse to join those digital "communities". ) Unfortunately it seems I will remain in the minority and we will cont to have celebrity "connections"( or doggie obits:O ) placed in the on line world. It's up to us if we complete the connection tho.

Updated On: 1/16/16 at 07:08 PM

This piece in The New Yorker from 2014 expands a bit more on the general theme of this thread. Worth a read, if the topic hasn't been exhausted by now.

Mark O'Connell writes : A wake is attended by people acquainted with the deceased, and a celebrity is, in a sense, a mutual acquaintance we hold in common with the world. And so to say that the death of a famous person brings people together might be less mawkish, less glib, than it initially sounds.

There is, I think, a tension between the compulsion to say something and a sort of resentment at the futility of doing so, of adding to the trending topic of mortality. It’s very hard, in any medium, to say anything significant about death. The linguistic incapacity you feel at a funeral, when faced with having to speak to someone who is bereaved, can seem like a gravitational force of silence around a void of significance. You want to say something, and you want it to be meaningful, but you know there is nothing meaningful to be said, at least not by you.

Link