Personal Essay
On Flying Too Close to the Sun
As Daedalus told Icarus, never go too low or too high.
This is a story about obedience to a rule that probably doesn’t exist. But just in case it does, I follow it because the consequences of disobedience are too great.
The rule: never ask or strive for too much. This is especially true if you already have enough. And the tricky part is that everyone probably already has a enough.
A few years ago, I wrote about Linda Evangelista’s disastrous decision to undergo Coolsculpting™ a process that apparently freezes and then “melts away” (I don’t get this, but ok) “stubborn” fat. (Sometimes I like to imagine a pile of fat sitting across from me at a lunch, insisting “no, I’m telling you, the Great Wall of China is visible from space.”)
To the uninitiated, Linda Evangelista was a supermodel in the 1980s and 1990s who famously said that she never got out of bed for “less than $10,000 a day.” She was — and still is — beautiful in an otherworldly way. I previously described her as a “cross between a gazelle and a hammerhead shark, made of alabaster,” and looking at her photos again, that holds up.
But she aged. She gained weight. She couldn’t lose weight. So she decided to fix that with Coolsculpting™ and ended up…
