有些人一直没机会见，等有机会见了，却又犹豫了，相见不如不见。

有些事有很多机会做的，却一天一天推迟，想做的时候却发现没机会了。
有些话埋藏在心中好久，没机会说，等有机会说的时候，却说不出口了。 
有些爱给了你很多机会，却不在意没在乎，想重视的时候已经没机会爱了。
人生有时候，总是很讽刺。
一转身可能就是一世。
说好永远的，不知怎么就散了。感情原来是这么脆弱的。经得起风雨，却经不起平凡；风雨同船，天晴便各自散了。也许只是赌气，也许只是因为小小的事。幻想着和好的甜蜜，或重逢时的拥抱，那个时候会是边流泪边捶打对方，还傻笑着。该是多美的画面。
没想到的是，一别竟是一辈子了。
于是，各有各的生活，各自爱着别的人。曾经相爱，现在已互不相干。
即使在同一个城市，也不曾再相逢。某一天某一刻，走在同一条街，也看不见对方。先是感叹，后来是无奈。
也许你很幸福，因为找到另一个适合自己的人。
也许你不幸福，因为可能你这一生就只有那个人曾真正用心在你身上。

I've watched "the Queen" time and again. What surprises me is that Princess Diana, her historic significance and contribution to England have far transcended her superficial beauty.

 

The British have always been good at silence — at family meals spent wordlessly; intense emotions expressed through a hand on the shoulder — but on Sept. 6, 1997, they surpassed themselves. London, the big, braying capital, was stilled as over a million mourners of Diana, Princess of Wales, kept vigil along the route to Westminster Abbey. Britain's customary stoicism had been overwhelmed by raw, unbridled grief. We can say that the festival of mourning which culminated in her extraordinary funeral marked a transformation — the moment when the old British virtues of reserve and silent suffering gave way to publicly expressed catharsis. The People's Princess had unlocked hearts, reordered values, presided at the triumph of emotional intelligence over cold intellect, of compassion over tradition.

Ten years on, Diana is still the world's most famous Briton, but many of her own compatriots don't seem sure if she did much more than wear designer dresses and shift a lot of tabloids. So here are a few incontrovertible facts. Diana shook up the British monarchy and speeded its modernization. She helped to tear down prejudices about AIDS. She raised awareness of eating disorders. She coalesced opposition to land mines. These are pretty hefty achievements for a woman of little education who mocked herself for being "thick as a plank." Add to these a more dubious accomplishment — her skillful manipulation of media images — and it's clear why, a decade after her death, Diana remains an inescapable presence in British life: mostly, but not always, benign; a restless and seductive ghost. It's time to peer into the many corners she still haunts.

Modernizing the Monarchy
The quiet affection of the British people for Queen Elizabeth II has barely wavered during her 54-year reign. There was a low ebb early in 1998 — Diana's legacy — but even then the monarch's popularity rating dipped no lower than 66%. It's now 85%.

The Queen never gives interviews — a wise policy that has helped to preserve the fraying mystique of royalty. Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary to the Queen, Charles and Diana, who was responsible for the media arrangements for Diana's funeral, says "The Queen was always going to pay tribute to Diana, she planned from the outset to make her broadcast shortly before the funeral. There was a furor because she was at Balmoral and not down with the sniveling mobs in London. But William and Harry needed her more than hundreds and thousands of people keeping Kleenex in business."

Yet while the Queen and her immediate family kept their grief to themselves, there was a whiff of revolution beyond the palace gates. The U.S. academic Camille Paglia, speaking two days after the Paris car crash, foretold the fall of the house of Windsor. "With its acquisition of Diana, the monarchy had restored its modernity, while its mistreatment of her may mean the end of the monarchy." Not so. As soon as the Queen walked among the mourners, support for ditching her plunged to historic lows. The royals had learned a lesson too, "The monarchy realized that it stands or falls on public opinion."

In her charitable work, Diana set a standard that's hard to equal. She ignored the prevailing prejudices and fears about AIDS to clasp the hands of sufferers, and embraced leprosy patients in Indonesia. Arbiter remembers a visit to a home for the blind where Diana noticed that an old resident was crying: "She asked what was the matter and he said, 'I can't see you.' So she took his hand and put it on her face." Charles still doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, but it's increasingly evident that it's in the right place. His Prince's Trust organization raises a good deal of money for charities helping young people, and he's gaining respect for his stance on environmental issues, as mainstream thought catches up with views he's propagated for years.

Unbuttoning Britain
Diana had been brought up in about as old-fashioned an environment as was possible in the last quarter of the 20th century, but nothing could have prepared her for the antiquity of palace life. Britain had been postimperial for more than a generation, which meant that the values associated with empire (or with its rulers) had long lost their edge. By the time she married it was already — and especially in London — a place less homogeneous, more multicolored than it had ever been, and far less deferential to the Victorian virtues that the royal family represented. Yet in the royal household, those virtues — and that deference — held sway. The new Princess could not fit in. Her rebellion, inchoate and self-destructive at first, reverberated far beyond the palace walls. Tina Brown, the latest of Diana's biographers, relates asking former Prime Minister Tony Blair if Diana had found a new way to be royal. "No," Blair replied. "Diana taught us a new way to be British."

Diana led the charge for emotion and the unembarrassed displays that now routinely go with it: from hugs and kisses to public tears. Unlike her remote royal in-laws, she touched the people she met, literally touched them, and bought their trust with a coinage she had in endless supply: her most personal thoughts and feelings. That's partly because her unhappiness drove her humanitarian impulses. Arbiter says, "She always championed the downtrodden" because she was attracted to their suffering.

After her separation and divorce, Diana's efforts to redefine herself took on an edge of urgency. She had given up her patronage of most of the charities she once represented. She fantasized about becoming the wife of one of her boyfriends, a heart surgeon called Hasnat Khan, and living in anonymity. Yet she could never hope to become normal. Instead she became a celebrity.

Though friends say he was just a distraction, her choice of two Muslim boyfriends looked set to test how deep the tolerance of New Labour's Britain would go. This much is plain: she had long since escaped or shed the attitudes of many white Britons. After her death, Trevor Phillips, a black Labour politician who now chairs Britain's Commission for Equality and Human Rights, told Newsweek Diana "embraced the modern, multicultural, multi-ethnic Britain without reservation." Unlike most Europeans, she had "no flinch, no anxiety about race ... for nonwhite Britons, she was like a beacon in the darkness."

In her final years, Diana mingled less and less with her own class, preferring instead the company of the self-made aristocracy of entertainment and fashion. The members of this élite were from different countries and cultures — gay, straight, black, white and united by fame. Diana fitted into this new world perfectly. She wasn't seen as posh. She was one of the people.

From Fairy Tale to PostFeminist
Imagine this: Diana is still alive. She's a well-preserved 46, with a new boyfriend and an apartment in Manhattan. Is she popular? Maybe. A legend? No way. By dying young, Diana ensured her immortality. Better dead than wrinkled.

Celebrity culture is cruel, but especially to women. "One of the characteristics of celebrity culture is that you first build someone up and then you write about their downfall," says German writer Tom Levine, the author of a book on Britain's first family. "If Diana had lived she would have been going on that up-and-down train." Her last summer was already something of a downward ride. A slight weight gain set the press speculating she might be pregnant. She wasn't, and such close attention could not have been easy for a bulimic. But her public admission of her eating disorder in a 1995 interview with Martin Bashir for the BBC had encouraged hidden sufferers to seek help. Her life reflected many of the concerns of ordinary women — their weight, their relationship troubles — and by talking openly she also eroded the stigma attached to failure. Even a Princess battled the bulge, even a beauty lost her husband. Diana was criticized for her "American style of emotionalism," says feminist writer Naomi Wolf, but her approach actually represented a liberation theology in hidebound Britain. "It was very radical. She didn't just talk the talk, she walked the walk."

That was not the fate feminists predicted when the news of her engagement to Charles broke. The feminist magazine Spare Rib ran an article headed "DON'T DO IT DI". This slogan, rendered as a lapel button, became a fashionable accessory for the thinking woman. "On 29 July 1981," wrote the British journalist Beatrix Campbell of the fairy-tale wedding in St. Paul's Cathedral, "the deceitful and depressed engagement ended when this thin, wan, whiter-than-white woman walked down the aisle, propping up the aged patriarch who had got her into all this ... Her ivory silk wedding dress was a shroud."

By the time Diana died, however, many feminists had read her struggle against a sclerotic system as a parable of empowerment. Paglia dubbed her an "incredible superstar." That she was, but she would never have located herself in the feminist firmament. She wasn't interested in gender equality. She fought against a patriarchy because it was old-fashioned and restrictive, not because she repudiated its male values. The Princess was one of the first and most potent symbols of the "girl power" celebrated by the Spice Girls with their mildly predatory allure and celebration of girly friendship. It was a neat fit for Diana, with her close women friends and her troubled search for a mate. What Royal Spice really, really wanted was not at all radical: to love and be loved.

The Political Princess
The royal wedding in 1981 — with Diana's endless train, the pages and flower girls, the choirs and coaches — was widely seen at the time as a reaffirmation of tradition in Britain, a throwback to an age when nobility and pomp held the nation in thrall. That it should have taken place during Margaret Thatcher's first term only added to the idea that Britain was becoming a more conservative society, and that Diana, the girl from the old aristocracy who had married into royalty, epitomized it.

Yet the Princess was never in tune with the Iron Lady. "Who is society? There is no such thing," Thatcher told Woman's Own magazine in 1987. "There are individual men and women and there are families." Thatcher's bracing doctrine of personal responsibility was always at odds with Diana's faith in the power of redemptive understanding, of allowing the weak to be weak. Her belief system very much included an entity called society, which rejected and marginalized people. "Someone has got to go out there and love people and show it," she said in her BBC interview.

By the time the Princess died, Thatcher was long gone, her pallid successor John Major was vanquished and Blair was in 10 Downing Street, with a huge popular mandate to build a more inclusive, caring Britain. That agenda echoed Diana's. The Princess had two secret meetings with Blair before his election. According to Alastair Campbell's recently published diaries, she told the intermediary who set up the meetings that "she would like to help [Labour] if she could." Diana had certainly made her mark on Campbell, who recorded that the Princess "had perfect skin and her whole face lit up when she spoke and there were moments when I had to fight to hear the words because I'm just lost in the beauty." Today Campbell has a more sober assessment: "She was very small-p political. I have no idea if she would have ended up taking some kind of unofficial role with a Labour government, but I am sure she would have found a way of harnessing her own skills and popularity to the sense of Britain as a more modern and compassionate country."

We will never know if she would have achieved such a dispensation. But the fact that she was — undeniably — on occasion manipulative, deceitful and self-centered should not blind us to the fact that, during her 17 years in the limelight, she had grown as Britain had grown, changed as Britain had changed, and that by the time she died she had something increasingly vital to offer. Arbiter recalls a strange, muted, mournful night after the Princess died when he encountered a group of wheelchair users on their way to lay flowers at Kensington Palace. "They were saying, 'Who's going to speak for us, now?' They had a point. The disabled: who's going to speak for them? The AIDS patients: who's going to speak for them? The drug addicts, the down-and-outs, the homeless, the elderly? She was their voice and drew attention to their plight." Arbiter pauses. "She'd have made a good Queen, you know. But that's it. She's gone." Gone? As anyone who knows anything about the strains that make up modern Britain will tell you, that is very far from true.

Diana, is always there...