Is Kim Kardashian Using Her Time Out Of The Spotlight To Reflect On The Vacuous Horror Of Celebrity Culture?

Since her Paris Ordeal, celebrity goddess Kim Kardashian has slithered quietly into the shadows of obscurity, far from the parasitical paparazzi and siren call of social media.

Where once there was what the Germans call “Sturm and Drang,” the French celebrated as “joie de vivre,” and the British used to dismiss as “the vulgar brashness of the common Yank,” there is now an unsettling silence and gnawing emptiness in the places Kim used to inhabit like a larger than life blow-up doll.

The Queen of the Kardashian clan’s Twitter feed remains barren of tweets, her Instagram devoid of the sort of soft shots that her 87.3 million followers would froth at the mouth over, and celebrity magazines haven’t had a fresh shot and new angle of Kim’s legendary buttocks in what feels like a joyless and fleshless eternity.

As Colonel Kurtz laments in Apocalypse Now, “The horror, the horror.”

To be fair, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian have rallied valiantly and tried their best to keep the world on its axis and its inhabitants sane since Kim disappeared into the shadows to seek the sanctuary of solitude, the relief of anonymity, and become the Greta Garbo of the Donald Trump era.

Only this week the two plucky feminists have shared what newspapers have described as “hot shots of their perky rears.”

The Mirror described this massive double event, perhaps the biggest of its kind since Trump won and Clinton lost, in glowing prose.

“The sisters are soaking up the sun on yet another luxury holiday and have of course been keeping their fans up to date with candid social media snaps.”

“On Tuesday, the pair sent temperatures soaring when Kourtney shared photos of them both lying in the sun with the rears on full display.”

In case viewers were unaware of exactly what they were looking at, Kourtney captioned the pic of her sister with her butt hanging out with the poetic phrase, “A** Parade.”

Yet in a world without Kim, such celebratory and meaningful works of art lose a little bit of flash, dash, and panache, and render a person of a more melancholy disposition susceptible to what the poet William Woodsworth called “The still, sad music of humanity.”

Despite their fierce determination to celebrate the unbounded joy of the human buttocks in all their multi-faceted glory, Kourtney and Khloe’s noble attempts at spreading a little joy in this cruel world, fell somewhat flat, with so many longing for fresh updates and snaps of their almost mythical sister.

Yet when all hope appears lost, there is a little light at the end of the tunnel. Pictures of Kim at a Halloween party dressed as Princess Jasmine from the 1992 Disney film Aladdin, recently appeared on the website kimkardashianwest.com.

“What on earth could it mean?” Fans asked. Was Kim sending the world some sort of secret message that by dressing as a Princess on Halloween she was yearning to retreat back to a more simpler and innocent time, before the vacuous horror of sex tapes, stalkers, egos, narcism, gratuitous wealth, and bust-ups on Twitter hollowed out all meaning in life and reduced it to little more than the fearful symmetry of an hourglass figure?

Is Kim prowling her mansion like the ghost of celebrity culture past and consuming the complete works of philosophical giants such as Nietzche and Plato, and epic poetry from wordsmiths like Byron, Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe in a bid to understand the existential despair that waits patiently like a gaping abyss just beneath the most tenacious tinsel and elaborate artifice of celebrity culture?

Who knows? One thing’s for sure, Kim better hurry up and use it or lose it, because when you’re the champ, you have to stay on your toes.

Contenders are always looking to make a play for the throne, like Russia’s Anastasia Kvitko, who claims she is “much better looking” than Kim and is building on her 4.7 million Instagram following by moving to L.A. and taking a shot at the title.

Will Kim come out of retirement and put this young upstart in her place or will she simply say “enough is enough,” decide her 15 minutes is up, turn her back on the whole pantomime of fame, fame, fatal fame, and fade into a blissful and graceful obscurity?

More importantly, will the world let her?

[Featured Image by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Huffington Post]