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PARTISAN REVIEW
personal world, the sense of yourself which has grown out of a child–
hood of Christmas trees that would not stand up straight, and enter
the higher self of the Hotel. You flow through its arteries with the assur–
ance of a red corpuscle that knows its own plasma, and you are carried,
with increasing sense of desolation, to the utmost limbs of the organism,
feeling lonelier and lonelier as you move down the capillary that leads
you to yourself (W-11 01), where, after you have ransomed yourself from
the bellboy, you find it impossible to reconcile the personal myth with
the general, to fit your shabby and discolored psyche into a light brown
room with tan curtains.
It
is impossible to sit alone in that room, for
the room is a contradiction: it is designed on principles of togetherness
and other-directedness ; it takes its inspiration from the Lobby, where
your suit and necktie are important, because others are looking at you.
But it is impossible to be other-directed where there are no others; there–
fore there is a moment of real fear when you think, "I should function
here. I should use that telephone, make notes on that desk-pad, turn
that light-switch, hang
something
on each of those hangers, dampen
all the towels and unroll all the toilet-paper. I must be one of the ap–
propriate people, one of those who fits easily into a rectangle, one of
those with no burned-out bulbs or cracked ornaments, one of those who
does not shed his needles." After straightening your tie in the mirror
where the Hotel watches you because it is in your very lenses, you run
a comb through your hair, concealing the places where the needles have
been falling, then reach for the door-knob with sweating palms and walk
out into the corridor, shutting the door on the problem of your con–
flicting selves, and you will not return until you are drunk enough for
both of you to sleep together.
Walter Stone
