We travel within closed loops, taking our worlds with us on devices. If the deep absorption of place requires the setting aside of the place one has come from, it has grown infinitely rarer. That in turn means the diminishment of discovery, which demands the vigilance of the senses. Without discovery the spirit withers.

The Virtue of Redeeming Vice

International New York Times | 26 December 2014

Roger Cohen

I’ve resisted writing about Berlin’s Hotel Savoy because I don’t want to ruin it, but I figure that if it’s resisted modernizing conformity this long it can probably withstand anything. Let me just say how wonderful it is to walk into the fug of cigar smoke in the hotel lobby. Proust’s madeleine has nothing on that time-canceling waft of tobacco.

Out of the mists of time, emerging through the inhaled smoke, looms another age of laissez-faire before anyone ever dreamed of saying “Stay safe” — most awful of salutations — and anyone discovered special dietary requirements; a time when kids roamed free and did not even know what a helmet was.

The Savoy is not a great hotel, but it’s a pleasurable place to be because it has not succumbed to the scented air, the technological ostentation and the simpering obsequiousness by which luxury accommodation seems to be measured these days. It has taps and regular light switches rather than electronic command consoles designed to bamboozle. Its staff tends toward the gruff. Its clientele tends toward avoidance of gyms. Nobody asks for your room number when you walk in for the excellent breakfast. Right next to reception is its cigar bar, where you can drink and smoke into the wee hours as the masters of espionage did back in Cold War days.

The relief from sameness is overwhelming. I’ll take the Savoy’s tobacco smoke any day over the homogenization of the world. But what, you will say, about health? It’s important, and it’s a good thing we’re living longer (although it has become way too difficult to die). But as the sole criterion for existence it’s a bore.

Somewhere along the winding road to today the freedom to be different has been curtailed as technology extracts its last measure of cost-effective efficiency from every aspect of life and social media hands a real-time megaphone to the humorless global thought police. The importance of Oscar Wilde’s “redeeming vice” has been lost.

I know that by almost every measure of prosperity and well-being we are better off than back in the fast-fading 20th century, with its conflagrations and long shadow of nuclear Armageddon. I know curmudgeons are a bore. I remind myself that for my children this hectic era will constitute “the good old days,” a thought that makes one wonder what precisely it is that will consign the technological wonders of today to that quaint Jurassic Park where voice-mail and the fax already reside in the excellent company of the three-martini lunch.

Still, progress cannot hide the fact that something is amiss in this more perfect world, something fundamental. Nobody emerging from 2014 can escape that feeling. People are angry and worried, with cause. Their pressured lives are not getting better. A million apps do not a happy camper make. Injustices grow more acute. Tax systems, grossly skewed toward the wealthy, are warped. Global affairs can look like a scam put in place by the privileged, the trimmers of corporate fat who have no idea what is happening down on Desolation Row.

At the Savoy there is still time. Nobody hurries you. They forgot to install the latest software that guarantees increased profitability (and greater staff misery). In those swirls of smoke lurks conversation, meandering without purpose, dying art. Somehow the hotel has escaped the clutches of the global operators who see in every place of slightly run-down charm an opportunity to create a purring palace just like everywhere else.

I traveled several thousand miles recently from London to Singapore. There I found myself on Orchard Road, that vast temple dedicated to the worship of the global brand, a tropical and air-conditioned Oxford Street. I wondered why I had bothered. Nothing to be bought there in the Asian city-state was any different from what could be bought in the glittering streets of the British capital, where billionaires like to bivouac. 

We travel within closed loops, taking our worlds with us on devices. If the deep absorption of place requires the setting aside of the place one has come from, it has grown infinitely rarer. That in turn means the diminishment of discovery, which demands the vigilance of the senses. Without discovery the spirit withers.

Anxiety is a growing scourge. Humanity is twitchy. It has become harder to make a firm appointment because people wait to see if something better may emerge. “Are we still on for today?” is a frequent refrain, as if the absence of confirmation of something already confirmed a week ago must be a source of concern, even if there no reason for it.

So the Savoy, in its otherworldly smokiness, is a wonderful balm, an invitation to forget about time and be lifted into another. If there’s a thought worth taking into 2015, it is perhaps that there are vices that redeem and help defeat the rush to sameness of a shrinking world.