The hotel shown above is the hotel we stayed at in at Ioninna, Greece. It had four massive wings each three stories high. There was room for a couple of thousand guests. For a while, Elizabeth and I were the only guests.
It was called the Epicurus Lux Palace. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who taught that we could only gain knowledge by relying on our senses – that all other reasonings were suspect. His followers, the Epicureans, argued with Paul the Apostle. Lux is a measurement of luminance.
All of this will become important in a moment.
Anyway, back to the hotel. All the furnishings and fountains reminded us of Versailles – long well-furnished corridors, gilt-edged chairs and chaise-lounges. The reception man sort of appeared from beneath the counter when we arrived. There were well-dressed staff all over the place, polishing knobs and washing floors. There was a single barman, but no drinkers in the bar. A restaurant, but no diners.
I wondered aloud to Elizabeth whether there were, in fact, any other guests besides us. At that moment we noticed two other guests in the distance. This led to the idea that this was the Existential Hotel: not in a philosophical sense, only in the sense that I decided it meant: that the appearance of guests, staff – even a dog we saw outside – only came into being as they were needed to give us the appearance of reality. All the rest of the time, the hotel continued in splendid, dusty, dark solitude.
Lights only came on as we turned a corner; whole floors only appeared (the lift doors were transparent glass) as we glided through them. When we went down for food, the cook came into being as we ordered from the waiter that had appeared only when we wondered aloud if there was going to be a waiter.
endless empty corridors greeted us at every turn
Meanwhile, Epicurus was turning in his dark, dusty grave. Because, if our theory was right, the whole Epicurus Lux Hotel existed only to fool our senses, shed false light onto a false reality and make its guests question their own understanding of what was real.
I don’t know if anybody else thinks like this…
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