The Old Miyako in Kyoto
How is a hotel important to me in a pleasure trip?

It sounds daft to ask a question such as this, and even more daft to answer it in such great details. It sounds exceedingly daft if I address it to those, who have not subsisted psychologically but been overly nourished materially. For those, who are known to be in such a category, a hotel is no more than a mahjong room, where the means of turning an organism to obesity is fully practiced. But I feel obliged, as a person of peculiarity and intellectual vociferousness, to justify the importance of a great hotel in a pleasure trip, especially that in which the only protagonist is yourself and, hopefully, your mind. Sometimes, though bookish solitude remains highly sacred, you wish the company of some intellectual pyrotechnics by which sparks may be initiated in some everyday discussions. Of course, if you go just with a bunch of mediocre mahjong minds, then probably a shit hotel will do equally good or even better as does a great one, for all you are given in the course of the journey is sight seeing points for the dudes or an invitation to play mahjong in the room at the end of a hazy, hectic day trip. Through continual training of reaching out for a mahjong cube, those people, of whom many are half-balding fat-so’s or overly nourished females destined to tarnish the elegant brands of Gucci and Louis Vuitton, have developed a morbidly stinky sense of arguing against good taste stations, lest their entire lack of substance in life is seen with contempt and spit upon when they stay in the room at Hotel de Crillion playing mahjong over the collection of Alexander Dumas. They will curse Alexander Dumas for having written so many great books, of which the soon-defunct Cantonese pronunciation equals “loss”. This wastage is destined to remain low lives, and the existence, even though inevitably eternal at a point of the course of history, cannot be retrieved inasmuch as they will never interest conscious minds in the entire course of passage of time. Perhaps it is more a shame than a sense of melancholy. For the Sun King, who, if not as a king for excessively flamboyancy, has been forgotten, the extravagant life appeared essentially deficient. Even the Sun King could not find substance out of his life; likewise, it is far from a merely hedonistic desire for me to opt for a luxurious hotel; the luxuriance of excess, if treated in caution, being in essence more important. The terminally mentally ill morons ignorantly rush to take picture before the Temple of the Golden Pavilion and claim conceitedly that they have been there. Why did they not set fire on the Temple and exist eternally with the beauty of it? You may say it is only in literatures that such hallucinatory scenarios occur. But you are not entirely correct. As the morons are both terminally ill and mentally unsound, they are not in the capacity to think highly of the situation that beauty can be seen and restored by the utmost destruction of the “instruments” that provisionally hold it. In a metaphysical tone, this means that there is factually “something” more than or in higher order than the instruments through which we look at the beauty of a physical expression. If this were possible, then we must leap through the barrier of the physical expression and appreciate what is behind it. The unfortunate plight facing us is that when one talks of metaphysics, he immediately recalls what is nonsensical. Something, which is not understandable in everyday or highly technically analytic languages, is viewed as metaphysical or beyond the physical world. The examples of the Sun King and the Temple of the Gold Pavilion are suggestive of a high probability that what is appreciable appears more than its physical side that shows up to our eyes; there are something metaphysical built within, from which true beauty is known and maintained in the everlasting long future. This structure of argument gets the argument of the better things in life started and does not necessarily refute at all empirical possibilities. He may choose a lowlife motel instead of a high class hotel, not because of the services or the functions, but because of his necessitation of a trip to go somewhere in order to confirm that he has been there and evident of his being there. His necessitating of a trip is derived from an explicit reason and possibly also an implicit “hidden agenda.” He may brandish his capability of making money, show off his knowledge of the European culture or assimilate to look more like his peers, who have been to Europe before.

A lowlife eternity is worst and a sprinkle of high life prosperity is better. The statement is a hybrid of “being an unhappy Bernard Shaw is better than a happy pig.” The hybridisation arises from the fact that it makes an absolute judgement rather than simply comparing the degree of two classes. But is it truly necessary to go for the highest amongst available accommodations, just for the sake of beauty? The answer is, not particularly. One must foster the yeast of goodness and highness in order to enjoy stay in a legendary hotel such as the Miyako. You may see a neatly attired monk carrying a Louis Vuitton Taiga bag stay in the Miyako. Or you will see George Bush Senior heavily guarded by the secret servicemen walking conceitedly and behaving vaingloriously through the stupendous lobby. If it is not particularly necessary, why do you choose the better but not the worse? What we seem to overlook here is mediocrity. Is mediocrity an unambiguous concept? Mediocrity can be spotted between the better and the worse. Mediocrity has the cunning disposition to disguise either the better or the worse. Therefore, mediocrity is not easily spotted as it is, even it is ubiquitous among us. When I say “better”, it refers to the fact that the attributes are higher in functionality and beauty than those of the “worse”. And I overlook it also refers to the fact that they are higher in functionality and beauty than those of mediocrity. This tiny glitch sneaked in without notice and we begin to be confused with the question of “better” and “worse.” The fact that we have to be the better is also conditioned by the fact that we do not want to be mediocre.