Architect of Himself

Arriving recently in one of those hotels whose bedroom windows do not open by more than two inches in case the guests should immediately precipitate themselves out of them and make a terrible mess in the street below (to say nothing of killing the doorman), I found a glossy magazine on my desk designed for people whose main problem in life seemed to be spending money.

It was a publication called “Wallpaper,” of whose existence I had previously been unaware. The title struck me as odd, for to call something “wallpaper” metaphorically implies its unimportance, superficiality, triviality, inconsequence, etc. But hotel rooms are not places to which people look to find serious literature that they have not brought with them, other than the Gideon Bible in hideous modern English, of course, and I started to flick through Wallpaper much as passengers flick through airline magazines while waiting for takeoff. The magazine’s motto, incidentally, is “The Stuff That Refines You.”