Light On Dark Water

At the Grand Babylon

“Grand Babylon” was the term Christopher Derrick once used to describe the American luxury hotel. I stayed at one of these for most of the past week, attending a conference for customers of the company that provides the software that supports most of the administrative functions of the college where I'm employed, and for which I'm the chief person responsible. It's an annual event, but this is the first time I've attended since 2008. With somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people attending, it’s always held at a big hotel with a conference center, and that means not only big but luxurious. I couldn’t get Derrick’s phrase out of my head for very long.

This particular mini-Babylon is the Gaylord Texan, located in Grapevine, Texas, which seems to be a little town in the process of being absorbed by the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolis. Presumably the name was originally a straightforward reference to the fact that grapes are indeed grown here, and wine produced from them. I had the impression that it’s a formerly rustic little town which has turned to playing the role of rustic little town for city-dwellers and tourists. You find a lot of this near big cities: small towns that no longer have much of a genuine and viable economy of their own, but are now in commuting distance of the city, allowing people whose livelihood depends on the metropolis to play nostalgically at being residents of a sleepy little town, while turning it into an affluent suburb. I live in one such town, and I suppose the only thing that differentiates me much from immigrants of that sort is that I have, by way of my wife, pretty deep roots here. Also, I have less money than most of them.

My experience of Texas is very limited, and my one previous trip to Dallas was spent, like this one, in hotels and meeting rooms. Judging by what I could see from the shuttle van that took me from and to the airport, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has an interesting countryside, pretty flat, dry-looking by my standards but far from desert, covered with smallish trees including what seemed to be a lot of live oaks.

But none of this was visible to me once I entered the hotel, a word which doesn't really do justice to the scope of the place. It is an entire environment, which conceptually if not physically resembles various cities of the future imagined in old science-fiction novels: my very rough guess is that it comprehends ten acres in area and somewhere between 100 and 150 ft (30-54m) in height, all of which is enclosed. The building proper surrounds an atrium which I would guess covers five acres or so, and the apex of its glass roof (with a Lone Star emblem of darker glass) appeared to be the highest point in the place. I am basing my height estimate on the fact that there is a fountain which shoots at least 30 feet (10m) straight up, but would have to go several times higher to hit the roof. This atrium is full of landscaping, including some fairly large trees, at least one of which, disconcertingly, is artificial: a replica of the Treaty Oak in Austin, which, we are told by a plaque, cost $250,00. There are a number of streams flowing through several levels linked by winding paths and containing canyons made of concrete formed and painted to resemble sandstone. There is a “mission” tower and plaza. There is a life-sized Longhorn (steer? I didn’t notice), and the biggest and most interesting model train layout I’ve ever seen—I believe it must have been half the size of my house. And there is pop-country music audible everywhere, from speakers hidden among the plants and rocks, in case anyone should feel insufficiently peppy.

The confusion of real and artificial was disconcerting at times. My room faced the atrium, and included a tiny terrace with two chairs. Several times I thought “I’ll sit outside and read for a while this evening,” only to realize that outside was inside. Large public areas of the hotel itself were fully open to this “outside,” and again I was momentarily puzzled by the fact that they were not miserably hot, because I knew the temperature of the actual outdoors must be in the vicinity of 90 (Fahrenheit—32 Celsius). One night there was a thunderstorm, and I thought of going out to watch it, and then I remembered—though someone who was out in the atrium said the lightning had been something to see.

After a day or so at the hotel, I discovered a short cut for the ten-minute walk to the meeting rooms. It took me into the actual outdoors, though still inside the hotel complex, and still in the carefully constructed unnatural-natural landscape. There I saw something surprising: actual grapevines, with actual grapes, still very green, on them. They were a welcome bit of actuality.

I have never pursued luxury, or had much desire to do so, though I certainly enjoy it when it comes my way. But to say that I have never pursued it doesn’t mean that I don’t find it attractive. A few weeks ago I wrote something here about the lure of the earthly paradise—the paradise of sensual ease and pleasure. The lure of the idea, and of images that suggest the idea, is very strong. And to some extent a luxury hotel realizes the idea. But I can never get out of my head the knowledge that the luxury comes at great cost, and that many of those who work to provide it do not share in it. I don’t know what the normal price for a night at the Gaylord Texan is, but the “special convention rate” paid by my employer was just under $200. Most people can’t afford to pay that very often, if at all. I cringe to imagine what it must cost to maintain the constant 72 degrees or so within this complex, summer and winter. I’m enough of an environmentalist to doubt whether our way of life is sustainable, and such things as this hotel provoke those doubts especially. And whenever I walked down the long halls of the hotel on my way to and from a day of technical sessions in the convention center, I heard the voices of the Spanish-speaking housekeepers who I doubt are very well paid. It isn’t paradise if it isn’t paradise for everyone.

Anyway, I don’t even need a place like this to feel that I’m living in luxury. I’m a middle-class resident of an industrialized nation, and most of us live in great luxury compared to most people in most times and places. 

There is an undeniable moral and spiritual problem with wealth. I think every religious tradition warns against its hazards. And for a Christian especially it is simply not licit to accumulate wealth vastly in excess of one’s needs. I don’t hold the idea that if A is rather wealthy, it can only be because he stole something from B, C, and D. I’m inclined to think that the attempt to distribute wealth more widely by taking it forcibly from some and giving it to others would tend, in the long (or maybe short) run to make everyone poorer. And “needs” is a pretty flexible term. And there is plenty of room for argument about explanations and solutions for the vast gap between rich and poor across the world and within our own society. But there’s no room for arguing that it’s a morally acceptable situation for some to starve while some live in extreme luxury, that there’s nothing wrong with the current situation in which that happens on a wide scale, or that we have no obligation to give what we can to those in immediate need, and to support efforts to alleviate the fundamental problems in whatever way we think can be effective. Four days of the pure and concentrated luxury of the Texan pricked my conscience on this score, as it ought to have done.

Here’s a short video that may give you some sense of the size of the atrium, though it only shows part of it.