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Feb. 28th, 2017 04:30 pm “It’s just a silly fairy tale that says hotel chambermaids spy through keyholes. Hotel chambermaids have no interest whatsoever in the people behind the keyholes. Hotel chambermaids have a lot to do and are tired out, and they are all a little disillusioned, and besides, they are entirely occupied with their own affairs. Nobody bothers about anyone else in a big hotel. Everybody is alone with himself in this great pub that Doctor Otternschlag not inaptly compared with life in general. Everyone lives behind double doors and has no companion but his own reflection in the mirror or his shadow on the wall. People brush past one another in the passages, say good morning or good evening in the Lounge, sometimes even enter into a brief conversation painfully raked together out of the barren topics of the day. A glance at another doesn’t go up as far as the eyes. It stops at his clothes. Perhaps it happens that a dance in the Yellow Pavilion brings two bodies into contact. Perhaps someone steals out of his room into another’s. That is all. Behind it lies an abyss of loneliness. Each in his own room is alone with his own ego and is little concerned with another’s. Even the honeymoon couple in Room No. 134 are separated by a vacancy of unspoken words as they lie in bed. Some wedded pairs of boots and shoes that stand outside the doors at night wear a distinct expression of mutual hatred on their leather visages, and some have a jaunty air though they are desperate and floppy eared. The valet who collects them suffers terribly from chronic indigestion, but who cares?”-Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel
