Unreal! American motels are unreal! My good girl -- you know and I know that our motels are deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use the idiotic jargon, for the simple reason that an American motel room isn't a room in an hotel, it's the Room, definitively, period. There is only one; The Room. And it's a symbol -- an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like -- for our way of life. And what's our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you've got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death...The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We've reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that's the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can't ever truly be free. One would think that was obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the Europeans call us inhuman -- or they prefer to say immature, which seems ruder -- because we've renounced their world of differences, and romantic inefficiency, and objects-for-the-sake of-objects....We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained -- and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out, "these people are zombies!". They've got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they're a far far advanced culture -- five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead than Europe...Essentially, we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. ---George, in A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood