Writing for Colette, blooms within hotels and boardinghouses and trains, amid temporary situations. Better than home, to write from hotel, to write "on wobbly pedestal tables," surrounded by "this disorder of a camp." To camp is to take shelter, temporarily away from original surroundings, for reasons of war, exile, or pleasure. Her writing table, in hotel exile, hovers between"cheval glass" and a "bunch of narcissus." Hotel writing, or hotel consciousness, takes the liberty of introspection into narcissism. Is this happiness? No. Colette calls it darkness -- an obscurity "made beautiful by an unwearying sadness." She prolongs melancholy, like an aria or a philosophical investigation, to educate and to seduce. --- Wayne Koestenbaum, Hotel Theory.