The Richness of the Soul, The Spiritual Poverty of Wealth
“And charge it, please.” ― Kay Thompson, Eloise
In cases regarding important situations of my life, the night before I need to go, it is a very dedicated ritual of mine to stay up the entire night before. That way, when I arrive at my destination and fall asleep, I wake up in a completely unfamiliar environment (and my human senses are very confused). My goal is to make it it feel as if I teleported to another dimension within the limitless expanse of time and space and woke up on the bed of a hotel room on Wall Street.
Today, June fourteenth, of the year twenty-twenty four, at around 7 pm EST, I was awoken from a nap to a knock at my door.
“Housekeeping,” she said.
I sleepily crawled out of my king bed. On my short journey, it occurs to me that I am twenty-one years old in New York City. At the door, there is a woman who has presented me with a plate of dark chocolate and water.
I know it is her job, but I wanted to hug her. (I’m a normal person. I did not.)
I have always felt, ever since I was a child, most comfortable in hotels. Nothing bad ever happens here and you can make friends in the lobby. Hotels are always bustling with travelers, adventurous souls on an undying quest to seek new experiences, and rise above whatever circumstances they happened to be born into. The human spirit is as resilient as it is forever curious. It brings me a great relief to know there is but one phone call away from me and an extra mini fridge for my room (among other comforts most in the first-world take for granted…).
It had always been my dream, ever since I was a young girl, to live in a fancy hotel somewhere in New York, like Eloise from one of my favorite movies of childhood, Eloise at the Plaza, based on the book by Kay Thompson, Eloise: A book for precocious grown-ups.
What I didn’t realize then, and what I know now, is that Eloise’s childhood very much so mirrored my own childhood. Despite varying economic disparities, our stories are very much alike.
Similarly, in the way that she had parents to financially support her every need, whim, and desire, but found more nurturing from the people who were paid to be her caretakers than she did her own parents, I myself have more fond memories of being just eight years old exploring subway stations by myself or being taken out by my caretaker to the city park where I’d stumble across a lonely meadow of butterflies than I ever did with my parents.
My mother would bring me to the break room at her workplace and place a laptop in front of me to study, I promised her (I played dress up games on girlsgogames.com). Sometimes, when I knew no one was looking, I would sneak away and take the subway to the very end of the line and back again before anyone knew I was gone. Going nowhere in particular, just wanting to see what the world looked like, new faces in every car, though oddly all similar seeming people, as if I seeing the same people over and over again in different bodies. As if I were in a waking dream, or a computer simulation.
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
At just six years old, Eloise established herself as a member of this world. While her father remained [unmentioned] throughout the book series and the various movies and subsequent television shows about this little girl’s life, with her mother consistently away, Eloise was still left to her own devices living at the Plaza hotel in New York, having no friends and no choice but to find numerous ways to entertain herself in between private tutoring lessons and eating Filet Mignon (and charge it, please).
She spends her childhood not playing with the other children. She is bothering the busboys, ransacking private high-society events and pouring water down the mail chute. Some may see this behavior as the work of an unruly child that should be reprimanded. I see it as the exact opposite. Eloise’s life is, to me, from the young age of six, already so very sad. She is this little girl running around an adult’s world all alone and will not realize the sordid reality of her situation until she is much older.
(Rumors within the Eloise fandom suggest that her mother is sleeping with the owner of the Plaza for rent…)
The whole movie follows Eloise going about her entire day making a racket at the Plaza, and though it is humourous to the audience, Eloise at the Plaza is a story of a perhaps very seen child, albeit a grossly unheard one. Though a plate Filet Mignon served on a silver platter is simply one call away of Eloise, her mom is not. She spends her childhood surrounded by people, but she is extremely lonely and engages in attention-seeking behaviors in an attempt to be seen by those whose dedicated job it is to care for her.
When Eloise grows up, will she be able to adjust to adulthood in a healthy way, with all the responsibilities accompanied with it? Where do the people whose job it was to care for her go when she doesn’t need caring for anymore (allegedly)?
“When I was younger, I didn’t wonder much about the parents of Eloise, the six-year-old heroine who lives with her British nanny in the Plaza Hotel, putting sunglasses on her dog Weenie and combing her hair with a fork. Now when I read the book to my son, I think about them a lot. It’s wealth that allows Eloise’s mother to neglect her daughter, and it’s the mother’s absence that haunts the book. What do we know of the woman? Eloise tells us that she is 30 and has “a charge account at Bergdorf’s.” Her mother knows Coco Chanel, and has AT&T stock and “knows an ad man whatever that is.” Sometimes she goes to Virginia with her lawyer. Eloise’s father is never mentioned. (Is the lawyer Eloise’s dad, and Eloise just doesn’t know it?) I’d love to read a novel narrated by Eloise’s mother. She’s a rich fuck-up, to be sure, maybe a functioning alcoholic with a penchant for Bloody Marys at breakfast and champagne every afternoon. She loves her daughter, but can’t stand to be around her for more than a few minutes. She jets off to Milan, to Paris, forgetting to remember her offspring back in Manhattan. There would definitely be a strange and/or degrading sex scene involving the owner of The Plaza."
-Edan Lepucki on "Don’t Let the Story End: Five Spinoff Novels I’d Love to Read"
“Eloise is a very special little girl who lives at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. She may not be pretty yet, but she’s definitely already a real person.”
On the surface, from the outside looking in, it is possible to assume that Eloise is a child of whom some would consider spoiled (some… if not, quite a few). Private tutors, learning specialists, nannies, and curated meals were what constituted her entire life at just six years old. I also believe that childhood is a very delicate time in one’s life, a short period where the blueprint as to what the rest of your life will look like is drawn out.
Some girls played house with the boys, and grew up to become engaged at 24. Others, strange girls like me, sat in an isolated corner of the playground, and burned ants underneath a magnifying glass, playing a merciliess God, watching them burn in eternal hellfire one by one in utter fascination. I grew up into an insufferable young woman who spends her waking days actively working towards not working or getting engaged (Being in a relationship as an adult constitutes as a full time job. No thank you), pondering upon the nature of the universe and the fabric of reality, wishing to understand the mind of God, sometimes lying down in the grass and daydreaming about falling in love (never in actuality, only in concept), pleasantly among other activities that you’d consider fun when you simply had nothing else to do and no one else to do it with (and a very active imagination).
Rewatching Eloise at the Plaza as an adult, I can only feel sorry for Eloise. She is not the spoiled girl critics say she is. Eloise is a lonely child living in a glass cage. Though this cage is well maintained, and the girl is well cared for, every comfort catered to, and needs seemingly not only met, but exceeded to be met, there remains a strange hollowness to the story of Eloise.
Though she is silver-spoon fed, and her every whim, need and personal comforts are provided for, she is parentless. This is the eternal tragedy of Eloise. The only family she knows is the curated one for her. This artificially created family, alike her nanny and various hotel employees she clings to and finds comfort within, is, unbeknownst to her six year old mind, as false and illusory as the actors in her favorite films. It is only in adolesence does she sorely realize that her whole life has been one expertly crafted lie.
As for adulthood, do you think Eloise is adequately prepared for it? When the artificial society falls, do you think she has any ground to stand on?
In many ways, my childhood was very similar to Eloise’s. She, like I, spent her early childhood years in a high rise building in the city. I lived in Boston in a government-subsidized apartment building on the eighteenth floor. Eloise lived at the top floor at the Plaza hotel in New York. Despite economic disparities, our pain is the same.
She, like I, was raised mainly by nannies with emotionally absent, but economically providing parents. And she, like I, have always found, from a young age, solace and comfort in the noise and chaos of the world around her, more so than in sitting in a quiet room alone within the expertly curated illusion that constitutes her life.
Though it may seem, on the surface, Eloise is the luckiest girl in the world, a dark interior is carefully and purposefully hidden by a neatly polished exterior.
I stood here on Earth today at the age of twenty-one, sixty-three stories high at a rooftop bar in New York off Wall St. The pointy roof of the Plaza hotel aims towards the limitless sky all the while the mighty, eternal spirit of the sun parallels me.
Perhaps I am the moon, I think.
I look down. Everything seems so very small from up here. I wonder if this is how God sees the Earth.
How so very insignificant our problems must seem from up here.
“You ever think about jumping off?” I ask a man at the bar.
“No,” he says, and gives me a very strange look.
“I do,” I say, not breaking my stare into his nonexistient soul through his automated, unfeeling, uncaring Wall Street eyes.
He looks very disturbed and walks away. I shrug.
I began to feel extremely dizzy, and it wasn’t just the Rosé that was making me feel like I did. It is at that moment where I realized I possessed my own richness that you can’t find anywhere on the stock market. It is a woman owned-sole propietorship, not able to be traded within the public domain. This very valuable stock that I possess is the richness of my very own soul.
When I am finished with my Rosé, I decided to leave the rooftop alone. I hated everyone there and found them particularly very boring. Though I am in a small financial debt (for now, but it was Donald Trump, one of the godfathers of New York’s highest caste who once said that debt can be a good thing), I left the rooftop bar past an extensive gathering of people outside eager to be let in (some wait hours. I waited just a few minutes…) feeling like the richest woman in the whole entire world.
Amongst a small crowd of the extremely wealthy, I found no true joy upon the faces of anyone other than myself in the reflection of the glass windows, whilist character-acting amongst the super-wealthy, giving them great discomfort in what they thought was a safe haven against crazy people (I have infiltrated your camp. Watch out America. Crazy ladies will cleanse this Earth).
Once I was satisfied and done after being the most interesting person in the room, I asked the hostess waiting by the elevator to, please, very pretty please, take me sixty-three stories back down to the ground. I wished very dearly to go back to my room, a deluxe king suite inside a hotel a few blocks down from the Plaza.
When I arrive back to the Wall St Hotel, it was as if a magical fairy had taken all my nastiness and mess and organized it in such a way that it surprised myself to see my clothes folded in such a neat, particular order. I pleasantly find myself in a similar position in my life that I found myself in as a child.
Once again, I am very well-cared for.
I am accosted with a strange sense of Deja-Vu. I peer towards the floor-ceiling glass windowpane and look out to the streets of New York. Visions of cobblestone and horse carriages replace asphalt and Teslas. (The former reality is very calm and nice. I can only wonder what New York was like without smog, and what structural and architectural beauties and human-made wonders lie beneath these steel and glass cages built by machines.)
This vision was paralleled by the accosting vision of gray smoke from hellish flames, airplane parts littering the sky, and bodies falling to the ground from the sky. And screams. (Oh, the screams, the terrible screams.)
Upon beginning to grasp the illusory nature of my own reality, I realize it can either be very sweet, or very bitter, I think, as I take a bite of dark chocolate and wash it down with some red wine found in my deluxe King suite. At the end of the day, the way you see things is up to you!
Psychological attachments create the nature of your reality. Shakespere’s question, to be or not to be, pangs within my mind as I walk aimlessly in a sparkly red dress alone throughout the lonely streets of the financial district in Manhattan.
I pass by a poster for an advertisement for Chanel. The model looks very beautiful and rich. I pass by a paper Chanel bag from the store down the street on the ground, empty, devoid of any substance, and covered in mud. It’s still Chanel, sure, but absolutely and completely worthless.
And thus, you dear Substack reader, my conclusion is simple: To be or not to be. That is the eternal question. And the decision is yours!
Xoxo
B.G. <3