The face of luxury (a dizzy little thing) seems to pop up at the oddest times.
In our own odd times, for example, there are very few signs of a world in the chips. Yet, on a given street on a given day, Rolls-Royces idle bumper to splendid bumper; the air is soaked in Bal a Versailles; diamonds go like Tic Tacs. From now to Christmas The New Yorker will be heaving with ads for crystal yaks and other lavish doodads in "limited editions," for which one assumes there must be buyers. Saks Fifth Avenue, which advertises itself as all the things we are, has recently decided that we are a 14-karat gold charge plate ($750). Of course such stuff is not for the multitudes. But you would think that the multitudes might get rather sore at the spectacle of the luxuriating few. Occasionally they do. Today in Italy and West Germany, the rich are growing shy about strutting their stuff in public. On the whole, however, they are about as reticent as Bette Midler. On the whole, too, nobody resents the flaunting.
For luxury exists quite comfortably on two incompatible planes of thought. The higher plane is moral. On it luxury is heartily condemned, as indeed it has been heartily condemned throughout history. "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," it says plainly in Matthew. Cato offered a practical note. "Beware of luxury," he told the Romans. "You have conquered the province of Phasis, but never eat any pheasants." And that has been the general line on the subject, spliced here and there with a quibble on what actually constitutes a luxury (Voltaire holding that it is anything above a necessity), or a rare defense: "Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with its necessities" (John Lothrop Motley). Still, history's high livers have been accused of every imaginable sin: active, cardinal, political, cosmic, original.
Since that is so, it ought to follow that the world's big spenders would constantly be shrinking from the public's stony stare, like devils in the sunshine. That they do not shrink, that instead they swell and shimmer, may be yet another sign of our essential depravity. For all its sermons to the contrary, the world loves a big spender. We cannot help ourselves. We may be stripped of all our possessions, out in the cold, down to our last charge plate (not one from Saks), and standing last in a breadline that accepts only cash. But let a Silver Shadow come humming along, and our hollow faces will suddenly be laved in an involuntary beatific glow, like the Ancient Mariner just before the bird dropped. Why?