The Limo
"You will be met by a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce limousine and swept away to a deluxe hideaway on four miles of romantically secluded white-sand beach where you will relax in the lap of luxury…"

Or so they would have you believe, the bankers who finance the "developers" who pay the flacks who write the travel brochures which display the flawless bodies of mindless boys and girls doing impossible gymnastics on beaches gleaned of cigarette butts.

Virtually Carefree
In fact, those happy, carefree boys and girls do not exist, nor do those beaches. They're just part of the virtual reality created by astute publicists. For that matter, even if those beaches did exist it wouldn't matter, because when you got there you would still be you. You are, more than likely, the brunt of cruel jokes among the chauffeurs of the limousines. They know, as you know, that you're not an Oriental potentate nor a shipping magnate. They know, as you know, that you're a fraud in the back of that chauffeur-driven limousine. Ah, if Mr. Rolls and Mr. Royce could see the riff-raff which rides in the rear seats of their limousines today they might reconsider the project they launched together one day at the Midland Hotel in Manchester.

In olden times the Rolls Royce was reserved exclusively for the aforementioned potentates. Nowadays even drug dealers ride in Rolls Royces. Soon only drug businessmen will ride in Rolls Royces, along with their bankers and, of course, the great public benefactors who deal in the sacred somniferants of government and religion, those wise and powerful men who concede you liberty on earth and everlasting life in heaven. Soon all the limousines made by Mr. Rolls and Mr. Royce will be bulletproof, like the Popemobile. Soon there will be even more prophets in the business of kissing airstrips and more citizens discovering that their destiny is to lick the boots of heavily-guarded psychotics.

Foetid Deluxe
They, the movers and shakers, have made their definition of luxury and they have no doubt as to its validity: luxury is what makes them richest. Their greatest luxuries are arms and drugs, of course. But there is also luxury in tourism and fashion. Or so they would have you believe. Never mind that tourism is massified and sordid. Never mind that the Mediterranean is a large cesspool ringed by steel-reinforced concrete where the European industrial classes are transported sheeplike to absorb dangerous quantities of ultraviolet radiation through the skin and to add their effluents to the already foetid waters. Now we have "eco-tourism," you say, "green tourism." That means, now that we have ruined the seashore we shall proceed to ruin the mountains.

The Joy of Labels
As for the luxury of fashion, they are teaching your children--and you are permitting them--that one of the most important things in life is the color of the tag on one's jeans. You, of course, wear only luxurious clothes with the labels on the outside, clothes advertised in glossy magazines read by women who paint their toenails with red lacquer. Ah, the luxury of tobacco. Remember that? Expert tobacco sellers told you it was luxurious and liberating, but they didn't tell you about the concomitant luxury of having a plastic esophagus, or the luxury of the triple bypass. Extraordinary luxury, that.

You say I exaggerate? Of course I exaggerate. I need to get your attention.

Surely no sentient being will be taken in by any of these crassly mercantile imitations of true luxury. Imitations? "If a Rolls Royce limousine is not truly luxurious," you ask, "then what is?" This is a stupid question, a question to which everybody already knows the answer. True luxury is many things but none of them will fatten the coffers of bankers very much, nor advance the ambitions of politicians very far. That's why you don't hear much about them in the mass media (which, don't ever forget, is a big business in itself).

Make Your Own List
I can give you my list but you, of course, must make up your own. That is the first luxury: the freedom to make up your own mind without having it manipulated by experts who want to sell you something luxurious, whether in this life or the next. Luxury, I think, is not a hazardous airplane ride to a tropical island with seven presidential palaces and mosquitoes the size of sparrows. Luxury is a place to be alone. Time to think. Silence. Luxury is an honest loving wife and the conviction that she will never leave you. Luxury is the belief that the planet will be an infinitesimally better place for having had you briefly on it.

Where does one buy this conviction? What is the price? These are silly questions. Like everything of greatest importance, true luxury cannot be bought, regardless of what our most accomplished buyers and sellers tell you. A spot under a tree if it's hot, a place by the fire if it's cold; this is luxury. A cord of firewood which you have cut and stacked yourself. Also luxurious is a room, or better yet a house, without the terrible anti-personnel fragmentation bomb which is the television with its strident banalities and truculent irrelevancies.

Sliced-Bread Pushers
Old clothes are more luxurious than new ones. Everybody used to know that, but most have had that knowledge insidiously supplanted by determined sellers of new clothes. Maximum sartorial luxury is, of course, old clothes with patches lovingly sewn by one's wife or mother. This basic luxury has also been stolen from you. Neither your wife nor mother has the time nor inclination to sew any patches on your fine old clothes. They, too, have been won over by the sellers of new, disposable clothes. What about homemade bread? When is the last time you ate homemade bread? Did you ever eat homemade bread? Meanwhile, those who traffic in new clothes and sliced bread have so much money that they can fly to places even farther away, where there are mosquitoes the size of starlings, and sharks.

What is the Meaning of Life, Anyway?
Luxury--and the very meaning of life--is, I think, to plant an apple tree, cultivate it and eat the apples, and to see your children eat the apples, then cultivate the tree for their children. The Japanese used to know this best, but even they have forgotten, having fallen into the webs of wily Occidental apple sellers.

Luxury is a friend. If you have ever had one I do not need to tell you that. And I need not remind you that you did not buy him. I think a beefsteak and a bottle of decent red wine are luxurious; you may prefer fish and a cold white. Neither need be very expensive if you prepare it yourself, another luxury. I also like a dog who comes when I call him, a cat which sidles up to me and purrs and a fishtank with fish of extravagant colors. There are even greater luxuries: a pair of goldfinches nesting in the ivy outside your kitchen window. But this is a luxury that only the gods can bestow on you. No banker can help.

I think it's luxurious not to be told what to do and, in turn, not to have to tell anybody else what to do. And, under the right circumstances, I think a book is luxurious. Also a record, an etching, a painting, you know… Then there's the luxury of creation. And what of the luxury of the flesh? A backscratch, a footrub, a nuzzle, a fiddle, you know…

The Good News: It's Not Too Late!
I am loath to bore you. Have I made my point? Almost nothing they want to sell you as luxury is truly luxurious. Most of it is banal at best, and some of it is positively dangerous. I remind you of this because, in all likelihood, you are not one of the rare exceptions to the millions of marks being tricked daily into believing that expensive wrappings are more important than the contents of life's package. I remind you that true luxury resides in the things you mainly already have, things which have been badly devaluated by the incessant lies of skillful peddlers of freeze-dried and canned luxury, things which you have been too busy lately to cultivate and which are slowly dying on the vine.