Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

What a relief it was, those few minutes with our guard let down and our gaze inexact, finding the one true solace that human isolation allows.

Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you’re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.

I cracked two eggs in a bowl and whisked them with grated cheese and herbs. I poured them into a pan of heated oil and covered them with a lid. Something about heating the oil and putting on the lid makes the eggs puff upon contact. And they brown without burning.

Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish.

Lest there be any doubt, I took A Room with a View from my purse and opened to Chapter VI. It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance:

But if New York was a many-cogged machine, then lack of judgment was the grease that kept the gears turning smoothly for the rest of us.

Wasn’t that just perfect, I thought. How little imagination and courage we show in our hatreds.

Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.

What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

If my father had made a million dollars, he wouldn’t have eaten at La Belle Époque. To him, restaurants were the ultimate expression of ungodly waste. For of all the luxuries that your money could buy, a restaurant left you the least to show for it.

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits.

nor was it the life of the seafarer exposed to the elements for years at a time, returning like Odysseus older, weaker, nearly forgotten—unrecognizable to all but one’s dog.

We think of our lives as a sequence of actions, an accumulation of accomplishments, a fluid articulation of style and opinion. And yet, in that one sixteenth of a second, a photograph can wreak such havoc.

But the family tradition was to wrap everything in a heavy white stock that was delivered to the house by the roll. Then they dressed the gifts with a different-colored ribbon for each member of the clan.

There it was again. That slight stinging sensation of the cheeks. It’s our body’s light-speed response to the world showing us up; and it’s one of life’s most unpleasant feelings—leaving one to wonder what evolutionary purpose it could possibly serve.

—Most people have more needs than wants. That’s why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs.

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion—whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say.

Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.

—If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.

I knew too well the nature of life’s distractions and enticements—how the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises.