Table for Two

by Amor Towles

At each crossing, faced with the decision of whether to go left, right, or straight ahead, the young man may rely upon the advice he has been given as a child, or the sum of his experiences, or the flip of a coin. But of all the forces that are likely to influence him as he proceeds from one fork to the next, there are few more powerful than the moderate increase in income.

Feeling the lingering pleasures of a job well done and a meal well eaten, he listened with satisfaction to the sounds rising from the street eight stories below: the honking of horns, the shouting of drunkards, the barking of dogs, even the siren of a police car. Together, they all combined to form the symphony that is the city of Manhattan on a warm summer night.

But when a man is paid to provide his opinions and he’s had some success in doing so, he is bound to become a little insufferable.

Sometimes, that’s what we need—a little smooch on the noggin that assures us, however improbably, that everything is going to be all right.

Certainly, we are all shaped by that first decade of our youth, but the first decade of our youth is shaped by the decade that preceded our arrival.

Alas, there is no fixing of man’s position in the system of the heavens, anymore than one can fix the position of a skiff at sea. Alas, yes, alas; but also, avanti!

She laughed again, and he smiled to hear it. There was nothing jaded or ugly about her laughter. On the contrary, it was the laugh of one who knows well the foibles of others without begrudging them. It was a tribute to the human comedy—the sort of laugh he had not heard in years, or maybe eons. The sort of laugh that should not be interrupted!

The personality of a man always poses the biggest obstacle to his own education, thought Charlie. He’s either too proud, too stubborn, or too timid to submit to the process of discovery. Many of life’s lessons come through trial or tribulation, and the cost of those lessons shouldn’t be taken lightly. But at least half of what a man hasn’t learned in his lifetime he could have learned with ease. This is one of the insights that comes with age—when one understands the nature of discovery but no longer has the time or energy to submit to its splendors. Thus, we are doomed to end our days in an ignorance largely of our own making.