Table for Two

by Amor Towles

Times of upheaval throw off orphans like sparks. Wherever the grinder meets the metal, they shoot in the air in dazzling arcs, then either bounce once on the pavement and disappear, or settle in the hay and smolder.

The human race is famously adaptive, but there is nothing that a human will adapt to more quickly than an improved standard of living.

What Communism actually guaranteed is that in place of lineage and luck, the State would determine who should get what after taking careful account of the greater good.

Oh, what crueler irony could there be than for the gods to infuse a young man with dreams of literary fame and then provide him with no experiences? But as I’ve noted, this was a secret that Timothy kept from everyone, including himself. So, every morning at 10:00, it was off to the library, where he postponed the writing of novels through the study of practices.

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.

Long gone are the days when the world was divided into manors and huts. In their place, we have an era in which the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter are experienced in a thousand gradations. Thus, while once we needed to marry an heiress or found a railroad in order to change our lot, today an extra fifty dollars a week will allow us to take one more step up the ladder of well-being to a tier where the soups are a little more tasty, the shirts a little more stylish, and the living rooms a little more exposed to natural light.

This rings true to me.

since the days of antiquity, those sitting in judgment of the gravest crimes have required evidence of a man’s intent and sought to classify his awareness of the moral implications of his actions. Even when one man kills another, we separate the accidental from the spontaneous and the spontaneous from the carefully planned—despite the fact that such distinctions provide no comfort to the dead.

Oh, Timothy. At long last, here comes your experience.

Be careful what you wish for.

As I stood there in the customer service line thinking of all that had just transpired, what I found myself hoping, what I found myself almost praying for, was that despite all my flaws, when the time came, as it surely would, my wife would be willing to fight for me as hard as Jennifer had fought for her husband.

Oh, Peggy felt cheated, all right. And not simply in terms of her husband’s infidelity. She felt cheated by the implicit promises of her youth. Cheated by institutions like Smith College, the Episcopal Church, and Jane Austen, each of which openly celebrated the sacrament of marriage. Cheated by old friends who either sided with Harry or diplomatically expressed their neutrality. Cheated by members of her social circle who were less likely to invite her for dinner because she made for an odd number at the table. Ultimately, cheated by Life, which had forced her to endure the scandal, the loneliness, the indignities of marital collapse—even as less-deserving women all around her exuded a sense of moral superiority secured by an untarnished union.

you could tell you were in the presence of some form of perfection. For not only was the music uplifting, each individual phrase seemed to follow so naturally, so inevitably upon the last that a slumbering spirit deep within you, suddenly awakened, was saying: Of course, of course, of course . . .

Isserlis somehow conveyed the improbability of it all through his playing. For surely, it was all so improbable. To begin with you have the fact that some crumpled old sheet of music, which could have been torn or tossed or set on fire a thousand times over, had survived long enough to be discovered by a boy in an old music shop—in a harbor in Barcelona, no less. The very cello Isserlis was playing had survived two and a half centuries despite the fact that its entire essence seemed to depend upon the fragility of its construction. But the greatest improbability, the near impossibility, was that somewhere in Germany back in seventeen something something Bach had taken his deep and personal appreciation of beauty and translated it so effectively into music that here in New York, hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away, thanks to the uncanny skill of this cellist, that appreciation of beauty could be felt by every one of us.

it was . . . it was the opposite of cascading—a fluid and effortless tumbling upward. An ascension. Yes, the music was ascending and we were ascending with it. First slowly, almost patiently, but then with greater speed and urgency, imagining now for one instant, and now for another, that we have reached the plateau, only for the music to take us higher still, beyond the realm in which climbing can occur, beyond the realm in which one looks down at the ground, beyond hope and aspiration into the realm of joy where all that is possible lies open before us.

Oh, how we applauded. First in our chairs, and then on our feet. For we were not simply applauding this virtuoso, or the composition, or Bach. We were applauding one another. Applauding the joy which we had shared and which had become the fuller through the sharing. As we applauded, everyone in every aisle was looking to their left and right such that suddenly I and the old man were nodding at each other with smiles on our faces in acknowledgment of what we had just witnessed, what we had been a part of.

I would have loved to describe that moment to Tommy. To describe for him the sense of improbability, of ascension, of joy that I had been lucky enough to partake in thanks largely to him. But, of course, for Tommy any description of that night represented another cut of the knife. So, we never spoke of it.

in the years that followed, only when he was away on business, and the children were sound asleep, and the city was hushed unexpectedly, like with a newly fallen snow, would I take the cassette tape the police officer had given me from the back of my drawer and listen to Mr. Fein’s recording.

The only advantage to growing old is that one loses one’s appetites. After the age of sixty-five one wishes to travel less, eat less, own less. At that point, there is no better way to end one’s day than with a few sips of an old Scotch, a few pages of an old novel, and a king-size bed without distractions.

I wonder if this is true for most people. It is not true for me.

Park Avenue pauper.

No one is born pompous. To attain that state requires a certain amount of planning and effort. Presumably you could achieve it by a variety of means, but one sure way is to attend an old prep school that’s a little past its prime; while there, exhibit some facility in a field sport that you will never have cause to play again; room with a fellow whose name is over the library door; and along the way, gain familiarity with a pastime that requires travel and specialized apparel—such as duck hunting or downhill skiing.

Well he knew that in this country, in this life, we fashion ourselves. We pick our spot and our companions and how we’ll earn our keep, and that’s how we go about the fashioning. Through the where of it, and the who, and the how. But if that is how we fashion ourselves, then surely it follows that with the loss of each of these elements comes the winnowing away. The burying of one’s spouse, the retirement from the job, the moving from one’s home where one has lived for twenty-two years—this is the undoing, the unmaking.

But because they were an old man’s stories. They were sorry and tired and overtold.

—Without a doubt, there are titanic personalities at the helm of Hollywood. And to those who read the papers, it must seem that we alone deserve the credit or condemnation for what reaches the screen. But making a movie is a contingent art, Miss Ross. Yes, a great producer starts with a vision and personally assembles its elements. After an extensive search, he chooses the Mona Lisa as his model. He selects a dress that will drape across her shoulders just so. He arranges her hair. He locates the perfect landscape as a backdrop. He makes her comfortable, unselfconscious. Then patiently, he waits for her to express her innermost humanity through a smile, so that he can capture it on canvas. But at that very moment, the studio doors fling open to admit an onslaught of actors and extras, stuntmen and cameramen, Foley artists, fitters, gaffers, best boys—every one of whom brandishes a brush. David spoke of his employees with a slight grimace, as if their arrival signaled civilization’s second descent into the Dark Ages. —What I am telling you, Miss Ross, is that every single one of the two hundred men and women whom I have enlisted to help make my picture can ruin it. He began ticking off potential setbacks: —A poorly scripted line of dialogue. A hapless delivery. A garish gown. Unflattering lighting. Maudlin music. Any one of these bumbled details can turn a carefully crafted romance into claptrap, or a heart-wrenching tragedy into a vaudeville farce. And to this list of pitf...

Across the top of it in large capital letters she wrote PLACES TO GO, then commenced to itemize: The Forbidden City The Taj Mahal After the Taj Mahal she paused. She bit the pencil’s eraser, at a loss for a third locale. At a loss for a third locale?! she chided herself. The world is big. It’s bigger than a bread box! Eve closed her eyes and tried to remember the map of the world that had hung on the wall of her ninth-grade classroom. (She had certainly stared at it enough.) And there in the south of Spain a destination presented itself. Then one in the heart of Russia. And another on the banks of the Nile. In fact, so quickly did the destinations come to mind, the kindly stranger’s pencil could barely keep up. The Alhambra The Hermitage The Pyramids! Lists aren’t so bad, Eve realized. They didn’t have to be a catalogue of ladylike constraints. They could just as easily testify to plans and aspirations. A celebration of the not yet done. Of what Thou shalt! It really just depended on which side of the pencil you were on.

I have traveled extensively, yet most of the places listed I have yet to visit. The world is vast and there is never enough time to see everything. It is necessary to prioritize.

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.

It is a funny aspect of life, thought Charlie, how a group of grown people can convince themselves to do something that none of them really want to do. They start by talking an idea into existence. Once the idea begins to take shape and dimension, they’ll talk away their hesitations, replacing them with all the supposed benefits, one by one. They’ll talk away their instincts and their second thoughts and their common sense too, until they are moving in lockstep together toward some shared intention that doesn’t appeal to any one of them.

when the momentum was against you, exculpatory details tended to be either overlooked or swept aside.

I want to hear everything. I want to hear what’s happened no matter how ugly, or uncomfortable, or unnerving it might be. Because if we don’t stare down the things that make us want to look away, then the world is just a mirage.