Table for Two

by Amor Towles

Yes, yes, I know. When God the Father is smiling on a nation, when average incomes are on the rise, food is plentiful, and soldiers are biding their time with card games in their barracks, nothing seems worthier of condescension than a discussion of the weather. At dinner parties and afternoon teas, those who routinely turn to the topic are deemed boring, even insufferable. The possibility of precipitation seems worthy as a topic only to those without the imagination or intelligence to speak of the latest literature, the cinema, and the international situation—or, in short, the times. But when a society is in turmoil, a discussion of the weather doesn’t seem quite so unwelcome….

And in that moment, Pushkin felt a great sense of joy. For to serve the ones we love and receive their approval in return, need life be any more complicated than that?

Not for nothing have writers been called wordsmiths for centuries. The craft of writing demands all the specialized training and physical stamina of the blacksmith. The serious writer sweats at the forge of his imagination while hammering out sentences on the anvil of language, and so on.

The road along which a young man discovers what he is capable of is no midwestern interstate. It has no uninterrupted views to the horizon, no painted white lines, no brightly lit signs indicating the distance to one’s destination. Rather, it is a narrow and winding byway crowded with undergrowth and overhung with branches. Along his journey, the young man is presented with sudden intersections, divergent footpaths, and fateful detours, each of which, if taken, will lead him to other byways with their own intersections, footpaths, and detours. So intricate are the paths and so wooded the way, at any given point it is almost impossible for a young man to see from whence he’s come, never mind to where he’s headed. 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.

So, on the following day, Timothy went to his usual table at the New York Public Library, and rather than bending over literary memoirs, he bent over ten issues of Forbes magazine, which were literally (well, not literally literally, but figuratively literally) brimming with exciting new words and concepts.

We all have our flaws. Some large and some small. Some that come and go, others that persist. I, for one, don’t remember birthdays. I’m not always welcoming to perfectly nice people whom I’m meeting for the first time. When inconvenienced, even slightly, I can’t resist the temptation to let the person who’s inconvenienced me know that I’ve been inconvenienced. And I tend to allow my priorities to overshadow the priorities of others, even of those I love. Perhaps, especially of those I love. 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.

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.