Table for Two

by Amor Towles

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?

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.

Emotional contagion is a term coined by behavioral scientists for a fairly universal aspect of human nature—that we tend to mirror the mood signals of others.

He was an oboist from Switzerland named Hans. Or maybe Hanz. (Either way, it’s pronounced the same.)

Give me an unstuffed four-pound chicken any day. Toss a slice of lemon, a sprig of rosemary, and a clove of garlic into the empty cavity, roast it at 425° for sixty minutes or until golden brown, and you will have a perfect dinner time and again.

Sometimes you just wanted to be left to yourself, even when it was for three thousand miles.

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. It is through this process that time and intent reclaim the solitary soul for its grander purpose.

Fates once again laid claim to their supremacy, to their dominion over mortal men.

there are elements of boarding school that I miss. There are elements of my most catastrophic romances that I miss. So let us agree that missing is not at the heart of the matter.

hoped to get a good night’s rest, but when he woke at five in the morning, he knew he wouldn’t fall back asleep. He was feeling the excitement of a child, the anxiety of an adolescent, the hubris of a young man, and the dread of an adult, all at once.

For over thirty years, Betty had offered him a cup of tea. On a cold winter morning or a rainy afternoon, she would make one for herself and offer to make one for him, reminding him of its merits. But Charlie was a coffee man, so he always turned her down. Then the year she died, unable to bring himself to throw her tea in the trash, he had made himself a cup and realized that what she had always said was absolutely right: Sometimes, it just hit the spot.

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.

At this point, 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.

For the world to have any sense of justice, a team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and paintbrushes and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.