Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The superego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into an ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.

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.

we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled.

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.

Slurring is the cursive of speech, I observed.

But there are tens of thousands of butterflies: men and women like Eve with two dramatically different colorings—one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage—and which can be switched at the instant with a flit of the wings.

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)?

But here on the trout pond, the shotgun was resonant. It boomed like a ship’s cannon and the sound lingered for a full beat. It seemed to give shape to the open air, or rather to reveal the hidden architecture that was there all along—the invisible cathedral that vaulted over the surface of the pond—known to sparrows and dragonflies but invisible to the human eye.

when the clay pigeon shattered there was no question that you had commanded it so. Standing at the pulpit, peering down the barrel into the open air, you suddenly had the power of a Gorgon—the ability to influence matter at a distance merely by meeting it with your gaze. And the feeling didn’t dissipate with the sound of the shot. It lingered. It permeated your limbs and sharpened your senses—adding a certain self-possession to your swagger, or a swagger to your self-possession.

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.

halcyon

Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care.

It was like the drummer had jimmied open the door and the others were stealing everything in the house.

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.