Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

Every morning in early spring one of them skips off her porch with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane ready to flag down the first Greyhound headed to Manhattan—this city where all things beautiful are welcomed and measured and, if not immediately adopted, then at least tried on for size.

With the heaviness of the quilt weighing on my chest, I could feel every beat of my heart—as if it was still keeping time, measuring the days like a metronome set somewhere on the finely graduated scale between impatience and serenity. For a while, I lay there listening to the house, to the wind outside, to the hoot of what must have been an owl. Then I finally fell asleep, listening for the footsteps that weren’t going to come.

What a transcendent diversion the crossword can be.

I suppose we don’t rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment—a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.