Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

For many are called, but few are chosen.

It was what the social columnists liked to refer to as “a superlative affair.”

the women wore brightly colored dresses hemmed at every length from the Achilles tendon to the top of the thigh.

In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin—all crests and no table settings.

For, in fact, the pictures captured a certain naked humanity.

The 1930s . . . What a grueling decade that was. I was sixteen when the Depression began, just old enough to have had all my dreams and expectations duped by the effortless glamour of the twenties. It was as if America launched the Depression just to teach Manhattan a lesson.

our socioeconomic strata—that thousand-layered glacial formation that spans from an ash can on the Bowery to a penthouse in paradise.

The driver put the cab in gear and Broadway began slipping by the windows like a string of lights being pulled off a Christmas tree.

The food at Chernoff’s was cold, the vodka medicinal and the service abrupt.

What should we wear? —Whatever you like. —Nice, nicer or nicest?

I pointed out the window toward Trinity. For over half a century, its steeple had been the highest point in Manhattan and a welcome sight to sailors. Now, you had to be in a diner across the street just to see it.

Eve was aglow. But if Mrs. Grandyn’s little visit had lit the candles on Eve’s cake, for Tinker it had blown them out. Her unexpected appearance had changed the whole tenor of the outing. In the blink of an eye the caption had gone from Man of means takes two girls to swanky spot to Young peacock shows off feathers in family’s backyard.

—That’s the problem with being born in New York, the old newsman observed a little sadly. You’ve got no New York to run away to.

We had to wait fifteen minutes for a train. It rattled into the station like it was coming from another century. The interior lights cast a halfhearted glow over the nocturnal flotsam in its care: the janitors, drunkards and dance-hall girls.

The sharp contrast provides butterflies with a material evolutionary advantage, because when their wings are open they can attract a mate, while when their wings are closed they can disappear on the trunk of a tree.

It’s a bit of a cliché to refer to someone as a chameleon: a person who can change his colors from environment to environment. In fact, not one in a million can do that. 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.

Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.

I’ve come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

If my father had made a million dollars, he wouldn’t have eaten at La Belle Époque. To him, restaurants were the ultimate expression of ungodly waste.

And asparagus? My father would sooner have carried a twenty-dollar bill to his grave than spend it on some glamorous weed coated in cheese.

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization.

On the edge of a couch, four blondes sat in a row comparing notes like a conspiracy of crows on a telephone wire.

But when your daughter runs away, it is the fond memories that have been laid to rest; and your daughter’s future, alive and well, recedes from you like a wave drawing out to sea.

In the doleful court behind my building a patchwork of windows was all that separated me from a hundred muted lives being led without mystery or menace or magic.

The Wolcotts’ “camp” was a two-story mansion in the Arts & Crafts style. At one in the morning, it loomed from the shadows like an elegant beast come to the water’s edge to drink.

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.

The air smelled of sumac and sassafras and other sweet-sounding words.

—Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you—that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: How does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets—from having made choices with . . . such poise and purpose. It stopped me in my tracks a little. And I just couldn’t wait to see it again.

the stiff-postured silent deference of an Oriental waitstaff (the last servile ethnicity of America’s nineteenth-century immigrant classes).

In the apartment next door, I could hear the Zimmers sharpening their sarcasm. Over an early dinner, they chipped away at each other like little Michelangelos, placing every stroke of the mallet with care and devotion.

I think there is another reason they please—a reason that is at least as important, if not more so—and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve.

in the pages of Agatha Christie’s books men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them.

As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion—whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say.

1939 may have brought the beginning of the war in Europe, but in America it brought the end of the Depression.

Associate yourself with Men of good Quality if you Esteem your own Reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad Company.