Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

On Friday nights, we let boys whom we had no intention of kissing buy us drinks, and in exchange for dinner we kissed a few whom we had no intention of kissing twice.

When the waitress appeared I ordered a BLT; Tinker leapt straight into uncharted territory, ordering Max’s eponymous sandwich, which the menu defined as unparalleled, world famous and legendary. When Tinker asked if I’d ever had it, I told him I’d always found the description a little too long on adjectives and a little too short on specifics.

Bucky dear, his wife warned, you’re slurring your words. —Slurring is the cursive of speech, I observed.

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.

Most people have more needs than wants. That’s why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs.

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. This is one of the finer maxims that I’ve discovered in life.

If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.

It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time—by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still? In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.