Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I—like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs.

For starters, you could hardly blame them. Balmy breezes, turquoise seas, Caribbean rum, these are well-established aphrodisiacs. But so too are proximity and necessity and the threat of despair.

One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

That’s how quickly New York City comes about—like a weather vane—or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.

To begin, Wallace ordered aspic, of all things, and I had the house salad—a terrific concoction of iceberg greens, cold blue cheese and warm red bacon. If I were a country, I would have made it my flag.

—It’s funny about photography, isn’t it? The entire medium is founded on the instant. If you allow the shutter to be open for even a few seconds, the image goes black. We think of our lives as a sequence of actions, an accumulation of accomplishments, a fluid articulation of style and opinion.

He’d break out the samovar and boil black tea and recall some December when there was a lull in conscription and the well wasn’t frozen and the harvest hadn’t failed. It wouldn’t be such a bad place to be born, he’d say, if you never had to live there.