Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

One of the great advantages that the midwestern girls had was that you couldn’t tell them apart. You can always tell a rich New York girl from a poor one. And you can tell a rich Boston girl from a poor one. After all, that’s what accents

and manners are there for. But to the native New Yorker, the midwestern girls all looked and sounded the same. Sure, the girls from the various classes were raised in different houses and went to different schools, but they shared enough midwestern humility that the gradations of their wealth and privilege were obscure to us.

But my grandfather and I, we’d sit in these big green rockers on the porch and watch the day draw to a close.

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.

For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise—that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.

Labour to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial fire Called Conscience.