Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.

This king was an asshole

And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away.

Truth

It was as if America launched the Depression just to teach Manhattan a lesson.

After the Crash, you couldn’t hear the bodies hitting the pavement, but there was a sort of communal gasp and then a stillness that fell over the city like snow. The lights flickered. The bands laid down their instruments and the crowds made quietly for the door.

By the summer that Val and I had begun seeing each other, we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled.

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.

Washington Square

At No. 25, a curtain on the second floor was drawn back and the ghost of Edith Wharton looked out with shy envy. Sweet, insightful, unsexed, she watched the three of us pass wondering when the love that she had so artfully imagined would work up the courage to rap on her door. When would it present itself at an inconvenient hour, insist upon being admitted, brush past the butler and rush up the Puritan staircase urgently calling her name? Never, I’m afraid.

I don’t understand this. Wharton had a lover.

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

This could have been the start of the book?

When I first dragged Eve to Chernoff’s, she hated it.

Pamela Petus

Is every character an Xx Xx?

Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you’re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.

On the corner of Broadway and Exchange Place across the street from Trinity Church there was a little diner with a soda pop clock on the wall and a hasher named Max who even cooked his oatmeal on the griddle.

This whole section feels like a nod to 1930’s quickshot repoirte

Within seconds it was clear that she was filled with the spirit of the Lord. When she swerved onto Sixth Avenue, Tinker almost grabbed the wheel. But as we zigzagged through traffic, she drove in one fluid motion, accelerating and decelerating in imperceptible increments like a shark cutting through water, timing each light to the second. So we both sat back, quiet and wide-eyed—like others who put themselves in the hands of a higher power.

This I kind of like

Or rather, three empty glasses arrived. Each had a trio of olives skewered on a pin that was propped on the rim of the glass like an oar on the hull of a rowboat. Casper placed a napkin on top of a silver shaker and rattled it good. Then he carefully began to pour. First, he filled my glass to the brim. The liquor was so cold and pure it gave the impression of being more translucent than water. Next

The whole 21 scene feels written for those that haven’t seen the Thin Man movies.

The couples at the tables around us were engaged in conversations they’d been having for years—about their jobs and their children and their summer houses—conversations that may have been rote but that reinforced their sense of shared expectations and experience.

Tinker swept that aside and launched a conversation more suitable to our situation—one grounded in the hypothetical.

A shared flirtation come baiting. Dance of the birds of paradise

I cracked two eggs in a bowl and whisked them with grated cheese and herbs. I poured them into a pan of heated oil and covered them with a lid. Something about heating the oil and putting on the lid makes the eggs puff upon contact. And they brown without burning. It was the way my father used to prepare eggs for me when I was a girl, though we never ate them for breakfast. They tasted best, he used to say, when the kitchen was closed.

Walden by Thoreau—the only book in which infinity can be found on every other page.

Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish.

I freed my hands and put a palm on the smooth skin of his cheek, taking comfort in the well-counseled patience for that which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and, most important, endures them.

redirected my gaze across the aisle and found the chambermaid staring at me. With her doleful eyes, she looked down at the forgotten document. It wouldn’t be the both of them who got what they deserved, she seemed to be saying. That charming boy with his fine enunciation and floppy bangs, they’ll let him talk his way out of it. And little miss wide eyes, she’ll pay the price for the both of them.

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.

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.

—If I may be so bold, Miss Kontent, the color of my hair is available to you on the second floor.

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect’s ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn’t be hocked.

Vishniovy Sad

which time had yet the time to erase.

Knickerbocker Club—the

I wandered inside trying to size up the invited as Mason Tate would have.

—An eggbeater has only four. But I can’t figure out how that works either. —Okay, he said with a smile. Then watch me first. You rest the butt against your . . . shoulder, the way you would a . . . violin. Hold the barrel with your left hand here. Don’t grip. Just . . . balance it. Square your feet. Sight the target. Take a breath. Exhale.

I plucked the cards out of his hand and swept up the deck. We sat for a minute saying nothing and he drank to the bottom of his glass. I sensed that he was about to go. I tried to think of something captivating to say.

Hmmm

But the family tradition was to wrap everything in a heavy white stock that was delivered to the house by the roll. Then they dressed the gifts with a different-colored ribbon for each member of the clan.

Lining the hallway were photographs of family members smiling in enviable locales. There were grandparents on a dock, an uncle on skis, sisters riding sidesaddle. At the time it seemed a little odd, this back hall gallery; but running into a similar setup in similar hallways over the years, I eventually came to see it as endearingly WASPy. Because it’s an outward expression of that reserved sentimentality (for places as much as kin) that quietly permeates their version of existence.

There it was again. That slight stinging sensation of the cheeks. It’s our body’s light-speed response to the world showing us up; and it’s one of life’s most unpleasant feelings—leaving one to wonder what evolutionary purpose it could possibly serve.

each city has its own romantic season. Once a year, a city’s architectural, cultural, and horticultural variables come into alignment with the solar course in such a way that men and women passing each other on the thoroughfares feel an unusual sense of romantic promise. Like Christmastime in Vienna, or April in Paris.

Whatever their story, Eve was breathing easy now—for the moment forgetful, vulnerable, at peace. It’s a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that’s why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they’re fast asleep.

When a mother loses a daughter, she grieves over the future that her daughter will never have, but she can take solace in memories of close-knit days. 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. —

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.

right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.