Re-reading books is one of my favorite pleasures. It’s a unique chance to be with your former self and your current self at the same time, connected by a book that you both adore.
Revisiting their story, I can’t help but wonder how my circumstances when I first read about Katey and Eve and Tinker at the 21 Club — spending the 2020 lockdown at home preparing to move to Atlanta and start my career — influenced my reaction to Katey’s mid-20s social life and career aspirations.
I made sure to wait long enough before re-reading Rules of Civility. This is overdramatic, but much like 1938 was a destiny-defining year for Katey, a lot has changed for me in the year-plus since July 2020. Destiny-defining is a stretch, but my days look nothing now like they did then — I live in a new city surrounded by entirely new people and devote the majority of my waking hours to working on things that previously had no meaning to me.
In the time between readings, I considered this my favorite book and have recommended it to many friends (a surprising number of whom actually read it — thanks, y’all!). I waited until I had a clear head and was just about to visit New York (in the fall no less!) to pick it back up.
But as I made my way through the early acts, I was questioning my tastes. Rules of Civility felt less polished and more contradictory than I remembered. I worried I wouldn’t be able to relate to Katey’s ambition after becoming disenchanted with a job I once found swanky. I was afraid this wasn’t such a timeless story after all, that it was rooted to a culture that revered Carnegie- and Vanderbilt- and Elon Musk-types for their genius and boot-straps work ethic.
[spoiler warning]
Fortunately the final third eased all these anxieties and then some. Rules of Civility speaks to my sensibilities in a way few books can, as I try to decide which path I want my life to travel (not to sound dramatic again) — whether it entails making the most of my talents and living a lavish life at the peaks of society like Katey, or like letting my affairs be two or three rather than a hundred or a thousand like Tinker.
Anne Grandyn, an imposing, capable widow who serves as Katey’s North Star, comments that the world is run by the few whose wants outnumber their needs. Katey later observes how the people of virtue — Eve, Wallace, Hank — are gone, leaving herself, Anne, and Tinker behind with their wants. This wants vs. needs business is a little confusing at first. But my interpretation is that wants — status, wealth, consumerism — get you the lavish lifestyle that Anne commands, that Katey and Tinker weave their way into, that so many get caught up in when they think of elite New York. That is, if you are blessed with a combination of desire, cleverness, and of course, coming from the right family and background.
But the virtuous among us deny all that in favor of what is real — the way Eve turns down a lavish proposal, the way Wallace gives up everything to go to war, the way Hank turns his back on his brother’s way of life and leaves the city, the way Thoreau went to the woods, and — eventually — the way Tinker goes to the docks. Tinker worked his way up to the life everyone thinks they want, only to leave it all behind. Katey also works her way up to a spot in the World of Wants, but chooses to stay.
It’s a beautiful dynamic and, set in the 1930s, an enriching homage to Gatsby. The rift between Tinker and Katey isn’t an antagonistic either/or. It isn’t even a rift. There’s no spite or arrogance from either about choosing a different path — the World of Wants is no better or worse than the World of Needs, just different. Katey and Tinker are as kindred as spirits come. The beauty of their parting is that they each could have chosen the other’s path, and it would’ve been just as right. Katey could have been the one to go the way of Thoreau and “let all the voodoos of ambition sleep.” Tinker could have been the one to climb to the top of Manhattan society. Or they could have each made the same choice, in either direction, and would have been able to stay together.
In the couple’s final encounter, Katey quips that she would rather have it all first before giving it up. But anyone who’s stumbled into the briefest period of good fortune knows this is easier said than done. The Hedonic treadmill, the golden handcuffs, lifestyle creep, whatever you prefer to call it. It’s no easier to give it up when you’re 50 instead of 25, making 3X instead of X.
As someone who left finance to be an author (albeit a very successful one), I wonder where Towles would place himself on this spectrum. I wonder how he relates to his characters. I wonder where he thinks we should aspire to land, and if there is a moral to this story after all. And of course, I wonder where I fall on that same spectrum — today, in a year, in twenty years, or whenever I read Rules of Civility the next time.
– October 2021
Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition
sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
– “Today” by Mary Oliver
excerpts
Charlotte had changed into high heels and a tangerine-colored blouse that clashed with all her best intentions. (129)
This particular September day promised to be a long one, I aimed to squander every last minute of it. (232)
This is a game that is won through powers of visualization more than memory. The best player puts herself in the traveler’s shoes as the journey unfolds, using her mind’s eye to see exactly what the traveler has seen, so that when she walks the route a second time the differences will draw attention to themselves. So as I took a second pass at 1938, setting out from The Hotspot and proceeding through the pageant that is day-by-day Manhattan, I immersed myself in the landscape and reobserved the little details, the offhand remarks, the actions on the periphery — all through the new lens of Tinker’s relationship with Anne. And many fascinating changes did I discover there. (241)
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. (259)
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 my life. And you can have it, since it’s been of no use to me. (260)
I gave a little prayer of thanks to no one in particular. Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer. (278)
Having been out late at The Lean-To, the next night we indulged in the sweetest of New York luxuries: a Sunday night at home with nothing to do. (278)
At any given moment, we’re all seeking someone’s forgiveness. (283)
For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense. (285)
Dicky was probably the first man I’d dated who was so well raised that he couldn’t bring himself to pry. And I must have acquired a taste for the trait — because he was far from the last. (291)
Time has a way of playing tricks on the mind. Looking back, a series of concurrent events can seem to stretch across a year while whole seasons can collapse into a single night. (291)
Suddenly, all the people of valor were gone. One by one, they had glittered and disappeared, leaving behind those who couldn’t free themselves from their wants: like Anne and Tinker and me. (292)
I could almost feel something dying inside him. And what was dying was his self-confident, unquestioning, all-forgiving impression of me. (296)
If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us… then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place. (297)
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Sometimes, it sure seems that’s what life intends. After all, it’s basically like a centrifuge that spins every few years casting proximate bodies in disparate directions. And when the spinning stops, almost before we can catch our breath, life crowds us with a calendar of new concerns. Even if we wanted to retrace our steps and rekindle our old acquaintances, how could we possibly find the time? (317)
And Tinker Grey? I didn’t know where Tinker was. But in a sense, I knew what had become of him. having cut himself adrift, Tinker had finally found his way to unfettered terrain. Whether trekking the snows of the Yukon or sailing the seas of Polynesia, Tinker was where the view to the horizon was unimpeded, the crickets commanded the stillness, the present was paramount, and there was absolutely no need for the Rules of Civility. (319)
So it was with mixed feelings that I received this news. Picturing Tinker wandering among the crowds of Manhattan, poor in all but spirit, I felt regret and envy; but a touch of pride too; and a little bit of hope. (321)
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 shape our lives for decades to come.
Maybe that sounds bleaker than I intended.
Life doesn’t have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and stable mechanics. To even have one year when you’re presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course — that’s by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn’t come without a price.
I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubts that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss. (323)
