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Category: Amor Towles

In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.

Change, Music, Painting

For it is a fact that a man can be profoundly out of step with his times. A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all. As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers.

confusion, cultural-differences, culture, disconnection

If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

immigrants, new-york-city, socialites

That’s the problem with living in New York. You’ve got no New York to run away to.

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

new-york-city, nyc

That’s the problem with being born in New York, the old newsman observed a little sadly. You’ve got no New York to run away to.

amor-towles, new-york-city, rules-of-civility

…the book had been written with winter nights in mind. Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one’s friends had no desire to venture in.

books, cozy, winter

If they (ghosts) wander the halls of night, it is not from a grievance with or envy of the living. Rather, it is because they have no desire to see the living at all. Any more than snakes hope to see gardeners, or foxes the hounds. They wander about at midnight because at that hour they can generally do so without being harried by the sound and fury of earthly emotions. After all those years of striving and struggling, of hoping and praying, of shouldering expectations, stomaching opinions, navigating decorum, and making conversation, what they seek, quite simply, is a little peace and quiet.

There are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.

laughter, self-deprecation

Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress—any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have lingered for decades. And this must be especially so, when those with newfound power are men who distrust any form of hesitation or nuance, and who prize self-assurance above all.

change, political, progress, revolution, russian-revolution, society

Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all the Count knew, the cannons that had been salvaged from Napoleon’s retreat to make the Ascension’s bells had been forged by the French from the bells at La Rochelle; which in turn had been forged from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years War. From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time.

fate, russia, war