A good many of these early morning hours can be filled with the same haze of drudgery that finds us all and hangs about from time to time. On a lot of mornings, standing in the glare of the street lights shining down on the municipal parking lot where I meet my two running buddies, it can feel a bit like Groundhog Day, as if we had been making the trip around our five mile loop over and over again without stopping. There are few of these kinds of days for me, though. I am one who tends to take comfort in routine, the discipline of doing the same thing at the same time day after day in pursuit of a larger goal. But then, there are also the days that come careening out of nowhere, that shake you with an unexpected flood of pleasantness and your mind seems clearer and you breathe fuller and you are reminded of the good in the world.
In the midst of our family's low-country road trip last week -- we traversed the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for a few days -- I was treated to one of these simple and glorious mornings when so many small things just sort of fall into place. On the Wednesday of our week away, I woke just before sunrise and headed out for a run. Five miles of cruising around an island town by my own locomotion before anyone else had bothered to roll over made me feel as if I was the only man on Earth. After the run, I took a stroll on the beach, drying off in the breeze and enjoying the immense solitude of a wide and never-ending stretch of sand. Afterwards, it was a hot shower and good coffee and good quiet as my wife and our daughter finished their sleeping-in. And, a fantastic book, of course. As I have said before, it is the small pleasures in life that I relish.
As much as I love the South and the rural area that I call home, I am a ready and willing traveler and savor opportunities to visit cities. I am especially a fan of New York and I am especially a fan of good New York novels. It had been a while since I found one -- probably since Pete Hamill's Tabloid City, but my latest read, Amor Towles' Rules of Civility is a best-in-class. I am greatly intrigued by Towles as an author. He is not an author by trade, as his day job is his work in a Manhattan based investment firm. He wrote the book in the course of a year, devising a plan that echoes the grinding work toward a goal like I mentioned above, allowing himself two weeks to write and revise each of the twenty-six chapters of his book. Consequently, the story itself begins on New Years Day in 1938 and charts an auspicious year for its main character and the series of deliberate decisions and chance encounters that end up setting the course for the rest of her life. I enjoyed this book so much that it quickly became one that I wanted to read a little more slowly, prolonging the time I was able to spend with it. For someone who knows and loves New York, it was like a time machine tour of the city with visits to underground jazz clubs, dark, smoky bars, Westside apartments overlooking the park, jaunts out to the Hamptons and enough other spots in Manhattan to likely guide an entire weekend long tour. And, in what has become one of the markers for me of a really good New York novel, there is at least the mention of one of my all-time favorite places in the city, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.
And, of course, it is Towles' prose that is exceedingly satisfying, even as much as the setting in New York during a time charged with the anticipation of a great turning point in the history of the country and of the world. His writing is rife with clever metaphor and is delivered with a wink-and-a-nudge kind of humor that also makes good use of the slang of the day. You might be able to tell that I had fun with this book, but for all the sheer enjoyment, there is much to contemplate here about life--the connections that are forged in our lives and then fade from view, about the early parts of adulthood before the decisions we make set us down certain paths of no return, and about how things are hardly ever exactly as they may seem. There were a number of favorite passages I could have shared, but the one I will leave for you is particularly fitting, I think, given my own discussion above about an "ability to take pleasure in the mundane."
"My father was never much for whining. In the nineteen years I knew him, he hardly spoke of his turn in the Russian army, or of making ends meet with my mother, or of the day that she walked out on us. He certainly didn't complain about his health as it failed.
But one night near the end, as I was sitting at his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium. 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. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticement.
In retrospect, my cup of coffee has been the works of Charles Dickens. Admittedly, there's something a little annoying about all those plucky underprivileged kids and the aptly named agents of villainy. But I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine."
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