"The guests feel struck with awe in that dining-room, and solemnly bolt their food as quickly as they can. You hear less noise in an American hotel dining-room containing five hundred people, than you do at a French table d’hôte accommodating fifty people, at a German one containing a dozen guests, or at a table where two Italians are dining tête-à-tête."
The author clearly has a ranking of how much each nationality speaks while eating :)
The theatrics read like a caricature of European elegance, which is what I imagine they were. I had a conversation with a family friend the other day, an age-old exercise in trying to reconcile the often contradictory movements of the American sociopolitical body. It suddenly occurred to me: not for morals or money, on either side, but, ultimately, to avoid humiliation on the global stage. We don't want to be seen as backwards, a backwater, underdeveloped, unserious, unsophisticated. So: we build railroads, we build skyscrapers, we tear down Jim Crow, we go to the moon. And, occasionally, we take the wrong impression of what would impress our international neighbors and it backfires, apparently.
Still, if only we could harness this proclivity for healthcare and housing or guns... I suppose the starkest signal of the breakdown of American stability is that not even the embarrassment of being the odd, terrible one out on those issues has spurred us to action.
If you enjoy this style of writing with its pithy observations then I can recommend J.P. Donleavy's "The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners":
As an aside, I hate layouts that are a single narrow column with a huge swathe of space on either side. It's hard to get into the flow of reading when having to move to a new line constantly.
(never mind, even Hacker News reformats my example for me)
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
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"The guests feel struck with awe in that dining-room, and solemnly bolt their food as quickly as they can. You hear less noise in an American hotel dining-room containing five hundred people, than you do at a French table d’hôte accommodating fifty people, at a German one containing a dozen guests, or at a table where two Italians are dining tête-à-tête."
The author clearly has a ranking of how much each nationality speaks while eating :)