Just before I was asked to write this essay, on comporting oneself with elegance in the modern age, I was asked to lay out my thoughts on glamour for the New Inquiry. I mildly demurred, with regard to myself, and pointed to the term’s archaic roots as a kind of benign trickery. Glamour, you go out with; elegance, you marry (if you have any sense). Glamour is Ava Gardner, long my inspiration, and her penchant for bullfighters. Danger, costume, machismo –– it makes for a perfect cocktail of artfully constructed fantasies. One of the most elegant women who have ever lived would have to be Eleanor of Aquitaine, for the way in which she divorced the King of France and resurfaced as the Queen of England. As I recall, all anyone could piece together was a single meeting. Glamour is constructed, elegance is acquired, and charm is innate. For that reason, I think of the state of being elegant as having a kind of democratic virtue, open to all. Most of being elegant is knowing when to say “no,” and how (quickly, neutrally and with as little detail as possible, and more often than not), and cultivating empathy and a set of behaviors that spring forth from that compassionate heart. Civility, it is said, comes from the place where our elbows rub together. Manners are just the common practice.