When I was in my early twenties, eating alone in a restaurant was fraught with anxiety. Walking in by yourself, being led to a table, sitting down across from an empty chair — you might as well wear a sandwich board that reads Nobody wanted to have dinner with me. 

Whenever I did, I always brought a book, thinking it made me look intellectual and self-sufficient, when in fact a young person eating alone with a book looks even more pathetic than a young person eating alone without one. The book says: I have thought about this in advance, and I have brought a prop. 

Robert Duvall, 1931–2026

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Somewhere along the way, though — probably around 40, which is about the time people start realizing that nobody is paying any attention to them, that we’re all too wrapped up in our own psychological dramas to notice the guy eating alone — I learned to really love the experience of dining out by myself. A........

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