The actor-writer Ethan Hawke bounded up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past the fat pigeons and the tourists with selfie sticks, and began to talk. It was the morning of his forty-fifth birthday, and he was in an expansive mood. “When I was first in New York, I used to come here to kill time between auditions,” he said, entering the Great Hall. “My son just loves it here.” Hawke walked through the galleries, past crucifixes and stained glass, and soon reached his destination: the Arms and Armor Court.
He was dressed in “Boyhood” chic: blue baseball cap, Army green jacket, and worn-down corduroys. A toothpick poked out the side of his mouth. While eying the gleaming breastplates and helmets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century kings and noblemen, Hawke explained the backstory of his new book, “Rules for a Knight,” which arrives this week. “I’ve just always loved the idea of knighthood,” he said. “It makes being a good person cool. Or, aspiring to be a good person cool.”
The book is a hybrid parenting guide and self-help book, on horseback. It takes the form of a letter from a father to his four children. The father is an imagined fifteenth-century ancestor of Hawke’s, a Cornish knight named Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke. Writing on the eve of a battle, Sir Thomas presents a guide for living an upright and noble life in twenty short chapters, each containing a moral and a parable. “It’s one of the stranger things I’ve ever worked on,” Hawke said, grinning. “I don’t know what exactly possessed us to publish it.” (Rule No. 2, Humility: “Never announce that you are a knight, simply behave as one.”)
The project began about a decade ago, Hawke explained. “My wife was reading a book about step-parenting, and this book was talking about the value of rules,” he said, before approaching a massive suit of armor made for Henry VIII in the fifteen-forties. “So we started saying, well, what are the rules of our house? And you start with the really mundane, like eight-o’clock bedtime, all that kind of stuff. And then, invariably, you start asking yourself, well, what do we really believe in? So I started riffing on this idea of ‘rules for a knight.’ Like, what does the king decree, you know? I wrote it out—the idea was we were going to put it on the wall, in calligraphy. Like, these are the rules.” (Rule No. 14, Discipline: “Without it, locating your saddle may take all morning.”)
The book evolved gradually. There were seven rules, then ten, then twenty. One year, Hawke and his wife gave bound copies of the rules to their children as a Christmas present. Another year, they gave copies out to friends. (Rule No. 6, Friendship: “Remember, a friend does not need you to impress him.”) Hawke entered a side room and spotted the child-sized armor of Infante Luis, Prince of Asturias. “I haven’t been in here in a long time,” he said. He stood quietly for a moment, leaning forward to read the display copy, then returned to the topic of the book. “I hope that people like it,” he said. “But I have no idea. What has been valuable about it for me was that it gave me an excuse and permission to bring up subject matters that are very difficult to talk about with kids. How do you find the right reason to talk about why it’s good to be alone with yourself? Why solitude is important in a person’s life? What is humility?”
The ideas in the book come from “other knights,” as Hawke credits them on the acknowledgment page. They include Muhammad Ali, Emily Dickinson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Mother Teresa. “I think I only thanked one real knight in the book,” Hawke said. “Tom Stoppard.”
Hawke began roaming the halls of the museum more widely. He paused to take in some small engraved pistols, then some old baseball cards on display on the mezzanine floor. He eventually found himself in the vestibule of the American Wing. He kept walking, and explained how his wife had wanted him to go further into the historical research for “Rules for a Knight,” to dig deeper into the Cornish language, for example. But he’d resisted, doing only what he thought necessary to keep the spell of the book from breaking. “That’s where the actor in me just comes out,” he said, snapping his fingers to illustrate the point. “I’m just trying to entertain. I’m not trying to be a Cornish scholar.”
Hawke turned a corner into a giant room. The Temple of Dendur loomed. He lowered his voice. “Have you read ‘From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’?” he said, walking not out into the middle of the room but along the back wall, toward the rear side of the stone temple. “I can’t help but think of that every time I walk in here. You know, I always think, if you had to hide in here”—he stopped below a dark cavity in the wall, about eight or so feet off the ground—“if you just, really quick, hopped up in that back vent, and then you just lay down, right in there, and let them close up shop ... I think that’s the spot. That’s the spot.” (Rule No. 11, Patience: “There is a moment for action, and with a clear mind that moment is obvious.”)
