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Joan Didion
I
had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have
been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the
grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind
of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect
relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless
nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation
lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa
nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the
word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green
for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which
had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi
Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a
certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair,
and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful
amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day
with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire
and has no crucifix at hand. Although
to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like
trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now
the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most
of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most
difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps
assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily
drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain
through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason,
the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic
act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect
has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all,
deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as
Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage
can do without. To
do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling
audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s
failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for
every screening. There’s the
glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now,
this next scene, the night he came back from Houston, see how you muff
this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night,
beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on
the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the
trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably
wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we
postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously
uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in
it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. To
protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could
not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to
miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think
that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in
one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that
“self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that
keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange
beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at
all. It has nothing to do with the private reconciliation. Although the
careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment
in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for
self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that
genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan
took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace:
“I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to
make an accident.” Like
Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their
mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit
adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience,
to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain
unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named
co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain
toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called
character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes
loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of
its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in
connection with homely children and United States senators who have been
defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless,
character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own
life—is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect
is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all
about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the
sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to
do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate
comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts,
It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that
Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the
Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California
involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the
winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall
noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the
house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about
it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely
fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the
Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm,
the child duly recording the event and noting further that those
particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians
were simply part of the donnée. In
one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of
recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect
themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be
hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not
turn out to be one in which every
day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to
invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they
do play, they know the odds. That
kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be
faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested
to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As
it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with
oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is
incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying
oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a
similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves;
imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a
cold shower. But
those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent
larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton
is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in
cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless
did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper,
stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of
ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember
it, one must have known it. To
have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes
self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to
discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be
locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or
indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand
forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us,
so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the
other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously
determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false
notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to
please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy,
evidence of our willingness to give. Of
course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to
anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too
ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play
roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating
fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand
made upon us. It
is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its
advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone
might want something; that we could say no without drowning in
self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too
much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as
small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that
answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters
their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give
us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of
self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the
screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.  |