"On Self-Respect," by Joan Didion (1961)
Once,
in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a
notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that
one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind
on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record
of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of
those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
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 proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful
amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day
with the nonplussed 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 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 ones’ 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 we 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 deals 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 Y 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, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the
coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions 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 improbably 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
face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private
reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby
seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had
it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more
often seen in women than 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 mortal 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-yaer-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 out 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 donnee.
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 bin the extreme to continue
fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with ones 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 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
notion 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.
