On Self respect
Joan Didion
Once in a dry ason, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes onelf. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itlf should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of tho particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced lf-respect.
elevenI 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 though mylf a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cau-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 gre
honest是什么意思en for me; the pleasant certainty that tho rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed the 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 lf-respect been pinned, and I faced mylf that day with the nonplud apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Although to be driven back upon onelf is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credential, it ems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real lf-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, lf-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 onelf: 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 emingly heroic act into which one h
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ad been shamed. The dismal fact is that lf-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 Scarlet O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.
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大写字母表 26个To do without lf-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 Y came back from Houston, e how you muff this one. To live without lf-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 promis 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 ourlves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of cour, on whether or not we respect ourlves.
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To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themlves, em to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as tho people miss it who think that lf-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “lf-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps tho who have it locked in some unlighted 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 parate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby em equally improbable candidates for lf-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often en in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, make her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “it takes two to make an accident.”
vision是什么意思Like Jordan Baker, people with lf-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choo to commit adultery, they do not then go running, i
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n an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the underved embarrassment, of being named correspondent. In brief, people with lf-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 los 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 nators 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 lf-respect springs.brasil
