Self-Respect

This week, I've been playing hooky in certain respects. It feels good.

My favorite cashmere sweater is one that I have worn only a few times so far - light gray, with a black outline of a cartoon feline. Men seem very pleased with themselves when they correctly identify it as Hello Kitty. It's so cute. But then, guys are very often at their cutest when they do guy things. Like trying to make sense of women doing typical girl things.

I made some progress on cleaning my apartment - I diagnosed the problem with my vacuum cleaner (for the first time in 6 years, the bag needed to be changed), tracked down a dealer that actually sells bags for my idiosyncratic machine, and the rest is history. For some reason. I keep thinking of a phrase from a 1961 essay by Joan Didion, commenting on the ability to "assign unanswered letters their proper weight."

I discovered Joan Didion's essay "On Self-Respect" (published in the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem) when I was in college. It immediately resonated with me, it had somehow the ring of truth:

[T]o be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials..... Most of our platitudes nothwithstanding, 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.... 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 apparently heroic act into which one had been shamed. ... To do without self-respect ... 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....

Her thought is ultimately that self-respect involves "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."