I first encountered the brilliance of Joan Didion in 1979 when I subscribed to The New York Review of Books. Recently, my interest had been rekindled by The Year of Magical Thinking, her powerful memoir about the grief following the unexpected death of her husband, and The Center Will Not Hold, her nephew Griffin Dunne’s moving documentary about her life. Her genius shines brightly in each and I highly recommend both.
Dunne’s film led me to On Self Respect, a seminal piece she published at age 27 in Vogue. Excerpts follow.
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 that people with courage can do without…
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…
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…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 is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are…willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds…
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, 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.
Great writing startles, enlightens and inspires. I will continue to explore Joan Didion’s works and recommend that you do as well.