Magazine
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
October 22, 2014 4:44 PM
by Joan Didion
Here, in its original layout, is Joan Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.
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.
- on the outs with itself：No longer speaking or on friendly terms (with someone); having a dispute or angry (with someone).
- misplaced: 错置，缺失的
1 : to put in a wrong or inappropriate place misplace a comma
2 : mislay misplaced the keys
3: to set on a wrong object or eventuality his trust had been misplaced
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 that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless 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, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); 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 nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic 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 charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had 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 that 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 home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each 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, 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 post- pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
- 不做该做的事(sins of omission)，可译为失职之罪 。
- 做了不该做的事( Sins of commission）,可译为明知故犯。
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 face of things, but concerns instead a separate 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 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 corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
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 with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
- in the abstract： 理论上
- loses ground to：输掉
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.
- Chinese Gordon ：因带领中国军训镇压太平天国起义而闻名
- Khartoum [苏丹] 喀土穆
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.
- swoon晕厥
- commiserative 怜悯，同情
- carnal, 性欲
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.
- insofar
Insofar as I can say now, I shall come.
目前我只能说来。
- playing fields of Eton
- a crash program ： a rapid and intense course of training or research； crash course, crash programme
- cricket 板球
- liana 藤蔓
- call forth 唤起，产生作用
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. 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 weak- nesses. 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 gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity 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 spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. 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.
- consort with :to spend time with someone that other people do not approve of 狼狈为奸，勾结
- in thrall 奴役，束缚
- live out 身体力行，实践，live out their false notions of us 活成别人口中的样子，而不是自己该有的样子
- untenable incapable of being defended or justified 站不住脚的
- ludicrous 滑稽的
- the final turn of the screw： > Something that worsens an already difficult or negative situation.
Seeing my ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend is justanother turn of the screw. My financial situation is already dire, so that traffic ticket is a real turn of the screw.
祸不单行，变得更糟糕
- Francesca to Paolo 但丁《失乐园》人物
- divining ： to discover by intuition or insight : infer divine the truth
- tears the nerves, drains the will：撕裂神经，摧毁意志
- one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home：
我们总是跑出去寻找自我，却往往只能发现一个空虚内心。
END
In This Story:Joan Didion
关于自尊 – by Joan Didion
有一天，天气干燥，我摊开我的笔记本，用硕大的字体写下：当一个人发现自己不再喜欢自己时，TA的纯真年代也就终结了。几年之后，我知道那些忠实地记录自己的每一次挣扎的人，往往是不愿意跟自己和解的人，我赞赏这样的人。但是当我发现自己能够清晰地回忆起往事的气息时，我仍然感到窘迫，那是关于我迷失的自尊。
我因为分数不够，没能入选Phi Beta Kappa（美国大学生荣誉学会），这几乎是可以预料的，但是我却因此失去了自信。我曾经想象自己是学术型的拉斯柯尔尼科夫，可以奇迹般地不受因果的束缚。尽管我的落选肯定跟斯科特菲茨加拉德没能成为普林斯顿三角俱乐部的主席一样是个无足轻重的悲剧，我落选的那一刻仍然意味着某种东西的丧失，或许纯真是最恰当的表述。我不再确信我的人生之路会一路亮绿灯；不再确信童年时候大受赞许的乖巧性格能保证我得到Phi Beta Kappa的会员资格，幸福，荣誉或者一个好男人的爱情（最好是兼具 “卡萨布兰达”演员亨弗莱·鲍嘉的潇洒和默奇森家族的富有）；也不再相信良好的修养，干净的头发和斯坦福比奈智力测试上的高分可以带来图腾式的神奇魔力。我竟然将自尊寄托于这些所谓的“护身符”之上，因此得知我落选的那天，我就像是一个碰到吸血鬼却发现自己没带大蒜的人一样惊慌失措。
被逼迫自力更生可不是什么轻松的事情，就像是拿着别人的护照过境一样。但是对于我来说，这是为了拥有真正的自尊而迈出的第一步。尽管这已经是老生常谈了，我还是要说，自欺欺人是最大的欺骗。当一个人想要独处时，在别人眼里灯火通明的美丽小巷对TA来说则一无是处。这就像是好心帮了倒忙，轻而易举的胜利和被讴歌的羞辱一样让人懊丧。一个令人忧伤的事实是自尊与别人的支持无关，毕竟人们可以轻易地上当；自尊也与名声无关，就像《乱世佳人》中白瑞德对郝思嘉说的那样：“勇敢的人无所谓名声。”
失去自尊，正如不得不看那冗长的家庭录像带，看着那些被记录下来的或真实或虚假的失败。不断地有新的胶卷被粘接在旧的胶卷上。你看到你在愤怒中摔碎的杯子，被你打伤的某人，注意看下一个场景，是某人回来的那天晚上，看看你是如何搞砸那一晚的。失去自尊，如同在夜里辗转难眠，却找不到热牛奶、镇静剂或者另一半放在被子外面的手；如同细数自己犯下的罪过，如同被信任之人背叛，如同许下的承诺被巧妙打破，如同因为懒惰、懦弱或者粗疏而浪费的天赋。不管我们如何拖延，我们最终都会躺在那张我们亲手制造的，并不舒适的床上，我们是否能够安然睡去，取决于我们是否尊重自己。
有人也许会反驳说，有些看起来似乎没有什么自尊的怪人，倒是睡得很好。持此意见的人完全没有搞清楚问题本身。我也可以肯定，他们一定认为自尊就像是在内衣上别安全别针这一类的事。人们误认为自尊就像是舞蛇人的笛声，拥有自尊的人将自己封闭在无忧无虑的伊甸园中，他们不睡陌生的床，不说矛盾的话，也没有一般人的烦恼。实际上并不是这样。自尊与事物外表无关，而是一种独立的平静，私下的妥协。《相约萨马拉》中的轻率，最终自毁的朱利安和《了不起的盖茨比》中同样轻率，虚假地无可救药的乔丹似乎都不是拥有自尊的人。而事实上，朱利安没有自尊，乔丹却是拥有自尊的。乔丹就像许多女性一样有着天赋的适应能力，这一点在男性身上则比较少见。她有自己的处事方式，她可以与自己和平共处，并保持这种和平不受破坏。她对尼克说：“我讨厌轻率的人，两个轻率的家伙就得闹出事故来。”
像乔丹一样，拥有自尊的人有勇气面对自己的错误。TA们知道事情的代价。如果TA们选择与人偷情，那么就不会心怀愧疚，四处乞求被伤害者的原谅。TA们也不会过度抱怨自己受到的不公正待遇，比如被冠以“通奸者”这样耻辱的称呼。如果TA们选择放下，打个比方，放下编剧的工作去度假，TA们就不会痛苦地思索为什么是艾伯特·哈克特创作出了《安妮日记》，而不是自己。
简单来说，拥有自尊的人表现得有点强硬，拥有一种道德勇气，TA们拥有“性格”。而人们虽然认可“性格”，但是往往会更加赞赏那些可以妥协的品质。当人们想赞美那些没有什么特点的乖孩子或者安慰落选的美国参议院议员，尤其是谋求连任却在初选就落选的议员时候，则会想起这种品质。 尽管如此，“性格”--愿意为自己的生活接受责任--仍然是自尊的源泉。
我们的祖父母们或多或少都拥有，或者至少了解什么是真正的自尊。他们年轻时就懂得自律，懂得人们其实是靠着做自己并不怎么喜欢的事情谋生。他们不去害怕或者顾虑什么，他们会为了未来的幸福而舍弃眼前的快乐，尽管未来充满了不确定。十九世纪的人们认为，衣着整洁的戈登将军夺取喀什穆尽管不是什么伟大的战争，至少也是值得尊敬的；尽管解放加利福尼亚的过程中充斥着杀戮，困境和肮脏，但是它是公平的。一个十二岁移民男孩那西撒·康沃尔于1846年冬天在日记中以冷静的语调写道：父亲正忙着阅读，直到母亲说起，他才发现屋子里已经挤满了陌生的印第安人。尽管我们不知道这位母亲说了什么，但是这个事件很容易使读者印象深刻：忙着阅读的父亲，挤满了印第安人的屋子，小心翼翼的母亲，以及忠实地记录这一切的男孩。男孩在后文中写道：幸运的是，这些印第安人并没有敌意。印第安人只是日记的一部分。
“印第安人”总是以这样或那样的方式存在着。再一次，我们得承认，获得一样东西要付出相应的代价。真正尊重自己的人会考虑到印第安人怀有敌意的风险，投资失败的风险，一段感情趋于平淡的风险。他们愿意投资一些自己的东西。他们也许从来不玩乐，但是当他们玩乐的时候，他们是有把握的。
这种自律其实是自尊的表现，是一种无法伪装，但是可以发展，训练和诱导的思维习惯。曾经有人建议我，哭泣的时候就把头套在纸袋子里。这个方法有生理学上的道理，因为缺氧会使人停止哭泣；但是更重要的是它产生的心理效果。毕竟，当一个人把脑袋套在食品袋里的时候，TA几乎不可能继续把自己当成《呼啸山庄》中的凯瑟琳。在一些小事上也能体现这个道理，想象一下，谁在冲冷水澡的时候，还能昏昏欲睡，悲天悯人，或者情欲高涨？
这些只是在小事上的自律，不过，当这种自律扩大到更大的范围时，就有了价值。滑铁卢战役的成败在伊顿公学的操场上就已经注定了，这并不意味着如果拿破仑上了板球速成班就能反败为胜；因为藤蔓上的烛光反映了人们深层的，强烈的自律和长久以来积淀的价值，所以在雨林中的晚宴才变得有意义。这是一种仪式，帮助我们记得我们是谁，我们是怎样的人。为了记住它，我们必须了解它。
我不能断言这件事情是好是坏，但是获得这种形成自尊的内在价值，就相当于获得了一切。你可以区别事物，去爱，或者保持冷漠。缺少这种内在价值意味着自我封闭，意味着你无法去爱或者保持冷漠，尽管这看起来很矛盾。如果我们不尊重自己，一方面，我们被迫鄙视那些不如我们，却能指出我们的致命缺点的可怜家伙；另一方面，我们又奇怪地被每一个所见之人束缚，我们因为不满于自己的形象而决定活出别人眼中的自己，尽管那并不是真实的自己。我们以为取悦于人是一种好品质，是为他人着想的体现，是我们愿意奉献的证明，因此我们自命不凡。我们希望成为保罗的弗朗西斯卡1，杰克的阿什莉2，安妮莎莉文的海伦凯勒3 那样的人。期望总不会有错，每一个角色都不可笑。我们鄙视一些人，却又不得不受他们的摆布。我们就像是扮演一个还没有开场就注定要毁灭的角色。每一次我们达不到别人的期许，就会更加迫切得想要满足TA们的下一个期许。
这种现象有时被称为“异化自我”。到了“异化自我”严重的时候，我们不再接听电话，因为某人也许会向自己要什么，而我们会因为自己的拒绝而感到内疚。每一次相遇都超出我们的承受能力，摧毁我们的勇气和意志。一封没回复的信件都会引起我们的愧疚，以至于认识我们人开始猜测我们的神经是否正常。
不要让未回复的信件成为负担，不再活在别人的期待中，活出自己，这就是自尊的力量。如果没有自尊，我们最终会发现事情只会变得更糟，我们总是跑出去寻找自我，却往往只能发现一个空虚内心。