On Self Respect Pt. 3
Another Joan Didion - this one from On Keeping a Notebook.
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.
I’ve written before about my sympathy toward the view that we are not some continuous, indivisible soul that persists across our life. Instead, I think we are a string of experiences — or experiencers, rather — that are each extemely similar to the ones who came immediately before, but increasingly dissimilar across longer stretches of time.
So how do we relate to our past selves, or our future selves for that matter? There is something important in the continuous relationship we have to them, and I think (as Didion suggests) we do best to weave them into a grander narriative of our lives.
Alienation from the self carries costs that we shouldn’t wish to bear.