What was once called character

 Woke up to the news that white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche had been murdered in the north of the country after a pay dispute with two of his farm workers. Terreblanche was known to be an unfair and abusive employer, so the death is a brutal tragedy but not altogether surprising. But 20 years ago this might have meant civil war in South Africa. How nations come to be divided against themselves is a strange and frightening phenomenon, so often grounded in irrational prejudice and fear.

And as I have been thinking about self-respect all week, how we build it, how  we recognise it in others, how essential it is in relationship, I was very pleased to find Andrew Sullivan quoting  Joan Didion:

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 excess of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. 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 United States senators 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 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.

Tough-mindedness is something I find in many  of my long-sober friends, the willingness to go the distance and to stick with things for the long haul,. The metaphor of marathon running comes to me, although I just walk up and down a small hill each morning and do my inelegant t’ai chi in the back garden. But I hope some of that tough-mindedness  rubs off on me.

The rain has stopped and everything outdoors sparkles and smells fresh, of rainwater and sunlight. The house is brimming with talkative guests and  excited small dogs and the leg of lamb has been turned in its marinade, bowls of fruit offered around, the kitchen table cleared — in the elder tree a wood pigeon coos like a bubble of sound pulsing in the clear morning air, rings of seductive cooing going up like circles of brightness — coming out of my bedroom in an faded kimono dressing gown I was called to rescue a small frog cowering under the sofa. A pleasure to set a tiny  viridian green frog  at liberty under a bush of red-flowering pineapple sage. Guests call the house a happy-go-lucky  menagerie of geckos, spiders, frogs and dogs, and there is a plump ginger cat asleep on  the crumpled bed in the spare room. And snails are climbing up the study wall, they too must be liberated.

And there are carrots and potatoes to be peeled, guests sent outside to smoke after breakfast, standing talking together and looking up at the gnarly elder tree all felted  with clusters of berries and small leaves, glimpses of squirrels  across the road, bowls of half-eaten muesli to be rinsed out, floors to be swept — all this while we are laughing and talking about the communal student houses of our youth, the parties and misbehaving, the way  our lives came together despite all the upsets and wrong roads taken. The wood pigeon goes on pulsing in the tree, the wet olive leaves  glinting silver in the sunlight — enchantment in phrases and snatches of being, what is luminous and present and already slipping away out of sight, beyong my grasp.

As Virginia Woolf described so well, that evanescent, haloed and vanishing reality — and I pause  with my hands in the soapy dishwater and remember that this March just past it was 68 years since she walked  down to the River Ouse in East Sussex and drowned herself for fear of going mad during wartime. Loss and the shadow of loss always there, a gentle but  dark haunting. Today may be all we have, let us live it to the full.

Stay well beloved readers, take care.