I say, "Do you have any cover letters where someone did well?"
And she says, "I have a part of the application where people have to write 150 characters about themselves. And this person wrote:
If you could only have 5 words on your tombstone, describing yourself, what would it say?
Mine: She wanted to learn, everything.
The punctuation is so gorgeous that I read the sentences twice, and I imagine myself using a comma with such intention. It will not happen, of course, but I like thinking about it.
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.
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.
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.
People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
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.
Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
