On Self-Respect

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

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.

I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others.