Been here, doing what Fred sings about in this video — figuratively speaking – for those who fancy themselves above the dreary necessity of having to pay for their mistakes. Here's what Joan Didion had to say about it in her 1961 essay on self-respect:
"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.
If you've started it, for God's sake, finish it, or have the decency to say, face-to-face, why you cannot.
From Follow the Fleet (1936), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”.
"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.
"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."
If you've started it, for God's sake, finish it, or have the decency to say, face-to-face, why you cannot.
From Follow the Fleet (1936), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”.
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