What do you say to yourself when you self-talk? I mean the words that crawl across the figurative screen in that figurative region known as the soul when, in some sort of duress, you want to remind yourself of what's important to you, a certain ideal you should strive to attain. For a long time I have borrowed on these occasions some words that I came across in the editor's introduction to The Portable Chekhov:
In the end, this boy who had been born into the meanest and the most backward section of Russian society, the lower middle class, and who had not been immune to its vulgarities, managed to make his way into what E. M. Forster happily describes as "the aristocracy of the considerate, the sensitive, and the plucky."
To be a member of that club--that "aristocracy"--seems a worthy goal to keep before one's eyes. Reading along yesterday in The New York Review, in an article about Janet Malcolm's latest, I came across a single sentence, quoted from the book under review, that I like about as well:
The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral.
Maybe all that earnestness could be lightened up with a few jokes but I think she's a long way in a good direction.