McIlvanney: "The Language of My Living"

Here's a passage from one of William McIlvanney's novels that I've always liked.  The juxtaposition of humility and arrogance, the mix of what others think versus what the narrator knows, has stuck with me, has resonated over the years.  I recall giving this passage to a colleague, for I felt that the passage conveyed both his affect and his self-understanding, but he just smiled as he read, so I wasn't given a full commentary.  I relate and don't quite relate to what's voiced here, but it always resonates.

Here, read for yourself:

'Well,' she said.  'I'd better be going.'

I looked at her and nodded.  She smiled and pointed to the ground behind the cars.  There were tread-marks on the grass.

'Those,' she said.  'They'll always remind me of Scott.  Him and me here.  I wonder how long they'll last.  What is all this about for you really?  I mean.  What is it you're doing exactly?'

'I don't know exactly.  I suppose I'm trying to make my own peace with Scott's death.  I suppose this is how I do it.'

'How do I do it?'

She started suddenly to cry.

'Damn,' she said.  'Will you hold me one time for him?'

I crossed and held her.  It was a small, chaste ceremony of mutual loss.  Her hair in my face gave off a melancholy sweetness.  Clenched to her, I felt the tremors of her body, how the edifice of beauty was undermined from within with deep forebodings.  In the embrace I experienced our shared nature--so much questionable confidence containing so much undeniable panic.  That was me, too.  Some of my colleagues and bosses liked to say I was completely arrogant.  They misunderstood the language of my living.  Arrogance should be comparative.  Humility was total.  Faced with simplistic responses to life that tried to fit my living into themselves, I was arrogant.  I seemed to meet them every day and I knew I was more than they said I was.  But when I sat down inside myself in the darkness of a night, I knew nothing but my smallness.  I knew it now and shared it with hers.

--William McIlvanney,
Strange Loyalties,
A Harvest Book,
Harcourt Brace and Company,
1991

This is the third Laidlaw book, and the other two are worth looking for.  This one shifts the narration from third-person to first-person (and for excellent reasons).