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Hazlitt’s “The Fight” reminded me of Norman Mailer, himself a great pugilist, and author of a book of the same name. Here he is (in King of the Hill) on his favourite activity:

There was only one way in which boxing was still like a street fight, and that was in the need to be confident you would win. A man walking out of a bar to fight with another man is seeking to compose his head into the confidence that he will certainly triumph – it is the most mysterious faculty of the ego. For the confidence is a sedative against the pain of punches and yet it is the sanction to punch your own best.

The logic of the spirit would suggest that you win only if you deserve to win; the logic of the ego lies down the axiom that if you don’t think you will win, you don’t deserve to. And in fact, usually don’t; it is as if not believing you will win opens you to the guilt that perhaps you have not the right, you are too guilty.

The great essayist and author of “The Fight” was an obsessive and violently competitive sportsman, according to James Fenton (subscription protected). In “On Great and Little Things“, he writes [about rackets, a precursor of squash]:

I have sometimes lain awake a whole night, trying to serve out the last ball of an interesting game in a particular corner of the court, which I had missed from a nervous feeling.

Rackets … is, like any other athletic game, very much a thing of skill and practice: but it is also a thing of opinion, “subject to all the skyey influences”. If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.

Only the most assiduous readers of this blog, those who sit there refreshing my about page every five minutes to see what new likes and dislikes I have decided to define myself with (you know who you are), will know about my lifelong passion for Dianna Wynne Jones. Even they won’t know how far it goes.

Dianna Wynne Jones (DWJ) is the only author whose characters I know back-to-front and off-by-heart. I have read almost all of her 50+ books more than once, in some cases a lot more than once (we’re talking over ten here). Don’t ask me why. She’s just the best.

(If you’re wondering who DWJ is, then shame on you. Read this immediately. Then buy this. It’s her best book, I’d say, or at least the best one to start with).

Anyway, the point of all this is to encourage – implore would be a better word – anyone I know who’s reading this to join me in my most exciting recent discovery of the last year: the Dianna Wynne Jones character quiz. I know it might not mean that much to you, but for me it will be beyond fascinating. And if you do I’ll dig out the relevant book and let you know just what sort of person you are.

In case you’re wondering, I came out as Chrestomanci in any book apart from The Lives of Christopher Chant. Those familiar with the books will know him – among other things – as the best dressed man in town. Naturallement.

I’ve argued before that confidence inevitably leads to overconfidence. A new hypothesis suggests that it may just as inevitably lead to depression. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine, suggests that, just as pain stops you pursuing harmful physical courses of action, so low mood stops you pursuing damaging mental ones. In particular, he says, it stops you chasing after unreachable goals.

If The Economist is to believed, this theory is backed up by the evidence. It describes a study by social psychologists Carsten Wrosch and Gregory Miller:

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals … the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health … Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of living in a dynamic society.

The same point can be made about confidence. Confidence encourages persistence, because it encourages you to believe in yourself and your abilities. Is depression – like overconfidence – part of the price we pay for our need for self-belief?

There is also a deeper story here, one that Nesse understands more fully than The Economist. In his talk (video) earlier this year, Nesse said (23.00 onwards):

I do look forward to the day when a patient comes to me and says “Dr. Nesse, I have a serious problem: I don’t have enough anxiety. It’s deficient, I know it’s wrecking my life, I’m getting arrested, I’m losing jobs, I can’t stay in a marriage, I know it’s a problem, I don’t have enough anxiety – do you have any good drugs for me?” I’m not sure this will ever become a big business, but I wish we would think about these things in this way.

I’m not sure if I would want this to be a big business, but I agree: it would be better if we thought about things this way. Part of the problem, it seems to me, lies in our estimation of virtue. Think about it this way: has anyone ever said to you that it’s possible to be too good? Or too happy? Or too heroic? Or too confident? We recognise and warn against overconfidence, of course, but is this the same thing? Often, it seems to me, overconfidence is defined more as having the wrong sort of confidence than it is having too much of it.

What is the difference between confidence and overconfidence? Or confidence and arrogance? Let me know your thoughts.

One of the many strange and contradictory things about the land of the free: it is the country whose citizens complain most about their own unfreedom. Here’s my favourite Independence Day story, told in the lapidary prose of the Stamford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America’s declared independence from Britain — July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.” It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any “new value for each other”. Thoreau welcomes those visitors who “speak reservedly and thoughtfully”, and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town (it was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance).

It’s all in the brackets. Happy July 4th.

Some wise advice. A guilty pleasure from my teenage years:

It’s too beautiful to blog. Or to work at all. So I didn’t. I went and had a swim, then watched a bit of Murray. Lovely.

But don’t think I wasn’t thinking of you, reading this in your sweltering office. What could I give you, to make your life a little bit more like mine? For a while, I thought there was nothing. Then it came to me: what could express the beauty of a summer’s day better than John Cheever’s great short story The Swimmer?

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. “I drank too much,” said Donald Westerhazy. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill. “It must have been the wine,” said Helen Westerhazy. “I drank too much of that claret.”

Thanks to Kirty for the tip. Read it and weep.

ps. If you’re hot, just watching this is incredibly cooling.