Believing that this time we will succeed where in the past we have failed, or failed to try; believing the best of ourselves even when we are intimately familiar with the worst and the merely average; believing that everything in us that is well-intentioned will triumph over all that is lazy or fickle or indifferent or unkind: this is wrongness as optimism—an endlessly renewable, overextended faith in our own potential. Wrongness as optimism is why my friend thought he would read one of the world’s longest and hardest works of literature during a four-week holiday, and why my neighbor swears
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