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“Although I’m famous as a pessimist, I really haven’t been pessimistic,” Davis told me in 2022, the last time we saw each other, months before he died of esophageal cancer at 76.

In addition, my friend told me that in 1930s Germany, there was a saying that the pessimists went to New York and London, and the optimists went to Auschwitz.

Today, pessimists say the battle is over and lost.

But taken together, his auctioned personal items revealed another side of Chandler: a man who, unlike the tough guys of his fiction or the pessimist of his nonfiction, was playful and tender.

And certain breeds of pessimists are actually highly motivated by threat-centered communication.