I just now came across this phrase for the first time in my long life of reading on p. 442 of Blake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty. If literary biography/pathography is your thing, Bailey’s the man. The context is a discussion of suicide, which is the act the phrase names. I recommend this erudite disquisition on the term and its variants.
As for Yates’s attitude to suicide, it seems he held that one was a wimp to off oneself, but also a wimp to give up the hard drinking and heavy smoking — piecemeal suicide one might call it — which put paid to his life at the relatively young age of 66.
What surprises me is the cocksurety of those who believe that we are mere material systems easily disposed of. I am not saying we are not. I am not a dogmatic affirmer. Maybe we are. But to be cocksure of such a thing in the face of counter-evidence is surprising and suggests an unseriousness of attitude bordering on insanity. The sane look before they leap in matters large and small. Beware the leap of despair.
I have often wondered to what extent one’s cock or the female counterpart thereof influences the over-confident conviction of the mortalist. Is it your cock, the dowsing rod of your concupiscence, that makes you so sure?
As for the word ‘cocksurety,’ I thought I had coined it. I was wrong. We are not only concupiscent but vain as well, and much else besides. And so the the Calvinists speak of total depravity — which brings us back around to the Dutch.
Finally, it is slanderous to speak of Dutch valor in the case of the pot-valiant?