There’s a character in War and Peace who never realizes how beautiful she is. Her most dazzling attribute is her glance, her wonderful spiritual eyes, but when she studies herself in the mirror, her eyes go dead. She becomes rigid and disapproving—and she remains in ignorance of what everyone else knows, that she is the woman with the beautiful eyes. Many people fail to perceive their looks clearly. We all carry around in our heads a sketch, if not a finished painting, of how we appear, and too often the sketch is unflattering. Sometimes the sketch may be redrawn along more attractive lines if we’ve been cruised heavily in the streets. But the next time we are ignored or rejected, the sketch turns into a caricature. Not everyone goes through these agonizing fluctuations in self-esteem about his body, but there’s bound to be some correlation between the way people react to your body and the way you regard it. If everyone tells you that you look terrific, you’ll begin to believe it — at least until the next time you face a mirror or have to choose some clothes or decide whether to grow a goatee.