Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Cleopatra too \ And made sincerity. To their relief, seated below her on a smaller throne was her a gap in nature. nephew the emperor. He looked pale, but he greeted them enthusiastically — W I L L I A M SHAKESPEARE, and seemed in good spirits. Maybe he was indeed simply ill. A N T O N Y AND CLEOPATRA The empress shook the hand of each of the women. As she did so, an attendant eunuch handed her a large gold ring set with a large pearl, which she slipped onto each woman's hand. After this introduction, the wives In the palmy days of the were escorted into another room, where they again took tea, and then were gay quarters at Edo there led into a banqueting hall, where the empress now sat on a chair of yellow was a connoisseur of fashion named Sakakura satin—yellow being the imperial color. She spoke to them for a while; she who grew intimate with the had a beautiful voice. (It was said that her voice could literally charm birds great courtesan Chitose. out of trees.) At the end of the conversation, she took the hand of each This woman was much given to drinking sake; as woman again, and with much emotion, told them, "One family—all one a side dish she relished the family." The women then saw a performance in the imperial theater. Fi-so-called flower crabs, to be nally the empress received them one last time. She apologized for the per-found in the Mogami River in the East, and formance they had just seen, which was certainly inferior to what they these she had pickled in were used to in the West. There was one more round of tea, and this time, salt for her enjoyment. as the wife of the American ambassador reported it, the empress "stepped Knowing this, Sakakura forward and tipped each cup of tea to her own lips and took a sip, then commissioned a painter of the Kano School to execute lifted the cup on the other side, to our lips, and said again, 'One family—all her bamboo crest in one family' " The women were given more gifts, then were escorted back powdered gold on the tiny to their sedan chairs and borne out of the Forbidden City. shells of these crabs; he fixed the price of each The women relayed to their husbands their earnest belief that they had painted shell at one all been wrong about the empress. The American ambassador's wife re-rectangular piece of gold, ported, "She was bright and happy and her face glowed with good will. and presented them to Chitose throughout the There was no trace of cruelty to be seen. . . . Her actions were full of free-year, so that she never dom and warmth. . . . [We left] full of admiration for her majesty and lacked for them. hopes for China." The husbands reported back to their governments: the

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Of course there were some who were offended by her, stating publicly that she was no more than a high-class whore. They repeated the rumor (perhaps true) that she had made older men dance while she played the lute, and if their dancing pleased her, they could hold her in their arms. To Tullia's faithful followers, all of noble birth, this was slander. They wrote a document that was distributed far and wide: "Our honored mistress, the well-born and honorable lady Tullia d'Aragona, doth surpass all ladies of the past, present, or future by her dazzling qualities. . . . Anyone who re- fuses to conform to this statement is hereby charged to enter the lists with one of the undersigned knights, who will convince him in the customary manner." Tullia left Rome in 1535, going first to Venice, where the poet Tasso became her lover, and eventually to Ferrara, which was then perhaps the most civilized court in Italy. And what a sensation she caused there. Her voice, her singing, even her poems were praised far and wide. She opened a literary academy devoted to ideas of freethinking. She called herself a muse and, as in Rome, a group of young men collected around her. They would follow her around the city, carving her name in trees, writing sonnets in her honor, and singing them to anyone who would listen. One young nobleman was driven to distraction by this cult of adora- tion: it seemed that everyone loved Tullia but no one received her love in return. Determined to steal her away and marry her, this young man tricked her into allowing him to visit her at night. He proclaimed his undy- ing devotion, showered her with jewels and presents, and asked for her hand. She refused. He pulled out a knife, she still refused, and so he stabbed himself. He lived, but now Tullia's reputation was even greater than before: not even money could buy her favors, or so it seemed. As the years went by and her beauty faded, some poet or intellectual would always come to her defense and protect her. Few of them ever pondered the reality: that Tullia was indeed a courtesan, one of the most popular and well paid in the profession. Interpretation. All of us have defects of some sort. Some of these we are born with, and cannot help. Tullia had many such defects. Physically she was not the Renaissance ideal. Also, her mother had been a courtesan, and she was illegitimate. Yet the men who fell under her spell did not care. They were too distracted by her image—the image of an elevated woman, a woman you would have to fight over to win. Her pose came straight out of the Middle Ages, the days of knights and troubadours.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ber, all the young girls in the prosperous house of Chia are in love with the "must be fond of practical jokes. " So he said, "It is, rakish Pao Yu. He is certainly handsome, but what makes him irresistible is sir, the whitest bread I have his uncanny ability to enter a young girl's spirit. Pao Yu has spent his youth ever seen, and I have never around girls, whose company he has always preferred. As a result, he never tasted the like in all my life. " • "This bread," said comes over as threatening and aggressive. He is granted entry to girls' the host, "was baked by a rooms, they see him everywhere, and the more they see him the more they slave girl whom I bought fall under his spell. It is not that Pao Yu is feminine; he remains a man, but for five hundred dinars." one who can be more or less masculine as the situation requires. His famil-Then he called out to one of his slaves: "Bring in the iarity with young girls allows him the flexibility to enter their spirit. meat pudding, and let there This is a great advantage. The difference between the sexes is what be plenty of fat in it!" makes love and seduction possible, but it also involves an element of fear • . . . Thereupon the host moved his fingers as though and distrust. A woman may fear male aggression and violence; a man is to pick up a morsel from an often unable to enter a woman's spirit, and so he remains strange and imaginary dish, and threatening. The greatest seducers in history, from Casanova to John F. popped the invisible delicacy into my brother's Kennedy, grew up surrounded by women and had a touch of femininity mouth. • The old man themselves. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in his novel The Seducer's continued to enlarge upon Diary, recommends spending more time with the opposite sex, getting to the excellences of the know the "enemy" and its weaknesses, so that you can turn this knowledge various dishes, while my brother became so to your advantage. ravenously hungry that he Ninon de l'Enclos, one of the greatest seductresses who ever lived, had would have willingly died definite masculine qualities. She could impress a man with her intense Enter Their Spirit • 225 philosophical keenness, and charm him by seeming to share his interest in for a crust of barley bread. politics and warfare. Many men first formed deep friendships with her, • "Have you ever tasted anything more delicious," only to later fall madly in love. The masculine in a woman is as soothing to went on the old man, men as the feminine in a man is to women. To a man, a woman's strange- "than the spices in these

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Cleopatra too \ And made sincerity. To their relief, seated below her on a smaller throne was her a gap in nature. nephew the emperor. He looked pale, but he greeted them enthusiastically — W I L L I A M SHAKESPEARE, and seemed in good spirits. Maybe he was indeed simply ill. A N T O N Y AND CLEOPATRA The empress shook the hand of each of the women. As she did so, an attendant eunuch handed her a large gold ring set with a large pearl, which she slipped onto each woman's hand. After this introduction, the wives In the palmy days of the were escorted into another room, where they again took tea, and then were gay quarters at Edo there led into a banqueting hall, where the empress now sat on a chair of yellow was a connoisseur of fashion named Sakakura satin—yellow being the imperial color. She spoke to them for a while; she who grew intimate with the had a beautiful voice. (It was said that her voice could literally charm birds great courtesan Chitose. out of trees.) At the end of the conversation, she took the hand of each This woman was much given to drinking sake; as woman again, and with much emotion, told them, "One family—all one a side dish she relished the family." The women then saw a performance in the imperial theater. Fi-so-called flower crabs, to be nally the empress received them one last time. She apologized for the per-found in the Mogami River in the East, and formance they had just seen, which was certainly inferior to what they these she had pickled in were used to in the West. There was one more round of tea, and this time, salt for her enjoyment. as the wife of the American ambassador reported it, the empress "stepped Knowing this, Sakakura forward and tipped each cup of tea to her own lips and took a sip, then commissioned a painter of the Kano School to execute lifted the cup on the other side, to our lips, and said again, 'One family—all her bamboo crest in one family' " The women were given more gifts, then were escorted back powdered gold on the tiny to their sedan chairs and borne out of the Forbidden City. shells of these crabs; he fixed the price of each The women relayed to their husbands their earnest belief that they had painted shell at one all been wrong about the empress. The American ambassador's wife re-rectangular piece of gold, ported, "She was bright and happy and her face glowed with good will. and presented them to Chitose throughout the There was no trace of cruelty to be seen. . . . Her actions were full of free-year, so that she never dom and warmth. . . . [We left] full of admiration for her majesty and lacked for them. hopes for China." The husbands reported back to their governments: the

• From The Lover (1984)

  I read The Lover to be Marguerite Duras writing about herself. She was born in Indochina, and like the narrating lover “returns” to France at the age of seventeen. I’ll take the nameless “I” to be Marguerite. My favorite books are about the writer writing about writing. I, Marguerite, create myself as an artist and as a woman as I write—levels and levels of consciousness—consciousness of consciousness. And I also make up the world, and a place to be. Rootless, I existentially write myself the stable world. “I’m going to write. That’s what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.” “I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do—write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, When you’ve got your math degree you can write if you like, it won’t be anything to do with me then. She’s against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.” “I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing.” “I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live to the exclusion of everywhere else. It’s in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I’m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I’ll be a writer.” The Lover is a story about girl and woman becoming artist. I feel all right about taking this fiction as Marguerite Duras’s autobiography. In Duras’s movie, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the heroine is making a movie about peace. Duras’s heroines have the same profession as she does, writing the book and making the film as she lives her life. Author, narrator, protagonist speaks in one clear integral voice of a whole life. Her writer’s curiosity rushes forth to know the foreigner, the alien. The heroine in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, loves the enemy, a German soldier. Long after the war is over, she has a Japanese lover. Always, Marguerite Duras’s attention—her writer’s love—embraces the Other. Thirty years after the French left Vietnam, she overcame “reticence,” and wrote The Lover. “Now she comes to write it down.” The woman writer takes upon herself her highest responsibility and “quest”: enwording the most otherly man. One of the pleasures of loving the Chinese man is to write him down. She may be loving him to have something to write. She has a story to tell because of having loved him. I listen to war veterans say that when they were dumb kids, they went to the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War) to find something to write about.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  A young 48 • The Art of Seduction The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dis- simulated sex is powerful. —COLETTE Keys to the Character M any of us today imagine that sexual freedom has progressed in recent years—that everything has changed, for better or worse. This is mostly an illusion; a reading of history reveals periods of licentiousness (imperial Rome, late-seventeenth-century England, the "floating world" of eighteenth-century Japan) far in excess of what we are currently experi- encing. Gender roles are certainly changing, but they have changed before. Society is in a state of constant flux, but there is something that does not change: the vast majority of people conform to whatever is normal for the time. They play the role allotted to them. Conformity is a constant because humans are social creatures who are always imitating one another. At cer- tain points in history it may be fashionable to be different and rebellious, but if a lot of people are playing that role, there is nothing different or re- bellious about it. We should never complain about most people's slavish conformity, however, for it offers untold possibilities of power and seduction to those who are up for a few risks. Dandies have existed in all ages and cultures (Al- cibiades in ancient Greece, Korechika in late-tenth-century Japan), and wherever they have gone they have thrived on the conformist role playing of others. The Dandy displays a true and radical difference from other peo- ple, a difference of appearance and manner. Since most of us are secretly oppressed by our lack of freedom, we are drawn to those who are more fluid and flaunt their difference. Dandies seduce socially as well as sexually; groups form around them, their style is wildly imitated, an entire court or crowd will fall in love with them. In adapting the Dandy character for your own purposes, re- member that the Dandy is by nature a rare and beautiful flower. Be differ- ent in ways that are both striking and aesthetic, never vulgar; poke fun at current trends and styles, go in a novel direction, and be supremely uninter- ested in what anyone else is doing. Most people are insecure; they will wonder what you are up to, and slowly they will come to admire and imi- tate you, because you express yourself with total confidence. The Dandy has traditionally been defined by clothing, and certainly most Dandies create a unique visual style.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  And so, when she met the dashing Major Jules de Canouville, in 1810, everyone assumed the affair would last no longer than the others. Of course the major was a decorated soldier, well educated, an accomplished dancer, and one of the most handsome men in the army. But Pauline, thirty years old at the time, had had affairs with dozens of men who could have matched that resume. A few days after the affair began, the imperial dentist arrived chez Pauline. A toothache had been causing her sleepless nights, and the dentist saw he would have to pull out the bad tooth right then and there. No painkillers were used at the time, and as the man began to take out his vari- ous instruments, Pauline grew terrified. Despite the pain of the tooth, she changed her mind and refused to have it pulled. Major Canouville was lounging on a couch in a silken robe. Taking all this in, he tried to encourage her to have it done: "A moment or two of pain and it's over forever. ... A child could go through with it and not ut- ter a sound." "I'd like to see you do it," she said. Canouville got up, went over to the dentist, chose a tooth in the back of his own mouth, and or- dered that it be pulled. A perfectly good tooth was extracted, and Canou- ville barely batted an eyelash. After this, not only did Pauline let the dentist do his job, her opinion of Canouville changed: no man had ever done any- thing like this for her before. The affair had been going to last but a few weeks; now it stretched on. Napoleon was not pleased. Pauline was a married woman; short affairs were allowed, but a deep attachment was embarrassing. He sent Canouville to Spain, to deliver a message to a general there. The mission would take weeks, and in the meantime Pauline would find someone else. Canouville, though, was not your average lover. Riding day and night, without stopping to eat or sleep, he arrived in Salamanca within a few days. There he found that he could proceed no farther, since communications had been cut off, and so, without waiting for further orders, he rode back to Paris, without an escort, through enemy territory. He could meet with Pauline only briefly; Napoleon sent him right back to Spain. It was months before he was finally allowed to return, but when he did, Pauline immedi- ately resumed her affair with him—an unheard-of act of loyalty on her part. This time Napoleon sent Canouville to Germany and finally to Rus- sia, where he died bravely in battle in 1812. He was the only lover Pauline ever waited for, and the only one she ever mourned. Interpretation. In seduction, the time often comes when the target has be- gun to fall for you, but suddenly pulls back.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The conspirators convinced Villiers to break off his engagement to a young lady; the king was single-minded in his affections, and could not stand competition. Soon James wanted to be around Villiers all the time, for he had the qualities the king admired: innocence and a lighthearted spirit. The king appointed Villiers gentleman of the bedchamber, making it possible for them to be alone together. What particularly charmed James was that Villiers never asked for anything, which made it all the more delightful to spoil him. By 1616, Villiers had completely supplanted the former favorite. He was now the Earl of Buckingham, and a member of the king's privy council. To the conspirators' dismay, however, he quickly accumulated even more privileges than the Earl of Somerset had done. The king would call him sweetheart in public, fix his doublets, comb his hair. James zealously protected his favorite, anxious to preserve the young man's innocence. He tended to the youth's every whim, in effect became his slave. In fact the king seemed to regress; whenever Steenie, his nickname for Villiers, entered the room, he started to act like a child. The two were inseparable until the king's death, in 1625. Interpretation. We are most definitely stamped forever by our parents, in ways we can never fully understand. But the parents are equally influenced and seduced by the child. They may play the role of the protector, but in the process they absorb the child's spirit and energy, relive a part of their own childhood. And just as the child struggles against sexual feelings toward the parent, the parent must repress comparable erotic feelings that lie just beneath the tenderness they feel. The best and most insidious way to seduce people is often to position yourself as the child. Imagining themselves stronger, more in control, they will be lured into your web. They will feel they have nothing to fear. Emphasize your immaturity, your weakness, and you let them indulge in fantasies of protecting and parenting you—a strong desire as people get older. What they do not realize is that you are getting under their skin, insinuating yourself—it is the child who is controlling the adult. Your innocence makes them want to protect you, but it is also sexually charged. Innocence is highly seductive; some people even long to play the corrupter of innocence. Stir up their latent sexual feelings and 348 • The Art of Seduction you can lead them astray with the hope of fulfilling a strong yet repressed fantasy: sleeping with the child figure. In your presence, too, they will begin to regress as well, infected by your childish, playful spirit.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The dynamics of the Ideal Lover have limitless possibilities, not all of them erotic. In politics, Talleyrand essentially played the role of the Ideal Lover with Napoleon, whose ideal in both a cabinet minister and a friend was a man who was aristocratic, smooth with the ladies—all the things that Napoleon himself was not. In 1798, when Talleyrand was the French foreign minister, he hosted a party in Napoleon's honor after the great general's dazzling military victories in Italy. To the day Napoleon died, he remembered this party as the best he had ever attended. It was a lavish affair, and Talleyrand wove a subtle message into it by placing Roman busts around the house, and by talking to Napoleon of reviving the imperial glories of ancient Rome. This sparked a glint in the leader's eye, and indeed, a few years later, Napoleon gave himself the title of emperor—a move that The Ideal Lover • 39 only made Talleyrand more powerful. The key to Talleyrand's power was his ability to fathom Napoleon's secret ideal: his desire to be an emperor, a dictator. Talleyrand simply held up a mirror to Napoleon and let him glimpse that possibility. People are always vulnerable to insinuations like this, which stroke their vanity, almost everyone's weak spot. Hint at something for them to aspire to, reveal your faith in some untapped potential you see in them, and you will soon have them eating out of your hand. If Ideal Lovers are masters at seducing people by appealing to their higher selves, to something lost from their childhood, politicians can benefit by applying this skill on a mass scale, to an entire electorate. This was what John F. Kennedy quite deliberately did with the American public, most obviously in creating the "Camelot" aura around himself. The word "Camelot" was applied to his presidency only after his death, but the romance he consciously projected through his youth and good looks was fully functioning during his lifetime. More subtly, he also played with America's images of its own greatness and lost ideals. Many Americans felt that with the wealth and comfort of the late 1950s had come great losses; ease and conformity had buried the country's pioneer spirit. Kennedy appealed to those lost ideals through the imagery of the New Frontier, which was ex-emplified by the space race. The American instinct for adventure could find outlets here, even if most of them were symbolic. And there were other calls for public service, such as the creation of the Peace Corps. Through appeals like these, Kennedy resparked the uniting sense of mission that had gone missing in America during the years since World War II. He also attracted to himself a more emotional response than presidents commonly got. People literally fell in love with him and the image.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Germain painted the strangest paintings anyone had ever seen—the colors BRIAN SINGER 128 • The Art of Seduction If you want to know all were so vibrant that when he painted jewels, people thought they were real. about Andy Warhol, just Painters were desperate to know his secrets but he never revealed them. He look at the surface of my would leave town as he had entered, suddenly and quietly. His greatest ad-paintings and films and me, and there I am. mirer was Casanova, who met him and never forgot him. When he died, There's nothing behind it. no one believed it; years, decades, a century later, people were certain he — A N D Y W A R H O L , QUOTED I N was hiding somewhere. A person with powers like his never dies. STEPHEN K O C H , STARGAZER: The count had all the Star qualities. Everything about him was ambigu-THE LIFE, WORLD & FILMS OF ANDY WARHOL ous and open to interpretation. Colorful and vibrant, he stood out from the crowd. People thought he was immortal, just as a star seems neither to age nor to disappear. His words were like his presence—fascinating, diverse, strange, their meaning unclear. Such is the power you can command by transforming yourself into a glittering object. Andy Warhol too obsessed everyone who knew him. He had a distinctive style—those silver wigs—and his face was blank and mysterious. People never knew what he was thinking; like his paintings, he was pure surface. In the quality of their presence Warhol and Saint-Germain recall the great trompe l'oeil paintings of the seventeenth century, or the prints of M. C. Escher—fascinating mixtures of realism and impossibility, which make people wonder if they are real or imaginary. A Star must stand out, and this may involve a certain dramatic flair, of the kind that Dietrich revealed in her appearances at parties. Sometimes, though, a more haunting, dreamlike effect can be created by subtle touches: the way you smoke a cigarette, a vocal inflection, a way of walking. It is often the little things that get under people's skin, and make them imitate you—the lock of hair over Veronica Lake's right eye, Cary Grant's voice, Kennedy's ironic smile. Although these nuances may barely register to the conscious mind, subliminally they can be as attractive as an object with a striking shape or odd color. Unconsciously we are strangely drawn to things that have no meaning beyond their fascinating appearance.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  charisma. Any political figure—Churchill, de Gaulle, Kennedy—who has failed not to arrive at the proven himself on the battlefield has an unmatchable appeal. Many had appointed time. • But the thought of D'Annunzio as a foppish womanizer; his experience in the war lady, still wishing to try the strength of his love, had gave him a heroic sheen, a Napoleonic aura. In fact he had always been an said to her beautiful effective seducer, but now he was even more devilishly appealing. You do damsel— "I am well aware not necessarily have to risk death, but putting yourself in its vicinity will of the love a certain nobleman bears to you, give you a seductive charge. (It is often best to do this some way into the and I think you are no less seduction, making it come as a pleasant surprise.) You are willing to enter in love with him; and I feel the unknown. No one is more seductive than the person who has had a so much pity for you both, brush with death. People will be drawn to you; perhaps they are hoping that I have resolved to afford you time and place that some of your adventurous spirit will rub off on them. that you may converse together at your ease." • The damsel was so enchanted that she could 4. According to one version of the Arthurian legend, the great knight Sir not conceal her longings, Lancelot once caught a glimpse of Queen Guinevere, King Arthur's wife, but answered that she and that glimpse was enough—he fell madly in love. And so when word would not fail to be present. • In obedience, reached him that Queen Guinevere had been kidnapped by an evil knight, therefore, to her mistress's Lancelot did not hesitate—he forgot his other chivalrous tasks and hurried counsel and command, she in pursuit. His horse collapsed from the chase, so he continued on foot. Fi- undressed herself and lay down on a handsome bed, nally it seemed that he was close, but he was exhausted and could go no in a room the door of farther. A horse-driven cart passed by; the cart was filled with loathsome- which the lady left half looking men shackled together. In those days it was the tradition to place open, whilst within she set criminals—murderers, traitors, cowards, thieves—in such a cart, which a light so that the maiden's beauty might be clearly then passed through every street in town so that people could see it. Once seen. Then she herself you had ridden in the cart, you lost all feudal rights for the rest of your life. pretended to go away, but The cart was such a dreadful symbol that seeing an empty one made you hid herself near to the bed so carefully that she could

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And the reader of Fruits & Vegetables (1971) and Half-Lives (1973) has already encountered Isadora Wing’s fractured leg and burgeoning crow’s-feet, her multicolored notes to herself and the trail of sequins one of her gowns leaves, her mother’s avocado tree behind her mother’s avocado-colored couch, her mad first husband and her fondness for likening human cheeks to willow tips for softness, her irritated observation of Braque and Utrillo prints in psychiatrists’ offices, and her quotation of Sylvia Plath’s question “Is there no way out of the mind?” In some of the poems of Half-Lives , the husband and lover of Fear of Flying are distinctly silhouetted, and in the earlier collection the sequence entitled “Flying You Home” presents the removal of “Brian Stollerman” to a California hospital in a slightly different light—more moving and ominous than what we find in the corresponding chapter of the novel, where the incident seems one more of the long string of zany mishaps that comprise Isadora Wing’s amorous education. Fear of Flying wears its gossamer disguise as fiction with a breathtaking impudence; the difference between the Green Hornet and the Blue Wasp series for radio appears about the thickness of it. Adrian and Isadora playfully discuss how he will be portrayed in the book she will presumably write about their affair, and the sister whose husband later attempts sodomy on Isadora screams at her, “Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing—do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all.” The disinterested reader, of course, need not tremble, but the flashback sections about romances past do feel more spilled than told, and there is something a shade archetypical, or unanalyzed, about the heroine: for all the times she looks at herself nude, she remains visually misty, and the author’s nimble recourse to cultural and psychoanalytical tags at times verges on nervous patter. As a creator of scenes and characters, Ms. Jong is at her best in the present—that is, at the Vienna Congress of 1971, with Isadora running back and forth between her husband and her new lover, getting their inexhaustible and incompatible analyses of what is happening. Here, comedy becomes satire and distress becomes drama. The prose flies. Throughout, the poet’s verbal keenness rarely snags the flow of breathy vernacular; a few false shifts of tone, an occasional automatism of phrase (“intensely interested,” “poring over books,” “clutching my baby,” within six lines), a few clammy touches of jargon insignificantly mar a joyously extended performance. The novel is so full, indeed, that one wonders whether the author has enough leftover life for another novel. Fearless and fresh, tender and exact, Ms. Jong has arrived nonstop at the point of being a literary personality; may she now travel on toward Canterbury. —John Updike A CONVERSATION WITH ERICA JONG Q. Does it bother you when people assume the novel is simply autobiography? A.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Sometimes apes appear to understand a purely mental concept when they do not. In one experiment, chimps earned tokens for completing tasks and could exchange them for food. They spontaneously learned to save up their tokens to exchange them for a desired treat. When you watch chimps engage in this transaction, it is tempting to infer that chimps understand the concept “Money.” But here, the token was just a tool for obtaining food, rather than a form of currency that’s exchangeable for goods in general. The chimps did not understand, as many humans do, that money comes to have value for its own sake. 2 4 If chimps cannot form goal-based concepts, then necessarily, chimps are not naturally equipped to teach concepts to one another; that is, they don’t have social reality. Even if they could learn a concept like “Anger” from a human trainer, one generation doesn’t create the context for the next generation to bootstrap concepts into their brains. Chimps and other primates do have shared practices, like cracking nuts with rocks, but chimp mothers don’t spontaneously instruct their infants on the finer culinary points; the children learn by observation. For example, in a troop of macaques in Japan, one member began washing her food before eating it, and within ten years, three-quarters of the adults in her troop had picked up the practice. This sort of collective intentionality is very limited compared to what we humans do with words and the mental concepts that we invent. 2 5 The human capacity for social reality appears unique in the animal kingdom. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Only we can use these concepts to more effectively regulate our own body budgets and each other’s, while we cooperate and compete with one another. Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower. 2 6 Which brings us back to Matsuzawa and his chimps. It is remarkable how he nestled a chimp troupe, preserving its family relationships, into human culture in an intimate way. I wonder whether, over time, Matsuzawa’s very human cultural context will influence the brain development of the infant chimps, as they are raised by mothers who are acculturated by a group of trusting, loving humans. One example that I find particularly striking, relayed by Virginia Morell in her book Animal Wise, describes two human experimenters who provide social support to a nursing mother chimp. The mother is reluctant to nurse her infant, but the experimenters gently encourage her to be brave. In Morell’s words, “A researcher gently picks up the baby and places it in the mother’s arms. The infant’s hands latch on to her fur. The mother then attempts to nurse but cries when the baby takes her nipple; she seems about to drop her infant to the floor.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  31 Dogs can learn concepts too. Again, not surprising. They can distinguish dogs from other animals in photographs, for example, if trained to do so. It takes them a thousand or more trials to get the knack of it, compared to human infants who need only a few dozen trials. But dogs can learn to be accurate over 80 percent of the time, even if the dog in the photo is completely new or embedded in a complex scene. Not bad for a dog brain. 32 Dogs also form olfactory concepts. They can distinguish the smell of an individual human, grouping together different smells from different parts of the body to treat as equivalent, and yet distinct from the smells of other humans. And of course, we know that dogs can be trained to track categories of objects by smell. Anyone who’s been caught in an airport with food or drugs in their suitcase can tell you so. 33 I will gingerly concede that dogs appear to infer intentions of some sort. Dogs are better than chimps at perceiving human gestures and following human gaze. When Sophia was younger and would play in the sand with her favorite beach dog, Harold, the two of them often looked to a human adult for permission to run farther away: Sophia to me and Harold to his owner. Dogs use our gaze to tell them what to attend to, and their skill is so great that they seem to read our mind in our eyes. Even more remarkably, dogs follow each other’s gaze to get information about the world. When Rowdy wants to know what’s going on, he spontaneously looks to his “sister,” Biscuit, a Golden Retriever, and follows her gaze. The two of them freeze as they reference each other, and then . . . they both suddenly leap into action. It’s like watching a silent movie. 34 But being the skeptic that I am, I have my doubts that dogs are making goal-based mental inferences. They could be just really good at perceiving human actions, because, let’s be honest, we’ve bred them to be sensitive to our every whim. Dogs do appear to understand that humans use symbols to communicate intent. For example, in one study, an experimenter put dog toys in different rooms and then used miniature replicas of the toys as symbols. Her test subjects (Border Collies) understood she was asking them, via the miniature, to retrieve the matching toy from the other room. This is rather more sophisticated than playing fetch.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Sometimes apes appear to understand a purely mental concept when they do not. In one experiment, chimps earned tokens for completing tasks and could exchange them for food. They spontaneously learned to save up their tokens to exchange them for a desired treat. When you watch chimps engage in this transaction, it is tempting to infer that chimps understand the concept “Money.” But here, the token was just a tool for obtaining food, rather than a form of currency that’s exchangeable for goods in general. The chimps did not understand, as many humans do, that money comes to have value for its own sake.24 If chimps cannot form goal-based concepts, then necessarily, chimps are not naturally equipped to teach concepts to one another; that is, they don’t have social reality. Even if they could learn a concept like “Anger” from a human trainer, one generation doesn’t create the context for the next generation to bootstrap concepts into their brains. Chimps and other primates do have shared practices, like cracking nuts with rocks, but chimp mothers don’t spontaneously instruct their infants on the finer culinary points; the children learn by observation. For example, in a troop of macaques in Japan, one member began washing her food before eating it, and within ten years, three-quarters of the adults in her troop had picked up the practice. This sort of collective intentionality is very limited compared to what we humans do with words and the mental concepts that we invent.25 The human capacity for social reality appears unique in the animal kingdom. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Only we can use these concepts to more effectively regulate our own body budgets and each other’s, while we cooperate and compete with one another. Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower.26 Which brings us back to Matsuzawa and his chimps. It is remarkable how he nestled a chimp troupe, preserving its family relationships, into human culture in an intimate way. I wonder whether, over time, Matsuzawa’s very human cultural context will influence the brain development of the infant chimps, as they are raised by mothers who are acculturated by a group of trusting, loving humans.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She really was my hero. Reva led me down a spiral staircase into the basement, where there was a kind of rec room—rough blue carpeting, wood paneling, small windows up by the ceiling, a cluster of half-decent watercolors hanging crookedly above a frowning, wrinkled, mauve vinyl couch. “Who did those?” I asked. “Mom did. Aren’t they beautiful? My room’s through here.” Reva opened a door into a narrow, pink-tiled bathroom. The toilet tank was running. “It’s always like that,” she said, jiggling the handle to no effect. Another door led to her bedroom. It was dark and muggy inside. “It gets stuffy down here. No windows,” she whispered. She turned the bedside lamp on. The walls were painted black. The sliding door of the closet was cracked and had been taken off its runner and set to lean against the wall. The closet contained only a black dress and a few sweaters on hangers. Apart from a small chest of drawers, also painted black and topped with a sagging cardboard box, the room had very little in it. Reva turned on the ceiling fan. “This was your room?” I asked her. She nodded and pulled back the slippery blue nylon sleeping bag covering the bed, which was just a twin-size box spring and mattress on the floor. Reva’s sheets had flowers and butterflies on them. They were sad, old, pilly sheets. “I moved down here and painted the room black in high school. To be cool,” Reva said sarcastically. “It’s very cool,” I said. I put my shopping bag down, finished the coffee. “When should I wake you up? We should leave here around one thirty. So factor in whatever time you’ll need to get ready.” “Do you have shoes I can borrow? And tights?” “I don’t keep much here,” Reva said, opening and shutting her drawers. “You can borrow something of my mom’s, though. You’re an eight in shoes, right?” “Eight and a half,” I said, getting into the bed. “There’s probably something up there that will fit you. I’ll just wake you up around one.” She closed the door. I sat on the bed and turned off the light. Reva was making noise in the bathroom. “I’m leaving clean towels for you here by the sink,” she said through the door. I wondered if my presence was keeping her from vomiting. I wished I could tell her I wouldn’t mind it if she threw up. I really wouldn’t have. I would have understood. If puking could have brought me any solace, I would have tried it years ago. I waited until I heard her close the outside door of the bathroom and creak up the stairs before I went and looked through her medicine cabinet. There was an old bottle of bubblegum-flavored amoxicillin and a half-empty tube of Monistat anti-itch cream. I drank the amoxicillin. I peed into the running toilet. The underwear I had on was white cotton with an old brown bloodstain.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This is unwelcome news for the many children who in their heart of hearts cling to the hope that Dad will walk in the door and resume his place at the head of the table. On top of all this, there’s a built-in conflict of interest between the newly married couple and the children. The couple wants privacy, which means opportunity to be without the children. They want and need time for sex, companionship, and adult play. Children who fear losing what they had naturally demand more time from their mothers. They are endlessly resourceful in getting into trouble, becoming ill, creating emergencies, or simply making mischief. (The many young children who have been displaced by the stepfather from sleeping in the mother’s bed are especially outraged.) These inevitable tensions add to the drama of the stepfather’s arrival. Nothing about it is easy. Nevertheless, the parents should strive for a balance that fairly allots time to the new couple and to the children. Moreover, they should make the limits of each clear. Many remarried families have found that regular family meetings to discuss various issues can be very helpful in clearing the air. They allow each person to be heard and then give the opportunity to set household rules and future plans firmly in place. It is very important for children to feel that they are being treated fairly but not that they are in control of the family. This is no small feat for the parents to accomplish, especially with older youngsters who often had a big say in the divorced family. There are important gender differences, especially at the outset, that should also be carefully considered by the adults. 3 Boys may welcome the presence of a man in the household once they are reassured that he will not disrupt or run their lives. He relieves the anxiety of the only son about being the only male in the family. Many school-age boys complain after divorce, “There is no one here like me since my dad left.” Girls, in contrast, often enjoyed a close, privileged position with their mothers prior to the remarriage and resent the stepfather’s intrusion, fearing that they will lose their access to their mother. It would be very helpful for the mother to think realistically about each of her relationships with her children and consider how each child is likely to feel when the stepfather arrives. Simply setting aside special times to be alone with her son or daughter can be very effective in preventing difficulties later on. It would have been very reassuring to Billy had his mother set aside exclusive time with him a few hours each week. From the child’s point of view, a stepfather is resented if he marches into the home in seven-league boots, telling the mom that she’s been too lenient and that the children need a man’s firm hand. Taking over the discipline without first earning the child’s respect and loyalty is a bad mistake.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Not only was nothing lost on Nabokov, but, like the title character in Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” he seemed to remember everything. At dinner the first evening of my 1966 visit, we reminisced about Cornell and his courses there, which were extraordinary and thoroughly Nabokovian, even in the smallest ways (witness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing students two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an answer with a substantial and accurate quotation [“a gem”] drawn from the text in question). Skeptically enough, I asked Nabokov if he remembered my wife, Nina, who had taken his Literature 312 course in 1955, and I mentioned that she had received a grade of 96. Indeed he did, since he had always asked to meet the students who performed well, and he described her accurately (seeing her in person in 1968, he remembered where she had sat in the lecture hall). On the night of my departure I asked Nabokov to inscribe my Olympia Press first edition of Lolita. With great rapidity he not only signed and dated it but added two elegant drawings of recently discovered butterflies, one identified as “Flammea palida” (“Pale Fire”) and, below it, a considerably smaller species, labeled “Bonus bonus.”19 Delighted but in part mystified, I inquired, “Why ‘Bonus bonus’?” Wrinkling his brow and peering over his eyeglasses, a parody of a professor, Nabokov replied in a mock-stentorian voice, “Now your wife has 100!” After four days and some twelve hours of conversation, and within an instant of my seemingly unrelated request, my prideful but passing comment had come leaping out of storage. So too was Nabokov’s memory able to draw on a lifetime of reading—a lifetime in the most literal sense.20

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  25 The human capacity for social reality appears unique in the animal kingdom. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Only we can use these concepts to more effectively regulate our own body budgets and each other’s, while we cooperate and compete with one another. Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower. 26 Which brings us back to Matsuzawa and his chimps. It is remarkable how he nestled a chimp troupe, preserving its family relationships, into human culture in an intimate way. I wonder whether, over time, Matsuzawa’s very human cultural context will influence the brain development of the infant chimps, as they are raised by mothers who are acculturated by a group of trusting, loving humans. One example that I find particularly striking, relayed by Virginia Morell in her book Animal Wise, describes two human experimenters who provide social support to a nursing mother chimp. The mother is reluctant to nurse her infant, but the experimenters gently encourage her to be brave. In Morell’s words, “A researcher gently picks up the baby and places it in the mother’s arms. The infant’s hands latch on to her fur. The mother then attempts to nurse but cries when the baby takes her nipple; she seems about to drop her infant to the floor. But then the soft voice of the scientist is heard again. Yes, yes, he says soothingly, it may hurt at first, but soon it will not. And slowly the mother settles down, cradling her baby against her breast and letting the infant nurse.” Thousands of human mothers each day experience nursing for the first time, and I can tell you from experience that it hurts like hell. But someone else (a nurse, an older female relative, or a friend) offers supportive encouragement and shows you what to do, and eventually all is well. 27 To the mother chimp, these helpful humans are not merely her caretakers: they are affectively salient to her, regulating her body budget. She and her infant and their relationship are being bathed in human culture. Will this social contact make a difference to the language and conceptual abilities of these chimps long-term? If their offspring eventually become able to form goal-based concepts, it’s a whole new ballgame. ... Okay, so chimps and other primates don’t appear to have emotion concepts or social reality. How about dogs like Rowdy?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Perspicacious “research” aside, it was a remarkable imaginative feat for a European émigré to have re-created America so brilliantly, and in so doing to have become an American writer. Of course, those critics and readers who marvel at Nabokov’s accomplishment may not realize that he physically knows America better than most of them. As he says in Speak, Memory, his adventures as a “lepist” carried him through two hundred motel rooms in forty-six states, that is, along all the roads traveled by Humbert and Lolita. Yet of all of Nabokov’s novels, Lolita is the most unlikely one for him to have written, given his background and the rarefied nature of his art and avocations. “It was hardly foreseeable,” writes Anthony Burgess, “that so exquisite and scholarly an artist should become America’s greatest literary glory, but now it seems wholly just and inevitable.”18 It was even less foreseeable that Nabokov would realize better than any contemporary the hopes expressed by Constance Rourke in American Humor (1931) for a literature that would achieve an instinctive alliance between native materials and old world traditions, though the literal alliance in Lolita is perhaps more intimate than even Miss Rourke might have wished. But to have known Nabokov at all personally was first to be impressed by his intense and immense curiosity, his uninhibited and imaginative response to everything around him. To paraphrase Henry James’s famous definition of the artist, Nabokov was truly a man on whom nothing was lost—except that in Nabokov’s instance it was true, whereas James and many American literary intellectuals after him have been so selfconscious in their mandarin “seriousness” and consequently so narrow in the range of their responses that they have often overlooked the sometimes extraordinarily uncommon qualities of the commonplace.