Anger

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.

Page 134 of 447 · 20 per page

• From On Beauty (2005)

  We just roll with the punches as they come. Who knows what you’ll do to this family next. You know? Nobody can know that.’ ‘Kiki – ’ ‘ What? What do you want me to say ?’ ‘Nothing!’ flashed Howard, and then he reconstituted his self-control, lowering his voice, clasping his hands together. ‘Nothing . . . the onus is on me, I know that. It’s for me to – to – explain my narrative in a way that’s comprehensible . . . and achieves an . . . I don’t know, explanation, I suppose, in terms of motivation . . .’ ‘Don’t worry – I comprehend your narrative, Howard. Otherwise known as, I got your number. We’re not in your class now . Are you able to talk to me in a way that means anything ?’ To this Howard groaned. He abhorred the reference (an old war-wound in this marriage, continually reopened) to a separation between his ‘academic’ language and his wife’s so-called ‘personal’ language. She could always say – and often did – ‘we’re not in your class now’ and that would always be true, but he would never, never  the anatomy lesson concede the point that Kiki’s language was any more emotionally expressive than his own. Even now, even now , this oldest argument of their union was rousing its furious armies in his mind, preparing for one more appearance in the field. It took an enormous act of will on his part to divert his forces. ‘Look, let’s not . . . All I want to say is that I feel . . . you know, that we seem to be taking rather a giant step backwards. In the spring it seemed that we were going to . . . I don’t know. Survive this, I suppose.’ What came next burst from Kiki’s chest like an aria she was singing. ‘In the spring I didn’t know you were fucking one of our friends . In the spring it was just someone, a nameless someone, it was a one-night stand – now it’s Claire Malcolm . It went on for weeks!’ ‘ Three weeks,’ said Howard, almost inaudibly. ‘I asked you to tell me the truth, and you looked me in the eye and lied to me . Like every other middle-aged asshole in this town lying to his idiot wife. I can’t believe how much contempt you have for me. Claire Malcolm is our friend . Warren is our friend .’ ‘All right. Well, let’s talk about that.’ ‘Oh, can we? Can we really?’ ‘Of course.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Next morning I typed the thing in a two-fingered fury and raced downtown to give it to Horst. I dropped it off quickly and left. Three hours later he called me. “You really want me to translate this?” he asked. “Yes,” and I began with a burst of outrage about how he’d promised not to censor me. “I will keep my word,” he said, “but you’re young and you really don’t understand the Germans.” “What do you mean I don’t?” “The Germans loved Hitler,” he said quietly. “If they were to be honest, you wouldn’t like what you would hear. But they are not honest. For twenty-five years they have not been honest. They never cried for their war dead and they never cried for Hitler. They swept it all under the rug. Even they don’t know their real feelings. If they were honest, you would hate it worse than their hypocrisy.” Then he began to tell me about what it was like to be a press correspondent under Hitler. It was a quasi-military position and all news was censored from above. The press corps knew plenty of things which were kept from the general public and they deliberately concealed them. They knew about death camps and deportations. They knew and they still cranked out propaganda. “But how could you do it?” I shouted. “How could I not do it?” “You could have left Germany, you could have joined the Resistance, you could have done something!” “But I was not a hero, and I didn’t want to be a refugee. Journalism was my profession.” “So what!” “All I am saying is that most people are not heroes and most people are not honest. I don’t say I’m good or admirable. All I am saying is that I am like most people.” “But why?” I whined. “Because I am,” he said. “No reason.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When he felt he’d been attacked, he became nasty and threw in a four-letter word to show how hip he was. “Typical small-man complex,” I muttered. “What was that?” “Oh nothing.” “Come on, I want to hear it. I can take it.” Big brave analyst. “I was just thinking, Dr. Kolner, that you have what is known in psychiatric literature as a ‘small-man complex.’ You get feisty and start hurling four-letter words around when somebody points out that you aren’t God Almighty. I know it must be tough on you to be only five foot four—but supposedly you were analyzed and that should make it easier to bear.” “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,” Kolner snarled. He had regressed all the way to second grade. He thought he was being very witty. “Look—why is it that you can throw stale clichés at me —and I’m supposed to be grateful for your superior insight and even pay you for it—but if I do the same to you—which surely is my right, given all the bread I push in your direction—then you get furious and start talking like some spiteful seven year old.” “I simply said you ought to quit if you feel that way about me. Leave. Walk out. Slam the door. Tell me to go to hell.” “And admit that the past two years and the thousands of dollars that have passed between us have been a total loss ? I mean maybe you can write it off that way—but I have a somewhat greater stake in deluding myself that something positive went on here.” “You can work it all out with your next analyst,” Kolner said. “You can figure out what went wrong from your point of view….” “My point of view! Don’t you see why so many people are getting so fucking fed up with analysis? It’s all the fault of you stupid analysts. You make the process like some sort of Catch-22. The patient goes and goes and goes and keeps paying in her money and whenever you guys are too dense to figure out what’s going on or whenever you realize that you can’t help the patient, you simply up the number of years they have to keep going or you tell them to go to another analyst to figure out what went wrong with the first analyst. Doesn’t the absurdity of it even strike you?” “The absurdity of my sitting here and listening to this tirade certainly does strike me. So I can only reiterate what I said before. If you don’t like it, why don’t you just get the hell out?”

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

  You just can’t point to a spot in a defendant’s brain, face, or EKG, and say, “Look, anger is right here,” let alone draw legal conclusions. The legal system’s second assumption behind the heat-of-passion defense is that “cognitive control” in the brain is synonymous with rational thought, deliberate actions, and free will. For you to be considered culpable, it is not enough that you performed a harmful action (known by the legal term actus reus ). You also had to mean it. You caused harm of your own free will with a guilty mind ( mens rea ). Emotions, on the other hand, are seen as rapid, automatically triggered reactions spewing from your ancient, inner beast. The human mind is considered a battleground for reason and emotion, so when you fail to exercise sufficient cognitive discipline, emotions are said to burst forth to hijack your behavior. They interfere with your choice of action, and therefore make you less culpable. This narrative of emotion as the primitive part of human nature, to be controlled by the more advanced and uniquely human rational parts, is the “triune brain” myth ( chapter 4 ) whose roots go all the way back to Plato. The distinction between emotion and cognition hinges on their alleged separation in the brain, with one regulating the other. Your emotional amygdala spies an open cash register, but then, as the story goes, you rationally consider your likelihood of jail time, which causes your prefrontal cortex to slam on the brakes and stop your arm from dipping into the drawer. But as you’ve learned by now, thinking and feeling are not distinct in the brain. Your desire for easy cash and your decision to pass it up are both constructed across your entire brain by interacting networks. Whenever you carry out an action—whether it feels automatic, like recognizing an object as a gun, or more deliberate, like aiming one—your brain is always a whirlwind of parallel predictions that compete with one another to determine your actions and your experience. At different times, you have different experiences of agency. Emotion sometimes can feel uncontrollable, like a burst of anger that arrives without warning, but you can also act in anger with intent, methodically plotting someone’s demise. In addition, non-emotions like memories or ideas can pop into your head unbidden. And yet we never hear of defendants who commit murder “in a fit of thinking.” You can even work yourself up deliberately into a frothing anger. Accused mass murderer Dylann Roof, who shot nine people in a Bible study meeting in South Carolina in June 2015, appeared to cultivate his anger toward African Americans deliberately for many months before the day he walked into that church.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But this did not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something better than a broom. Then, canceling my search, I dashed out of the house with the heroic decision of attacking him barefisted; despite my natural vigor, I am no pugilist, while the short but broad-shouldered Maximovich seemed made of pig iron. The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with good photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N. Y., G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sunshine- haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight—actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page: Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You. Quilty, Clare, American dramatist.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Howard realized it at once, but how could Claire pick up on that tiny piece of tight skin on the left side of his wife’s mouth, or know what it meant? In her innocence, thinking she was rescuing the situation, Claire enclosed both of Kiki’s hands in her own. ‘I want to meet Sir Montague Kipps. Howard’s being tricky about it.’ ‘Howard’s always tricky,’ said Kiki, flashing him a second steely, confirmatory glance that put the matter beyond doubt. ‘He thinks it makes him look clever.’ ‘God, you look great, Keeks. You should be in a fountain in Rome.’ Howard expected that this flattery of his wife’s appearance by Claire was compulsive. All he wanted to do was to stop her saying another word. Wild, violent fantasies took hold of him. ‘Oh, you too, honey,’ said Kiki calmly, dampening down this false enthusiasm. So there wasn’t going to be a scene. Howard had always loved this about his wife, her ability to play things cool – but at this moment he would have been happier to hear her scream. She stood like a zombie, her eyes quite dead to any appeal from him, her smile nailed on. And still they were stuck in this ludicrous conversation. ‘Look, I need an opening salvo,’ continued Claire. ‘I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing I actually want to talk to him. What can I get him on?’ ‘He’s got a finger in every pie,’ said Howard, converting his personal desperation into anger. ‘Take your pick. State of Britain, state of the Caribbean, states of blackness, state of art, state of women, state of the States – you hum it, he’ll play it. Oh, and he thinks affirmative action is the work of the devil – he’s a charmer, he’s a . . .’  On Beauty Howard stopped. All the drink in his body had turned against him; his sentences were beginning to rush away from him like rabbits down their holes; soon neither the white tip of a thought nor the black hole into which it was vanishing would be visible to him. ‘Howie – you’re making yourself ridiculous,’ said Kiki precisely and bit her lip. Howard could see the battle going on inside her. He saw how determined she was. She would not scream, she would not cry. ‘He’s anti-affirmative action? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ asked Claire, watching Monty’s nodding head. ‘Not really,’ replied Kiki. ‘He’s just a black conservative – thinks it’s demeaning for African-American kids to be told they need special treatment to succeed, etcetera. It’s terrible timing for Wellington, having him here – there’s an Anti-Affirmative Action bill working its way through the Senate and it’s gonna cause trouble.

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

  The archetypal victim in American culture is fearful, passive, and helpless, but in African American communities, women sometimes violate this stereotype by defending themselves vigorously against their alleged batterers. By fighting back, they reinforce a different stereotype of female emotion, the “angry black woman,” which is also pervasive in the U.S. legal system. These women are more likely to be charged with domestic violence themselves, even when their actions were in self-defense and were less severe than the original assault. (No “stand your ground” allowed here!) And if they injure or kill their alleged batterer, they usually fare worse than a European American woman in the same situation. 2 2 For example, consider the case of Jean Banks, an African American woman who stabbed and killed her live-in partner, James “Brother” McDonald, after he had beaten her for years, sometimes so severely that she required medical attention. On this particular day, both had been drinking, and during an argument, McDonald pushed Banks to the ground and attempted to slice her with a glass cutter. Banks grabbed a knife to defend herself and stabbed him through the heart. She claimed self-defense but nonetheless was convicted of second-degree murder. (Compare this to light-skinned Judy Norman, who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, a lesser charge.) 2 3 Angry women do not fare well outside of domestic violence cases either. Judges infer all sorts of negative personality characteristics in angry female rape victims that they tend not to attribute to angry male crime victims. When a woman has been raped, for instance, judges (and juries and the police) expect to see her express grief on the witness stand, which tends to bring the rapist a heavier sentence. When a female victim expresses anger, judges evaluate her negatively. These judges are falling prey to another version of the “angry bitch” phenomenon. When people perceive emotion in a man, they usually attribute it to his situation, but when they perceive emotion in a woman, they connect it to her personality. She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day. 2 4 Outside the courtroom, we find laws where gender stereotypes prescribe the acceptable emotions we must feel and express. Abortion laws, as written, signal which emotions are appropriate for a woman to feel, namely, remorse and guilt, whereas relief and happiness go unmentioned. The debate over the legality of gay marriage was, in a way, whether the law should sanction the emotion of romantic love between two people of the same sex. Adoption laws governing gay men raise the question of whether a father’s love is equal to that of a mother. 2 5 Overall, there is no scientific justification for the law’s view of men’s and women’s emotions.

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

  3 If something interferes with your ability to choose your actions freely, the law says that you might be less responsible for the harm you caused. Take the case of Gordon Patterson, who caught his wife, Roberta, “in a state of semiundress” with her boyfriend, John Northrup. Patterson shot Northrup twice in the head, killing him. Patterson confessed to the shooting but argued that he was less culpable due to his “extreme emotional disturbance” at the time of the crime. According to U.S. law, Patterson’s sudden burst of rage caused him not to be fully in control of his actions, and he was therefore found guilty of second-degree murder—rather than first-degree murder, which requires premeditation and carries a harsher punishment. In other words, rational killing is considered worse than emotional killing, all other circumstances being equal. 4 The U.S. legal system assumes that emotions are part of our supposed animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts, unless we control them with our rational thoughts. Centuries ago, legal minds decided that people, when provoked, sometimes kill because they haven’t “cooled off” yet, and anger erupts unbidden. Anger steams, boils, explodes, and leaves a wake of destruction in its path. Anger makes people unable to conform their actions to the law, and so partially mitigates a person’s responsibility for his actions. The argument is known as a heat-of-passion defense. 5 The heat-of-passion defense depends on some familiar assumptions from the classical view of emotion. The first assumption is that there is one universal type of anger, with a specific fingerprint, that justifies such a defense to a charge of murder. It supposedly includes a flushed face, clenched jaw, flared nostrils, and increased heart rate, blood pressure, and perspiration. As you’ve already learned, this alleged fingerprint is merely a Western cultural stereotype that’s not supported by data. On average, people’s heart rates go up when angry, but there’s tremendous variation, and similar increases are also part of the stereotypes for happiness, sadness, and fear. And yet, most killings are not committed in happiness or sadness; and if they were, the law does not consider these emotional episodes to be a mitigating factor. 6 What’s more, most instances of anger do not lead to killing. I can state quite definitively that in twenty years of creating anger in my lab, we’ve never seen a test subject kill anybody. We see a far greater repertoire of action: swearing, threatening, pounding the table, leaving the room, crying, trying to resolve whatever conflict they’re having, or even smiling while wishing ill upon their oppressor. So the idea of anger as a trigger for uncontrolled murder is at best questionable. 7 When I explain to people in the legal profession that anger has no biological fingerprint, they often assume I am claiming emotions don’t exist. That’s not at all the case. Of course anger exists.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “And so,” I shouted, “you are going to Canada? Not Canada”—I re-shouted—“I mean Alaska, of course.” He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: “Well, he cut it on a jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in Italy.” Lovely mauve almond trees in bloom. A blown-off surrealistic arm hanging up there in the pointillistic mauve. A flowergirl tattoo on the hand. Dolly and band-aided Bill reappeared. It occurred to me that her ambiguous, brown and pale beauty excited the cripple. Dick, with a grin of relief stood up. He guessed Bill and he would be going back to fix those wires. He guessed Mr. Haze and Dolly had loads of things to say to each other. He guessed he would be seeing me before I left. Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids? “Sit down,” she said, audibly striking her flanks with her palms. I relapsed into the black rocker. “So you betrayed me? Where did you go? Where is he now?” She took from the mantelpiece a concave glossy snapshot. Old woman in white, stout, beaming, bowlegged, very short dress; old man in his shirtsleeves, drooping mustache, watch chain. Her in-laws. Living with Dick’s brother’s family in Juneau. “Sure you don’t want to smoke?” She was smoking herself. First time I saw her doing it. Streng verboten under Humbert the Terrible. Gracefully, in a blue mist, Charlotte Haze rose from her grave. I would find him through Uncle Ivory if she refused. “Betrayed you? No.” She directed the dart of her cigarette, index rapidly tapping upon it, toward the hearth exactly as her mother used to do, and then, like her mother, oh my God, with her fingernail scratched and removed a fragment of cigarette paper from her underlip. No. She had not betrayed me. I was among friends. Edusa had warned her that Cue liked little girls, had been almost jailed once, in fact (nice fact), and he knew she knew. Yes … Elbow in palm, puff, smile, exhaled smoke, darting gesture. Waxing reminiscent. He saw—smiling—through everything and everybody, because he was not like me and her but a genius. A great guy. Full of fun. Had rocked with laughter when she confessed about me and her, and said he had thought so. It was quite safe, under the circumstances, to tell him … Well, Cue—they all called him Cue—

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I would dash down the hill over the tiers of seats and stand in the dead center of the stage reciting my own poetry to an audience of echoes. One day I told Horst that I wanted to write about the amphitheater. “Why?” he asked. “Because everyone pretends it isn’t there.” “Do you think that’s enough of a reason?” “Yes.” I went to the Heidelberg main library and began looking through guidebooks. Most of them were routine, with glossy photos of the Schloss and old engravings of the pasty-faced Electors of the Palatinate. Finally I came across a library-bound one, English and German on facing pages, with cheap, yellowing paper, black and white photographs and old Gothic type. The publication date was 1937, and every ten pages or so a paragraph or a photo or a small block of type was covered over with a square of oak-tag. These little squares were firmly glued down so that you couldn’t lift the corners, but the minute I saw them I knew I wouldn’t rest until I had unglued them all and discovered what was underneath. I checked out the book (along with four others so the librarian wouldn’t be suspicious) and raced home where I carefully steamed the offending pages over a tea-kettle spout. It was interesting to see what the censor had thought to censor: A photograph of the amphitheater in all its glory: flags rippling in the wind, hands flying upward in a Nazi salute, hundreds of little pinpoints of light—representing Aryan heads—or perhaps, Aryan brains. A passage describing the amphitheater as “One of the monumental buildings of the Third Reich, a Giantic [sic] Openairtheatre which aims at uniting thousands of Fellow-Germans for Festive and Solemn-Hours in a common Experience of Loyalty to the Fatherland and Inspirations of the Nature.” A paragraph describing the (now rutted and bumpy) Heidelberg-Frankfurt Autobahn as the “Giantic [sic] and Monumental Creation of the New Age which is so much Promising.” A paragraph describing Germany as “This Nation favored to the Gods and placed in the First Ranks of the Great and Powerful Nations...” A photograph of the main assembly hall of the university with swastikas hanging from every Gothic arch.... A photograph of the mensa with swastikas hanging from every Roman arch.... And so on and so on throughout the book. I was in a frenzy of outrage and moral indignation. I sat down at my desk and scrawled a furious column about honesty, dishonesty, and almighty History. I asked for truth above beauty, History above beauty, and honesty above all. I fumed and sputtered and spouted. I pointed to the offensive oak-tag patches in the guidebook as examples of all that was odious in life and art.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I wanted to weep out of sheer exhaustion, but I knew I couldn’t make myself that conspicuous. Already I was attracting the kind of quizzical glances a woman alone attracts. And I was too tired and harassed to react with subtlety. If anyone tried to pick me up now, I would probably scream and begin swinging with my fists. I was beyond words. I was tired of reasoning and arguing and trying to be clever. The first man who approached me with a cynical or flirtatious look would get it: a knee in the balls or a punch in the jaw. I would not sit there cowering in fear as I had at age thirteen when exhibitionists started unzipping their pants at me on the deserted subway to high school. I actually used to be afraid they’d be insulted and take terrible revenge unless I remained rooted to my seat. So I stayed, looking away, pretending not to notice, pretending not to be terrified, pretending to be reading and hoping somehow that the book would protect me. Later, in Italy, when men followed me in the ruins or pursued me in cars down the avenues (opening their doors and whispering vieni, vieni), I always wondered why I felt so sullied and spat upon and furious. It was supposed to be flattering. It was supposed to prove my womanliness. My mother had always said how womanly she felt in Italy. Then why did it make me feel so hunted? There must be something wrong with me I thought. I used to try to smile and toss my hair to show I was grateful. And then I felt like a fraud. Why wasn’t I grateful for being hunted? But now I wanted to be alone, and if anybody interpreted my behavior differently, I’d react like a wild beast. Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my “availability"—as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily. Or wore my hair too wantonly. Or something. I deserved to be attacked, in short. It was the same old jargon of the war between the sexes, the same old fifties lingo in disguise: There is no such thing as rape; you ladies ask for it. You ladies. I nursed my beer. As soon as I looked up, a man at a nearby table caught my eye. He had that swaggering look which says, I know what you want, baby.... It was the same flirtatiousness that I had fallen for in Adrian, but now it sickened me. All I saw in it at this point was bullying and sadism. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps 90 percent of the men who displayed it were really concealing impotence. I didn’t care to test that hypothesis either. I furrowed my brows and looked down. Couldn’t he see I didn’t want anyone?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  No, but it’s OK . . . I really couldn’t care less. I mean I care , obviously I care! But what’s the point? It’s just pretty tacky – she knew I was here, we said hi an hour ago. It’s just tacky. But you’d think she could at least try to . . .’ Jerome kept on talking but Zora was not listening any more. Something alien to Zora was taking her over, starting in her belly and then rocketing like adrenalin through the rest of her system. Maybe it was adrenalin. It was certainly a rage physical in nature – never in her life had she experienced an emotion as corporal as this. She seemed to have no mind or will; she was only resolute muscle. Afterwards she could in no way account for how she got from the balcony to the coat room. It was as if fury transported her there instantaneously. And then she was in the room, and it was as Jerome had described. He on top of she. Her hands embracing his head. They looked perfect together. So perfect! And then, a moment after that, Zora herself was outside on the porch with Carl, with Carl’s hood in her hand, for she had – as was explained to her afterwards – physically dragged him down the hallway and out of the party. Now she released him, pushing him away from her, on to the wet wood. He was coughing and working his hand around his throat, which had been constricted. She had never known how strong she was. Everyone had always told her she was a ‘big girl’ – was this why she was big? So she might drag grown men by their hoods and throw them to the floor? Zora’s brief physical elation was soon replaced by panic. Out here it was cold and wet. The knees of Carl’s jeans were soaked.  on beauty and being wrong What had she done? What had she done? Now Carl knelt before her, breathing heavily, looking up, enraged. Her heart justly broke. She saw she had nothing further to lose. ‘ Oh, man, oh, man . . . I can’t believe . . .’ he was whispering. Then he stood up and became loud: ‘What the FUCK do you think – ’ ‘Did you even read that piece?’ cried Zora, shaking madly. ‘I spent so long on that, I missed my dissertation deadline, I’ve been working constantly for you and – ’ But of course without the secret piece of the narrative in Zora’s head – the one that connected ‘writing pieces for Carl’ with ‘Carl kissing Victoria Kipps’ – no sense could be made of what she was saying. ‘What the hell are you talking about, man? What did you just do?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Victoria reached out for Zora, but Carl restrained her. Jerome grabbed hold of Zora’s pointing hand. ‘Zoor!’ he said, raising his voice. ‘Stop it! That’s enough!’ Zoor wrenched her wrist from her brother’s grasp. Carl looked disgusted with them both. He took Victoria’s hand and began to walk her towards the house. ‘Take your sister home,’ he said, without looking back at Jerome. ‘She’s drunk as hell.’ ‘And I also know about guys like you ,’ said Zora, shouting impotently after him. ‘You can’t keep your dick in your pants for five minutes – that’s all that’s important to you. That’s all you can think about. And you haven’t even got the good taste to stick it in something a little more classy than Victoria Kipps . You’re just one of those kind of assholes .’ ‘Fuck you!’ screamed Victoria and began to cry. ‘Like your old man?’ yelled Carl. ‘An asshole like that? Let me tell you something – ’ But Victoria began to speak frantically over him. ‘No! Please, Carl – please , just leave it. There’s no point – please – no!’ She was hysterical, placing her hands all over his face, apparently trying to stop him speaking. Zora frowned at her, not understanding. ‘Why the hell not?’ Carl asked, peeling a hand from his mouth and holding Victoria at the shoulders as she continued to weep loudly. ‘She’s so damn superior all the time, she should have a little home truth told to her – she thinks her daddy’s such a – ’ ‘NO!’ screamed Victoria. Zora put her hands on her hips, utterly bemused, almost entertained, by this new scene passing in front of her. Someone was making a fool of herself, and, for the first time tonight, it  on beauty and being wrong wasn’t Zora. A window someplace down the street was thrown up. ‘ Keep the goddamn noise down! It’s the middle of the goddamn night! ’ The clapboard houses, prim and shuttered, silently seemed to support the departure of the street’s noisy visitors. ‘Vee, baby, go back in the house. I’ll be in in a minute,’ said Carl and tenderly wiped some tears from Victoria’s face with his hand. Zora abandoned her curiosity. She felt the fury double inside her. She didn’t stop to consider the meaning of what had just passed, and so did not follow Jerome as his mind wandered down a formerly concealed path to a dark destination: the truth. Jerome put his hand against the soggy trunk of a tree, and this alone kept him upright. Victoria rang the bell to get back in the house. For a moment Jerome met her eye with all that he felt: disappointment because he had loved her; grief because she had betrayed him. ‘Can you keep it down out here?’ requested a kid at the door and let a distraught, broken Victoria back into the house.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I know you all think I’m some kind of a fool – I’m not a fool. And I been reading, I been watching the news – this shit is real . With that money from that painting you could go build a hospital in Haiti!’ ‘Oh, is that what you were intending to do with the money?’ asked Jerome. ‘Build a hospital?’ Levi made a face both sheepish and defiant. ‘No, not zackly. We was going to redistribute ,’ said Levi successfully. ‘The funds.’ ‘I see. So how exactly were you gonna sell it? Ebay?’ ‘Choo had people on that.’ Kiki found her voice again. ‘Choo? Choo? WHO IS CHOO?’ Levi covered his face with both hands. ‘Oh, shit .’ ‘Levi . . . I’m trying to understand what you’re telling me,’ said Kiki slowly, making an effort to calm herself. ‘And I . . . I understand that you had concerns about these people, but, baby, Jerome’s right, this is not the way you go about solving social problems, this is not how you – ’ ‘So how do you do it?’ demanded Levi. ‘By paying people four dollars an hour to clean? That’s how much you pay Monique, man! Four dollars! If she was American you wouldn’t be paying her no four dollars an hour. Would you? Would you?’ Kiki was stunned. ‘You know what, Levi?’ she said, her voice breaking. She bent  On Beauty down to put her hands to one side of the painting, ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more.’ ‘ ’Cause you ain’t got no answer to that!’ ‘ Because the only thing that comes out of your mouth is bullshit . And you can save it for the poh-leese when they come and drag your ass off to jail.’ Levi sucked his teeth. ‘You ain’t got no answer,’ he repeated. ‘Jerome,’ said Kiki, ‘take the other side of this. Let’s try to get it upstairs. I’ll call Monty and see if we can sort this out without a lawsuit.’ Jerome went to the other side and hitched the painting up on to his knee. ‘I think longwise. Levi – get out of the damn way,’ he said, and together they turned themselves a hundred and eighty degrees. As they were completing this manoeuvre, Jerome began to yank at something on the back of the canvas. Kiki let out a little scream. ‘No! No! Don’t pull at it! What are you doing ? Have you damaged it? Oh, Jesus Christ – I don’t believe this is happening.’ ‘No, Mom, no . . .’ said Jerome uncertainly. ‘It’s just there’s something stuck here . . . it’s fine . . . we can just . . .’ Jerome brought the painting upright and rested it against his mother. He pulled again at a piece of white notecard tucked into the frame. ‘Jerome! What are you doing?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The only things that threatened to disturb her resolve were the sheer temporal layers of Howard as they presented themselves before her: Howard at twenty-two, at thirty, at forty-five and fifty-one; the difficulty of keeping all these other Howards out of her consciousness; the importance of not being sidetracked, of responding only to this most recent Howard, the -year-old Howard. The liar, the heart-breaker, the emotional fraud. She did not flinch. ‘What is it, Howard?’ Howard had just finished ushering his resistant children out of the room. They were alone. He turned round quickly, his face a very nothing. He was at a loss as to what to do with his hands and feet, where to stand, what to rest upon. ‘There’s no ‘‘it’’,’ he said softly, and pulled his cardigan around himself. ‘Particularly. I don’t know what that question means. It? I mean . . . obviously, there’s everything.’ Kiki, feeling the power of her position, re-established her folded arms. ‘Right. That’s very poetic. I guess I’m just not feeling too poetic right now. Is there something you wanted to say to me?’ Howard looked to the floor and shook his head, disappointed, like a scientist getting no data from an elaborately set-up experiment. ‘I see,’ he said finally and made as if to return to his study, but then turned back at the door. ‘Umm . . . Is there a time when we could talk, properly? Like human beings. Who know each other.’ For her part, Kiki had been waiting for a hook. That would do. ‘Don’t you tell me how to behave like a human being. I know how to behave like a human being.’ Howard looked up at her, eagerly. ‘Of course you do.’ ‘Oh, fuck you .’  On Beauty To accompany this, Kiki did something she hadn’t done in years. She gave her husband the finger. Howard looked baffled. In a faraway voice he said, ‘No . . . This isn’t going to work.’ ‘No, really? Aren’t we having good dialogue? Are we not inter-facing as you’d hoped? Howard, go to the library.’ ‘How can I talk to you when you’re like this? There’s no way for me to talk to you.’ His real distress was obvious and for a moment Kiki considered matching it with her own. Instead, she grew still harder inside. ‘Well, I’m sorry about that.’ Kiki became aware, suddenly, of her own belly and the way it hung over her leggings; she reorganized it under the elastic of her underwear, a move that made her feel more protected somehow, more solid. Howard placed both hands on the sideboard like a lawyer giving his summation to an invisible jury. ‘Clearly we need to talk about what’s going to happen next. At least . . . well, the kids need to know.’ Kiki released a flare of laughter. ‘Sugar, you’re the one who makes the decisions.

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

  28 It’s tricky to distinguish discomfort and suffering in the moment. Are you feeling irritated or just having caffeine withdrawal? If you are a woman, you probably have ambiguous physical symptoms related to your menstrual cycle or during menopause, and you may categorize the sensations as having emotional meaning when they do not. I remember in 2010 when my whole lab was moving from one university to another, including twenty researchers and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. Everything seemed to be going wrong, plus I was about to leave for a two-week trip. Somehow I was holding myself together, extinguishing each fire as it ignited . . . and then my laptop died. I sank to the floor in the middle of my kitchen and started sobbing. At just that moment, my husband walked in, noticed my state, and asked innocently, “Are you premenstrual?” Oh. My. God. I lashed out at him, the goddamn sexist pig and how dare he be so smug when I’m barely holding my life together?? My fury shocked us both. And three days later, I discovered that he was right. With practice, you can learn to deconstruct an affective feeling into its mere physical sensations, rather than letting those sensations be a filter through which you view the world. You can dissolve anxiety into a fast-beating heart. Once you can deconstruct into physical sensations, then you can recategorize them in some other way, using your rich set of concepts. Perhaps that pounding in your chest is not anxiety but anticipation, or even excitement. Look around right now and find an object to focus on. Try recategorizing it not as a three-dimensional visual object but as the individual pieces of differently colored light that your perception is constructed from. Tough, isn’t it? Nevertheless, you can train yourself to do it. Pick the shiniest part of the object and try tracing its outlines with your eye. With a lot of practice, you can learn how to deconstruct objects like this. Great artists like Rembrandt could do it and realistically render objects in paint on a canvas. In a similar manner, you can deconstruct your emotions. Recategorization is a tool of the emotion expert. The more concepts that you know and the more instances that you can construct, the more effectively you can recategorize in this manner to master your emotions and regulate your behavior. For instance, if you’re about to take a test and feel affectively worked up, you might categorize your feeling as harmful anxiety (“Oh no, I’m doomed!”) or as helpful anticipation (“I’m energized and ready to go!”). The head of my daughter’s karate school, Grandmaster Joe Esposito, advises his nervous students before their black belt test: “Make your butterflies fly in formation.” He is saying yes, you feel worked up right now, but don’t perceive it as nervousness: construct an instance of “Determination.” Recategorization of this kind can bring tangible benefits to your life.

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

  Roof said that he almost didn’t go through with his plan because everyone was so nice to him, and he appeared to work himself up to the heinous deed in the meeting, uttering repeated phrases like “I have to do it” and “You have to go.” So, overall, moments of emotion are not synonymous with moments that you’re out of control. 8 Anger is a population of diverse instances, not a single automatic reaction in the true sense of the phrase. The same holds for every other category of emotion, cognition, perception, and other type of mental event. It might seem like your brain has a quick, intuitive process and a slower, deliberative one, and that the former is more emotional and the latter more rational, but this idea is not defensible on neuroscience or behavioral grounds. Sometimes your control network plays a large role in the construction process, and other times its role is less, but it is always involved, and the latter times are not necessarily emotional. 9 Why does the fiction of the two-system brain survive, beyond the usual reason of essentialism? Because most psychology experiments unwittingly perpetuate this fiction. In real life, your brain predicts nonstop, with each brain state dependent on those that came before. Laboratory experiments break this dependency. Test subjects view images or listen to sounds presented in random order, responding after each one, say, by pressing a button. Such experiments disrupt the brain’s natural process of prediction. And the results come out looking like the subject’s brain makes a rapid, automatic response, followed by a controlled choice about 150 milliseconds later, as if the two responses came from distinct systems in the brain. 10 The illusion of a two-system brain is a byproduct of a century-old, flawed experimental design, and our laws maintain the illusion. * The legal system, with its essentialized view of the mind and brain, mixes up volition—whether your brain actually played a role in controlling your behavior—and awareness of volition—whether you experience having a choice. Neuroscience has quite a bit to say about this distinction. If you sit in a chair with your legs bent, toes not touching the floor, and tap your knee just below your kneecap, the bottom half of your leg gives a little kick. Hold your hand to a flame and your arm recoils. Present a puff of air to your cornea and you blink. Each of these examples is a reflex: sensation leading directly to motion. Reflexes in your peripheral nervous system have sensory neurons wired directly to motor neurons.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  At times I wrote satirically, spoofing events like German-American Friendship Week or the Fasching Ball in the town hall. At times I wrote reviews of art shows and operas, discussions of architecture and music, accounts of historic visitors to Heidelberg like Goethe and Mark Twain. I learned all kinds of interesting things about the city, picked up quite a lot of conversational German, became a minor celebrity in town and on the army post, and got lavishly wined and dined by Heidelberg restaurants which wanted to be written up. But there was a glaring disparity between my brittle, witty columns on the pleasures of Heidelberg and the way I really felt about Germany. Gradually I got braver and was able to bring my feelings and my writing into some sort of uneasy alignment. What I learned from those columns foreshadowed what I was later to learn in my “real writing.” I started out being clever and superficial and dishonest. Gradually I got braver. Gradually I stopped trying to disguise myself. One by one, I peeled off the masks: the ironic mask, the wise-guy mask, the mask of pseudosophistication, the mask of indifference. In my snooping around town for ghosts, I had discovered the solidest ghost of all—a Nazi amphitheater nestled in the hills above Heidelberg. Going there became an obsession with me. Nobody in Heidelberg seemed to recognize the existence of the place and this denial gave the amphitheater an added appeal. Perhaps it didn’t even exist except in my own mind. I went back again and again. It was built in 1934 or ‘35 by the Youth Labor Corps (I could just imagine them: blond, shirtless, singing Deutschland über Alles , lifting the pink sandstone rocks of the Neckar Valley while blowsy Rhine maidens brought steins of piss-dark beer), and it was nestled in the crotch of the Heiligenberg , or Holy Mountain, where a shrine to Odin had reputedly once stood. I would reach the amphitheater by driving across the river from the old town, down a wide street which led to the suburbs, then up the Holy Mountain, following the signs to the ruins of St. Michael’s Basilica. The amphitheater itself was not, sinisterly enough, marked. The road wound upward through the woods, the light filtered down between the black-green pines, and I was Gretel in a huffing, puffing Volkswagen, but no one was dropping bread crumbs behind me. As I wound my way up the hill, thinking of all those cruel German fairy tales featuring frightened little girls and dark woods, the car would stall in third gear. Afraid of rolling backward down the hill, I’d shift into second and stall again. Finally, I would have to climb in first gear. At the top of the Heiligenberg was a smallish tower built of red sandstone, with mossy, worn-down steps winding to a lookout on top.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  LUCIUS APULEIUS capite deprompta Thrasylli convulnerat tota lumina eumque prorsus exoculatum relinquens, dum dolore nescio crapulam cum sommo discutit, arrepto nudo gladio quo se Tlepolemus solebat incingere, per mediam civitatem cursu furioso proripit se, procul dubio nescioquod scelus gestiens et recta monimentum mariti contendit. At nos et omnis populus nudatis totis aedibus studiose consequimur, hortati mutuo ferrum. vesanis extorquere manibus. Sed Charite capulum Tlepolemi propter assistens gladioque ful- genti singulos abigens, ubi fletus uberes et lamenta- tiones varias cunctorum intuetur, * Abicite ' inquit, * Importunas lacrimas, abicite luctum meis virtutibus alienum. Vindicavi in mei mariti cruentum peremp- torem, punita sum funestum mearum nuptiarum praedonem, Iam tempus est ut isto gladio deorsus 14 ad meum Tlepolemum viam quaeram.' Et enarratis ordine singulis quae sibi per somnium nuntiaverat maritus quoque astu Thrasyllum inductum petisset, ferro sub papillam dexteram transadacto corruit et in suo sibi pervolutata sanguine postremo balbutiens incerto sermone proflavit animam virilem. Tune propere familiares miserae Charites accuratissime corpus ablutum unita sepultura ibidem marito per- petuam coniugem reddidere. Thrasyllus vero cognitis omnibus, nequiens idoneum exitum praesenti cladi 366 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII took a great needle from her head and pricked out both his eyes: which done, leaving him blind and waking in great pain (though he knew not whence it eame) from his drunkenness and sleep, she by and by caught the naked sword which her husband Tlepolemus accustomed to wear, and ran throughout all the city like a mad woman towards the sepulchre, of her husband, doubtless bent on some wild purpose. Then we with all the citizens left our houses and ran incontinently after her, exhorting each other to take the sword out of her furious hands ; but she, clasping about the tomb of Tlepolemus, kept us off with her naked weapon, and when she perceived that every one of us wept and lamented, she spake in this sort: ‘I pray you, my friends, let there be no unasked tears for me nor laments unworthy of my courage, for I am revenged of the death of my husband, I have punished deservedly the wicked breaker of our marriage ! ; now is it time to seek out with this sword the way to my sweet Tlepolemus.’ And therewithal, after she had made relation of the whole matter which was declared unto her by the vision of her husband which she saw, and told by what means she deceived Thrasyllus, thrusting the sword under her right breast and wallowing in her own blood, she babbled some uncertain words and at length with manly courage yielded up the ghost. Then immediately the friends of miserable Charite did wash carefully her body and bury her within the same sepulchre with Tlepolemus to be his spouse for ever. Thrasyllus, hear- ing all the matter, and knowing that by no death he could fitly atone for this present ruin, for he thought

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  24 “Contubernalis mei fullonis uxor, alioquin servati pudoris, ut videbatur, femina, quae semper secundo rumore gloriosa Larem mariti pudice gubernabat, occulta libidine prorumpit in adulterum quempiam : cumque furtivos amplexus obiret assidue, ipso illo denique momento, quo nos lauti cenam petebamus, cum eodem illo iuvene miscebatar in Venerem. Ergo nostra repente turbata praesentia, subitario ducta con- silio, eundem illum subiectum contegit viminea cavea, quae fustium flexu tereti in rectum aggerata cumulum lacinias circumdatas suffusa candido fumo sulphuris inalbabat, eoque iam, ut sibi videbatur, tutissime ce- lato mensam nobiscum secura participat. Interdum acerrimo gravique odore sulphuris iuvenis inescatus atque obnubilatus intercluso spiritu diffluebat, utque est ingenium vivacis metalli, crebras ei sternu- 25 tationes commovebat. Atque ut primum e regione mulieris pone tergum eius maritus acceperat sonum sternutationis—quod enim putaret ab ea pro- fectum—solito sermone salutem ei fuerat imprecatus, et iterato rursum et frequentato saepius, donec rei nimietate commotus quod res erat tandem suspica- tur, et impulsa mensa protenus remotaque cavea pro- ducit hominem crebros anhelitus aegre reflantem ; inflammatusque indignatione contumeliae gladium flagitans iugulare moriturum gestiebat, ni respecto communi periculo vix eum ab impetu furioso cohib- uissem, asseverans brevi absque noxa nostri suapte inimieum eius violentia sulphuris periturum : nec 438 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX she ceased not to urge him until he accorded to the request of his wife, and ignorant of the state of his own house, declared the mischance of another.