Anxiety

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

  Based on the evidence, it appears that anxiety, like depression, is a constructed category in the same fashion as emotion, pain, and stress. The misery you feel in anxiety and depression tells you that something is seriously wrong with your body budget. Either your brain is trying to secure a deposit, ramping up unpleasant affect, or it’s attempting to reduce your need for the deposit by remaining still, resulting in fatigue. Your brain may categorize these sensations as anxiety, depression, or, for that matter, pain or stress or emotion. To be clear, I am not saying that major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders are interchangeable. I’m suggesting that every category of mental illness is a diverse population of instances, and certain collections of symptoms could reasonably be categorized equally well as an anxiety disorder or as depression. There’s also the issue of severity—some of Helen Mayberg’s severely depressed patients, such as those who are near-catatonic, would clearly not be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. However, some of her other patients who are in agony might reasonably be diagnosed with anxiety, chronic stress, or even chronic pain. In general, moderately severe depression and anxiety can have overlapping symptom profiles with one another, and with chronic stress and chronic pain, and also with chronic fatigue syndrome.39 These observations provide a solution to the mystery that opened chapter 1: why did test subjects in my graduate school experiments seem unable to distinguish between anxious and depressed feelings? One reason we’ve covered already is emotional granularity: some of my subjects could probably construct more finely tailored emotions than others could. But now a second reason comes to light: that “Anxiety” and “Depression” are concepts for categorizing similar sensations. When my subjects were feeling unpleasant, I handed them rating scales to report their feeling, but only in terms of anxiety and depression. People will use whatever measure you give them to describe how they feel. If someone feels crappy and you give her only an anxiety scale, she’ll report her feelings using words for anxiety. She might even come to feel anxious as the words prime her to simulate an instance of “Anxiety.” Alternatively if you hand her a depression scale, she’ll report her feeling using words for depression and might likewise end up feeling depressed. This would explain my mysterious results. Concepts like “Anxiety” and “Depression” are highly variable and malleable. Words on questionnaires can influence people’s categorizations, just like the basic emotion method influences perceptions with its list of emotion words.40

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I am anticipating a little, but I cannot help running my memory all over the keyboard of that school year. In meeting my attempts to find out what kind of boys Lo knew, Miss Dahl was elegantly evasive. Lo who had gone to play tennis at Linda’s country club had telephoned she might be a full half hour late, and so, would I entertain Mona who was coming to practice with her a scene from The Taming of the Shrew. Using all the modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of and staring at me with perhaps—could I be mistaken?—a faint gleam of crystalline irony, beautiful Mona replied: “Well, sir, the fact is Dolly is not much concerned with mere boys. Fact is, we are rivals. She and I have a crush on the Reverend Rigger.” (This was a joke—I have already mentioned that gloomy giant of a man, with the jaw of a horse: he was to bore me to near murder with his impressions of Switzerland at a tea party for parents that I am unable to place correctly in terms of time.) How had the ball been? Oh, it had been a riot. A what? A panic. Terrific, in a word. Had Lo danced a lot? Oh, not a frightful lot, just as much as she could stand. What did she, languorous Mona, think of Lo? Sir? Did she think Lo was doing well at school? Gosh, she certainly was quite a kid. But her general behavior was—? Oh, she was a swell kid. But still? “Oh, she’s a doll,” concluded Mona, and sighed abruptly, and picked up a book that happened to lie at hand, and with a change of expression, falsely furrowing her brow, inquired: “Do tell me about Ball Zack, sir. Is he really that good?” She moved up so close to my chair that I made out through lotions and creams her uninteresting skin scent. A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp? If so, she had found the wrong substitute. Avoiding Mona’s cool gaze, I talked literature for a minute. Then Dolly arrived—and slit her pale eyes at us. I left the two friends to their own devices. One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position—a knight’s move from the top—always strangely disturbed me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  now this is rare, in fact, unprecedented in my professional experience— you’ve been misdiagnosed. You might be suffering from something, how shall I put this . . . psychosomatic. Running that risk, I believe we should be conservative.” “I’ll try the Infermiterol,” I said curtly. “Good. And eat a high-dairy meal each day. Did you know that cows can choose to sleep standing up or lying down? Given the option, I know what I’d pick. Have you ever made yogurt on the stove? Don’t answer that. We’ll save the cooking lesson for our next meeting. Now write this down because I have a feeling you’re too psychotic to remember: Saturday, January twentieth, at two o’clock. And try the Infermiterol. Bye-bye.” “Wait,” I said. “The Ambien.” “I’ll call it in right away.” I hung up and looked at my phone. It was only Sunday, January 7. I went to the bathroom and took stock of the medicine cabinet, counting out all my pills on the grimy tile floor. In all, I had two Ambien but thirty more on the way, twelve Rozerem, sixteen trazodone, around ten each of Ativan, Xanax, and Valium, Nembutal, and Solfoton, plus single digit amounts of a dozen random medications that Dr. Tuttle had prescribed only once “because refilling something this peculiar might trigger speculation by the insurance wizards.” In the past, this supply of medication would have been enough for a month of moderate sleeping, nothing too deep if I was conservative with the Ambien. But I knew in my heart that they were all useless now—a collection of foreign currency, a gun with no bullets. The Infermiterol had made all other drugs moot. Maybe it was radiating detoxifying energy into everything on the shelves, I thought, and although I knew that was nonsense, I put all the pills back in the medicine cabinet, but left the Infermiterol bottle out on the dining table, its blue plastic top flashing like a neon light as I looked through the mail. I took a few Nembutal and shot back the dregs of a bottle of Dimetapp.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night. Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman. I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood. Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves. “Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.” A TEN Freud’s House It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet, gentle girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home. —Sigmund Freud drian dropped us off at the hotel without a word and roared off in the Triumph to get lost.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And during this lull in the drama of sleep, I entered a stranger, less certain reality. Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth. But that was all that went on. And I might have just dreamt up the scum. Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream. Three IN NOVEMBER, however, an unfortunate shift occurred. The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was unconscious. I’d fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor. Furniture got rearranged. I started to misplace things. I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I’d go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I’d acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I’d been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted? The Egyptians were generally indifferent and returned the standard chitchat or flat out ignored me, so it was hard to tell. It concerned me that I was venturing out of the apartment while unconscious. It seemed antithetical to my hibernation project. If I committed a crime or got hit by a bus, the chance for a new and better life would be lost. If my unconscious excursions went only as far as the bodega around the corner, that was okay, I thought. I could live. The worst that could happen was I’d make a fool of myself in front of the Egyptians and would have to start going to the deli a few blocks farther down First Avenue. I prayed that my subconscious understood the value of convenience. Amen.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  You’re having to work that much harder just to hold your mind centered. It’s effort wasted, I’m afraid. If you let your mind drift, you’d find you can adapt quite easily to the deviated reality. But the instinct for self-correction is powerful. Oh, is it powerful. Proper medication should soften the impulse. You had no idea about your facial deviation?” “No,” I answered, and raised my hands to touch my eyes. She reached down into a paper shopping bag and pulled out four sample bottles of Infermiterol. “Double your dosage. These are ten milligram tablets. Take two,” she said, and slid the boxes across her desk. “If vanity is going to keep you up at night, let me just say, it’s a very minor slant.” • • • IN THE CAB HOME, I looked at myself in the reflection of the tinted windows. My face was perfectly aligned: Dr. Tuttle was obviously crazy. In the gold-tone doors of the elevator up to my apartment, I still looked good. I looked like a young Lauren Bacall the morning after. I’m a disheveled Joan Fontaine, I thought. Unlocking the door to my apartment, I was Kim Novak. “You’re prettier than Sharon Stone,” Reva would have said. She was right. I went to the sofa, clicked the TV on. George Walker Bush was taking his oath of office. I watched him squint and give his monologue. “Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats; it is a call to conscience.” What the hell did that mean? That Americans should take the blame for all the ills of the world? Or just our own world? Who cared? And then, as though I’d summoned her with my mundane cynicism, Reva was knocking on my door once again. I answered somewhat gratefully. “Well, I scheduled the abortion,” she said, rushing past me into the living room. “I need you to tell me I’m doing the right thing.” “I ask you to be citizens: Citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens building communities of service and a nation of character.” “This Bush is so much cuter than the last. Isn’t he? Like a rascal puppy.” “Reva, I’m not feeling well.” “Well, neither am I,” she said. “I just want to wake up and it all be over, and I never have to think about this again. I’m not going to tell Ken. Unless I feel like I should. But only after. Do you think he’ll feel bad? Oh, I feel sick. Oh, I feel terrible.” “Do you want something to take the edge off?” “God, yes.” I pulled one of the Infermiterol samples Dr. Tuttle had given me from the pocket of my fur coat.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Brian Stollerman (my first lover and first husband) was very short, inclined to paunchiness, hairy and dark. He was also a human cannonball and a nonstop talker. He was always in motion, always spewing out words of five syllables. He was a medievalist and before you could say “Albigensian Crusade” he’d tell you the story of his life—in extravagantly exaggerated detail. Brian gave the impression of never shutting up. This was not quite true, though, because he did stop talking when he slept. But when he finally flipped his cookies (as we politely said in my immediate family) or showed symptoms of schizophrenia (as one of his many psychiatrists put it) or woke up to the real meaning of his life (as he put it) or had a nervous breakdown (as his Ph.D. thesis adviser put it) or became-exhausted-as-a-result-of-being-married-to-that-Jewish-princess-from-New York (as his parents put it)—then he never stopped talking even to sleep. He stopped sleeping, in fact, and he used to keep me up all night telling me about the Second Coming of Christ and how this time Jesus just might come back as a Jewish medievalist living on Riverside Drive. Of course we were living on Riverside Drive, and Brian was a spellbinding talker. But still, I was so wrapped up in his fantasies, such a willing member of a folie à deux that it took a whole week of staying up every night listening to him before it dawned on me that Brian himself intended to be the Second Coming. Nor did he take very kindly to my pointing out that this might be a delusion; he very nearly choked me to death for my contribution to the discussion. After I caught my breath (I make it sound simpler than it was for the sake of getting on with the story), he attempted various things like flying through windows and walking on the water in Central Park Lake, and finally he had to be taken forcibly to the psycho ward and subdued with Thorazine, Compazine, Stelazine, and whatever else anyone could think of. At which point I collapsed with exhaustion, took a rest cure at my parents’ apartment (they had become strangely sane in the face of Brian’s flagrant craziness), and cried for about a month. Until one day I woke up with relief in the quiet of our deserted apartment on Riverside Drive, and realized that I hadn’t been able to hear myself think in four years. I knew then that I’d never go back to living with Brian—whether he stopped thinking he was Jesus Christ or not.

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

  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. Numerous studies have looked at performance on math tests such as the GRE and found that students achieve higher scores when they recategorize anxiety as merely a sign that the body is coping. People who recategorize anxiety as excitement show similar effects, with better performance and fewer classic symptoms of anxiety when speaking in public and even when singing karaoke. Their sympathetic nervous system still creates those jittery butterflies, but with fewer of the proinflammatory cytokines that lower performance and generally make people feel crappy, so they perform better. Studies have shown that remedial math students at community colleges can improve their exam grades and their final course grade through effective recategorization. This significant development can change the trajectory of a person’s life, given that a college degree can be the difference between financial success and a lifelong struggle to make ends meet. 2 9 If you can categorize your discomfort as helpful, say, when you’re exercising hard, you can cultivate greater stamina. The U.S. Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Whenever you exercise just until you feel unpleasant and then stop, you’re categorizing your physical sensations as exhaustion. You’ll always exercise below your threshold, despite the health benefits of continuing. Through recategorization, however, you can continue exercising and feel even better later, as you reap the benefits of a stronger, healthier body. The more you do it, the more you tune your conceptual system toward longer exercise in the future. 3 0 Lower back pain, sports injuries, soreness from arduous medical treatments, and other ailments offer similar opportunities to distinguish between physical discomfort and affective distress. People who live with chronic pain, for example, commonly have catastrophic thoughts that appear to impact their lives even more than the intensity of the pain does. When they learn to separate their physical sensations from their unpleasant affect, they may use fewer opiate drugs and crave them less.

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

  You’d therefore have impaired statistical learning, making it difficult for you to learn basic concepts, even to recognize the same person from different angles. Many things would be outside your affective niche. If you were an infant in that situation, you’d most likely be disinterested in other humans; you’d stop looking at the faces of your caregivers, making it harder for them to regulate your highly disrupted body budget, breaking a crucial bond. You would also have trouble learning purely mental concepts of social reality because they’re learned with words, but you’re disinterested in humans so you probably have difficulty learning language. You’d never grow a proper conceptual system. In the end, you’d exist in a constant stream of ambiguous sensory input with few concepts to help you make sense of it. You’d be anxious all the time because sensations are unpredictable. In effect, you’d have a total breakdown of interoception, concepts, and social reality. In order to learn at all, you’d need your sensory input to be very consistent, even stereotyped, with as little variation as possible. I don’t know about you, but to me, this collection of symptoms sounds just like autism. 41 Clearly, autism is an incredibly complex condition and a gigantic area of research, and it can’t be summed up in a handful of paragraphs. Autism is also hugely variable, a term applied to a wide spectrum of symptoms that probably have multiple, complex causes. All I’m saying is: the possibility is intriguing that autism is a disorder of prediction. 42 People with autism who can describe their experiences say things consistent with the idea. Temple Grandin, one of the most famous and outspoken individuals with autism, writes clearly about her lack of prediction and her overwhelming prediction error. “Sudden loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve,” she writes in “An Inside View of Autism.” Grandin eloquently describes how she struggled to form concepts: “When I was a child, I categorized dogs from cats by sorting the animals by size. All the dogs in our neighborhood were large until our neighbors got a Dachshund. I remember looking at the small dog and trying to figure out why she was not a cat.” Naoki Higashida, a thirteen-year-old boy with autism who wrote The Reason I Jump, notes his efforts to categorize: “First, I scan my memory to find an experience closest to what’s happening now. When I’ve found a good close match, my next step is to try to recall what I said the last time. If I’m lucky, I hit upon a usable experience and all is well.” In other words, lacking a properly functioning conceptual system, Higashida has to work hard to do what other brains do automatically. 43 Other researchers too are now speculating that autism is a failure of prediction. Some believe that autism is primarily caused by a dysfunction of the control network, producing a model of the world that is too specific to each situation.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  See to it that she does not outshine you.'" Beauty shook her head then and kissed Prince Alexi. She now saw what he meant when he said he had only just begun to yield. "But Alexi," she said gently, almost as if she could save him from his fate, as if it hadn't already happened long ago, "When you were brought by the stable boy to the Queen's presence, when she made you fetch the golden balls for her in the parlor, was this not something of the same thing?" She stopped. "O, how shall I ever do these things!" "But you can do them, all of them, that's the point of my story," he said. "Each new thing seems terrible because it is new, because it is a variation. But at the heart it is all the same ultimately. The paddle, the strap, the exposure, the bending of the will. Only they infinitely vary it. "But you do well to mention this first session with the Queen. It was similar. But remember I was raw and shaken from the kitchen, and thoughtless. I had regained my strength since then, and my strength had to be broken down again. Now perhaps had the little circus been constructed when I was fresh from the kitchen I would have taken to it eagerly then too. But I think not. It encompassed much greater exposure, much greater stamina, much greater surrender of self into positions and attitudes that appeared grotesque and inhuman. "No wonder they need no real cruelty, no fire, no whips, to teach their lessons or amuse themselves," he sighed. "But what happened? Did it come about?" "Yes, of course, though Lord Gregory had no need of telling me beforehand except to rob me of sleep. I spent a painful restless night. I awoke many times thinking others were near, the stable boys, or the kitchen servants, that they had found me helpless and alone and meant to torment me. But no one approached me. "During the night I heard whispers of conversation as Lords and Ladies walked under the stars. Now and then I even hears a slave driven past, crying fitfully under the inevitable smack of the leather. A torch would flicker under the trees, nothing more. "When the morning came, I was bathed, and rubbed with oil, and all this time, my penis was not touched, save when it flagged. Then it was cleverly awakened. "At twilight, the Slaves' Hall was full of talk of the circus. I was told by my groom, Leon, that the circle of performance had been prepared in a spacious hall near the Queen's apartments. There would be four rows of Lords and Ladies surrounding it, and they would bring their slaves, too, to see the amusement.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was much younger then: the best I can say is that I was appalled, but not-alas-surprised. Still, it was horrible to be confirmed: out of this obscenely fomented hysteria, we are confronted with the nonsense of the pumpkin papers, the self-important paranoia of Whittaker Chambers, such night shade creatures as Harvey Matusow, Elizabeth Bentley, and Harry Gold, and the breathtaking careers of those remarkable spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: who are about to lose their lives, just the same, in order to astonish, halt, and purify, an erring nation. Yes: and there were others. Some knew it, and some didn't. I wandered, then, in my confusion and isolation-for al most all the friends I had had were in trouble, and, therefore, CHAPTER TWO 545 in one way or another, incommunicad(}--into a movie, called My Son, John. And I will never forget it. This movie stars Miss Helen Hayes, the late Van Heflin, and the late Robert Walker. Dean Jagger plays the American Legion husband. (Years and years ago, Dean Jagger had ap peared in John Wexley's play about the Scottsboro Case, They Shall Not Die!: he played the young reporter whose love forces one of the poor white girls to retract her testimony that the black boys had raped her.) The family is the American family one has seen and seen and seen again on the American screen: the somewhat stolid, but, at bottom, strong, decent, and loving head of the family; the somewhat scatterbrained, but, at bottom, shrewd, loving, and tough wife and mother; and the children of this remark ably unremarkable couple. In My Son, John, there are two sons. One of them plays football, which is, literally, all that we ever learn about him. The other son, John, who does not, apparently, play football, has flown the family coop, and has a job in Washington, where he appears to be doing very well. But they don't see very much of him anymore, which causes the mother some distress: she misses her son, John, and this to a somewhat disquieting extent-the movie seems to feel, however, that this morbid worry about the life of her grown son is the normal reaction of any normal American mother. The mother's distress is considerably augmented by the ar rival of the FBI, in the personable person of Van Heflin, who arrives to ask the family discreet questions concerning their maverick relative. Though this FBI agent is the soul of tact and understanding, the mother eventually perceives the grav ity of the situation, and agrees to attempt to save her son. The salvation of her son depends on confession, for he is, indeed, a Communist agent: for the sake of her son's salvation, she must, therefore, cooperate with the FBI.

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

  These adult children of divorce tend to cultivate close ties with their spouse’s family and distance themselves from their own parents so that their children can share the sense of stability and safety they find so reassuring. I was impressed by how many women in the study eventually found kind, caretaking husbands who truly loved them and were willing to put up with excitable behavior in their young wives. Several women said that their husbands were challenged by their moody restlessness and enjoyed setting boundaries in the marriage. Marie, who had been wild during her early-and mid-twenties, described this interaction in vivid detail. “He just wouldn’t be drawn into my stuff,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me manipulate him. He tolerated it but he remained himself. He was a center for me. I danced all around. He was on to my tricks. I tried everything I usually do with guys, but it didn’t work. He said ‘Forget it lady, I’m here for keeps.’ That was ten years ago. We’ve been married ever since.” The men, too, sought calm and kindness rather than passion in their wives. They valued the woman’s ability to create a comfortable home. They said that they wanted a woman on whom they could depend. Being older, they were much more aware of how to assess a woman’s moods and how to repair the relationship when necessary. Several spoke of their wives in romantic terms, describing their beauty and caring qualities. But they also mentioned their long work days and concern that their wives might be lonely. They worried they might lose their love and fidelity. While this ongoing, subsurface tension was more a residue of their parents’ divorce than a current reality, it made the men eager to be good husbands. They tried hard to please their wives and felt blessed by unusual good fortune when they felt loved. Waiting for the Other Shoe E VEN IN MARRIAGES as loving as Karen’s, there are residues from the divorce. We discussed her problem with handling conflict but now she described another: “Whenever Gavin’s late, when he has a faculty meeting, when he has to be out of town for a consulting job, my first thought—and I hate myself for this—is that he’s going to leave me. He doesn’t really love me.” “Is that what you mean by waiting for the other shoe to drop?” She smiled wryly. “If you’re asking me whether I’m still afraid, the answer is yes, even though I’m married to a man who truly loves me. I’ve finally come to accept that my fears won’t go away. It’s like they’re imprinted in my head. They’re not as strong as they used to be and Gavin tries to teach me to laugh them away.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Behind us was the past—which we invoked more and more to pass the time and to amuse each other (in the way that parents make up games of geography or identify-the-song-title for their bored children during long car rides). We told long stories about our pasts, embellishing, embroidering, and dramatizing in the manner of novelists. Of course, we pretended to be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but nobody (as Henry Miller says) can tell the absolute truth; and even our most seemingly autobiographical revelations were partly fabrications—literature, in short. We bought the future by talking about the past. At times I felt like Scheherazade, amusing my king with subplots to keep the main plot from abruptly ending. Each of us could (theoretically) throw in the towel at any point, but I feared that Adrian was more likely to do it than me, and that it was my problem to keep him amused. When the chips are down and I’m alone with a man for days on end, then I realize more than ever how unliberated I am. My natural impulse is to toady. All my high-falutin’ rebelliousness is only a reaction to my deep-down servility. It’s only when you’re forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer. Take it away and there is only the past—and a windshield spattered with dead bugs. Adrian made the rules, but he also had a tendency to change them frequently to suit himself. In this respect, he reminded me of my older sister Randy when she and I were kids. She taught me to shoot craps when I was seven (and she was twelve) but she used to change the rules around from minute to minute depending on what she rolled. After a ten-minute session with her, I would be divested of the entire contents of my carefully hoarded piggybank, while she (who started out broke) wound up as flush as Sky Masterson. No matter how Lady Luck had smiled on me, I always ended up a loser. “Snake eyes—I win!” my sister would yelp. “You do?” (I used to hoard my dollar allowance like the ant while she spent hers like the grasshopper—but she always wound up flush and I wound up bankrupt.) The perils of primogeniture. And I the perennially second-born.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  If a violin string can ache, then I was that string. But it would have been unseemly to display any hurry. As I made my way through a constellation of fixed people in one corner of the lobby, there came a blinding flash—and beaming Dr. Braddock, two orchid-ornamentalized matrons, the small girl in white, and presumably the bared teeth of Humbert Humbert sidling between the bridelike lassie and the enchanted cleric, were immortalized—insofar as the texture and print of small-town newspapers can be deemed immortal. A twittering group had gathered near the elevator. I again chose the stairs. 342 was near the fire escape. One could still—but the key was already in the lock, and then I was in the room. 29 The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton glow came through the Venetian blind from the outside arclights; these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed the following situation. Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, my Lolita lay on her side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae. I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas with the kind of fantastic instantaneousness which is implied when in a cinematographic scene the process of changing is cut; and I had already placed my knee on the edge of the bed when Lolita turned her head and stared at me through the striped shadows. Now this was something the intruder had not expected. The whole pill-spiel (a rather sordid affair, entre nous soit dit) had had for object a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed, and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me “Barbara.” Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited and strained on the brink, like that tailor with his homemade parachute forty years ago when about to jump from the Eiffel Tower. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto my narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the odds and ends of sheets piled up to the south of my stone- cold heels—and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And still I dared not. Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in your hole. Courts became extravagantly active only when there was some monetary question involved: two greedy guardians, a robbed orphan, a third, Kill greedier, party. But here all was in perfect order, an inventory had been made, and her mother’s small property was waiting untouched for Dolores Haze to grow up. The best policy seemed to be to refrain from any application. Or would some busybody, some Humane Society, butt in if I kept too quiet? Friend Farlow, who was a lawyer of sorts and ought to have been able to give me some solid advice, was too much occupied with Jean’s cancer to do anything more than what he had promised—namely, to look after Charlotte’s meager estate while I recovered very gradually from the shock of her death. I had conditioned him into believing Dolores was my natural child, and so could not expect him to bother his head about the situation. I am, as the reader must have gathered by now, a poor businessman; but neither ignorance nor indolence should have prevented me from seeking professional advice elsewhere. What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation. I decided that at Beardsley (the site of Beardsley College for Women) I would have access to works of reference that I had not yet been able to study, such as Woerner’s Treatise “On the American Law of Guardianship” and certain United States Children’s Bureau Publications. I also decided that anything was better for Lo than the demoralizing idleness in which she lived.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When people spoke, I had to repeat what they’d said in my mind before understanding it. I told Dr. Tuttle I was having trouble concentrating. She said it was probably due to “brain mist.” “Are you sleeping enough?” Dr. Tuttle asked every week I went to see her. “Just barely,” I always answered. “Those pills hardly put a dent in my anxiety.” “Eat a can of chickpeas,” she said. “Otherwise known as garbanzos. And try these.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. The array of medicines I was accumulating was awe inspiring. Dr. Tuttle explained that there was a way to maximize insurance coverage by prescribing drugs for their side effects, rather than going directly to those whose main purposes were to relieve my symptoms, which were in my case “debilitating fatigue due to emotional weakness, plus insomnia, resulting in soft psychosis and belligerence.” That’s what she told me she was going to write in her notes. She termed her prescribing method “ecoscripting,” and said she was writing a paper on it that would be published soon. “In a journal in Hamburg.” So she gave me pills that targeted migraine headaches, prevented seizures, cured restless leg syndrome, prevented hearing loss. These medicines were supposed to relax me so that I could get some “much-needed rest.” • • • ONE DAY IN MARCH 2000, I returned to my desk at Ducat after a visit to the infinite abyss of the supply closet and found what would light the path toward my eventual dismissal. “Sleep at night,” the note read. It was from Natasha. “This is a place of business.” I can’t blame Natasha for wanting to fire me. I’d been napping at work for almost a year by then. Over the final few months, I had stopped dressing up for work. I just sat at my desk in a hooded sweatshirt, three-day-old mascara caked and smeared around my eyes. I lost things. I confused things. I was bad at my job. I could plan to do something and then find myself doing the opposite. I made messes. The interns wrangled me back on task, reminding me of what I’d asked them to do. “What next?” What next? I couldn’t imagine. Natasha started to take notice. My sleepiness was good for rudeness to visitors to the gallery, but not for signing for packages or noticing if someone had come in with a dog and tracked paw prints all over the floor, which happened a few times. There were a few spilled lattes. MFA students touching paintings, once even rearranging an installation of shattered CD jewel cases in a Jarrod Harvey installation to spell out the word “HACK.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Bennett mumbled. I had awakened him. I always talked in my sleep, and he always answered. “What happened?” “You were on a seesaw with someone. I got scared.” “Oh.” He rolled over. Normally Bennett would have put his arms around me, but we were in narrow beds on opposite sides of the room and instead he went back to sleep. I was wide awake now and could hear birds making a racket in the garden behind the hotel. At first they comforted me. Then I remembered that they were German birds and I got depressed. Secretly, I hate traveling. I’m restless at home, but the minute I get away I feel the threat of doom hanging over my most trivial actions. Why had I come back to Europe anyway? My whole life was in pieces. For two years I had lain in bed with Bennett and thought of other men. For two years I had debated whether to get pregnant or strike out on my own and see some more of the world before settling down to anything that permanent. How did people decide to get pregnant, I wondered. It was such an awesome decision. In a way, it was such an arrogant decision. To undertake responsibility for a new life when you had no way of knowing what it would be like. I assumed that most women got pregnant without thinking about it because if they ever once considered what it really meant, they would surely be overwhelmed with doubt. I had none of that blind faith in chance which other women seemed to have. I always wanted to be in control of my fate. Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life. I had been compulsively using a diaphragm for so long that pregnancy could never be accidental for me. Even during the two years I took the pill, I never missed a day. Slob that I was about everything else, I had never messed up on that score. I was virtually the only one of my friends who’d never had an abortion. What was wrong with me? Was I unnatural? I just hadn’t the normal female compulsion to get knocked up. All I could think of was me with my restlessness, with my longings for zipless fucks and strangers on trains—being tied down with a baby.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  After a while, I began to wonder if she was drunk. Maybe we’d die in a car accident, I thought. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window and looked out at the dark water of the East River. It wouldn’t be that bad to die, I thought. Traffic slowed. Reva turned the radio down. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked stiffly. “I don’t want to be needy, but I’m afraid of being alone right now. I don’t feel like myself and I’m afraid something bad is going to happen.” “Okay,” I said, though I assumed she’d change her mind a few minutes past midnight. “We can watch a movie,” she said. “Whatever you want. Hey, can you dig my gum out of my purse? I don’t want to take my hands off the wheel.” Reva’s fake Gucci bag sat between us on the console. I fished around tampons and perfume and hand sanitizer and her makeup kit and rolled up issues of Cosmo and Marie Claire and a hairbrush and a toothbrush and toothpaste and her huge wallet and her cell phone and her datebook and her sunglasses and finally found a single piece of cinnamon Extra in the little side pocket otherwise full of old LIRR ticket receipts. The paper had turned pink and oily. “Wanna split it?” she asked. “Gross,” I said. “No.” Reva put her hand out. I watched her watching the road. Maybe she wasn’t drunk, I thought, just exhausted. I placed the piece of gum in her palm. Reva unwrapped it and stuck it in her mouth and flicked the wrapper over her shoulder and chewed and kept on driving. I stared down into the East River again, black and glittering with the yellow lights of the city. The traffic wasn’t budging. I thought of my apartment. I hadn’t been there in days—not awake, anyway. I imagined the mess I’d discover with Reva when we walked in. I hoped she wouldn’t comment. I didn’t think she would, given the day. “I always think about earthquakes when I’m on this bridge,” Reva said. “You know, like in San Francisco when that bridge collapsed?” “This is New York City,” I said. “We don’t get earthquakes.” “I was watching the World Series when it happened,” Reva said. “With my dad. I totally remember it. Do you remember it?” “No,” I lied. Of course I remembered it, but I’d thought nothing of it. “You’re watching a baseball game and then all of a sudden, boom. And you’re like, thousands of people just died.” “It wasn’t thousands.” “A lot, though.” “Maybe a few hundred, max.” “A lot of people got crushed on that freeway. And on that bridge,” Reva insisted. “It’s fine, Reva,” I said. I didn’t want her to cry again.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). So my nymphet is not in the house at all! Gone! What I thought was a prismatic weave turns out to be but an old gray cobweb, the house is empty, is dead. And then comes Lolita’s soft sweet chuckle through my half-open door “Don’t tell Mother but I’ve eaten all your bacon.” Gone when I scuttle out of my room. Lolita, where are you? My breakfast tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Lola, Lolita! Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks. Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. “Choose your favorite seduction,” she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business, do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car. “Hurry up,” she said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita’s sharp voice came from the parlor window: “You! Where are you going? I’m coming too! Wait!” “Ignore her,” yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. “This is intolerable,” began Haze; but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with glee. “Move your bottom, you,” said Lo. “Lo!” cried Haze (sideglancing at me, hoping I would throw rude Lo out). “And behold,” said Lo (not for the first time), as she jerked back, as I jerked back, as the car leapt forward. “It is intolerable,” said Haze, violently getting into second, “that a child should be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And needs a bath.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Person, Porlock, England.” In horrible taste but basically suggestive of a cultured man—not a policeman, not a common goon, not a lewd salesman—were such assumed names as “Arthur Rainbow”—plainly the travestied author of Le Bateau Bleu — let me laugh a little too, gentlemen—and “Morris Schmetterling,” of L’Oiseau Ivre fame ( touché , reader!). The silly but funny “ D. Orgon, Elmira, NY,” was from Molière, of course, and because I had quite recently tried to interest Lolita in a famous 18th-century play, I welcomed as an old friend “Harry Bumper, Sheridan, Wyo.” An ordinary encyclopedia informed me who the peculiar looking “ Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH” was; and any good Freudian, with a German name and some interest in religious prostitution, should recognize at a glance the implication of “ Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” So far so good. That sort of fun was shoddy but on the whole impersonal and thus innocuous. Among entries that arrested my attention as undoubtable clues per se but baffled me in respect to their finer points I do not care to mention many since I feel I am groping in a border-land mist with verbal phantoms turning, perhaps, into living vacationists. Who was “Johnny Randall, Ramble, Ohio”? Or was he a real person who just happened to write a hand similar to “N.S. Aristoff, Catagela, NY”? What was the sting in “Catagela”? And what about “James Mavor Morell, Hoaxton, England”? “Aristophanes,” “hoax”—fine, but what was I missing? There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity which caused me especially painful palpitations when I came across it. Such things as “ G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.” was the sign of treachery on Lolita’s part. “ Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island” suggested more lucidly than the garbled telephone message had that the starting point of the affair should be looked for in the East. “ Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa.” insinuated that my Carmen had betrayed my pathetic endearments to the impostor. Horribly cruel, forsooth, was “ Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.” The gruesome “ Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona” (which at another time would have appealed to my sense of humor) implied a familiarity with the girl’s past that in night-mare fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an old friend of the family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte’s, maybe a redresser of wrongs (“ Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev.”). But the most penetrating bodkin was the anagramtailed entry in the register of Chestnut Lodge “ Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.”.