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 The Art of Seduction (2001)

  As an undefensive lover, though, you produce the opposite effect: your victim might be hesitant or worried, but confronted with someone so sure and natural, he or she will be caught up in the mood. Like dancing with someone you lead effortlessly across the dance floor, it is a skill you can learn. It is a matter of rooting out the fear and awkwardness that have built up in you over the years, of becoming more graceful with your approach, less defensive when others seem to resist. Often people's resistance is a way of testing you, and if you show any awkwardness or hesitation, you not only will fail the test, but you will risk infecting them with your doubts. Symbol: The Lamb. So soft and endearing. At two days old the lamb can gambol gracefully; within a week it is playing "Follow the Leader." Its weakness is part of its charm. The Lamb is pure innocence, so innocent we want to possess it, even devour it. 66 • The Art of Seduction Dangers Achildish quality can be charming but it can also be irritating; the innocent have no experience of the world, and their sweetness can prove cloying. In Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the hero dreams that he is trapped on an island with a group of children. Soon their wonderful qualities become intensely annoying to him; after a few days of exposure to them he cannot relate to them at all. The dream turns into a nightmare, and he longs to be back among adults, with real things to do and talk about. Because total childishness can quickly grate, the most seductive Naturals are those who, like Josephine Baker, combine adult experience and wisdom with a childlike manner. It is this mixture of qualities that is most alluring. Society cannot tolerate too many Naturals. Given a crowd of Cora Pearls or Charlie Chaplins, their charm would quickly wear off. In any case it is usually only artists, or people with abundant leisure time, who can afford to go all the way. The best way to use the Natural character type is in specific situations when a touch of innocence or impishness will help lower your target's defenses. A con man plays dumb to make the other person trust him and feel superior. This kind of feigned naturalness has countless applications in daily life, where nothing is more dangerous than looking smarter than the next person; the Natural pose is the perfect way to disguise your cleverness. But if you are uncontrollably childish and cannot turn it off, you run the risk of seeming pathetic, earning not sympathy but pity and disgust.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I feel a tiny rivulet of sweat trickle down between my breasts. Suddenly Bob’s voice surfaces again. “What happened? Did you have a…” Then gurgling interference. Then silence. I envision some giant fish gnawing on the Atlantic cable. Every time the fish chomps down, Bob’s voice goes dead. “Bob!” “I can’t hear you. I said: did you have a fight? ” “Yes. It’s too hard to explain. It’s awful. It’s all my…” “ What? I can’t hear you…. Where’s Bennett?” “That’s why I’m calling you.” “What? I didn’t catch that.” “ Shit. I can’t hear you either…. Listen, if he calls, tell him I love him” “What?” “Tell him I’m looking for him.” “ What? I can’t hear you.” “Tell him I want him.” “ What? I can’t hear you.” “Tell him I want him.” “ What? Would you repeat that?” “This is impossible.” “I can’t hear you.” “Just tell him that I love him.” “What? This is a horrible conn…” We are cut off for the last time. The operator’s voice intervenes with the news that I owe 129 new francs and 34 centimes. “But I couldn’t hear anything!” The operator insists that I owe it anyway. I go to the telephone cashier, look in my wallet and find I have no francs at all, old or new. So I have to go through the hassle of changing money and fighting with the cashier, but finally I pay. It’s just too much trouble to protest further. I begin peeling off francs as if in penance. I’d pay anything just to be home now recollecting this whole thing in tranquillity. That’s the part of it all I really do like best. Why kid myself? I’m no existentialist. Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down—revising and embellishing as I go. I’m always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper. “What happened?” Adrian says, appearing from the men’s room. “All I know for sure is that he’s not in New York.” “Maybe he’s in London.” “Hey—maybe he is.” My heart is pounding at the thought of seeing him again. “Why don’t we drive to London together,” I suggest, “and part good friends?” “Because I think you have to face this on your own,” says Adrian the Moralist. I see nothing sinister in his proposal. In a way, he’s right. I got myself into this mess—why count on him to get me out? “Let’s go have a drink and think things over,” I say, stalling for time. “Right.”

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

  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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Petit, Larousse, Ill.”); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk—but that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else—he was quite capable of that—he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita’s pillow. In some instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick! I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold, that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton, she was about to shriek, but I managed to humanize her by the simple act of falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light of the moon. “He is your brother,” she whispered at last. I plucked the bill out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran away. This taught me to rely on myself alone. No detective could discover the clues Trapp had tuned to my mind and manner.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Like The House of Mirth,” I said. “A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle. “I haven’t read it.” “Better you don’t.” “I read The Age of Innocence.” “So you’re educated.” “I went to Columbia.” “That’s good for me to know, but not much use to you in your condition. Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned, having gone to Columbia. How’s your food intake? Is it steady? Any dietary restrictions? When you walked in here, I thought of Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway. Any relation? I’d say you’re what, twenty pounds below an ideal Quetelet index?” “I think my appetite would come back if I could sleep,” I said. It was a lie. I was already sleeping upwards of twelve hours, from eight to eight. I was hoping to get pills to help me sleep straight through the weekends. “Daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats. I’m not a religious person, but you could try visiting a church or synagogue to ask for advice on inner peace. The Quakers seem like reasonable people. But be wary of cults. They’re often just traps to enslave young women. Are you sexually active?” “Not really,” I told her. “Do you live near any nuclear plants? Any high-voltage equipment?” “I live on the Upper East Side.” “Take the subway?” At this point, I took the subway each day to work. “A lot of psychic diseases get passed around in confined public spaces. I sense your mind is too porous. Do you have any hobbies?” “I watch movies.” “That’s a fun one.” “How’d they get the rats to meditate?” I asked her. “You’ve seen rodents breed in captivity? The parents eat their babies. Now, we can’t demonize them. They do it out of compassion. For the good of the species. Any allergies?” “Strawberries.” With that, Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and stared off into space, deep in thought, it seemed. “Some rats,” she said after a while, “probably deserve to be demonized. Certain individual rats.” She picked her pen back up with a flourish of the purple feather. “The moment we start making generalizations, we give up our right to self-govern. I hope you follow me. Rats are very loyal to the planet. Try these,” she said, handing me a sheath of prescriptions. “Don’t fill them all at once. We need to stagger them so as not to raise any red flags.” She got up stiffly and opened a wooden cabinet full of samples, flicked sample packets of pills out onto the desk. “I’ll give you a paper bag for discretion,” she said. “Fill the lithium and Haldol prescriptions first. It’s good to get your case going with a bang. That way later on, if we need to try out some wackier stuff, your insurance company won’t be surprised.” I can’t blame Dr. Tuttle for her terrible advice.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She wondered if anyone could see her perplexity and excitement. She saw the distant Prince Tristan among the others, his blue eyes calmly fixed to the back of his master, Lord Stefan. Her mind was filled with lurid visions. And what was it Alexi had said, that such a punishment had been merciful and that if she found it too difficult to learn slowly, she might make herself ripe for some heavier punishment? Lady Juliana was shaking her head and making little tisks. "But it is only Spring now," she said. "Why, the poor darlings will be there forever. Ah, the heat, the flies, and the labor. You cannot imagine how they are used, and the soldiers crowding the taverns and the Inns, at last able to buy for a few coins a lovely Prince or Princess that they should never possess in a lifetime." "You make too much of it," the Prince insisted. "But would you send your own slave!" Lord Stefan appealed to him again. "I don't want him to go!" he murmured, "and yet I condemned him and before the Queen." "Then you have no choice, and yes, I would send my own slave, though no slave of the Queen or the Crown Prince has ever been so punished." The Prince turned his back to the slaves almost contemptuously. But Beauty continued to look, as the beautiful Prince Tristan commenced to push his way forward. He reached the fence and though a haughty guard who was having much sport with the group flailed at him with the leather belt, he did not move nor show the slightest discomfort. "Ah, he is appealing to you," Lady Juliana sighed, and at once Lord Stefan turned and the two young men faced each other. "Beauty watched as if in a trance as Lord Tristan knelt now slowly and gracefully and kissed the ground before his master. "It's too late," said the Prince, "and this little sign of affection and humility counts for nothing." Prince Tristan rose and stood with his eyes down in perfect patience. And Lord Stefan rushed forward and reaching over the fence embraced him immediately. He crushed Prince Tristan to his chest and kissed him all over his face and his hair. The captive Prince, his hands bound to the back of his neck, quietly returned the kisses. The Prince was in a rage. Lady Juliana was laughing. The Prince pulled Lord Stefan away and said they must leave these miserable slaves now. Tomorrow they would be in the village. Beauty lay on her bed afterwards unable to think of anything but the little group in the prison yard. Yet she saw too the narrow crooked streets of the villages she'd passed on her journey. She remembered the Inns with their painted signs over the gates, the half-timbered houses shadowing her path, and those tiny, diamond-pained windows. She would never forget the men and women in coarse breeches and white aprons, with sleeves rolled to the elbows.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty's breath became uneven, and she felt the moisture between her legs as though a grape had been squeezed there. It seemed the Queen was monstrously bigger than she, and as strong as a man, or was it only that to struggle against the Queen was unthinkable? Beauty tried to regain some calm, to think of her feeling of release on the Bridle Path, but it eluded her. It had been fragile all along. Now it was nothing. "Look at me," the Queen commanded gently again, and Beauty realized as she looked up that she was crying. "Spread your legs," the Queen ordered. At once Beauty obeyed. "Now she will see," Beauty thought. "It will be as bad as when Lord Gregory saw. And Prince Alexi will see." The Queen laughed. "I said spread your legs," she said, and gave Beauty's thighs fierce stinging slaps. Beauty spread her legs much wider and felt graceless as she did so. When her knees were pressed down to the coverlet on either side, she thought she could not endure the ignominy of it. She stared at the coffered ceiling of the bed above her and realized that the Queen was opening her sex as Leon had done. Beauty bit down on her cries. And Prince Alexi witnessed all of it. She remembered his kisses, and smiles. The lights of the room shimmered, and she felt her own shuddering as the Queen's fingers felt the moisture in this secret, exposed spot, playing with Beauty's pubic lips, smoothing the pubic hair, and finally catching a lock of it to pull and tease idly. It seemed the Queen took both her thumbs and wrenched Beauty open. Beauty tried to keep her hips still. She wanted to rise to escape, like some miserable Princess in the Training Hall who could not endure being so examined. Yet she did not protest; her whimpers were faint and uncertain. The Queen commanded her to turn over. Blessed concealment, that she could hide her face in the pillows. But those cool, commanding hands were playing with her buttocks now, opening them, touching her anus. "O, please," she thought desperately, and she knew that her shoulders shook with her silent crying. "O, this is dreadful, dreadful!" With the Prince, finally, she had known what was wanted. On the Bridle Path, finally, she had been told what was wanted. But what did this wicked Queen want of her, that she suffer, that she cringe, that she offer herself or merely endure?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Phil is at a prime age for the so-called midlife crisis that seems to hit many men around this stage of their lives. Explanations are easy to come by, ranging from economics (he finally has enough money and status to be attractive to the sort of sexy young women who had ignored him previously) to existential dread (he’s coming to terms with his own mortality by lashing out symbolically against his own impending aging and death) to the wife’s life cycle (she’s nearing menopause, so he’s biologically driven toward the fertility of younger women). Each of these may have some measure of truth, but none answers the most pressing question: Why do men have such overwhelming hunger for variety in their sexual partners—not just at midlife, but always? If the ghost of Calvin Coolidge weren’t haunting him, a man would simply buy a DVD or two of his favorite porn actress and watch it over and over the rest of his life. Knowing how the movie ends is hardly going to ruin the experience for him. No, what makes heterosexual men seek a constant stream of different women doing the same old things is the Coolidge effect. If you’ve never been to a porn gateway website, you’ll be astounded by the variety and specificity of the offerings there: everything from “unshaved Japanese lesbians” to “tattooed redheads” to “overweight older gals.” It’s a simple, unavoidable truth almost everyone knows to be true but few dare to discuss: variety and change are the necessary spice of the sex life of the human male. But an intellectual understanding of this aspect of most men’s inner reality doesn’t make accepting it any easier for many women. Writer and film director Nora Ephron has explored these issues in many of her films, including Heartburn, which was based on her own failed marriage. In a 2009 interview she explained how raising two sons had informed her view of men: “Boys are so sweet,” she said. “But the problem with men is not whether they’re nice or not. It’s that it’s hard for them at a certain point in their lives to stay true. It just is. It’s almost not their fault.” But then she added, “It feels like it’s their fault if you are involved with any of them.”21 The Perils of Monotomy (Monogamy + Monotony) The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful. CARL JUNG, in a letter to Freud dated January 30, 1910

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The vision of the Page, Felix, sucking it filled her with such sudden passion. She must have moaned or stirred because Prince Alexi, glancing up at the distant pavilion before he bent over the table to gather some sweet, suddenly kissed her on the ear, brushing Leon aside as if he were nothing. "You behave yourself, you wicked Prince," said Leon, but it was not playful. "I shall see you tomorrow night, my dearest," Prince Alexi whispered with a smile. "And don't be frightened of the Queen for I shall be with you." Beauty's mouth quivered on the verge of a cry, but he was gone, and now Leon had drawn up to her ear again, cupping his hand as he whispered: "You're to see the Queen tomorrow night for a few hours in her Quarters." "O, no, no..." Beauty wailed, tossing her head from side to side. "Don't be foolish. This is very good. You could not wish for better," and as he spook, he slipped his hand between her legs and pinched her lips gently. She felt herself grow warm there. "I was on the pavilion while you were running. The Queen was impressed in spite of herself," he went on, "and the Prince said you had always shown such form and spirit. And again, he pleaded for you, and that the Queen should not censure his passion. He agreed then not to see you tonight but to have a dozen or so new Princesses paraded before him..." "Don't tell me any more!" Beauty cried softly. "No, but don't you see, the Queen was enthralled with you and he knew it. She watched you closely as you ran, impatient for you to come to the pavilion. And it was she who said perhaps she should taste your charms herself to see if you were not as spoilt and vain as she had supposed. She will have you in her Quarters tomorrow night after supper." Beauty cried softly, too spiritless to answer. "But, Beauty, this is a great privilege. There are slaves here who serve years without ever being noticed by the Queen. You shall have your full opportunity to enchant her. And you shall, my dear, you shall, you cannot fail to do so. And the Prince has been clever for once. He has not worn his heart for all to see it." "But what will she do to me!" Beauty whimpered. "And Prince Alexi, will he see all of it? O, what will she do?" "O, she shall only make a plaything of you, of course. And you shall try to please her." THE QUEEN'S CHAMBER HALF THE night was gone before the Queen came.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  How would it feel to live in such a world? Well, we all know how it feels to live in this one. Apart from death itself, what causes as much human misery as the ongoing demise of marriage? In 2008, almost 40 percent of the mothers who gave birth in the United States were unmarried. This matters. As reported recently in Time, “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration…in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”3 “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing,” observed German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Indeed. By insisting upon an ideal vision of marriage founded upon a lifetime of sexual fidelity to one person—a vision most of us eventually learn is highly unrealistic, we invite punishment upon ourselves, upon each other, and upon our children. “The French are much more comfortable with the idea that their affair partner is just that—an affair partner,” writes Pamela Druckerman in her cross-cultural look at infidelity, Lust in Translation. Understanding that love and sex are different things, Druckerman says the French feel less need to “complain about their marriage to legitimize the affair in the first place.” But she found that Americans and British couples seemed to be reading from an entirely different script. “An affair, even a one-night stand, means a marriage is over,” Druckerman observed. “I spoke to women who, on discovering that their husbands had cheated, immediately packed a bag and left, because ‘that’s what you do.’ Not because that’s what they wanted to do—they just thought that was the rule. They didn’t even seem to realize there were other options…. I mean, really, like they’re reading from a script!”4 Psychologist Julian Jaynes described the commingling of terror and exhilaration one experiences upon realizing that things are not as they’d seemed: “There is an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.”5 This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore—even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the “confident girders” behind them in the past. The false expectations we hold about ourselves, each other, and human sexuality do us serious, lasting harm. As author and sex advice columnist Dan Savage explains, “The expectation of lifelong monogamy places an incredible strain on a marriage. But our concept of love and marriage has as its foundation not only the expectation of monogamy but the idea that where there’s love, monogamy should be easy and joyful.”6

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the Midwest lap of our journey, when she managed to convey some information to, or otherwise get into contact with, a person or persons unknown. We had stopped at a gas station, under the sign of Pegasus, and she had slipped out of her seat and escaped to the rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had bent to watch the mechanic’s manipulations, hid her for a moment from my sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only shook my benign head though strictly speaking such visits were taboo, since I felt instinctively that toilets—as also telephones—happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects—it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another—carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break. Well—my car had been attended to, and I had moved it away from the pumps to let a pickup truck be serviced—when the growing volume of her absence began to weigh upon me in the windy grayness. Not for the first time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green garbage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incompleted crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and because the rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of wind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch. The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously vibrated through me as, with her dress fluttering athwart the rhythm, Lolita veered from a totally unexpected direction. She had found the toilet occupied and had crossed over to the sign of the Conche in the next block. They said there they were proud of their home-clean restrooms.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty had dozed, then awakened again and again, to find herself still chained in the ornate bedchamber as if in a nightmare. She was bound to the wall, her ankles cuffed in leather, her wrists up over her head, her buttocks pushed against the cold stone behind her. At first the stone had felt good. Now and then she twisted to leg the air touch the soreness. Of course the abraded flesh was much healed from last night's ordeal on the Bridle Path, but she still suffered, and she knew tonight she was surely destined for more torment. Not the least of it, however, was her own passion. What had the Prince awakened in her that after one night of no satisfaction, she should feel so wanton? It was the stirring between her legs that first brought her out of sleep in the Slaves' Hall, and now and then she felt it as she stood waiting. The room itself lay in shadow and unbroken stillness. Dozens of thick candles burned in their heavy gilded holders, the wax spilling in rivulets through the traceries of gold. The bed with its tapestried draperies appeared a gaping cavern. Beauty closed her eyes. She opened them again. And when she was again on the verge of dream, she heard the heavy double doors thrown open and suddenly saw the tall, slender figure of the Queen materialized before her. The Queen moved to the center of the carpet. Her blue velvet gown cleaved to her girdled hips before flaring gently to cover her black pointed slippers. She gazed at Beauty with narrow, black eyes tipped up at the ends to give her a cruel expression, and then she smiled, her white cheeks dimpling though an instant before they had seemed as hard as white porcelain. Beauty had lowered her eyes at once. Petrified, she watched covertly as the Queen moved away from her and seated herself at an ornate dressing table, her back to a high mirror. With an off-handed gesture she dismissed the Ladies who stood at the door. A figure remained there, and Beauty, afraid to look, was certain it was Prince Alexi. So her tormentor had come, Beauty thought. Her heart pounded in her ears, becoming a roar rather than a pulse, and she felt the bonds holding her helpless so that she could not have defended herself against anyone or anything. Her breast felt heavy, and the moisture between her legs greatly agitated her. Would the Queen discover it and use it to further punish her? Yet mingled with her fear was some sense of her helplessness which had come over her the night before and never left her. She knew how she must appear, she was afraid, but she could do nothing and she was accepting it. Maybe this was a new strength, this acceptance.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  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. As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill did not even belong to the big and noble family of barbiturates, and though it might have induced sleep in a neurotic who believed it to be a potent drug, it was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit weary, nymphet. Whether the Ramsdale doctor was a charlatan or a shrewd old rogue, does not, and did not, really matter. What mattered, was that I had been deceived. When Lolita opened her eyes again, I realized that whether or not the drug might work later in the night, the security I had relied upon was a sham one. Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her unfair amount of pillow. I lay quite still on my brink, peering at her rumpled hair, at the glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half a haunch and half a shoulder dimly showed, and trying to gauge the depth of her sleep by the rate of her respiration. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I might risk getting a little closer to that lovely and maddening glimmer; but hardly had I moved into its warm purlieus than her breathing was suspended, and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would explode in screams if I touched her with any part of my wretchedness. Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote “frinstance”), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn (they call those fries “French,” grand Dieu! ) was added to my discomfort. She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. La Petite Dormeuse ou l’Amant Ridicule . Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed her mummy. In the glove compartment—or in the Gladstone bag? Should I wait a solid hour and then creep up again? The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This sort of thinking isn’t limited to Silicon Valley. A BBC report from September 2003 reported, “Well-off is the new poor.” Dr. Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, set out to study the “suffering rich” and found that four of every ten people earning over £50,000 (roughly $80,000 at the time) felt “deprived.” Hamilton concluded, “The real concerns of yesterday’s poor have become the imagined concerns of today’s rich.” Another recent survey in the United States found that 45 percent of those with a net worth (excluding their home) over $1 million were worried about running out of money before they died. Over one-third of those with more than $5 million had the same concern.18 “Affluenza” (a.k.a. luxury fever) is not an eternal affliction of the human animal, as some would have us believe. It is an effect of wealth disparities that arose with agriculture. Still, even in modern societies, we sometimes find echoes of the ancient egalitarianism of our ancestors. In the early 1960s, a physician named Stewart Wolf heard about a town of Italian immigrants and their descendants in northeast Pennsylvania where heart disease was practically unknown. Wolf decided to take a closer look at the town, Roseto. He found that almost no one under age fifty-five showed symptoms of heart disease. Men over sixty-five suffered about half the number of heart problems expected of average Americans. The overall death rate in Roseto was about one-third below national averages. After conducting research that carefully excluded factors such as exercise, diet, and regional variables like pollution levels, Wolf and sociologist John Bruhn concluded that the major factor keeping folks in Roseto healthier longer was the nature of the community itself. They noted that most households held three generations, that older folks commanded great respect, and that the community disdained any display of wealth, showing a “fear of ostentation derived from an ancient belief among Italian villagers relating to maloccio (the evil eye). Children,” Wolf wrote, “were taught that any display of wealth or superiority over a neighbor would bring bad luck.” Noting that Roseto’s egalitarian social bonds were already breaking down in the mid-1960s, Wolf and Bruhn predicted that within a generation, the town’s mortality rates would start to shift upward. In follow-up studies they conducted 25 years later, they reported, “The most striking social change was a widespread rejection of a long standing taboo against ostentation,” and that “sharing, once typical of Roseto, had given way to competition.” Rates of both heart disease and stroke had doubled in a generation.19

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare’s place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read to the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine? I asked with a smile. “Look,” said Lo making a weeping grimace, “let us get off the subject.” I then tried—also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my lips—to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?” I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark—and plunged into a nightmare.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I have a lot of anxiety. And I have an important business meeting coming up later this month.” Really, I just wanted something especially powerful to blindfold me through the holidays. “Give these a try,” Dr. Tuttle said, sliding a sample bottle of pills across her desk. “Infermiterol. If those don’t put you down for the count, I’ll complain directly to the manufacturer in Germany. Take one and let me know how it goes.” “Thank you, doctor.” “Any plans for Christmas?” she asked, scribbling my refills. “Seeing the folks? Where are you from again? Albuquerque?” “My parents are dead.” “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not surprised,” Dr. Tuttle said, writing in her file. “Orphans usually suffer from low immunity, psychiatrically speaking. You may consider getting a pet to build up your relational skills. Parrots, I hear, are nonjudgmental.” “I’ll think about that,” I said, taking the sheaf of prescriptions she’d written, and the Infermiterol sample. It was freezing cold outside that afternoon. As I crossed Broadway, a sliver of moon appeared in the pale sky, then disappeared behind the buildings. The air had a metallic tinge to it. The world felt still and eerie, vibrating. I was glad not to see many people on the street. Those I did see looked like lumbering monsters, human shapes deformed by puffy coats and hoods, mittens and hats, snow boots. I assessed my reflection in the windows of a darkened storefront as I walked up West Fifteenth Street. It did comfort me to see that I was still pretty, still blond and tall and thin. I still had good posture. One might have even confused me for a celebrity in slovenly incognito. Not that people cared. I hailed a cab at Union Square and gave the driver the cross streets of Rite Aid uptown. It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them. The pharmacist on duty that evening was a young Latina woman— perfect eyebrows, fake nails. She knew me on sight. “Give me ten minutes,” she said. Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing. A pleather pillow inflated around my bicep. I watched numbers on the digital screen go up and down. Pulse 48. Pressure 80/50. That seemed appropriate. I went to the rack of DVDs to browse the latest selection of pre-owned movies. The Nutty Professor, Jumanji, Casper, Space Jam, The Cable Guy.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "But what is happening, what is the Bridle Path?" she asked in a great fluster. "Shhhhh..." Leon said, pinching and prodding her breasts to give them as he said, "some color." He then glossed Beauty's eyelids and eyelashes with oil and smoothed a little rouge into her lips and into her nipples. Beauty drew back instinctively but his touch was sure and quick and he took no notice of her. But what bothered her most was that her body felt cool and vulnerable. She could feel the sheathing of leather against her calves, and all the rest of her felt worse than naked. It was more terrible than any of the smaller adornments. "What is going to take place?" she asked again, but Leon had thrust her over the end of the table and now oiled her buttocks vigorously. "Well healed," he said. "The Prince must have guessed last night you would run tonight and he spared you." Beauty felt his strong fingers plying her flesh and a dread came over her. So they would spank her, but they always did. Only it would be in the presence of many others? Every humiliating spank she had received before the eyes of others had cost her dearly, though she knew now she would suffer any amount of paddling for the Prince, but she had not really been given a hard, thorough spanking for the pleasure of others since the Inn on the road where the Innkeeper's daughter had spanked her for the soldiers and the common people at the windows. "But it must come," she thought. And a vision of the Court watching it as some ritual caused her to feel an undeniable curiosity that soon enough gave way to panic. "My Lord, please tell me..." Amid the crowd about her, she saw other girls with braided hair and boots. So she was not alone. And there were Princes being fitted with boots also. Through it all there moved a handful of young Princes on their hands and knees polishing boots as quickly as they could, their own buttocks raw, their necks encircled by a little cord of leather to which was attached a sign that Beauty could not read. But now as Leon brought her up standing again and gave some finishing touches to her lips and eyelashes, one of these Princes was now buffing her boots though he was weeping. His buttocks were as red as it could have been. And she saw the sign about his neck said, "I am in Disgrace," in small letters. A Page approached and gave the Prince a sound crack with a belt to hurry him on to another. But Beauty had no time to think of it. Leon had affixed the accursed little brass bells to her nipples.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Go to court. Don’t go to court. Get a rape kit. Don’t get a rape kit. Don’t take a class with that teacher. (He’s handsy.) Don’t take a class with her. (She’s unsympathetic.) Don’t watch violent movies. Don’t watch movies that might be violent. Don’t be angry. If you’re angry, explain why calmly. If I were you, I wouldn’t wear that. I’d rather be dead than be raped. (I’d rather be dead than be you?) Don’t talk about rape. Do you have proof? Don’t get defensive. Avoid your triggers. Don’t eat at restaurants with steak knives. Are you eating? You look thin. You look fat. No one’s going to want to go home with you. Don’t let people you don’t know into your home. Who do you really know anyway? Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t not walk alone at night. This is your life. This is your life. This is your life. 17. After college, I move back to Nashville. My girlfriend, M., is a social worker, and she’s heard from a colleague of hers of a lesbian therapist who specializes in PTSD. “Do you want to try?” she asks me. “Not really,” I tell her, thinking of the mutual stare-down with the therapist I saw in high school, thinking of the doctor who asked if I was “gay before,” thinking that I am really, all things considered, finally doing okay. I have a job teaching high school. I can sleep for hours at a time. I can go days, sometimes weeks, without having flashbacks. M. looks at me with exhaustion. “I guess I’ll try,” I say. A smile pops onto M.’s face like it’s been released by my acquiescence. The therapist’s office is attached to her home. She invites me in. I sit on a brown corduroy armchair. She asks me a series of intimate questions as though reading directions for shampoo use. I answer her equally sterilely. To: “Are you religious?” I say: “Jewish.” “Do you have siblings?” “A younger brother.” “Have you experienced trauma?” I say, “I was beaten and raped when I was sixteen,” as though agreeing, “Yes. Wash, rinse, repeat.” “Oh.” She pauses, looking up at me. “At least you weren’t killed,” she says, writing something down in her notebook. M. looks hopeful when she picks me up. “How was it?” “It was fine,” I say, and thank her for coming to get me. In our next session, the therapist says we are beginning Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I’d read that the first step involves holding aspects of the traumatic event in mind. I tell her I don’t think I’m ready. She tells me, “It will be helpful.” I wonder if I can say no. She probably knows what’s best. She tells me to visualize the part of “the scene” I remember most strongly. I throw up in her bathroom. That night, I sleep on the couch.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  To tell it and to crawl out of the experience anew. KEEPING ON TRACK A big project sometimes needs some project management. There are lots of apps and skills and managers able to help you with that. For me I needed to keep logs just to keep seeing that I was making progress, because a lot of times it felt like I wasn’t progressing at all. The logs helped verify what my anxiety and frustration was keeping me from seeing: that the process was moving forward. Finishing DO THIS I encourage you to be in your story again. Use this as a chance to live twice. If the story you’re working on is a positive one, then let the work be a celebration of it. If it’s a tragic story, then let your work on it be a healing. What follows are other good self-assignments to keep yourself going. START A LOG In the middle of a big project, it may be hard to see you’ve made any progress at all. Start a private log. Each day, write down how you pushed the project further. When you look back at that log, even if you’ve got big holes in it, you’ll still see that you’re moving forward. Continually moving forward is all it takes. At the best of times, I kept a log. On a Google spreadsheet, I logged what part of what pages I did every day I worked. Looking at this, rather than the art and story itself, which was always loaded with emotion, helped me realize that I was, in fact, making progress. If you are capable of sitting down and working one day, you’re capable of doing it again. And if you’re capable of getting down and working many days in a row, then you can finish your book. You may just need some reminders that you’re making progress. FIND SOME READERS It’s probably obvious, but there are tons of comics and comics sites on the web. Join them. Start a site for your project and invite others to look on. Finding friendly voices to egg you on, online, or in person, too, is sometimes essential. I found it imperative toward the end to have a few readers with whom I shared early drafts. I might have been disingenuous when I asked for criticism—I probably really wanted affirmation. It’s okay to ask for that, too. Find readers online, in public, or privately, but allow yourself a cheering section. I now host a forum of readers and creators doing just this. I see it helping people every day. Finishing GO FURTHER START A DIARY Each day, take five minutes to reflect on the process. Hard, easy, technical details, personal details, Morning Pages, whatever. Shedding this skin each day or each session will allow you to be stronger than the pain, the process, the difficulty. WRITE YOURSELF SOME ENCOURAGEMENTS There are times when it’s hard to go on.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Oh, it was? [musingly] Was it?”—and with a yelp of amorous vernal laughter she slapped the glossy bole and tore uphill, to the end of the street, and then rode back, feet at rest on stopped pedals, posture relaxed, one hand dreaming in her print-flowered lap. 14 Because it supposedly tied up with her interest in dance and dramatics, I had permitted Lo to take piano lessons with a Miss Emperor (as we French scholars may conveniently call her) to whose blue-shuttered little white house a mile or so beyond Beardsley Lo would spin off twice a week. One Friday night toward the end of May (and a week or so after the very special rehearsal Lo had not had me attend) the telephone in my study, where I was in the act of mopping up Gustave’s—I mean Gaston’s—king’s side, rang and Miss Emperor asked if Lo was coming next Tuesday because she had missed last Tuesday’s and today’s lessons. I said she would by all means—and went on with the game. As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his pudgily bunched fingers—dying to take that juicy queen and not daring—and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving a draw. He finished his brandy and presently lumbered away, quite satisfied with this result ( mon pauvre ami, je ne vous ai jamais revu et quoiqu’il y ait bien peu de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permettez-moi de vous dire que je vous serre la main bien cordialement, et que toutes mes fillettes vous saluent ). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table, consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity.