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)

  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. 4 1 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. 4 2 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. 4 3 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. Others see the problem as a deficit in the neurochemical called oxytocin, leading to problems in the interoceptive network. I suspect that there isn’t just one network problem in autism but a menu of different possibilities, owing to degeneracy. In fact, autism is characterized as a neurodevelopmental disorder that is extremely variable in its genetics, neurobiology, and symptoms. I speculate that the problems begin with body-budgeting circuitry because it’s present at birth, and all statistical learning is grounded in body-budget regulation (chapters 4 and 5 ). Alterations in the circuitry will change the trajectory of brain development. Without a fully loaded predictive brain, you’d be at the mercy of your environment.

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

  Some of these hubs also happen to sit in the control network. These weakened connections likely translate into an anxious brain that is clumsy at crafting predictions to match the immediate circumstances, and that fails to learn effectively from experience. You might predict threats needlessly, or create uncertainty by predicting imprecisely or not at all. In addition, your interoceptive inputs become even more noisy than usual when your body budget has been in the red for a while; as a consequence, your brain ignores them. These situations leave you open to a lot of uncertainty and a lot of prediction error that you can’t resolve. And uncertainty is more unpleasant and arousing than assured harm, because if the future is a mystery, you can’t prepare for it. For example, when people are seriously ill but have an excellent chance of recovery, they are less satisfied with life than people who know their disease is permanent. 38 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us. “Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room. “Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?” Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass. “Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.” Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina! When the dessert was plunked down—a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream for her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie—I produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the stopper, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep. “Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?” “Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.” “No, seriously—please.” “Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?” Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In Speak, Memory, Nabokov similarly “reject[s] completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents” (p. 20); while in Ada he notes the “pale pencil which poor [public] speakers are obsessed with in familiar dreams (attributed by Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu to the dreamer’s having read in infancy his adulterous parents’ love letters)” (p. 549). For Freud, see a case history. Humbertish: H.H.’s coinage; after any language ending in the -ish suffix (Finnish, English, Lettish). house … burned down: Nabokov omitted from the last draft of Lolita a hilarious scene describing H.H.’s arrival by taxi at the charred-out, bepuddled, roped-off ruins of the McCoo residence. A large crowd applauds H.H. as he grandly alights from the cab; only an encyclopedia has survived the holocaust. He recognizes that the lost opportunity to coach “the enigmatic [McCoo] nymphet” is no loss at all (see p. 41). Nabokov reinstated the scene in his published screenplay of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick had dropped it from the film). “Although there are just enough borrowings from [my Lolita script in Kubrick’s] version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the final product is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined and set down scene by scene during the six months I worked in a Los Angeles villa. I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlust [see Introduction, here] is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams. It is a great pity; but at least I shall be able to have people read my Lolita play in its original form” (Paris Review interview, 1967). Speaking more positively three years earlier, Nabokov said, “The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car—these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty [Peter Sellers] is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze [Shelley Winters; James Mason was H.H.]. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed—for example, the different motels at which they stopped” (Playboy interview). The highways and motels were so little in evidence because the film, released in 1962, was shot in England. 342: for “coincidences,” see A key (342!) and 342. A lady who lived opposite: and she is subsequently referred to as “Miss Opposite” on pp. 52 ff.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It took Solfoton and a bottle of Robitussin one day, Nembutal and Zyprexa the next. Reva came and went, blathering about her latest dates and heartaches over her mother. I watched a lot of Indiana Jones. But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything now was somehow linked to getting back what I’d lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever. • • • MY LAST RENDEZVOUS WITH Trevor had been on New Year’s Eve, 2000. I invited him to come to the party with me in DUMBO. I’d sensed he was between girlfriends. “I’ll come for a while,” he agreed. “But there are other parties I’m already committed to. I’ll stay at yours for an hour and then I’ll have to leave, so don’t get sensitive about it.” “That’s fair,” I said, though my feelings were already hurt. He had me meet him in the lobby of his building in Tribeca. He very rarely asked me to come up to his apartment. I think he thought that seeing the place would make me want to marry him. In truth, I thought his apartment made him seem pathetic—status seeking, conformist, shallow. It reminded me of the loft Tom Hanks rents in Big, huge windows along three walls, high ceilings—only instead of pinball machines and trampolines and toys, Trevor had filled the apartment with expensive furniture—a narrow gray velvet sofa from Sweden, a huge mahogany secretary, a crystal chandelier. I assumed some ex-girlfriend had picked it all out for him, or multiple ex-girlfriends. That would have explained the mismatched aesthetic. He worked as a portfolio manager in the Twin Towers, had freckles, loved Bruce Springsteen, and yet the wall above his bed was decorated with horrifying African masks. He collected antique swords. He liked cocaine and cheap beer and top-shelf whiskey, always owned the latest video game system. He had a waterbed. He played acoustic guitar, badly. He owned a gun he kept in a safe in his bedroom closet.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But I don’t know which side will win. ME: Think of Simone de Beauvoir! ME: I love her endurance, but her books are full of Sartre, Sartre, Sartre. ME: Think of Doris Lessing! ME: Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love...what more is there to say? ME: Think of Sylvia Plath! ME: Dead. Who wants a life or death like hers even if you become a saint? ME: Wouldn’t you die for a cause? ME: At twenty, yes, but not at thirty. I don’t believe in dying for causes. I don’t believe in dying for poetry. Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old. ME: Well—think of Colette. ME: A good example. But she’s one of very few. ME: Well, why not try to be like her? ME: I’m trying. ME: The first step is learning how to be alone.... ME: Yes, and when you learn that really well, you forget how to be open to love if it ever does come. ME: Who said life was easy? ME: NO one. ME: Then why are you so afraid of being alone? ME: We’re going round in circles. ME: That’s one of the troubles with being alone. Hopeless. I cannot reason myself out of this panic. My breath is coming in short gasps and I am sweating profusely. Try to describe the panic, I tell myself. Pretend you’re writing. Put yourself in the third person. But it’s impossible. I am sinking into the center of the panic. It seems I am being torn asunder by wild horses and that my arms and legs are flying off in different directions. Horrible torture fantasies obsess me. Chinese warlords flaying their enemies alive. Joan of Arc burned at the stake. French Protestants broken on the wheel. Resistance fighters having their eyes plucked out. Nazis torturing Jews with electric shocks, with needles, with unanesthetized “operations.” Southerners lynching blacks. American soldiers cutting the ears off Vietnamese. Indians being tortured. Indians torturing. The whole of history of the human race running with blood and gore and the screams of victims. I press my eyes closed, but the scenes replay themselves on the inside of my burning lids. I feel as if I have been flayed alive, as if all my inner organs are open to the elements, as if the top of my head has blown off and even my brain is exposed. Every nerve ending transmits only pain. Pain is the only reality. It isn’t true, I say. Remember the days when you felt pleasure, when you were glad to be alive, when you felt joy so great you thought you’d burst with it. But I can’t remember. I am nailed to the cross of my imagination. And my imagination is as horrible as the history of the world. I remember my first trip to Europe at the age of thirteen.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Howard ordered a minicab and went outside to wait for it. When it arrived, the driver’s door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: ‘ Is it you? ’ Howard stepped forward from the pub wall. ‘Yes, it’s me.’ ‘Where you go?’ ‘Queen’s Park, please,’ said Howard, and walked unsteadily round the car to get into the front seat. As soon as he sat down he realized that this was not the usual procedure. It was surely uncomfortable for a driver to have a passenger sitting so close to him, wasn’t it? Or was it? They drove in silence, a silence that Howard experienced as unbearably fraught with homoerotic, political and violent implications. He felt he must say something. ‘I’m not trouble, you know, I’m not one of those English thugs – I’m a bit pissed, that’s all.’ The young driver looked at him with a defensive, uncertain air. ‘You trying to be funny?’ he said in his thick accent, which yet possessed a fluency that made You trying to be funny? sound like a Turkish homily. ‘Sorry,’ said Howard, blushing. ‘Ignore me. Ignore me.’ He put his hands between his knees. The cab swung by the tube station where Howard had first met Michael Kipps.  on beauty and being wrong ‘Straight down, I think,’ said Howard very quietly. ‘Then maybe a left at the main road – yes, and then over the bridge and then it’s on your right, I think.’ ‘You talk quiet. I can’t hear.’ Howard repeated himself. His driver turned and looked at him incredulously. ‘You don’t know name of street ?’ Howard had to admit he did not. The young Turk grumbled something furiously in Turkish, and Howard felt one of those English minicab tragedies coming on in which customer and cabbie drive round and round, and the fare rises and rises, finally you reach the ugliness of being sworn at and cast out on to the street, further from your destination than ever. ‘There! That’s it! We just passed it!’ cried Howard and opened the door while the cab was still moving. A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard’s twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this – where one is so horribly mis-understood – that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse. Kiki was home. He needed to find her.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  This was when my online purchasing of lingerie and designer jeans began in earnest. It seemed that while I was sleeping, some superficial part of me was taking aim at a life of beauty and sex appeal. I made appointments to get waxed. I booked time at a spa that offered infrared treatments and colonics and facials. One day, I cancelled my credit card in the hope that doing so might deter me from filling my nonexistent datebook with the frills of someone I used to think I was supposed to be. A week later, a new credit card showed up in the mail. I cut it in half. My stress levels rose. I couldn’t trust myself. I felt as though I had to sleep with one eye open. I even considered installing a video camera to record myself while I was unconscious, but I knew that would only prove to be a document of my resistance to my project. It wouldn’t stop me from doing anything since I’d be unable to watch it until I woke up for real. So I was in a state of panic. I doubled my Xanax dosage in an attempt to counteract my anxiety. I lost track of the days, and as a result, missed my visit to Dr. Tuttle in November. She called and left me a message. “I’ll have to charge you for the missed appointment. Let me remind you, you did sign the agreement to my office policy. There’s a twenty-four-hour cutoff for cancellations. Most doctors in the area require you to cancel thirty-six or forty-eight hours before the scheduled appointment, so I think I’m being pretty generous. And it concerns me that you’d be so flip about your mental health. Call me to reschedule. The ball is in your basket.” She sounded stern. I felt terrible. But when I called to apologize and make another appointment, she was back to normal. “See you Thursday,” she said. “Toodle-oo.” Halfway through the month, my Internet use began to rise even more. I woke up with my laptop screen filled with AOL chat-room conversations with strangers in places like Tampa and Spokane and Park City, Utah. In my waking hours, I rarely thought of sex, but in my medicated blackouts, I guess my lusts arose. I scrolled through the transcripts. They were surprisingly polite. “How are you?” “I’m fine, thanks, how are you? Horny much?” It went on from there. I was relieved I never gave anyone my real name. My AOL screen name was “Whoopigirlberg2000.” “Call me Whoopi.” “Call me Reva,” I once wrote. The photos men sent of their genitals were all banal, semierect, nonthreatening. “Your turn,” they’d write. Usually I changed the subject. “What’s your favorite movie?”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  perfumed with balm, whereby I was readily prepared for the purpose. But nothing grieved me so much as to think how I should with my huge and great legs embrace so fair a matron, or how I should touch her fine, dainty, and silken skin made of milk and honey with my hard hoofs, or how it was possible to kiss her soft, her pretty and ruddy lips with my monstrous great mouth and stony teeth, or how she, who was so young and tender, could receive my love. And I verily thought if I should hurt the woman by any kind of means, I should be thrown out to the wild beasts : but in the mean season she spoke gently to me, kissing me oft, and looked on me with burning eyes, saying : *I hold thee my cony, I hold thee my nops, my sparrow," and therewithal she shewed me that all my fear was vain, for she oft-times embraced my body round about, and had her pleasure with me, whereby I thought the mother of Minotaurus did not causeless quench her inordinate desire with a bull! When night was passed, with much joy and small sleep, the matron went away, avoiding the light of day, so that she might not be seen, and bargained with my keeper for another. night: which he willingly granted, partly for gain of money, and partly to find new pastime for my master. He, after he was informed of all the history of my luxury, was right glad, and rewarded my keeper well for his pains, minding to shew in the public theatre what I could do; but because they would not suffer that noble wife of mine to abide such shame, by reason of her dignity, and because they could find no other that 1 [n a note referring to the whole of this passage Adlington writes: ‘Herel have left out certain lines propter honestatem, " in which his modesty is much to be commended, and will here be followed. o1 LUCIUS APULEIUS inveniri potuerat grandi praemio, vilis anquiritur aliqua sententia praesidis bestiis addicta, quae mecum incoram publicam populi caveam frequentaret. Eius poenae talem cognoveram fabulam : Maritum habuit, cuius pater peregre proficiscens mandavit uxori suae, matri eiusdem iuvenis (quod enim sarcina praegnationis oneratam eam relinquebat) ut si sexus sequioris edidisset fetum, protinus quod 'esset editam necaretur. At illa, per absentiam mariti nata puella, insita matribus pietate praeventa, descivit ab obsequio mariti, eamque prodidit vicinis alumnan- dam, regressoque iam marito natam necatamque nuntiavit. Sed ubi flos aetatis nuptialem virgini diem flagitabat, nec ignaro marito dotare filiam ;pro natalibus quibat, quod solum potuit, filio suo tacitum secretum aperuit: nam 'et oppido verebatur ne quo . casu caloris iuvenalis impetu lapsus nescius nesciam sororem incurreret. Sed pietatis spectatae iuvenis et matris obsequium et'sororis officium religiose dis- pensat et, arcanis domus venerabilis silentii custodiae

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  11] lbi complurium iumentorum multivii circuitus in- torquebant molas ambage varia; nec die tantum, verum perpeti etiam nocte prorsus instabili machina- rum vertigine lucubrabant pervigilem farinam. Sed mihi, ne rudimentum servitii perhorrescerem scilicet, novus dominus loca lautia prolixe praebuit: nam et diem primum illum feriatum dedit et cibariis abun- danter instruxit praesepium. Nec tamen illa otii saginaeque beatitudo duravit ulterius, sed die se- quenti molae, quae maxima videbatur, matutinus adstituor et illico velata facie propellor ad incurva spatia flexuosi canalis, ut in orbe termini circum- fluentis reciproco gressu mea recaleans vestigia vagarer errore certo. Nec tamen sagacitatis ac prudentiae meae prorsus oblitus facilem me tiro- cinio disciplinae praebui sed, quamquam frequenter cum inter homines agerem, machinas similiter cir- cumrotari vidissem, tamen, ut expers et ignarus operis, stupore mentito defixus haerebam, quod enim rebar ut minus aptum et huiusmodi ministerio 416 2 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX carried back to the town and put in prison by the inhabitants, who, taking the cup of gold and the image of the goddess which I bare, did put and con- secrate them amongst the treasure of the temple. The next day I was carried to the market to be sold by the voice of the crier, and again my price was set ; but I was sold at seven pence more than Philebus gave for me. There fortuned to pass by a baker of the next village, who, after that he had bought a great deal of corn, bought me likewise to carry it home, and when he had well laded me therewith, he drove me through a stony and dangerous way to his ' bakehouse. There I saw a great company of horses that went round and round in the mill turning the stones and grinding of corn : and not by day only, but at night also they must needs still work at the mill and make flour in those engines that never stood still: but lest I should be discouraged at the first, my master enter- tained me well in a luxurious place; for the first day I had a holiday and did nothing but fare daintily at a full manger. Howbeit, such mine ease and felicity did not long endure; for the next day following I was tied to the greatest mill (as it seemed to me) betimes in the morning with my face covered, and placed in a small path of a circle to the end in turn- ing and winding so often one way I might keep a certain course and tread in my own path again and again. But I forgat not my wisdom and careful prudence so as to lend myself too easily to the new labour, for although when I was a man I had seen many such horse-mills, and knew well enough how they should be turned, yet feigning myself ignorant of such kind of toil I stood still and would not go, whereby I thought I should be taken 2D 417 12

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Haee et huiusmodi mutuo blaterantes praesepio me proximum deligant. Erat quidam iuvenis satis corpulentus, choraula doctissimus, collaticia stipe de mensa paratus, qui foris quidem circumgestantibus deam cornu canens adambulabat, domi vero promiscui operis partiarius agebat concubinus. Hic me simul domi conspexit libenter, appositis largiter cibariis, gaudens alloquitur : “Venisti tandem miserrimi laboris vicarius: sed diu vivas et dominis placeas et meis defectis iam lateribus consulas." Haec audiens iam meas futuras novas cogitabam aerumnas. Die sequenti variis coloribus indusiati et deformiter quisque for- mati, facie caenoso pigmento delita et oculis obunctis graphice prodeunt, mitellis et crocotis et carbasinis et bombycinis iniecti, quidam tunicas albas in modum 388 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII thought verily that he had brought home a fit and convenient servant for their purpose. But when they perceived that it was not even an hind ! instead of a maiden, but rather a makeshift ass for a man, they began to reprove him with great scorn, saying that he had not brought a servant for them, but rather a stalling ass for himself. “ Howbeit," quoth they, “Keep this pretty beast not wholly for your _own delight, but let us, your darling doves, likewise have him at commandment.” Therewithal babbling in this wise, they led me into the stable, and tied me to the manger; and there was a certain stout young man with a mighty body, well skilled-in playing on flutes, whom they had bought in a market with the money they had collected ; and he walked before their procession, playing the horn when they carried round their goddess, and at home he shared in all their labours and they made great useof him. Now he, as soon as he espied me, entertained me very well, for he filled my rack and manger with meat, and spake merrily, saying: “O master ass, you are welcome; now you shall take my office in hand: you are come to supply my room, and to ease me of my miserable labour: I pray God thou mayest long live and please my master well, to the end thou mayest continually deliver my weary sides from so great pain and labour.” When I heard his words, I did prognosticate my new misery to come. The day following I saw them apparelled in divers colours, and hideously tricked out, having their faces ruddled with paint, and their eyes tricked out with grease, mitres on their heads, vestments coloured like saffron, surplices of silk and linen ; and some ware white tunics painted with purple stripes ‘4 The usual reference to the story of Iphigenia. 3 389 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I really appreciate that, man. I’m dry and dusty right now.’ ‘What about that job , for God’s sake?’ Levi squirmed a little before confessing. Howard listened with his head on the table. ‘Levi, that was a good job.’ ‘I got another one! But it’s more . . . irregular. And I’m not doing it right now, ’cos I got other things cooking, but imma go back to it soon, ’cos it’s like – ’ ‘Don’t tell me,’ insisted Howard, closing his eyes. ‘Just don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’ Levi put the dollars in his back pocket. ‘Anyway, so in the meantime I got a bit of a cash flow situation . I pay you back, though.’ ‘With other money I’ll have given you.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘I got a job, I told you! Chill. OK? Will you chill? You gonna give yo’self a heart attack, man. Chill .’ Sighing, he kissed his father on his sweaty forehead and closed the door softly on his way out. Levi did his funky limp through the department and out into the main lobby of the Humanities Faculty building. He stopped here to select a tune that would fit the experience of stepping out of this building and facing the freeze outside. Somebody called his name. He couldn’t see at first who it was. ‘Yo – Levi . Over here! Hey, man! I ain’t seen your ass in the longest time, man. Put it there.’ ‘ Carl? ’ ‘Yeah, Carl. Don’t you even know me now?’ They touched fists, but with Levi frowning all the time. ‘What you doing here, man?’ ‘Damn – didn’t you know?’ said Carl, smiling cheesily and popping his collar. ‘I be a college man now!’ Levi laughed. ‘No, seriously, bro – what you doing here?’ Carl stopped smiling. He tapped the knapsack on his back. ‘Didn’t your sister tell you? I’m a college man now. I’m working here.’ ‘ Here? ’ ‘Black Studies Department. I just started – I’m an archivist.’ ‘A what ?’ Levi transferred his weight to the opposite foot. ‘Man, you screwing with me?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘You work here. I don’t get it – you cleaning?’ Levi didn’t mean this the way it came out. It was just that he had met a lot of Wellington cleaners on the march yesterday, and it was the first thing that came to his mind. Carl was offended. ‘No, man, I manage the archives – I don’t clean shit. It’s a music library – I’m in control of the hip-hop and some R & B and modern urban black music. It’s an amazing resource – you should come check it out.’  On Beauty Levi shook his head, disbelieving. ‘Carl, bro, I’m tripping . . . you gotta run this past me again. You’re working here? ’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I don’t really follow any of it any more, it’s too fast . . . cut, cut cut , everything so hysterical and loud . . . but Monty says that even Channel Four can’t compete with the kind of liberal programming you find on PBS. He can’t bear PBS. He sees through it terribly – the way they promote all the usual liberal ideas and pretend it’s progress for minorities. He hates all that. Did you know most of the donors live  On Beauty in Boston? Monty says that tells you all you need to know. And yet this Lincoln documentary was really very good.’ ‘And . . . that was on . . . PBS?’ said Kiki despondently. She had lost her grip on her clip-on smile. Carlene pressed her fingers to her brow. ‘Yes. Didn’t I say that? Yes. It was very good.’ They were not getting very far, and whatever had moved so felicitously between them three weeks ago appeared to have vanished. Kiki wondered how soon she could make her excuses without seeming rude. As if in response to this silent speculation, Carlene leaned back in her chair and lowered her hand from her forehead to place it over her eyes. A pained murmur, lower than her speaking voice, came from her. ‘Carlene? Honey, are you OK?’ Kiki moved to stand, but with her other hand Carlene waved her off. ‘It’s a little thing. It’ll pass.’ Kiki stayed on the edge of her piano stool, in mid action, looking from Carlene to the door and back. ‘Are you sure I can’t get you any – ’ ‘It’s interesting to me,’ said Carlene slowly, removing her hand. ‘You were worried too, about their meeting again. Jerome and my Vee.’ ‘Worried? No ,’ said Kiki, laughing casually. ‘No, not really.’ ‘But you were. I was too. I was very glad to hear Jerome avoided her at your party. It’s a silly thing, but I knew I didn’t want them to meet again. Why was that?’ ‘Well,’ said Kiki and looked down, preparing to say something evasive. Glancing up into the woman’s serious eyes, she once more found herself speaking the truth. ‘For me, I guess I worry about Jerome taking things hard, you know? He’s inexperienced – very. And Vee – she’s so incredibly lovely – I’d never say it to him, but she was a little out of his league. A lot . She’s what my youngest son would call bootylicious .’ Kiki laughed, but, seeing that Carlene was following her words as if they were vital, she stopped. ‘Jerome always tends to aim a little high . . . You know what the bottom  the anatomy lesson line is? It just looked like broken-heart territory to me. I mean, the kind of broken heart that keeps on getting broke .

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

  Who has time to revamp their eating and sleeping habits and get more exercise, let alone learn new concepts, practice categorizing, and occasionally step back from the fiction of the self ? We all have jobs and schoolwork and time constraints and all sorts of personal and home situations. Also, some of these suggestions require an investment of time or money, which might be in short supply for the people who could benefit most. But . . . everyone can find something they can try in this chapter, even if it’s just taking walks or combining some emotion concepts before you go to sleep. Or giving up potato chips. (Okay, maybe not completely.) Emotion concepts and body budgeting can improve your health and well-being, as you’ve just seen, but they can also be a catalyst for illness. Emotions are said to influence a variety of debilitating medical disorders like depression, anxiety, and unexplained chronic pain, as well as metabolic dysfunctions that lead to type-2 diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. At the same time, new discoveries about the nervous system are dissolving the sacred boundary between what we think of as physical and mental illness, in the same way that the theory of constructed emotion blurs the boundary between the physical and the social. That is the next topic we’ll visit. 10 Emotion and Illness Think about the last time you had a cold. You probably had a runny nose, cough, fever, and other diverse symptoms. Most people attribute colds to a single cause, namely, a cold virus. And yet, when scientists place a cold virus into the noses of one hundred people, only 25–40 percent get sick. So a cold virus cannot be the essence of a cold—something more complex must be going on. The virus is necessary but not sufficient. 1 The diverse set of symptoms that you collectively call “a cold” involves not just your body but also your mind. For example, if you are an introverted or negative-minded person, you’re more likely to develop a cold from a noseful of germs. 2 Our new view of human nature, inspired by the theory of constructed emotion, dissolves the boundaries between the mental and physical, including where illness is concerned. Old, essentialist thinking, in contrast, keeps those dividing lines sharp. Having a problem with your brain? Then see a neurologist. If the problem is with your mind, well, you need a psychiatrist. A more modern view integrates mind and brain and offers guidance on how better to understand human illness. For example, if you look at the diverse symptoms found in illnesses like anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and chronic stress, they don’t fit into a handful of neat compartments, like a silverware drawer.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My Lo, without granting her new surroundings one glance, unseeingly turned on the radio to which instinct led her and lay down on the living room sofa with a batch of old magazines which in the same precise and blind manner she landed by dipping her hand into the nether anatomy of a lamp table. I really did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up somewhere; but I had, I suppose, in the course of my correspondence with vague Gaston, vaguely visualized a house of ivied brick. Actually the place bore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home (a mere 400 miles distant): it was the same sort of dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull green drill awnings; and the rooms, though smaller and furnished in a more consistent plush-and-plate style, were arranged in much the same order. My study turned out to be, however, a much larger room, lined from floor to ceiling with some two thousand books on chemistry which my landlord (on sabbatical leave for the time being) taught at Beardsley College. I had hoped Beardsley School for girls, an expensive day school, with lunch thrown in and a glamorous gymnasium, would, while cultivating all those young bodies, provide some formal education for their minds as well. Gaston Godin, who was seldom right in his judgment of American habitus, had warned me that the institution might turn out to be one of those where girls are taught, as he put it with a foreigner’s love for such things: “not to spell very well, but to smell very well.” I don’t think they achieved even that. At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, she approved of my child’s “nice blue eyes” (blue! Lolita!) and of my own friendship with that “French genius” (a genius! Gaston!)—and then, having turned Dolly over to a Miss Cormorant, she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recueillement and said: “We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, mean to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me. Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and even hair-fixing parties!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This technique implied the existence of garages specializing in “stage-automobile” operations, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French Gray ... The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little moustache and open shirt—or for his baldish pate and broad shoulders— led me to a profound study of all cars on the road—behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up ... The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us. We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had deepened and concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us. “You got a flat, mister,” said cheerful Lo. I pulled up—near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear wheel. The base of its tire was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my chance. I started to walk towards him—with the brilliant idea of asking him for a jack though I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a stone—and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck loomed from behind Trapp and thundered by me—and immediately after, I heard it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back—and saw my own car gently creeping away.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking Uh-oh , over and over. I’m in a rattled condition; I can’t calm down and figure this out. “I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” She nods again. I realize that I don’t know what braced means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods and heads into the kitchen. Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back and forth between CNN and the special reports by the local news. There is something terrifying about the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in the room. The phone never stops ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead people. Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still alive. California calls, New York calls, Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. All the guests at a party my husband is having call, one after the other, to ask how I’m doing. Each time, fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t. It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out exactly what happened. Fear that his mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9 newslady keeps saying there are six dead and two in critical condition. They’re not saying who did the shooting. The names will be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice all of them except Chris and Bob; they are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point I go into the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room, all those eyes, all that calmness in the face of chaos. The collie tries to stand up but someone stops her with a handful of Fritos. The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He asks Shirley if I’m holding up okay. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room. The newslady breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as they can. I’ve already figured out that if they go in alphabetical order Chris will come first.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  269Lecture 27—Rebellion and Reform in Latin America õBergoglio came of age during the regime of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón. Perón came to power in 1946 and convinced many Argentinians that he (and his charismatic wife, Evita) embodied the soul of the Argentinian people and always acted with the common people’s values and desires at heart. Many Catholics protested the Perón regime, and he retaliated by forbidding all public religious demonstrations and by cracking down on Catholic political activists. õIn 1955, a military junta overthrew Perón, but the generals were just as fond of oppressing dissent and bossing around the bishops as Perón had been. Bergoglio grew up in a church that swung between two extremes, sometimes defying state power and suffering dearly for it, and at other times struggling with the temptations of complicity and political corruption. Bergoglio lost a cousin to the army’s firing squad in 1956. A PRIEST’S DILEMMA õBergoglio was a Jesuit, and when he became head of the Argentinian Jesuits in 1973, he was worried that too many of his colleagues had become infatuated with secular ideologies like Marxism. In these years, leftist priests across Latin America had begun criticizing their more conservative colleagues and politicians who advocated letting foreign investors further develop Latin America’s economy and natural resources. õThe leftists thought these practices simply extracted the continent’s wealth and made the poor more miserable. Maybe the days of direct colonial rule were over, but this was a new kind of soft imperialism. õLeftists adopted a view of the Christian message known as liberation theology. They saw the church as an agent for socioeconomic and political liberation in this world, not just spiritual liberation in the next. Bergoglio understood their concerns, but he worried that they had begun to look down on the faith of the common people as a so- called opiate of the masses that helped keep the poor from rising up against oppression.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. How could I wish that on a baby? “If it weren’t for you, I’d have been a famous artist,” my furious redheaded mother used to say. She had studied art in Paris, learned anatomy and cast-drawing, water color and graphics, and even how to grind her own pigments. She had met famous artists and famous writers and famous musicians and famous hangers-on (she said). She had danced naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said), sat in Les Deux Magots in a black velvet cloak (she said), driven through the streets of Paris on the fenders of Bugattis (she said), gone to the Greek islands three and a half decades before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she said), and then she had come home, married a Catskill Mountains comedian who was about to make a killing in the tzatzka business, and had had four daughters all of whom received the most poetic names: Gundra Miranda, Isadora Zelda, Lalah Justine, and Chloe Camille.

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

  See more on stress, genes, and cytokines at heam.info/cytokines-1 . See also heam.info/glial-1 . Death from cancer comes sooner: Stress-related increases in β-adrenergic sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity encourage proinflammatory gene expression and discourage anti-viral immune gene expression as cells replicate (Irwin and Cole 2011). These transcriptional effects have been observed in breast tissue, lymph nodes, and the brain (Williams et al. 2009; Sloan et al. 2007; Drnevich et al. 2012). In this way, an acute physiological state can influence cellular makeup for days, weeks, months, or even years (Slavich and Cole 2013), enhancing vulnerability to cancer. Stress-related SNS activity also directly influences the micro-environment of tumor cells, enhancing metastasis, augmenting tumor cell potency, and increasing mortality (Antoni et al. 2006; Cole and Sood 2012). [back] 9. distinguished it from all others: Zachar and Kendler 2007; Zachar 2014. [back] 10. all associated with hub damage: Menon 2011; Crossley et al. 2014; Goodkind et al. 2015. [back] 11. poverty, abuse, or loneliness: For a discussion of childhood adversity and earlier mortality in adulthood, see Danese and McEwen 2012. For loneliness-related death, see Perissinotto et al. 2012. For the link between poverty and brain development, see Hanson et al. 2013, and for the link between childhood poverty and premature adult mortality (independent of family history, ethnicity, cigarette smoking, and other risk factors), see Hertzman and Boyce 2010. Also see Adler et al. 1994. [back] 12. stress and emotion are independent: For a rare counterexample, see Lazarus 1998. [back] 13. circuitry that regulates the budget: Ganzel et al. 2010; McEwen and Gianaros 2011; McEwen et al. 2015. [back] 14. accurately regulate your body budget: E.g., Danese and McEwen 2012; Sheridan and McLaughlin 2014; Schilling et al. 2008; Ansell et al. 2012; Hart and Rubia 2012; Teicher and Samson 2016; Felitti et al. 1998. For more on how childhood adversity wires the brain, see heam.info/adversity-1 . trajectory toward chronic disease: Miller and Chen 2010. childhood abuse or neglect: Teicher et al. 2002; Teicher et al. 2003; Teicher et al. 2006; Teicher and Samson 2016. the target of a bully: Teicher et al. 2002; Teicher et al. 2003; Teicher et al. 2006. psychiatric and physical diseases: Copeland et al. 2014. cancer, and other diseases: Repetti et al. 2002. For more on the bad effects of stress, see heam.info/stress-3 . [back] 15. during recovery from prostate cancer: Hoyt et al. 2013. or after a stressful event: Master et al. 2009. affect that they didn’t label: Hoyt et al. 2013. for cancer-related symptoms: Stanton et al. 2000; Stanton et al. 2002. that lead to poor health: Labeling reduced sympathetic nervous system reactivity to negative images for up to a week (Tabibnia et al. 2008). [back] 16. brain predicts damage is imminent: International Association for the Study of Pain 2012. The IASP now defines pain as an emotional experience and writes that “pain is always subjective.