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 believe that she judges everything you say and do. Even though no physical movement seems called for, your brain predicts that your body needs energy and makes a budget withdrawal, releasing cortisol and flooding glucose into your bloodstream. You also have a surge in interoceptive sensations. Stop and think about this for a minute. Someone merely walks toward you while you are standing still, and your brain predicts that you need fuel! In this manner, any event that significantly impacts your body budget becomes personally meaningful to you. Not long ago, my lab was evaluating a portable device for monitoring the heart. Whenever the wearer’s heart rate sped up 15 percent above normal, the device would beep. One of my graduate students, Erika Siegel, was wearing the device as she worked quietly at her desk, and it remained silent for some time. At one point, I walked into the room. When Erika turned and saw me (her Ph.D. advisor), the device beeped loudly, to her embarrassed surprise and to the amusement of everyone else around us. Later in the day, I spent time wearing the device, and during a meeting with Erika, it beeped several times as I received emails from a granting agency. (So Erika had the last laugh that day.) 31 My lab has experimentally demonstrated the brain’s budgeting efforts hundreds of times (as have other labs), observing as people’s body-budgeting circuitry shifts resources around, and sometimes as their body budgets fluctuate in and out of balance. We ask volunteers to sit completely motionless in front of a computer screen and view pictures of animals, flowers, babies, food, money, guns, surfers, skydivers, car crashes, and other objects and scenes. These pictures impact their body budget; heart rates go up, blood pressures change, blood vessels dilate. These budgetary changes, which prepare the body to fight or flee, occur even though the volunteers are not moving and have no conscious plan to move. When our volunteers view these pictures during an fMRI experiment, we observe their body-budgeting regions controlling these inner-body movements. And even though our subjects are lying down, completely motionless, they simulate motor movements like running and surfing, as well as the sensations from moving muscles, joints, and tendons. The pictures also change our volunteers’ feelings as interoceptive changes in their bodies are being simulated and corrected. Based on these and hundreds of other studies, we now have good evidence that your brain predicts your body’s responses by drawing on prior experiences with similar situations and objects, even when you’re not physically active. And the consequence is interoceptive sensation. 32 To perturb your budget, you don’t even require another person or object to be present. You can just imagine your boss, teacher, coach, or anything else relevant to you. Every simulation, whether it becomes an emotion or not, impacts your body budget.

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

  Is a Growling Dog Angry? 1. scientific discoveries in animal emotion: A quick search of Time, Pacific Standard, Newsweek, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times turned up twenty-six articles between 2009–2014 reporting that animals have emotions. dogs get jealous: Harris and Prouvost 2014. rats experience regret: Steiner and Redish 2014. crayfish feel anxiety: Fossat et al. 2014. flies fear the incoming flyswatter: Gibson et al. 2015. “they’re largely the same”: Safina 2015, 34. [back] 2. but not for emotion: LeDoux 2014. [back] 3. same basic nervous system plan: Swanson 2012; Donoghue and Purnell 2005. [back] 4. about 25 million years ago: Goodman 1999. All of these species have evolved since then to suit their habitats, so our modern forms hardly count for an evolutionary comparison. But scientists do their best to take that into consideration when interpreting the experimental results. that the human network does: Touroutoglou et al. 2016. More generally, macaque and human brains are very similar to one another (Barbas 2015), with a few notable changes, mostly at the front of the brain (Hill et al. 2010); see also heam.info/macaque-1 . [back] 5. watching negative behaviors like cowering: Bliss-Moreau et al. 2013. See also heam.info/macaque-2 . [back] 6. are paired with electric shock: Malik and Hodge 2014. [back] 7. can feel pleasure or pain: Bentham believed in utilitarianism; see heam.info/bentham-1 . [back] 8. more things matter to us: Globalization is just a massive expansion of your affective niche; see heam.info/niche-1 . [back] 9. “baby talk” tone of voice: Amso and Scerif 2015. The infant and her caregiver are sharing attention; see heam.info/sharing-1 . [back] 10. what is in her mind: Okamoto-Barth and Tomonaga 2006; see also heam.info/gaze-1 . [back] 11. large as a macaque brain: Passingham 2009. to learn purely mental concepts: Most of the evolutionary changes have occurred in the cortical areas that have many neurons for processing prediction errors; see heam.info/evolution-2 . [back] 12. animals learn concepts by smell: Animals have concepts (Lea 2010). Primary olfactory cortex has a limbic structure that is closely connected to visceromotor limbic regions. For a review, see Chanes and Barrett 2016. sight or sound as well: While mammals are more dominated by olfactory concepts, birds are more visually dominated. Mammals and birds split from a common ancestor about 200 million years ago. goats by vocal bleats: Lea 2010. [back] 13. reward them with food or drink: Mareschal et al. 2010. See also heam.info/animals-1 . regardless of font: Vauclair and Fagot 1996. animal images from food images: Fabre-Thorpe 2010. differ only by color: Yoshikubo 1985; Marmi et al. 2004. For more examples, see Fabre-Thorpe 2010. van Gogh, and Salvador Dalí: Four macaques were trained to classify parts of paintings from these three painters and a fourth, Jean-Léon Gérôme. These parts contained no faces or full objects that could be memorized; monkeys were required to attend to the style of painting (Altschul et al.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Every Christmas from the time I was two, we had a Christmas tree. Only we were not celebrating the birth of Christ; we were celebrating (my mother said) “The Winter Solstice.” Gillian, who had a crèche under her Christmas tree and a star of Bethlehem over it, disputed this hotly with me. I resolutely echoed my mother: “The Winter Solstice came before Jesus Christ,” I said. Poor benighted Gillian’s mother had insisted on a baby Jesus and a virgin birth. At Easter, we hunted for painted eggs, but we were not celebrating the resurrection of Christ; we were celebrating “the Vernal Equinox,” the Rebirth of Life, the Rites of Spring. Listening to my mother, you would have thought we were Druids. “What happens to people when they die?” I asked her. “They don’t really die,” she said. “They go back into the earth, and after a while get born again, as grass or maybe even as tomatoes.” This was strangely disquieting. Perhaps it was comforting enough to hear her say, “They don’t really die,” but who wanted to be a tomato? Was that my fate? To become a tomato with all those squishy seeds? But like it or not, it was the only religion I had. We weren’t really Jewish; we were pagans and pantheists. We believed in reincarnation, the souls of tomatoes, even (way back in the 1940s) in ecology. And yet with all this, I began to feel intensely Jewish and intensely paranoid (are they perhaps the same?) the moment I set foot in Germany. Suddenly people on buses were going home to houses where they treasured clever little collections of gold teeth and wedding rings…. The lampshades in the Hotel Europa were suspiciously finely grained…. The soap in the restroom of the Silberner Hirsch smelled funny…. The immaculate railroad trains were really claustrophobic and foul-smelling cattle cars…. The conductor, with his pink marzipan pig face, was not going to let me off…. The station commander, with his high-peaked Nazi hat, was going to inspect my papers on some pretext and hustle me over to one of those green-coated policemen in black leather boots with a matching whip…. The customs guard at the border crossing was surely going to stop me, discover my little cache of Lomotil paregoric, sulfur tablets, V-Cillin, and Librium from the army dispensary—usual supply of goodies for going down to Italy—and take me away to a secret cavern under the Alps where I would be tortured in cruelly ingenious ways until I confessed that beneath my paganism, pantheism and pedantic knowledge of English poetry, I was every bit as Jewish as Anne Frank.

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

  2011). [back] 43. song comforting while falling asleep: Only male crickets chirp, and they have different songs for different purposes, but mostly they are singing to attract females. So engage in a little mental inference and think of these sounds as rapturous love songs of nature. [back] 44. (nobody has proved cause and effect): Stellar et al. 2015. [back] 45. a moment of affective realism: Rimmele et al. 2011. [back] 46. predict and categorize in synchrony: Gendron and Barrett, in press; Stolk et al. 2016. [back] 47. other’s chests rising and falling: For indirect supporting evidence, see Giuliano et al. 2015. to prepare them for hypnosis: Some scientists refer to this phenomenon as affective synchrony or affective contagion. [back] 48. bees, ants, and cockroaches: Broly and Deneubourg 2015. [back] 49. to be a good sender: Zaki et al. 2008. [back] 10. Emotion and Illness 1. 25–40 percent get sick: Cohen and Williamson 1991. [back] 2. from a noseful of germs: Cohen et al. 2003. [back] 3. inflammation flares up: Yeager et al. 2011. See more on inflammation at heam.info/imflammation-1 . [back] 4. to feel seriously like crap: In a laboratory, when test subjects are injected with the typhoid vaccine, which causes a temporary increase in their proinflammatory cytokines, this was associated with increased activity in the interoceptive network, along with reports of feeling fatigued and very unpleasant (Eisenberger et al. 2010; Harrison, Brydon, Walker, Gray, Steptoe, and Critchley 2009; Harrison, Brydon, Walker, Gray, Steptoe, Dolan, et al. 2009). cytokines that make inflammation worse: Mathis and Shoelson 2011. even get sick more often: Yang et al. 2016; Cohen et al. 1997; Holt-Lunstad et al. 2010. [back] 5. the body into the brain: Proinflammatory cytokines cross the blood-brain barrier (Dantzer et al. 2000; Wilson et al. 2002; Miller et al. 2013). cells that secrete these cytokines: Louveau et al. 2015. particularly within your interoceptive network: Soskin et al. 2012; Ganzel et al. 2010; McEwen and Gianaros 2011; McEwen et al. 2015. See heam.info/inflammation-2 . pay attention and remember things: Karlsson et al. 2010. lowering performance on IQ tests: There is a vicious cycle: lower IQ, often associated with childhood adversity and poverty, predicts higher levels of inflammation in midlife (Calvin et al. 2011). See also Metti et al. 2015. [back] 6. flush with cortisol and cytokines: See more on the relationship between cytokines and cortisol levels at heam.info/cortisol-2 . and chronic inflammation sets in: Dantzer et al. 2014; Miller et al. 2013. This situation actually sensitizes you to interoceptive and nociceptive input (Walker et al. 2014). [back] 7. really, truly in trouble: Dowlati et al. 2010; Slavich and Cole 2013; Slavich and Irwin 2014; Seruga et al. 2008. [back] 8. acts like fertilizer for disease: Irwin and Cole 2011; Slavich and Cole 2013.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Tuttle said. “You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?” I leaned carefully against the bookshelf. “What do you use the massage table for?” I heard myself ask. “Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It’s an ancient form of healing— locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies.” “I see.” “And by surgery I mean metaphysical operations. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you’re interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it’s very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms— adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don’t worry. I’m not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you, anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it,” she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid’s at the doctor’s. “You really do look troubled. How are you sleeping these days?” “Like I said, I’ve been having some serious issues,” I began. “Don’t tell me, I know what you’re going to say,” Dr. Tuttle said. She picked a length of copper wire off her desk and put the tip to her cheek, poking in the soft flesh. Her skin looked suppler than I’d remembered it, and it struck me that Dr. Tuttle was probably younger than I had thought she was. She might only have been in her early forties. “It’s the Infermiterol. It didn’t work. Am I right?” “Not really . . .” “I know exactly what went wrong,” she said, and put the wire down. “The sample I gave you was the children’s dosage. That would only muddy up the waters, so to speak. The brain must cross a certain threshold before it can function abnormally. It’s like filling a bathtub. It means nothing to your downstairs neighbors until it’s overflowing.” “I was going to say that the Infermiterol—” “Because of leaks,” Dr. Tuttle clarified. “I get it. But I think the Infermiterol—” “Now just a moment while I pull your file.” She shuffled papers on her desk. “I haven’t seen you since December. Had a happy holiday?” “It was all right.” “Did Santa bring you something nice this year?” “This fur coat,” I told her.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  How could I answer such a difficult request? How could I phrase the letter? One of these requests sat in a drawer for two years while I deliberated. I tried writing various drafts. “Dear Mrs. Jones,” I began. But was that too presumptuous? Perhaps I should say “Mrs. Jones”; the “Dear” might be seen to be currying favor. How about no heading? Just launch into the letter? No. That was too stern. If I had this much trouble with the greeting, you can imagine what agonies I went through with the text. Thank you for your kind letter asking me to submit material. However... All wrong! It was too servile. Her letter wasn’t “kind” and why should I toady to her by thanking her? Better be self-confident and assertive: I have just received your letter asking me to submit poems for consideration... Too egotistical! (I crumpled up another sheet of paper.) Never, I once read, begin a letter with the personal pronoun. Besides, how could I say I had “just received” her letter when I had been holding it for a year? Try again. Your letter of November 12, 1967, has been on my mind for a long time. I am sorry to be such a poor correspondent but... Too personal. Does she want you to cry on her shoulder about your neurotic letter-writing problems? Does she care? Finally, two years later, after many more attempts, I drafted a disgustingly submissive, meek, and apologetic letter to the editor in question, tore it up ten times before mailing, retyped it eleven times, retyped my poems fifteen times (they had to be letter perfect, one typo and I threw away the page—and I had never learned to type) and sent the damned manila envelope off to New York. By return mail, I received a really warm letter (which even my paranoia couldn’t misinterpret), a notice of acceptance, and a check. How long do you suppose it would have taken me to get the next letter out if I had received a rejection slip? This was the dazzlingly self-confident creature who began treatment with Dr. Happe in Heidelberg. Gradually I learned how to sit still at my desk long enough to work. Gradually I learned how to send off manuscripts and write letters. I felt like a stroke victim learning penmanship all over again, and Dr. Happe was my guide. He was mild and patient and funny. He taught me to stop hating myself. He was as rare a psychoanalyst as he was a German.

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

  The effects of chronic misbudgeting can be devastating to your health and summon your body’s “debt collectors,” which are part of your immune system. Usually, your immune system is one of the good guys in your body, since it protects you from invaders and injury. It helps you by causing inflammation, like the swelling you get from banging your finger by accident with a hammer, or from a bee sting or an infection. The inflammation comes from little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines, which I mentioned briefly in the previous chapter. When you have an injury or illness, your cells secrete cytokines that draw blood to the affected region, raising its temperature and causing swelling. * These cytokines can make you feel fatigued and generally sick while they go about their job of helping you heal. Proinflammatory cytokines can also become bad guys, however, given the right conditions for debt collection. This is particularly true when your body budget is chronically unbalanced, say, if you live in a dangerous neighborhood and hear gunfire every night. In such a harsh environment, your brain might regularly predict that you need more energy than your body requires. These predictions cause your body to release cortisol more often and in greater amounts than you need. Cortisol normally suppresses inflammation (that’s why hydrocortisone cream relieves itching, and cortisone shots reduce swelling). When you have too much cortisol in your blood for a long time, inflammation flares up. You feel devoid of energy. You might run a fever. If someone placed a cold virus into your nose, you’d be one of the people who gets sick. 3 Now a vicious cycle can ensue. When you feel fatigued due to inflammation, you don’t move as much, in order to conserve (what your brain mistakenly believes to be) your limited energy resources. You start eating and sleeping poorly and neglect exercise, which throws your budget out of balance even more, and you start to feel seriously like crap. You might gain weight, which enhances your problems because certain fat cells actually produce the proinflammatory cytokines that make inflammation worse. You might also start avoiding other people, who then cannot help balance your body budget, and people with fewer social connections also have more proinflammatory cytokines and might even get sick more often. 4 About ten years ago, scientists discovered—to their astonishment—that proinflammatory cytokines can cross from the body into the brain. We also now know that the brain has its own inflammatory system with cells that secrete these cytokines. These little proteins, with their capacity to induce feelings of such misery, reshape the brain. Inflammation in the brain causes changes in brain structure, particularly within your interoceptive network; it interferes with neural connections, and even kills neurons. Chronic inflammation can also make it harder for you to pay attention and remember things, lowering performance on IQ tests.

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

  In these moments, we experience our perceptions of other people as an obvious property of them —a phenomenon we’ve called affective realism—rather than a combination of their actions and the concepts in our own brain. When someone is on trial for a crime, and liberty and life are at stake, there can be a gaping chasm between appearance and reality. Deep down we know this, but at the same time we are supremely confident that we can discern truth from fiction more accurately than the other schmucks in the room. And herein lies the problem in court. Jurors and judges are charged with an almost impossible task: to be a mind reader, or if you’d rather, a lie detector. They must decide if a person intended to cause harm. According to the legal system, intent is a fact that is as plain as the nose on a defendant’s face. But in a predicting brain, a judgment about someone else’s intent is always a guess you construct based on the defendant’s actions, not a fact you detect; and just as with emotions, there is no objective, perceiver-independent criterion of intent. Seventy years of psychological research confirms that judgments like these are mental inferences, that is, guesses. Even if DNA evidence connects a defendant to the scene of a crime, it does not determine whether he had criminal intent. 4 3 Judges and jurors infer intent, usually in line with their own beliefs, stereotypes, and current body states. Here is just one example of how this works. Test subjects watched a video of protestors being dispersed by police. They were told the protestors were pro-life activists picketing an abortion clinic. Those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to be pro-choice, inferred that the activists had violent intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred peaceful intentions. The researchers also showed the same video to a second set of subjects, describing the protestors this time as gay rights activists objecting to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This time, those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to support gay rights, inferred that the activists had peaceful intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred violent intentions. 4 4 Now imagine that this video were evidence at a trial. All jurors would watch the same scenes, with exactly the same behaviors onscreen, but through affective realism, they would come away with only perceptions, not facts, constructed in line with their own beliefs, entirely without their awareness. My point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Maybe she should keep the baby, I thought. Maybe a baby would wake her up. I got up and took a Solfoton and a Xanax. Now more than ever, a movie would have helped me relax. I turned the TV on—ABC7 news—and off. I didn’t want to hear about a shooting in the Bronx, a gas explosion on the Lower East Side, police cracking down on high school kids jumping the turnstiles in the subway, ice sculptures defaced at Columbus Circle. I got up and took another Nembutal. I called Trevor again. “It’s me,” is all he let me say before he started talking. It was the same speech he’d given me a dozen times: he’s involved now and can’t see me anymore. “Not even as just friends,” he said. “Claudia doesn’t believe in platonic relationships between the sexes, and I’m starting to see that she’s right. And she’s going through a divorce, so it’s a sensitive time. And I really like this woman. She’s incredible. Her son is autistic.” “I was just calling to ask if I could borrow some money,” I told him. “My VCR just broke. And I’m horny.” I knew I sounded crazy. I could picture Trevor leaning back in his chair, loosening his tie, cock twitching in his lap despite his better judgment. I heard him sigh. “You need money? That’s why you’re calling?” “I’m sick and can’t leave my apartment. Can you buy me a new VCR and bring it over? I really need it. I’m on all this medication. I can barely make it to the corner. I can hardly get out of bed.” I knew Trevor. He couldn’t resist me when I was weak. That was the fascinating irony about him. Most men were turned off by neediness, but in Trevor, lust and pity went hand in hand. “Look, I can’t deal with you now. I’ve got to go,” he said and hung up. That was fair. He could keep his flabby old vagina lady and her retarded kid. I knew how this new affair would play out for him. He’d win her over with a few months of honorable declarations—“I want to be there for you. Please, lean on me. I love you!”—but when something actually difficult happened—her ex-husband sued her for custody, for example—Trevor would start to have doubts. “You’re asking me to sacrifice my own needs for yours—don’t you see how selfish that is?” They’d argue. He’d bolt. He might even call me to apologize for “being cold on the phone the last time we talked. I was under a lot of pressure at the time. I hope we can move past it. Your friendship means a lot to me. I’d hate to lose you.” If he didn’t come over now, I thought, it was just a matter of days. I got up and took a few trazodones and lay back down. I called Trevor again. This time when he answered, I didn’t let him say a word.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  But what I do not as yet see is how the relationship to which you referred – ’ ‘No, you misunderstand me. What happened between Professor Malcolm and my father doesn’t interest me,’ Zora cut in. ‘What interests me is my academic career in this institution.’ ‘Well, naturally, that would be uppermost in all of – ’ ‘And as for the situation between Professor Malcolm and my father . . .’ Jack wished very much she would stop using that violent phrase. It was drilling into his brain: Professor Malcolm and my father, Professor Malcolm and my father . The very thing that was not to be spoken of this fall semester, in order to protect both the participants and the families of the participants, was now being batted around his office like a pigskin filled with blood . . . ‘as the situation is no longer a situation and has not been for some time, I don’t see why Professor Malcolm should be allowed to continue to discriminate against me in this blatantly personal fashion.’  the anatomy lesson Jack gazed tragically over her head to the clock on the far wall. There was a pecan muffin with his name on it in the cafeteria, but it would be too late for all that by the time he was through here. ‘And you feel certain, do you, that this is, as you say, a personal discrimination?’ ‘I really don’t know what else it can be, Dean French, I don’t know what else to call it. I am in the top three percentile of this college, my academic record is pretty spotless – I think we can both agree on that.’ ‘Ah!’ said French, grabbing at a thin rod of light in this murky discussion. ‘But we must also consider, Zora, that this class is a creative -writing class. It is not purely, therefore, an academic question, and when we approach questions of the creative , we must, to a certain extent, adapt our – ’ ‘I have a record of publication,’ said Zora, scrabbling around in her tote bag, ‘ canigetmyballback.com , Salon , eyeshot , unpleasantevent- schedule.com , and, as far as print journals go, I’m waiting on a reply from Open City .’ She thrust a crumpled bundle of sheets across the desk that seemed to be prints of things from websites – beyond that Jack did not wish to conjecture without his glasses. ‘I see. And you have submitted this . . . work , naturally, as material to be considered by Professor Malcolm. Yes, of course you have.’ ‘And at this point,’ said Zora, ‘I’m having to consider how the stress and adverse emotions attached to taking a matter like this to the advisory board would be likely to impact on me. I’m really worried about that impaction.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He was third on the agenda, absurdly, although everybody in the room had surely come to hear the Monty and Howard road show. But first, the Welsh-born classicist and temporary Housing Officer Christopher Fay in his harlequin waistcoat and red trousers must speak for an unendurable amount of time about meeting-room facilities for graduates. Howard took out his pen and began to doodle on his notes, all the time straining to simulate a pensive look on his face that would suggest an activity more serious than doodling. The right to freedom of speech on this campus, though strong, must yet contend with other rights, rights that protect students at this institution from verbal and personal attack, from conceptual denigration, blatant stereotyping and any other manifestation of the politics of hate . Around this opening gambit, Howard drew a series of interlocking curlicues, like elegant branches, in the style of William Morris. Once the outlines were completed he got on to the business of shading. Once the shading was completed, more curlicues suggested themselves; the pattern grew until it took up most of the left-hand margin. He lifted the paper up from his lap and admired it. And then once more with the shading, taking a childish joy in not exceeding the lines, in submitting to these arbitrary principles of style and form. He looked up and pretended to stretch; this movement gave him an excuse to turn his head from right to left and to study the room for supporters and detractors. Erskine was sitting right across the room, surrounded by his Black Studies Department, Howard’s cavalry. No Claire, or no Claire that he could see. Zora, he knew, was sitting on a bench in the hallway going through her own speech, waiting to be called. Howard’s Art History colleagues were widely spaced but all present and correct. Monty – and this was a nasty shock – was a mere knight’s move behind him. He smiled and acknowledged Howard with a little bow, but Howard, shamefully undeserving of such courtesy, could only whip back round and press his pencil into his own knee. There is a word for taking another man’s wife – to cuckold. But what is the word for taking another man’s daughter? If there were such a word, Howard felt certain that Christopher Fay, with his publisher-friendly, highly sexualized perspective on  On Beauty the mores of the ancient world, would know it. Howard looked up at Christopher now, still on his feet, nimble as a jester, speaking spiritedly, the little rat’s tail at the back of his head flicking from side to side.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let’s see.” (Opening a chained telephone book.) “Dignified Funeral Service. No, not yet. Here we are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin’s Pharmacy. And two more. That’s all Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountains—at least in the business section. Well, we will check them all.” “Go to hell,” she said. “Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere.” “Okay,” she said. “But you’re not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in show windows.” “Which? That window there for example?” “Yes, that one there, for example.” “Oh Lo! Let’s look closer at it.” It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet of sorts upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita’s size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication. “Look, Lo,” I said quietly. “Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other? However”—I went on as we got back in to the car—“I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove compartment), on this pad, I have our boy friend’s car number.” As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheatre of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edges—a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state—one adjacent to the state Beardsley was in.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki ignored the request. ‘I think the kids were quite moved,’ she said, squeezing Jerome’s arm lightly but saying no more. She would not expose him to his father’s ridicule. ‘And I was very moved. I  On Beauty don’t see how it’s possible not to be moved by music like that. You’re serious – you didn’t like it?’ ‘I liked it fine . . . it was fine. I just prefer music which isn’t trying to fake me into some metaphysical idea by the back door.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s like God’s music or something.’ ‘I rest my case,’ said Howard, and now turned from her and waved at Levi, who was stuck in the crowd, waving back at them. Levi nodded as Howard pointed to the gate where they should all meet up. ‘Howard,’ continued Kiki, because she was happiest when she could get him to talk to her about his ideas, ‘explain to me how what we just heard wasn’t the work of a genius . . . I mean, no matter what you say, there’s obviously a difference between something like that and something like . . .’ The family set off, continuing their debate, with the voices of the children now added to the dispute. The black boy with the elegant neck who had been sitting next to Zora strained to hear the disappearing remnants of a conversation he had been interested in, although he had not followed all of it. More and more these days he found himself listening to people talk, wanting to add something. He had wanted to add something just then, a point of information – it was from that movie. According to the film, Mozart died before he finished the thing, right? So someone else must have finished it – so that seemed relevant to that genius thing they were discussing. But he wasn’t in the habit of talking to strangers. Besides, the moment passed. It always did. He pulled his baseball cap down his forehead and checked in his pocket for his cell. He reached under his deckchair to retrieve his Discman – it was gone. He swore violently, padded his hand around the area in the darkness and found something, a Discman. But not his. His had a faint sticky residue on the bottom that he could always feel, the remains of a long-gone sticker of a silhouetted naked lady with a big afro. Apart from that the two Discmans were identical. It took him a second to figure it out. He rushed to get his hoodie off the back of his  kipps and belsey chair, but it got caught, and he ripped it slightly. That was his best hoodie. At last it was detached – he hurried as best he could after that heavy-set girl with the glasses. With every step more people seemed to place themselves between him and her. ‘Hey!

• 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 The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Howbeit (quoth they) keepe him not wholly for your owne riding, but let us likewise have him at commandement. Therewithall they led me into the stable, and tied me to the manger: there was a certaine yong man with a mighty body, wel skilled in playing on instruments before the gods to get money, who (as soone as he had espied me) entertained me verie well, for he filled my racke and maunger full of meat, and spake merrily saying, O master Asse, you are very welcome, now you shall take my office in hand, you are come to supply my roome, and to ease me of my miserable labour: but I pray God thou maist long live and please my Master well, to the end thou maist continually deliver me from so great paine. When I heard these words I did prognosticate my miserie to come.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  You shall understand that on a day this Barbarus preparing himselfe to ride abroad, and willing to keepe the chastity of his wife (whom he so well loved) alone to himselfe, called his man Myrmex (whose faith he had tryed and proved in many things) and secretly committed to him the custody of his wife, willing him that he should threaten, that if any man did but touch her with his finger as he passed by, he would not onely put him in prison, and bind him hand and foote, but also cause him to be put to death, or else to be famished for lacke of sustenance, which words he confirmed by an oath of all the Gods in heaven, and so departed away: When Barbarus was gone, Myrmex being greatly astonied of his masters threatnings, would not suffer his mistresse to goe abroad, but as she sate all day a Spinning, he was so carefull that he sate by her; when night came he went with her to the baines, holding her by the garment, so faithfull he was to fulfill the commandement of his master: Howbeit the beauty of this matron could not be hidden from the burning eyes of Philesiterus, who considering her great chastity and how she was diligently kept by Myrmex, thought it impossible to have his purpose, yet (indeavouring by all kind of meanes to enterprise the matter, and remembring the fragility of man, that might be intised and corrupted with money, since as by gold the adamant gates may be opened) on a day, when he found Myrmex alone, he discovered his love, desiring him to shew his favour, (otherwise he should certainly dye) with assurance that he need not to feare when as he might privily be let in and out in the night, without knowledge of any person. When he thought, with these and other gentle words to allure and prick forward the obstinate mind of Myrmex he shewed him glittering gold in his hand, saying that he would give his mistresse twenty crowns and him ten, but Myrmex hearing these words, was greatly troubled, abhorring in his mind to commit such a mischiefe: wherfore he stopped his eares, and turning his head departed away: howbeit the glittering view of these crownes could never be out of his mind, but being at home he seemed to see the money before his eyes, which was so worthy a prey, wherefore poore Myrmex being in divers opinions could not tell what to doe, for on the one side he considered the promise which he made to his master, and the punishment that should ensue if he did contrary.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then he answered, Verily masters you need not put yourselves to such paines, for I have men that serve for nothing but that purpose. So wee tooke leave of him and departed: and when we were come without the gates of the town, we perceived before us a great sepulchre standing out of the highway in a privy and secret place, and thither we went and opened the mouth thereof, whereas we found the sides covered with the corruption of man, and the ashes and dust of his long buried body, wherein we got ourselves to bring our purpose to passe, and having respect to the dark time of night, according to our custome, when we thought that every one was asleepe, we went with our weapons and besieged the house of Demochares round about. Then Thrasileon was ready at hand, and leaped out of the caverne, and went to kill all such as he found asleepe: but when he came to the Porter, he opened the gates and let us in, and then he shewed us a large Counter, wherein we saw the night before a great aboundance of treasure: which when by violence we had broke open, I bid every one of my fellows take as much gold and silver as they could carry away: and beare it to the sepulchre, and still as they carried away I stood at the gate, watching diligently when they would returne. The Beare running about the house, to make such of the family afeared as fortuned to wake and come out. For who is he that is so puissant and couragious, that at the ougly sight of so great a monster will not quayle and keep his chamber especially in the night? But when wee had brought this matter to so good a point, there chanced a pittifull case, for as I looked for my companions that should come from the sepulchre, behold there was a Boy of the house that fortuned to looke out of a window, and espied the Bear running about, and he went and told all the servants of the house. Whereupon incontinently they came forth with Torches, Lanthornes, and other lights, that they might see all the yard over: they came with clubs, speares, naked swords, Greyhounds, and Mastifes to slay the poore beast. Then I during this broyle thought to run away, but because I would see Thrasileon fight with the Dogs, I lay behinde the gate to behold him. And although I might perceive that he was well nigh dead, yet remembred he his owne faithfulnes and ours, and valiantly resisted the gaping and ravenous mouths of the hell hounds, so tooke hee in gree the pagiant which willingly he tooke in hand himself, and with much adoe tumbled at length out of the house: but when hee was at liberty abroad yet could he not save himself, for all the dogs of the Streete joyned themselves to the greyhounds and mastifes of the house, and came upon him.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was such a compulsive good girl that my professors were always dangling fellowships before me. I longed to turn them down but hadn’t the guts to—so I wasted two and a half years on an M.A. and part of a Ph.D. before it occurred to me that graduate school was seriously interfering with my education. Marrying Bennett sprung me from graduate school. I took a leave of absence to follow him into the army. What else could I do? It wasn’t that I wanted to give up my fellowship—it was History giving me a boot in the ass. Marrying Bennett also got me away from New York and away from my mother and away from the Graduate English Department at Columbia and away from my ex-husband and away from my ex-boyfriends—all of whom had come to seem identical in my mind. I wanted out. I wanted escape. And Bennett was the vehicle for it. Our marriage began under that heavy burden. That it survived at all is rather a miracle. In Heidelberg, we set up house in a vast American concentration camp in the postwar section of town (a far cry from the beautiful old section near the Schloss, which tourists see). Our neighbors were mostly army captains and their “dependents.” With a few notable exceptions they were the most considerate people I’ve ever lived among. The wives welcomed you with coffee when you moved in. The children were maddeningly friendly and polite. The husbands would spring gallantly to help you dig your car out of a snowbank or carry heavy boxes upstairs. It was all the more astonishing then when they announced to you that life was cheap in Asia, that the U.S. ought to bomb the hell out of the Viet Cong, and finally, that soldiers were only there to do a job but not to have political opinions. They regarded Bennett and me as creatures from outer space, and that was rather how we felt ourselves. Across the way were our other neighbors, the Germans. In 1945, when they were still militarists, they had hated Americans for winning the war. Now, in 1966, the Germans were pacifists (at least where other nations were concerned) and they hated the Americans for being in Vietnam. The ironies multiplied so fast you could hardly absorb them. If San Antonio had been strange, Heidelberg was a thousand times stranger. We lived between two sets of enemies and we were both so unhappy that we were enemies to each other as well. I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways.

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

  I encountered something similar in a physician’s office not long ago. I’d been feeling fatigued for some time and had gained some weight, and the doctor asked, “Are you depressed?” I responded, “Well, I don’t have sad feelings, but I do feel dead tired much of the time.” He countered with, “Maybe you’re depressed and you don’t know it.” My doctor did not realize that unpleasant affect can have a physical cause, which in my case was probably lack of sleep from running a lab of a hundred people, staying up late working on this book, and being a mother to my teenage daughter, plus a little thing called menopause. (I wound up explaining interoception and body budgets to him.) But here’s the thing: If he had simply diagnosed me with depression, he could have actually cultivated a feeling of depression in me in that instant. Sure, I was fatigued, and I probably had some inflammation going on due to a bit of chronic stress. If I hadn’t resisted, I could have come away with a prescription for antidepressants and a belief that something was seriously wrong with my life or myself for being unable to cope. This belief might have worsened my miscalibrated body budget, if I started to search for problems in my life . . . and you can always find something if you look. Instead, my doctor and I uncovered a body-budgeting issue and looked for ways to repair it. My doctor didn’t realize it, but he was co-constructing my experience. He wanted to construct one social reality, and I had another. When prediction error from the world dominates prediction, you can have anxiety. Suppose you couldn’t predict at all, ever. What would happen? For starters, your body budget would be screwed up because you couldn’t predict your metabolic needs. You’d have difficulty integrating sensory input from vision, hearing, smell, interoception, nociception, and your other sensory systems into a cohesive whole. You’d therefore have impaired statistical learning, making it difficult for you to learn basic concepts, even to recognize the same person from different angles. Many things would be outside your affective niche. If you were an infant in that situation, you’d most likely be disinterested in other humans; you’d stop looking at the faces of your caregivers, making it harder for them to regulate your highly disrupted body budget, breaking a crucial bond. You would also have trouble learning purely mental concepts of social reality because they’re learned with words, but you’re disinterested in humans so you probably have difficulty learning language. You’d never grow a proper conceptual system.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and the address she gave was “General Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.”—and not Coalmont, anyway—I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley—the day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor—and that he had got into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller—the grossness and obscene bonhommie of his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour of six A.M. Then, with the stern and romantic care of a gentleman about to fight a duel, I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and perfumed my delicate body, shaved my face and chest, selected a silk shirt and clean drawers, pulled on transparent taupe socks, and congratulated myself for having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes—a waistcoat with nacreous buttons, for instance, a pale cashmere tie and so on. I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality as a trivial contretemps, wiped my mouth with a gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door) and rang up the only Schiller—Paul, Furniture—to be found in the battered book. Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of his, and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not going very far for my pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door.