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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Supreme Court that raised questions about the constitutionality of certain methods of execution. States had largely abandoned execution by electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and hanging in favor of lethal injection. Viewed as more sterile and serene, lethal injection had become the most common method for the sanctioned killing of people in virtually every death state. But questions about the painlessness and efficacy of lethal injection were emerging. In the case I argued before the Court, we challenged the constitutionality of Alabama’s protocols for lethal injection. David Nelson had very compromised veins. He was in his sixties and had been a drug addict earlier in his life, making access to his veins difficult. Members of the correctional staff were not able to insert an IV in his arm in order to carry out his execution without medical complications. The Hippocratic oath prevents doctors and medical personnel from participating in executions, so Alabama officials planned for untrained correctional staff to take a knife and make a two-inch incision in Mr. Nelson’s arm or groin so that they could find a vein in which to inject him with toxins and kill him. We argued that without anesthesia, the procedure would be needlessly painful and cruel. The State of Alabama had argued that procedural rules barred Mr. Nelson from challenging the constitutionality of the protocol. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened. The legal question was whether condemned prisoners could file civil rights actions to challenge arguably unconstitutional methods of execution. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was especially active during the oral argument, asking me lots of questions about the propriety of correctional staff engaging in medical procedures. The Court ruled unanimously in our favor, deciding that a condemned prisoner could challenge unconstitutional methods of execution by filing a civil rights case. David Nelson died of natural causes a year after we won relief. Following the Nelson litigation, questions about the drug combination that most states used to carry out lethal injections arose. Many states were using drugs that had been banned for animal euthanasia because they caused a painful and torturous death. The drugs weren’t readily available in the United States, and so states had started importing them from European manufacturers. When the news spread that the drugs were being used in executions in the United States, European producers stopped making them available. The drugs became scarce, which prompted state correctional authorities to obtain them illegally, without complying with FDA rules that regulate the interstate sale and transfer of drugs. Drug raids of state correctional facilities were a bizarre consequence of this surreal drug dealing to carry out executions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Baze v. Rees, later held that the execution protocols and drug combinations weren’t inherently unconstitutional.

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

  She can’t help but feel anxious. The problem is that children of divorce grow up not having learned anything from their parents’ experience that might be useful to them in their own marriages—except that marriage is a slippery slope and people fall off it. Without any guidance and family history, their own marriages begin without an internal compass for telling them which way to turn when difficulties arise. They lack the template I described earlier of how a man and woman live together and solve their differences. Karen explained it this way: “I haven’t the faintest idea how to settle an argument without panicking. First, I’ve never seen how it’s done. My parents were always fighting. Mom was a shrieker and Dad would just walk out. That’s how they solved things or I guess you could say didn’t solve them. And now, whenever Gavin and I disagree, whether it’s about Maya or whether I think he’s working too hard or if it’s about a big decision like what I should do about my work, the one and only solution that occurs to me is that he’s going to leave or that I’ll have to walk out of here. And I panic. And then I pull myself together and act like an adult.” I asked Karen for an example. “Sure. It happened just last week. Gavin was very tense because the economics department was having a meeting and he really cared about the decision they were going to make. I should have known better but just as he was leaving, I started to chide him about not spending enough time with Maya. Judy, he just blew up. As he was walking out the door, he turned on his heel and said, ‘Damn it, Karen, are you never satisfied?’ and he slammed the door.” Karen bit her lower lip as the stress of the situation came back. “And I sat there, Judy, in a state of absolute terror. I tell you, I thought to myself, ‘This is it. This is where it ends. This is what happened to my parents.’ And I even went further, I’m ashamed to say. I thought, should I call a lawyer? What should I do about our joint bank account? I even spun out in my head that Gavin would support Maya but probably wouldn’t give me a dime if we got a divorce. I worked myself into an absolute panic and sat there frozen, for hours. And then Gavin sailed through the door and kissed me! He had completely forgotten our quarrel. It never registered on his radar screen. He must have realized that I was upset because he took me in his arms, hugged me and kissed me, and told me that he loves me more than he thought he would love anybody. And then it was over.” “How often do you have these panics?” “You mean how often do we quarrel?

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "O, but the village," murmured the young Lord. "He must go and he will be the better for it!" "O, heartless Prince," whispered Lady Juliana. She urged Beauty forward to kiss Lord Stefan's boots as she took her side beside both of them. "Poor Prince Tristan will be in the village the whole summer." The Prince lifted Beauty's chin and bent to take a kiss from her lips, which filled Beauty with a softening torment. But she was too curious about all that was being said and dared not make the slightest movement to attract him. "I must ask you..." Lord Stefan began. "Would you send Princess Beauty to the village if you felt she deserved it?" "Of course I would," said the Prince. But he did not sound convincing. "I would do it in an instant." "O, but you couldn't!" Lady Juliana protested. "She doesn't deserve it, so it does not matter," the Prince insisted. "But we are talking about Prince Tristan, and Prince Tristan, for all the abuse and punishments he has endured, remains a mystery to everyone. He needs the rigors of the village just as Prince Alexi once needed the kitchen to teach him humility." Lord Stefan was deeply troubled, and the words rigor and humility seemed to pierce him. He rose and begged the Prince to come with him and make a better judgment of it. "They go tomorrow. The weather is already very warm and the villagers are already preparing for the auction. I've sent him to the prisoners' yard to wait there." "Come, Beauty," the Prince said, rising. "It will be good for you to see this and come to understand it." Beauty was intrigued and followed eagerly. But the Prince's coldness and sternness made her uneasy. She tried to remain close to Lady Juliana as they proceeded along a pathway, out of the gardens, past the kitchen and stables to a plain dirty yard in which she saw a great cart, without its horse, standing on four wheels against the walls that surrounded the castle. There were common soldiers here, menials. She felt her nakedness as she was made to follow the brightly dressed trio. Her welts and cuts smarted anew and fearfully she looked up to see a small pen, fenced in crude sticks, in which a gaggle of naked Princes and Princesses stood with their hands bound to the backs of their necks, milling as if it were less exhausting to walk than to stand by the hour. A common soldier dealt a blow now and then through the fence with a heavy leather belt that sent a squealing Princess towards the middle of the group for cover.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The Queen seemed quite enormous to her. And now she perceived a great resemblance to the Prince, only as always the Queen seemed infinitely colder. Yet there was about her red mouth something which might have once been called sweetness. She had thick eyelashes, a firm chin, and as she smiled dimples showed in her cheeks. Her face was heart shaped. Flustered, Beauty closed her eyes, biting her lip so hard she might have cut it. "Look at me," said the Queen. "I want to see your eyes, naturally. I want no modesty from you now, do you understand me?" "Yes, your Highness," Beauty answered. She wondered if the Queen might hear her heart beat. The bed was soft beneath her, the pillows soft, and she found herself staring at the Queen's great breasts, the dark circle of a nipple beneath the gown, before she looked at the Queen's eyes again obediently. A shock passed through her, collecting in a knot in her belly. The Queen merely studied her in great absorption. Her teeth showed perfectly white between her lips, and those eyes, slanted, long, were black to the core and revealed nothing. "Sit there, Alexi," the Queen said without looking away. And Beauty saw him take his position at the foot of the bed, with his arms folded on his chest, and his back to the bedpost. "Little plaything," the Queen said under her breath to Beauty. "And now I understand perhaps why Lady Juliana is so enraptured over you." She ran her hand over Beauty's face, her cheeks, her eyelids. She pinched Beauty's mouth. She smoothed back her hair, and then she slapped Beauty's breasts to the right and to the left and again. Beauty's mouth quivered but she made no sound. She kept her hands still at her sides. The Queen was like a light that threatened to blind her. If she thought about it, lying here so near the Queen, she would be overcome with panic. The Queen's hand moved over her belly and her thighs. It pinched the flesh of her thighs and then the backs of her legs at the calves. And in spite of herself Beauty felt a tingling everywhere she was touched as if the hand itself had some dreadful power. She felt hatred for the Queen suddenly, more violently than she had felt it for Lady Juliana. But then the Queen commenced to examine, slowly, Beauty's nipples. The fingers of the Queen's right hand turned each nipple this way and that, testing the soft circle of skin around it.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty winced at this. To be taken in such a position hadn't occurred to her. But a Princess would surely be ripe and open for it. "Ad you can imagine," Alexi went on, "these spectacles became a torture. In my hours alone, I longed for them. As I watched, I could feel the blows on my buttocks as if I too were being spanked, and I felt my penis stir against my will at the sight of the little girls being chased, or even Prince Gerald being stroked and sometimes suckled by a Page for the Queen's amusement. "I should add that Prince Gerald found this hard. He was an anxious Prince, ever striving to please the Queen, and punishing himself in his own mind, dreadfully, for failure. He never seemed to realize that many of the tasks and games were deliberately made too difficult for him. The Queen would have him brush her hair with the brush fixed in his teeth. This is most difficult. And he would be weeping when he could not brush her hair in long enough strokes, nor thoroughly enough. Of course she was annoyed. She'd throw him over her lap, and with a leather-handled brush flail at him. He wept, full of shame and misery, and feared her worst wrath: that he be given over to others for pleasure and chastisement." "Does she ever give you to others, Alexi?" Beauty asked. "When she's displeased with me, she gives me to others," he continued. "But I have surrendered and accepted this. It saddens me but I accept it. I am never in the frenzy in which Prince Gerald always found himself. He would beseech the Queen with silent kisses all over her slippers. It was never any use. The more he pleaded, the more she punished him." "What became of him?" "The time came for him to be sent back to his Kingdom. That time comes for all slaves. It will come for you, too, though when, no one can say, on account of the Prince's passion for you, and that he awakened you and claimed you. Your Kingdom was a legend here," said Prince Alexi. "But Prince Gerald went home richly rewarded and I think most relieved to be let go. He was of course beautifully dressed before he left, and received by the Court, and then we were assembled to see him ride out. It's the custom. I think it was as humiliating for him as anything else. It was as if he remembered his nakedness and his subjugation. But other slaves suffer just as much when they are released for many reasons. Who knows, however. Maybe Prince Gerald's endless worries saved him from something worse. It's impossible to tell. Princess Lizetta is saved by her rebellion. It was interesting to Prince Gerald surely..."

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  At the Gare du Nord, I find a telephone and try to place a person-to-person call. But I’ve forgotten every word of French I ever knew and the operator’s English leaves much to be desired. After an absurd dialogue, many mistakes, bleeps and wrong numbers, I am put through to my own home number. The operator asks for “le Docteur Wing,” and far off, as if under the whole Atlantic Ocean, I hear the voice of the girl who has sublet our apartment for the summer. “He’s not here. He’s in Vienna.” “Madame, le Docteur est à Vienne,” the operator echoes. “Ce n’est pas possible!” I yell—but that’s the extent of my French. As the operator begins to argue with me, I become increasingly tongue-tied. Once, years ago, when I traveled here as a college student, I could speak this language. Now I can hardly even speak English. “He must be there!” I shout. Where is he if not at home? And what on earth will I do with my life without him? I quickly put through a call to Bennett’s oldest friend, Bob, who has our car for the summer. Bennett would be sure to contact him first. Surprisingly, Bob is home. “Bob—it’s me—Isadora—I’m in Paris. Is Bennett there?” Bob’s voice comes back faintly. “I thought he was with you.” And then silence. We’ve been cut off. Only it is not quite total silence. Is that the sound of the ocean I’m hearing—or do I imagine it? I feel a tiny rivulet of sweat trickle down between my breasts. Suddenly Bob’s voice surfaces again. “What happened? Did you have a…” Then gurgling interference. Then silence. I envision some giant fish gnawing on the Atlantic cable. Every time the fish chomps down, Bob’s voice goes dead. “Bob!” “I can’t hear you. I said: did you have a fight?” “Yes. It’s too hard to explain. It’s awful. It’s all my…” “What? I can’t hear you…. Where’s Bennett?” “That’s why I’m calling you.” “What? I didn’t catch that.” “Shit. I can’t hear you either…. Listen, if he calls, tell him I love him” “What?” “Tell him I’m looking for him.” “What? I can’t hear you.” “Tell him I want him.” “What? I can’t hear you.” “Tell him I want him.” “What? Would you repeat that?” “This is impossible.” “I can’t hear you.” “Just tell him that I love him.” “What? This is a horrible conn…” We are cut off for the last time. The operator’s voice intervenes with the news that I owe 129 new francs and 34 centimes. “But I couldn’t hear anything!” The operator insists that I owe it anyway. I go to the telephone cashier, look in my wallet and find I have no francs at all, old or new. So I have to go through the hassle of changing money and fighting with the cashier, but finally I pay. It’s just too much trouble to protest further.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “We have,” said Haze, “an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him ‘brace’ her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, you know, I think a summer camp is so much healthier, and—well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use mamma’s lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go into tantrums at the least provocation.” “Are you sure,” I said at last, “that she will be happy there?” (lame, lamentably lame!) “She’d better,” said Haze. “And it won’t be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes—you know, the woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things—health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility toward other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?” Nurse that tooth.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It was the kind of box they have in churches for accepting donations for candles. The fainting couch in her office was covered in cat fur and piled on one end with little antique dolls with chipped porcelain faces. On her desk were half-eaten granola bars and stacked Tupperware containers of grapes and cut-up melon, a mammoth old computer, more National Geographic magazines. “What brings you here?” she asked. “Depression?” She’d already pulled out her prescription pad. My plan was to lie. I’d given it careful consideration. I told her I’d been having trouble sleeping for the past six months, and then complained of despair and nervousness in social situations. But as I was reciting my practiced speech, I realized it was somewhat true. I wasn’t an insomniac, but I was miserable. Complaining to Dr. Tuttle was strangely liberating. “I want downers, that much I know,” I said frankly. “And I want something that’ll put a damper on my need for company. I’m at the end of my rope,” I said. “I’m an orphan, on top of it all. I probably have PTSD. My mother killed herself.” “How?” Dr. Tuttle asked. “Slit her wrists,” I lied. “Good to know.” Her hair was red and frizzy. The foam brace she wore around her neck had what looked like coffee and food stains on it, and it squished the skin on her neck up toward her chin. Her face was like a bloodhound’s, folded and drooping, her sunken eyes hidden under very small wire-framed glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it. “Both my parents died when I was in college,” I went on. “Just a few years ago.” She seemed to study me for a moment, her expression blank and breathless. Then she turned back to her little prescription pad. “I’m very good with insurance companies,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know how to play into their little games. Are you sleeping at all?” “Barely,” I said. “Any dreams?” “Only nightmares.” “I figured. Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.” She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?” “Yeah.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Lolita, it was decided, would go Thursday. Instead of waiting till July, as had been initially planned. And stay there after Phyllis had left. Till school began. A pretty prospect, my heart. Oh, how I was taken aback—for did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine? To explain my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning. Must have been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry. “We have,” said Haze, “an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him ‘brace’ her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, you know, I think a summer camp is so much healthier, and—well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use mamma’s lipstick, and pursue shy studious gentlemen, and go into tantrums at the least provocation.” “Are you sure,” I said at last, “that she will be happy there?” (lame, lamentably lame!) “She’d better,” said Haze. “And it won’t be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes—you know, the woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things—health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility toward other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?” Nurse that tooth. 15 Next day they drove downtown to buy things needed for the camp: any wearable purchase worked wonders with Lo. She seemed her usual sarcastic self at dinner.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over to Camp Q, tell Lolita her mother was about to undergo a major operation at an invented hospital, and then keep moving with my sleepy nymphet from inn to inn while her mother got better and better and finally died. But as I traveled campward my anxiety grew. I could not bear to think I might not find Lolita there—or find, instead, another, scared, Lolita clamoring for some family friend: not the Farlows, thank God—she hardly knew them—but might there not be other people I had not reckoned with? Finally, I decided to make the long-distance call I had simulated so well a few days before. It was raining hard when I pulled up in a muddy suburb of Parkington, just before the Fork, one prong of which bypassed the city and led to the highway which crossed the hills to Lake Climax and Camp Q. I flipped off the ignition and for quite a minute sat in the car bracing myself for that telephone call, and staring at the rain, at the inundated sidewalk, at a hydrant: a hideous thing, really, painted a thick silver and red, extending the red stumps of its arms to be varnished by the rain which like stylized blood dripped upon its argent chains. No wonder that stopping beside those nightmare cripples is taboo. I drove up to a gasoline station. A surprise awaited me when at last the coins had satisfactorily clanked down and a voice was allowed to answer mine. Holmes, the camp mistress, informed me that Dolly had gone Monday (this was Wednesday) on a hike in the hills with her group and was expected to return rather late today. Would I care to come tomorrow, and what was exactly—Without going into details, I said that her mother was hospitalized, that the situation was grave, that the child should not be told it was grave and that she should be ready to leave with me tomorrow afternoon. The two voices parted in an explosion of warmth and good will, and through some freak mechanical flaw all my coins came tumbling back to me with a hitting-the-jackpot clatter that almost made me laugh despite the disappointment at having to postpone bliss. One wonders if this sudden discharge, this spasmodic refund, was not correlated somehow, in the mind of McFate, with my having invented that little expedition before ever learning of it as I did now.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The trouble with me was that I always wanted to be the greatest in everything. The greatest lover. The greatest hungerer. The greatest sufferer. The greatest victim, the greatest fool…If I got myself into scrapes all the time, it was my own damn fault for always wanting to be the greatest. I had to have the craziest first husband, the most inscrutable second husband, the most daring first book, the most reckless post-publication panic…. I could do nothing by halves. If I was going to make a fool of myself by having an affair with an unfeeling bastard, I had to do it in front of the whole psychoanalytic community of the world. And I had to compound it by taking off with him on a drunken jaunt that might get us both killed. The transgression and the punishment all wrapped up in one neat little package. If undeliverable, return to sender. But who was the sender? Me. Me. Me. — And then, on top of everything else, I began to be convinced I was pregnant. That was all I needed. My life was in an uproar. My husband was God knows where. I was alone with a strange man who did not give a damn about me. And pregnant. Or so I thought. What was I trying to prove? That I could endure anything? Why did I have to keep making my life into such a test of stamina? I had no real reason to think I was pregnant. I had not missed a period. But I never need a real reason to think anything. And I never need a real reason to panic. Every time I took off my diaphragm I would feel my cervix, searching for some clue. Why did I never know what was going on inside me? Why was my body such a mystery to me? In Austria, in Italy, in France, in Germany—I felt for my cervix and considered the possibilities. I would discover I was pregnant. I would go through the whole pregnancy not knowing if the baby was going to be blond and blue-eyed like Adrian or Chinese like Bennett. What would I do? Who would take me in? I had left my husband and he would never forgive me and take me back. And my parents would never help me without extracting an emotional price so great that I would have to turn into a child again to count on them. And my sisters would think it served me right for my dissolute life. And my friends would laugh behind their false commiseration. Isadora bites the dust!

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

  Words on questionnaires can influence people’s categorizations, just like the basic emotion method influences perceptions with its list of emotion words. 4 0 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. In the end, you’d exist in a constant stream of ambiguous sensory input with few concepts to help you make sense of it.

• 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 Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In these frightening places we paid ten for twins, flies queued outside at the screenless door and successfully scrambled in, the ashes of our predecessors still lingered in the ashtrays, a woman’s hair lay on the pillow, one heard one’s neighbor hanging his coat in his closet, the hangers were ingeniously fixed to their bars by coils of wire so as to thwart theft, and, in crowning insult, the pictures above the twin beds were identical twins. I also noticed that commercial fashion was changing. There was a tendency for cabins to fuse and gradually form the caravansary, and, lo (she was not interested but the reader may be), a second story was added, and a lobby grew in, and cars were removed to a communal garage, and the motel reverted to the good old hotel. I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. For instance: I would not swear that there was not at least one occasion, prior to, or at the very beginning of, the Midwest lap of our journey, when she managed to convey some information to, or otherwise get into contact with, a person or persons unknown. We had stopped at a gas station, under the sign of Pegasus, and she had slipped out of her seat and escaped to the rear of the premises while the raised hood, under which I had bent to watch the mechanic’s manipulations, hid her for a moment from my sight. Being inclined to be lenient, I only shook my benign head though strictly speaking such visits were taboo, since I felt instinctively that toilets—as also telephones—happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects—it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another—carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Right here over Jamaica Bay where the plane banks and turns and the “No Smoking” sign goes off. This may well be where we go screaming down in thousands of flaming pieces. So I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot (a reassuringly midwestern voice named Donnelly) fly the 250-passenger motherfucker. Thank God for his crew cut and middle-America diction. New Yorker that I am, I would never trust a pilot with a New York accent. As soon as the seat-belt sign goes off and people begin moving about the cabin, I glance around nervously to see who’s on board. There’s a big- breasted mama-analyst named Rose Schwamm-Lipkin with whom I recently had a consultation about whether or not I should leave my current analyst (who isn’t, mercifully, in evidence). There’s Dr. Thomas Frommer, the harshly Teutonic expert on Anorexia Nervosa, who was my husband’s first analyst. There’s kindly, rotund Dr. Arthur Feet, Jr., who was the third (and last) analyst of my friend Pia. There’s compulsive little Dr. Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named “Nanci”) as if she were a taxi. (I saw Dr. Schrift for one memorable year when I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ living-room couch. He kept insisting that the horse I was dreaming about was my father and that my periods would return if only I would “ackzept being a vohman.”) There’s smiling, bald Dr. Harvey Smucker whom I saw in consultation when my first husband decided he was Jesus Christ and began threatening to walk on the water in Central Park Lake. There’s foppish, hand-tailored Dr. Ernest Klumpner, the supposedly “brilliant theoretician” whose latest book is a psychoanalytic study of John Knox. There’s black-bearded Dr. Stanton Rappoport-Rosen who recently gained notoriety in New York analytic circles when he moved to Denver and branched out into something called “Cross-Country Group Ski- Therapy.” There’s Dr. Arnold Aaronson pretending to play chess on a magnetic board with his new wife (who was his patient until last year), the singer Judy Rose. Both of them are surreptitiously looking around to see who is looking at them—and for one moment, my eyes and Judy Rose’s meet. Judy Rose became famous in the fifties for recording a series of satirical ballads about pseudointellectual life in New York. In a whiny and deliberately unmusical voice, she sang the saga of a Jewish girl who takes courses at the New School, reads the Bible for its prose, discusses Martin Buber in bed, and falls in love with her analyst. She has now become one with the role she created. Besides the analysts, their wives, the crew, and a few poor outnumbered laymen, there were some children of analysts who’d come along for the ride.

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

  At the very least, these results should help spread the word that depression is a brain disease and not just a shortage of happy thoughts. … Anxiety is a condition that seems very different from chronic pain and depression. When you’re anxious, you feel worried or worked up, like you don’t know what to do with yourself, and generally miserable. This is a stark contrast with depression, in which you feel sluggish, like you can’t go on with life, and also generally miserable, and with chronic pain, which is, well, painful. So far, we’ve learned that emotion, chronic pain, chronic stress, and depression all involve the interoceptive and control networks. Those same networks are critical to anxiety as well. Anxiety is still a puzzle being unraveled, * but one thing seems certain: it is yet another disorder of prediction and prediction error across these two networks. The neural pathways studied in anxiety for prediction and prediction error are also the same ones as for emotion, pain, stress, and depression. 3 5 Traditional research on anxiety disorders is founded on the old “triune brain” model, that cognition controls emotion. Your allegedly emotional amygdala is overactive, they say, and your so-called rational prefrontal cortex is failing to regulate it. This approach is still influential, even though the amygdala is not the home of any emotion, the prefrontal cortex does not house cognition, and emotion and cognition are whole-brain constructions that cannot regulate each other. So, how is anxiety made? We don’t know all the details yet, but we have some tantalizing clues. 3 6 I speculate that an anxious brain, in a sense, is the opposite of a depressed brain. In depression, prediction is dialed way up and prediction error way down, so you’re locked into the past. In anxiety, the metaphorical dial is stuck on allowing too much prediction error from the world, and too many predictions are unsuccessful. With insufficient prediction, you don’t know what’s coming around the next corner, and life contains a lot of corners. That’s classic anxiety. 3 7 Anxiety sufferers, for whatever reason, have weakened connections between several key hubs in the interoceptive network, including the amygdala. 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.

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

  Because belief in the classical view affects your life in ways you might not realize. Think about the last time you went through airport security, where taciturn agents of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) X-rayed your shoes and evaluated your likelihood as a terrorist threat. Not long ago, a training program called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) taught those TSA agents to detect deception and assess risk based on facial and bodily movements, on the theory that such movements reveal your innermost feelings. It didn’t work, and the program cost taxpayers $900 million. We need to understand emotion scientifically so government agents won’t detain us —or overlook those who actually do pose a threat—based on an incorrect view of emotion. 6 Now imagine that you’re in a doctor’s office, complaining of chest pressure and shortness of breath, which may be heart attack symptoms. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and sent home, whereas if you’re a man, you’re more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease and receive lifesaving preventive treatment. As a result, women over age sixty-five die more frequently of heart attacks than men do. The perceptions of doctors, nurses, and the female patients themselves are shaped by classical view beliefs that they can detect emotions like anxiety, and that women are inherently more emotional than men . . . with fatal consequences. 7 Belief in the classical view can even start wars. The Gulf War in Iraq was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein’s half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn’t serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces. 8 We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection. Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions. How are emotions made, if they aren’t simply triggered reactions? Why do they vary so much, and why have we believed for so long that they have distinctive fingerprints? These questions in and of themselves can be delightfully interesting to ponder.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Did he ask where we were going?” “Oh, he knows that” (mocking me). “Anyway,” I said, giving up, “I have seen his face now. He is not pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp.” “Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you—Oh, look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,” she continued unexpectedly, “I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my mother agreed to put the car in reverse.” It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick; and silently we travelled on, unpursued. But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow—as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him. O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek. A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets—at half-past-four P.M. in a factory town—was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb. When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared. Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.” “I have other notions by now,” I said. “You should—ah—check them by—ah—keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. “Gee, you are mean,” she added in her ordinary voice.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels and tourist homes. This figure includes a few registrations between Chestnut and Beardsley, one of which yielded a shadow of the fiend (“N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.”); I had to space and time my inquiries carefully so as not to attract undue attention; and there must have been at least fifty places where I merely inquired at the desk—but that was a futile quest, and I preferred building up a foundation of verisimilitude and good will by first paying for an unneeded room. My survey showed that of the 300 or so books inspected, at least 20 provided me with a clue: the loitering fiend had stopped even more often than we, or else—he was quite capable of that—he had thrown in additional registrations in order to keep me well furnished with derisive hints. Only in one case had he actually stayed at the same motor court as we, a few paces from Lolita’s pillow. In some instances he had taken up quarters in the same or in a neighboring block; not infrequently he had lain in wait at an intermediate spot between two bespoken points. How vividly I recalled Lolita, just before our departure from Beardsley, prone on the parlor rug, studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick! I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit. At the very first motel office I visited, Ponderosa Lodge, his entry, among a dozen obviously human ones, read: Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY. Its Italian Comedy connotations could not fail to strike me, of course. The landlady deigned to inform me that the gentleman had been laid up for five days with a bad cold, that he had left his car for repairs in some garage or other and that he had checked out on the 4th of July. Yes, a girl called Ann Lore had worked formerly at the Lodge, but was now married to a grocer in Cedar City. One moonlit night I waylaid white-shoed Mary on a solitary street; an automaton, she was about to shriek, but I managed to humanize her by the simple act of falling on my knees and with pious yelps imploring her to help. She did not know a thing, she swore. Who was this Gratiano Forbeson? She seemed to waver. I whipped out a hundred-dollar bill. She lifted it to the light of the moon. “He is your brother,” she whispered at last. I plucked the bill out of her moon-cold hand, and spitting out a French curse turned and ran away.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. It was I who kept saying dumb things like: “Oh well, I might as well give up this nonsense of writing and just have a baby.” And it was he who was always pointing out the falseness of such a “solution.” I hadn’t seen him for two and a half years, but I had sent him my first book of poems and he had written me about it. “Zo,” he said, like the comic-book German he wasn’t, “I see you no longer have trouble writing letters….” “No, but I certainly have lots of other trouble…” and I spilled out my whole confused story of what had happened since we arrived in Vienna. He wasn’t going to interpret it for me, he said. He was only going to remind me of what he’d said many times before: “You’re not a secretary; you’re a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion?