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)

  If you’re in a doctor’s office waiting for the results of a medical test, you might experience that same ache as an anxious feeling. In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your brain is an emotion concept. As before, your brain makes meaning from your aching stomach, together with the sensations from the world around you, by constructing an instance of that concept. An instance of emotion. And that just might be how emotions are made. ... Back when I was in graduate school, a guy in my psychology program asked me out on a date. I didn’t know him very well and was reluctant to go because, honestly, I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, but I had been cooped up too long in the lab that day, so I agreed. As we sat together in a coffee shop, to my surprise, I felt my face flush several times as we spoke. My stomach fluttered and I started having trouble concentrating. Okay, I realized, I was wrong. I am clearly attracted to him. We parted an hour later—after I agreed to go out with him again—and I headed home, intrigued. I walked into my apartment, dropped my keys on the floor, threw up, and spent the next seven days in bed with the flu. The same neural process of construction that simulates a bee from blobs also constructs feelings of attraction from a fluttering stomach and a flushing face. An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world. Philosophers have long proposed that your mind makes sense of your body in the world, from René Descartes in the seventeenth century to William James (considered the father of American psychology) in the nineteenth; as you will learn, however, neuroscience now shows us how this process—and much more—occurs in the brain to make an emotion on the spot. I call this explanation the theory of constructed emotion: 9 In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. If a swarm of buzzing bees is squeezing underneath your front door while your heart is pounding in your chest, your brain’s prior knowledge of stinging insects gives meaning to the sensations from your body and to the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations from the world, simulating the swarm, the door, and an instance of fear. The exact same bodily sensations in another context, like watching a fascinating film about the hidden lives of bees, might construct an instance of excitement.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decided—despite Lo’s visible annoyance—to spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woollen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb. I was now glad I had it with me—and even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird, though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof—only a little iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a tiny woodpecker—completely out of season, incidentally. Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did wound a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. “You lie here,” I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with a dram of gin. 18The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and accompany us further west. The following days were marked by a number of great thunderstorms—or perhaps, there was but one single storm which progressed across country in ponderous frogleaps and which we could not shake off just as we could not shake off detective Trapp: for it was during those days that the problem of the Aztec Red Convertible presented itself to me, and quite overshadowed the theme of Lo’s lovers.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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! Or else I would get an abortion. A botched abortion which would kill me. Blood poisoning. Or else permanent sterility. Suddenly I wanted a child with my whole heart. Adrian’s child. Bennett’s child. My child. Anyone’s child. I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted to be big with child. I was lying awake in Adrian’s pup tent and crying. He went on snoring. We were sleeping by a roadside somewhere in France that night and it might as well have been the moon.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was, after all, a good deal easier on her own conscience to envisage a Mrs Kipps kept from the world by dark, marital forces than to acknowledge a Mrs Kipps offended by Kiki’s own rudeness. So she had booked a two-hour lunch break today with the purpose of going over to Redwood and  On Beauty seeing about liberating Carlene Kipps from Montague Kipps. She would bring a pie. Everybody loves pie. Now she took out her cell and with a dextrous thumb scrolled down to – and pressed ‘Call’. ‘Hey . . . Hi, Mom . . . wait a minute . . . getting my glasses.’ Kiki heard a thump and then the sound of water spilling. ‘Oh, man . . . Mom, wait up.’ Kiki tensed her jaw. She could hear the tobacco in his voice. But it was no good attacking on that front, seeing as how she’d started up smoking again herself. Instead she attacked obliquely. ‘Every time I call you, Jerome, every time you always just getting out of bed. It’s amazing, really. Don’t matter what time I call, you still in bed.’ ‘Mom . . . please . . . less of the Mamma Simmonds . . . I’m in pain here.’ ‘Baby, we all in pain . . . now, look, Jay,’ said Kiki seriously, abandoning her own mother’s Southern stylings as too unwieldy for the delicate task at hand, ‘quickly – when you were in London . . . Mrs Kipps, her relationship with her husband, with Monty – they were, you know, cool with each other?’ ‘How do you mean?’ asked Jerome. Kiki could feel a little of the jittery anxiety of last year coming through the phone. ‘Mom, what’s going on?’ ‘Nothing, nothing . . . Nothing about that . . . It’s just every time I try to call her, Mrs Kipps – you know, I just want to see how she is – she is my neighbour – ’ ‘Give me some gossip, I am your neighbour!’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Nothing. It’s a song,’ said Jerome and chuckled gently to himself. ‘Sorry – go on, Mom. Neighbourly concern, etcetera . . .’ ‘Right. And I just want to say hello, and every time I call it’s like he won’t let me speak to her . . . like he’s got her locked away or . . . I don’t know, it’s strange. First I thought she was offended – you know how easy folk like that get offended, they’re worse than white folk that way – but now . . . I don’t know. I think it’s more than that. And I was just wondering if you knew anything.’  the anatomy lesson Kiki heard her son sigh into the phone. ‘Mom, I don’t think it’s time for an intervention. Just because she can’t come to the phone doesn’t mean the evil Republican is beating her.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait. I slept. I think I actually fell asleep with my face pressed to my spiral notebook. I remember waking up in the blue hours of early morning and feeling a spiral welt on the side of my cheek. Then I pushed away the notebook and went back to sleep. And my dreams were extravagant. Full of elevators, platforms in space, enormously steep and slippery staircases, ziggurat temples I had to climb, mountains, towers, ruins…. I had some vague sense that I was assigning myself dreams as a sort of cure. I remember once or twice waking and then falling back to sleep thinking: “Now I will have the dream which makes my decision for me.” But what was the decision I sought? Every choice seemed so unsatisfactory in one way or another. Every choice excluded some other choice. It was as if I were asking my dreams to tell me who I was and what I ought to do. I would wake with my heart pounding and then sink back to sleep again. Maybe I was hoping I’d wake up somebody else. Fragments of those dreams are still with me. In one of them, I had to walk a narrow plank between two skyscrapers in order to save someone’s life. Whose? Mine? Bennett’s? Chloe’s? The dream did not say. But it was clear that if I failed, my own life would be over. In another, I reached inside myself to take out my diaphragm, and there, floating over my cervix, was a large contact lens. Womb with a view. The cervix was really an eye. And a nearsighted eye at that. Then I remember the dream in which I was back in college preparing to receive my degree from Millicent McIntosh. I walked up a long flight of steps which looked more like the steps of a Mexican temple than the steps of Low Library. I teetered on very high heels and worried about tripping over my gown. As I approached the lectern and Mrs. McIntosh held out a scroll to me, I realized that I was not merely graduating but was to receive some special honor. “I must tell you that the faculty does not approve of this,” Mrs. McIntosh said. And I knew then that the fellowship conferred on me the right to have three husbands simultaneously. They sat in the audience wearing black caps and gowns. Bennett, Adrian, and some other man whose face was not clear. They were all waiting to applaud when I got my diploma. “Only your high academic achievement makes it impossible for us to withhold this honor,” Mrs. McIntosh said, “but the faculty hopes you will decline of your own volition.” “But why?” I protested. “Why can’t I have all three?”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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....

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties. FOURTEENArabs & Other Animals I’m the sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep…. —from “The Shiek of Araby,” by Ted Snyder, Francis Wheeler, and Harry B. Smith From Florence I took the rapido to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut. I was pretty panicky, as I recall—about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what that meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish—since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had forfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much—admittedly) by my terrible act of deception. I was also certain I’d caught the clap from all those uncircumcised Florentines. Oh, I have phobias about practically everything you can think of: plane crashes, clap, swallowing ground glass, botulism, Arabs, breast cancer, leukemia, Nazis, melanoma…. The thing about my clap phobia is that it doesn’t matter at all how well I feel, or how free of sores and lesions my cunt actually is. I look and look and look, and no matter how little I find, I’m still sure I have some silent asymptomatic form of the clap. Secretly, I know my Fallopian tubes are probably healing over with scar tissue and my ovaries are drying up like old seed pods. I imagine this in great visual detail. All my unborn babies drying up! Withering on the vine, as it were. The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror, trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris—but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave, and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within.

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

  The problem, of course, is that no treatment works for everyone, and there are some people for whom no treatments work. 34 One of the most promising avenues for treatment I’ve seen is the groundbreaking work of neurologist Helen S. Mayberg (chapter 4), who electrically stimulates the brains of unrelentingly depressed patients. Her technique instantly relieves the agony of depression, if only while the current is on, as the patient’s brain shifts from all-consuming internal focus to the external world, so it can predict and process prediction error normally. Let’s hope that these preliminary yet encouraging results will ultimately lead scientists to a more lasting treatment for depression. 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. 35 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. 36 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. 37 Anxiety sufferers, for whatever reason, have weakened connections between several key hubs in the interoceptive network, including the amygdala.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  You can’t boss me ... I despise you ... and so forth), I drove through the slumbering town at a fifty-mile-per-hour pace in continuance of my smooth highway swoosh, and a twosome of patrolmen put their spotlight on the car, and told me to pull over. I shushed Lo who was automatically raving on. The men peered at her and me with malevolent curiosity. Suddenly all dimples, she beamed sweetly at them, as she never did at my orchideous masculinity; for, in a sense, my Lo was even more scared of the law than I—and when the kind officers pardoned us and servilely we crawled on, her eyelids closed and fluttered as she mimicked limp prostration. At this point I have a curious confession to make. You will laugh—but really and truly I somehow never managed to find out quite exactly what the legal situation was. I do not know it yet. Oh, I have learned a few odds and ends. Alabama prohibits a guardian from changing the ward’s residence without an order of the court; Minnesota, to whom I take off my hat, provides that when a relative assumes permanent care and custody of any child under fourteen, the authority of a court does not come into play. Query: is the stepfather of a gaspingly adorable pubescent pet, a stepfather of only one month’s standing, a neurotic widower of mature years and small but independent means, with the parapets of Europe, a divorce and a few madhouses behind him, is he to be considered a relative, and thus a natural guardian? And if not, must I, and could I reasonably dare notify some Welfare Board and file a petition (how do you file a petition?), and have a court’s agent investigate meek, fishy me and dangerous Dolores Haze? The many books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on, that I guiltily consulted at the public libraries of big and small towns, told me nothing beyond darkly insinuating that the state is the super- guardian of minor children. Pilvin and Zapel, if I remember their names right, in an impressive volume on the legal side of marriage, completely ignored stepfathers with motherless girls on their hands and knees. My best friend, a social service monograph (Chicago, 1936), which was dug out for me at great pains from a dusty storage recess by an innocent old spinster, said “There is no principle that every minor must have a guardian; the court is passive and enters the fray only when the child’s situation becomes conspicuously perilous.” A guardian, I concluded, was appointed only when he expressed his solemn and formal desire; but months might elapse before he was given notice to appear at a hearing and grow his pair of gray wings, and in the meantime the fair daemon child was legally left to her own devices which, after all, was the case of Dolores Haze.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  You don’t. You’re very high-minded. That’s an admirable quality.’ Zora turned up Noam and leaned towards the screen, ear first. ‘I guess I’m just looking for something a little more . . . cerebral.’ ‘When I was your age I used to follow boys down the street ’cos they looked cute from the back. I liked to watch them shimmy and shake.’ Zora looked at her mother with wonder. ‘I’m trying to eat? ’ A sound of a door opening. Kiki stood up. Her heart, having inexplicably relocated to her right thigh, beat harshly and threatened to unbalance her. She took a step towards the back hallway. ‘Was that Levi’s door?’ ‘I saw that guy, as it happens . . . weirdly . . . last week in the street. His name’s Carl or something.’ ‘You did? How was he? Levi – is that you? ’  the anatomy lesson ‘I don’t know how he was , he didn’t give me his life story – he seemed fine. He’s a little creepy actually. Full of himself to an extent. I think ‘‘street poet’’ just probably means . . .’ said Zora, fading as her mother hurried across the room to greet her son. ‘Levi! Good after noon , baby. I didn’t even know you were down there.’ Levi pressed the knuckles of his thumbs into his sleep-encrusted eyes and met his mother and her relief halfway. Without struggle, he allowed himself be taken into the expansive familiarity of her chest. ‘Honey, you look bad . What time you get in?’ Levi looked up weakly for a moment before burrowing back in. ‘Zora – make him some tea. Poor honey can’t speak.’ ‘Let him make his own tea. The poor honey shouldn’t drink so much.’ This enlivened Levi. He freed himself from his mother and strode over to the kettle. ‘Man, shut up.’ ‘ You shut up.’ ‘I di’unt drink anything anyhow – I’m just tired. I got back late.’ ‘Nobody heard you come in – I worry, you know. Where were you?’ asked Kiki. ‘Nowhere – I just met some guys, I was hanging with them – we went on to a club. It was cool. Mom, is there any breakfast?’ ‘How was work?’ ‘Fine. Same. Is there breakfast?’ ‘These eggs are mine ,’ said Zora, and hunched over, drawing her plate into her chest. ‘You know where the cereal is.’ ‘Shut up .’ ‘Baby, I’m glad you had a good time, but that’s it now. I don’t want you out any night this week, OK?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Depends. My boys probably will,’ said Levi, flicking his head back in the direction of his companions. ‘Anyway, I guess I better be getting down there. Eleven thirty,’ he repeated to Zora and walked on. Claire, who had not missed Levi’s silent chastisement, poured herself another large glass of wine and put her knife and fork together over her half-eaten salad. ‘We should probably go down too,’ she said quietly.  The ethnography of the basement was not as it had been on previous visits. From where Claire sat she could see only a few other white people, and no one at all of her own age. This state of affairs need not change things particularly, but it was not quite as she’d expected and it would take a little while to feel comfortable. She was thankful for yoga; yoga allowed her to sit cross-legged on a floor cushion like a much younger woman, camouflaged among her students. On stage, a black girl in a tall headwrap rhymed brashly over the bluesy swing of the small live band behind her. My womb , she said, is the TOMB , she said, of your precious misconceptions / I KNOW the identity of your serenity / When YOU claim my hero was blond / Cleopatra? Brother, that’s plain wrong / I HEAR the Nubian spirit behind the whitewash / Oh, gosh / My redemption has its OWN intention . And so on. This was not good. Claire listened to her students’ lively discussion about why this was not good. In the spirit of pedagogy she tried to encourage them to be less abusive, more specific. She was only partly successful in this. ‘At least she’s conscious ,’ said Chantelle, a little guardedly. She  the anatomy lesson was shy of the weight of opinion on the other side. ‘I mean, at least it’s not ‘‘bitch’’ this and ‘‘nigger’’ that. You know?’ ‘This stuff makes me want to die ,’ said Zora loudly and put both hands on the top of her head. ‘It’s so cheesy .’ acknowledgements My gratitude to my first readers, Nick Laird, Jessica Frazier, Tamara Barnett-Herrin, Michal Shavit, David O’Rourke, Yvonne Bailey-Smith and Lee Klein. Their encouragement, criticism and good advice got the thing started. Thank you to Harvey and Yvonne for their support and to my younger brothers, Doc Brown and Luc Skyz, who offer advice on all the things I am too old to know. Thank you to my ex-student Jacob Kramer for notes on college life and East Coast mores. Thank you to India Knight and Elisabeth Merriman for all the French. Thank you to Cassandra King and Alex Adamson for dealing with all extra-literary matters. I thank Beatrice Monti for another stay at Santa Maddelena and the good work that came out of it. Thank you to my English and American editors, Simon Prosser and Anne Godoff, without whom this book would be longer and worse.

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

  We see them relative to ourselves, using the outmoded essentialist theory of human nature, instead of seeing them on their own terms. John Bradshaw, the author of Dog Sense, explains that we view dogs wrongly as having a dominance-seeking “inner wolf” that needs to be tamed by a civilizing force, their owners (an intriguing parallel to our own mythical inner beast that must be tamed by rationality). Dogs are extremely social creatures, continues Bradshaw, as are wolves in the wild when you don’t toss them into zoos with a bunch of strangers. Put a few dogs together in a park and in a few moments they’re playing together. What looks like dominance in dogs is what Bradshaw calls “anxiety,” and what we’d say is a body budget that’s out of balance. Think about it: we take an affiliative, affectionate creature whose body budget we regulate, and we abandon it for most of every day. (Can you imagine doing that to a human child?) Of course their body budget will get out of whack and they’ll feel high-arousal, unpleasant affect. We’ve bred them to be affectively dependent on us. So owners must take care with their dogs’ body budget. Dogs might not feel fear, anger, and other human emotions, but they do experience pleasure, distress, attachment, and other affective feelings. But for dogs to be successful as a species, living cooperatively with their human companions, affect may be enough. 3 9 … Let’s recap where we are. Do animals regulate their body budgets by interoception? I cannot speak for the entire animal kingdom here but for mammals—rats, monkeys, apes, dogs—I think we are on pretty safe ground answering yes. Do animals experience affect? Again, I think we can give a pretty confident yes, based on some biological and behavioral clues. Can animals learn concepts and can they categorize predictively with those concepts? Definitely. Can they learn action-based concepts? Unquestionably yes. Can they learn the meaning of words? Under some circumstances, some animals can learn words or other symbol systems, in the sense that the symbols become part of the statistical patterns that a brain can capture and store for later use. But can animals use words to go beyond the statistical regularities in the world, to create goal-based similarities that unite actions or objects that look, sound, or feel different? Can they use words as invitations to form mental concepts? Do they realize that part of the information they need about the world resides in the minds of other creatures around them? Can they categorize actions and make them meaningful as mental events? Probably not. At least not in the way that we humans do.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic. My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary we followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoid that chore. Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), our route began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then meandered south, up and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu’on appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there, veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is not too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any notes, and have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes, almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to check these recollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo’s strident remonstrations, little Lo’s birthplace, in a corn, coal and hog producing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering out in the college town of Beardsley. 2 Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de plaisir, our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d’ětre (these French clichés are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was built in 1934 or ‘35 by the Youth Labor Corps (I could just imagine them: blond, shirtless, singing Deutschland über Alles, lifting the pink sandstone rocks of the Neckar Valley while blowsy Rhine maidens brought steins of piss-dark beer), and it was nestled in the crotch of the Heiligenberg, or Holy Mountain, where a shrine to Odin had reputedly once stood. I would reach the amphitheater by driving across the river from the old town, down a wide street which led to the suburbs, then up the Holy Mountain, following the signs to the ruins of St. Michael’s Basilica. The amphitheater itself was not, sinisterly enough, marked. The road wound upward through the woods, the light filtered down between the black-green pines, and I was Gretel in a huffing, puffing Volkswagen, but no one was dropping bread crumbs behind me. As I wound my way up the hill, thinking of all those cruel German fairy tales featuring frightened little girls and dark woods, the car would stall in third gear. Afraid of rolling backward down the hill, I’d shift into second and stall again. Finally, I would have to climb in first gear. At the top of the Heiligenberg was a smallish tower built of red sandstone, with mossy, worn-down steps winding to a lookout on top. I’d climb the slippery steps for a view of the city—and there it would be: the gleaming river, the dappled woods, the pinkish hulk of the castle. Why did chroniclers of the Third Reich say everything about Germany except that it was beautiful? Was that too morally ambiguous? The beauty of the countryside and the ugliness of the people. Couldn’t we cope with such irony? Descending from the tower, I’d walk deeper into the woods past a small restaurant called Waldschenke (or, forest tavern) which featured fat-bottomed burghers drinking beer outside in summer, mulled wine inside in winter. There I had to leave the car and continue up through the forest (leaves crunching underfoot, pines drooping overhead, sun obliterated by foliage). Since the tiers of seats were cut into the hillside, the entrance to the amphitheater was from above. Suddenly the theater gaped beneath you—row after row of weedy seats, littered with bottle glass, condoms, candy wrappers. At the base was an apron stage flanked by flagpoles for the swastika or the German Eagle. And on either side were entrances for speakers to appear surrounded by brown-shirted bodyguards. But the most astonishing part was the setting: a gigantic pine-rimmed bowl nestled in the unearthly quiet of those fairy-tale woods. The ground was sacred. Odin had been worshipped, then Christ, then Hitler. I would dash down the hill over the tiers of seats and stand in the dead center of the stage reciting my own poetry to an audience of echoes. One day I told Horst that I wanted to write about the amphitheater. “Why?” he asked. “Because everyone pretends it isn’t there.” “Do you think that’s enough of a reason?” “Yes.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Before we came to Heidelberg, the setting for the first two months of our marriage was as strange as our reason for getting married. There we were, two terrified, transplanted Manhattanites, plunked down in San Antonio, Texas. Bennett was shorn of his hair, stuffed into army greens, forced to sit through hour after hour of army propaganda on how to be an army doctor—something he detested with his whole heart. I stayed “home” in a sterile motel outside San Antonio, watched television, tinkered with my poems, felt enraged and powerless. Like most native New York girls, I had never learned to drive. I was twenty-four and stranded in a Texas motel facing a sun-parched strip of highway between San Antonio and Austin. I slept until ten-thirty, awoke and watched television while I carefully made up my face (for whom?), went downstairs and gorged myself on a Texas brunch of pancakes, sausages, and grits, put on my bathing suit (which was growing tighter and tighter), and baked in the sun for two hours or so. Then I swam in the pool for five minutes and went back upstairs to confront my “work.” But I found it nearly impossible to work. The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had no sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability to write. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life. I had begun composing and illustrating little stories when I was eight. I had kept a journal from the age of ten. I was an avid and ironic letter-writer from age thirteen, and I consciously aped the letters of Keats and G.B.S. throughout my adolescence. At seventeen, when I went to Japan with my parents and sisters, I dragged along my Olivetti portable and spent every evening recapitulating the day’s observations into a loose-leaf notebook. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines during my senior year in college (where I won most of the poetry prizes and edited the literary magazine). And yet despite the obvious fact that I was obsessed with writing, despite publications and despite letters from literary agents asking whether I was “working on a novel,” I didn’t really believe in the seriousness of my commitment at all. Instead, I had allowed myself to be shunted into graduate school. Graduate school was supposed to be safe. Graduate school was supposed to be the thing that you got “under your belt” (like a baby?) before you settled down to writing. What an obvious swindle it now seems! But then it seemed prudent, wise, and responsible.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  You slept with Jerome .’ Victoria sat up in bed and touched his face. ‘Look, I hate to be cheesy, but it’s true: Jerome’s lovely, but he’s a boy , Howard. I need a man right now.’ ‘Vee – please,’ said Howard, grabbing her hand by the wrist and passing her the shirt she had been wearing. ‘We need to go downstairs.’ ‘All right, all right – keep your hair on.’ Together they got dressed, Howard hurriedly and Victoria languidly, with Howard taking a moment to marvel at the fact that the dream of many weeks – to see this girl naked – was now replaying in dramatic reverse. He’d do absolutely anything to see her with all her clothes on. Finally, after they had both fully dressed, Howard found his boxer shorts tucked in a pillowcase. These he stuffed into his pocket. At the door, Victoria stopped him by putting a hand to his chest. She breathed deeply and encouraged him to do the same. She unlocked the door. Slicked his cowlick down with a finger and straightened his tie. ‘Just try not to look like you love tomatoes,’ she said.  on beauty and being wrong  In the early years of the last century, Helen Keller embarked on a lecture tour of New England, enthralling audiences with her life story (and occasionally surprising them with her socialist views). En route she made a stop at Wellington College, and there named a library, planted a tree and found herself the recipient of an honorary degree. Hence the Keller Library: a long, draughty room on the ground floor of the English Department with a green carpet, red walls and too many windows – it is impossible to heat. On one wall hangs a life-sized portrait of Helen dressed in academic cap and gown, sitting in an armchair, her blind eyes demurely directed into her lap. Her companion Annie Sullivan stands behind her, a hand resting tenderly on her friend’s shoulder. It is in this chilly room that all faculty meetings for the Humanities are conducted. Today is January tenth. The first faculty meeting of the year is due to begin in five minutes. As when an especially important vote comes up in the House of Lords, even the most reluctant college members are present this morning, including the octogenarian tenured hermits. It’s a full house, although nobody hurries; they arrive in staggered fashion, scarves stiff and wet with the snow, with salty tide marks on their leather shoes, with handkerchiefs and ostentatious coughs and wheezes.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Potts, do we have any cots left?” Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen. Impatient Humbert! “Our double beds are really triple,” Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. “One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a disguised man [my static]. However—would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?” “I think it went to the Swoons,” said Swine, the initial old clown. “We’ll manage somehow,” I said. “My wife may join us later—but even then, I suppose, we’ll manage.” The two pink pigs were now among my best friends. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale. A key (342!) was half-shown to me (magician showing object he is about to palm)—and handed over to Uncle Tom. Lo, leaving the dog as she would leave me some day, rose from her haunches; a raindrop fell on Charlotte’s grave; a handsome young Negress slipped open the elevator door, and the doomed child went in followed by her throat-clearing father and crayfish Tom with the bags. Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death. “Say, it’s our house number,” said cheerful Lo. There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a reflected bed there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread, and two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps, left and right. I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill in that sepia palm, but thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placed a quarter. Added another. He withdrew. Click. Enfin seuls. “Are we to sleep in one room?” said Lo, her features working in that dynamic way they did—not cross or disgusted (though plain on the brink of it) but just dynamic—when she wanted to load a question with violent significance. “I’ve asked them to put in a cot. Which I’ll use if you like.” “You are crazy,” said Lo. “Why, my darling?” “Because, my dahrling, when dahrling Mother finds out she’ll divorce you and strangle me.” Just dynamic. Not really taking the matter too seriously. “Now look here,” I said, sitting down, while she stood, a few feet from me, and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sunshine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror. “Look here, Lo. Let’s settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great tenderness for you. In your mother’s absence I am responsible for your welfare.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. Given the perspective of history, it’s clear that Bennett and I owed our being in Heidelberg (and in fact our marriage) to the hoodwinking of the American public by the government, which was later revealed in the Pentagon Papers. In other words, we got married as a direct result of Bennett’s being drafted—and he was drafted as a direct result of the Vietnam troop buildup of 1965-66, which was a direct result of the hoodwinking of the American public by the government. But who knew that at the time? We suspected it, but we had no proof. We had ironic headlines promising that the buildup was to “end the war and bring a lasting peace.” We had good one-liners like: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it....” We had activists as articulate as any who came along later. But we had no proof in black and white on the front page of The Times. So Bennett, a child psychiatrist with half his analytic training done, was drafted at the age of thirty-one. We had known each other three months. We had come to each other from other unhappy love affairs—and on my part a disastrous first marriage. We were sick of being single; we were terrified of being alone; we were happy together in bed; we were frightened of the future; we were married one day before Bennett had to leave for Fort Sam Houston. From the first, the marriage was strange. We’d both expected rescue. And there we were both clawing at each other and drowning together. Things turned hostile in a matter of days. We quickly went from verbal assaults to utter silence, punctuated by lovemaking that kept on, amazingly enough, being good. Neither of us quite knew what we had gotten into, or why.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I assume that he’ll have gone back to New York. He hates knocking around Europe almost as much as I do. 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.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The fattest boy on the stage now took his turn with a solo. He was also the angriest, and the other boys dropped back in order to give him the space he needed for whatever it was he was angry about. ‘It’s a very worthy effort,’ shouted Claire to her class above the  the anatomy lesson unbearable noise of another chorus. ‘They have the power of the troubadour voice . . . But I’d say they have a little to learn about integration of idea and form – you break a form in two if you have all this undigested political fury in it. I think I’m going to go up for a cigarette.’ Deftly she rose without the need of putting her hands to the floor. ‘I’ll come up too,’ said Zora, and made heavier work of the same movement. They made their way through the crowds in the basement and restaurant without conversation. Claire wondered what was coming. Outside, the temperature had dropped another few degrees. ‘You want to share? Be quicker.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Claire and accepted the cigarette she was passed. Her fingers trembled a little. ‘Those guys are wild,’ said Zora. ‘It’s like, you so want them to be good, but – ’ ‘Right.’ ‘Something to do with trying too hard, I guess. That’s Levi all over.’ They were silent for a minute. ‘Zora,’ said Claire, letting the wine take her along, ‘are we OK?’ ‘Oh, absolutely ,’ said Zora with a certainty and speed that suggested she’d been waiting for the question all night. Claire looked at her doubtfully and passed back the cigarette. ‘You sure?’ ‘ Seriously . We’re all adults. And I have no intention of not being an adult.’ Claire smiled stiffly. ‘I’m glad.’ ‘Don’t mention it. It’s all about compartmentalization.’ ‘That’s very mature of you.’ Zora smiled contentedly. Not for the first time when talking to Howard’s daughter Claire felt estranged from her own being, as if she were indeed just another of the six billion extras playing in that fabulous stage show, the worldwide hit called Zora’s Life. ‘What’s important,’ said Zora, her voice turning excessively  On Beauty diffident, ‘is finding out, you know . . . whether I can actually do this thing, writing.’ ‘That’s a daily discovery,’ said Claire evasively. She felt Zora’s avid stare; she sensed something important was about to be said. But now the door of the restaurant was thrown open. It was Ron. The diners behind him complained of the draught. ‘Oh my God – you’ve got to see this guy. He’s amazing . Downstairs. He’s blowing everybody away .’ ‘This better be good – we’re smoking.’ ‘Zoor – I’m telling you. He’s like Keats with a knapsack.’