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 On Beauty (2005)

  The images were faint, ageing. ‘I have no idea when those were taken.’ ‘Sure,’ said Victoria. ‘Tell it to the judge.’ ‘I’ve never seen them before.’ ‘You know what I thought when I saw them? Rembrandt’s portraits. Right? Not that one – but look at that one, with your hair all over your eyes. And it works because you look older in that one than that one . . .’ She was leaning into him, shoulder to shoulder. Howard touched one of his faces softly with his own thumb. It was Howard Belsey. This was what people saw as he moved through the world. ‘Anyway . . . they’re mine now,’ she said, snatching them back. She folded the strip in half and put it in her pocket.  on beauty and being wrong ‘So tonight – you picking me up? Like in the movies – I’ll wear a corsage and then later I’ll throw up on your shoes.’ She moved away from him and took one step up, her arms stretched between the banister and the wall, swaying forward and back, fatally like one of Howard’s own children back in  Langham. ‘I don’t think . . .’ began Howard, and then started again. ‘What is it that we’re meant to be going to?’ ‘Emerson Hall. Three professors a table. You’re mine. Food, drink, speeches, go home. Not complicated.’ ‘Does your . . . Monty – does he know you’re going with me?’ Victoria rolled her eyes. ‘No – but he’ll think it’s perfect . He thinks Mike and I should always put ourselves in the paths of liberals. He says you learn how not to be stupid that way.’ ‘Victoria,’ said Howard and made an effort to look her in her eyes, ‘I think you should find someone else to go with. I think it’s inappropriate. And, to be honest, I’m really not in the right state at the moment to go to some – ’ ‘Oh, my God – hello? Girl whose mother just died. You are so bloody self-obsessed.’ Victoria climbed back up the stairs and put her hand to the fire door. Her eyes filmed over with ready tears. Howard felt sorry for her, naturally, but mostly he felt extremely anxious that if she were to cry it should be far away from here and him, before anyone came down these stairs or through that door. ‘Of course, I recognize that . . . of course . . . but I’m just saying . . . you know, we’ve made this . . . awful mess and the best thing now is to stop it exactly where it – just draw a line before more people are hurt.’ Victoria laughed horribly. ‘ But isn’t that true? ’ Howard pleaded in a whisper. ‘ Wouldn’t that be best? ’ ‘Best for who?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was almost like abjuring God, country, and flag. “But you’re such an excellent student, Mrs. Stollerman, what else could you do?” (What else indeed? What else might there be in life but Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire?) “Well, er, I think I want to write.” I said it as apologetically as if it were: “I think I want to kill my mother.” Professor Stanton looked troubled. “Oh that,” he said, vexed. Students were probably always coming to him with futile ambitions like wanting to write. “You see, Professor Stanton, I started studying eighteenth-century English literature because I love satire, but I think I want to write satire not criticize it. Criticism doesn’t seem very satisfying somehow.” “Satisfying!” he exploded. I gulped. “What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? Literature is work, not fun,” he said. “Yes,” I said meekly. “You come to graduate school because you love to read, because you love literature—well, literature is hard work! It’s not a game!” Professor Stanton seemed to have found his true subject. “Yes, but if you’ll excuse me, Professor Stanton, it does seem that all this criticism is out of keeping with the spirit of Fielding or Pope or Swift. I mean I always imagine them lying there in their graves and laughing at us all. This is just the sort of thing they’d find funny. I mean I read Pope or Swift or Fielding and it makes me want to write. It starts my mind going on poems. The criticism seems sort of silly to me. I’m sorry to say this, but it does.” “Who made you the guardian of the spirit of Pope? Or Swift? Or Fielding?” “No one.” “Then what the hell are you complaining about?” “I’m not complaining. I just think I may have made a mistake. I think I really want to write.” “Mrs. Stollerman, you’ll have plenty of time to write after you get your Ph.D. under your belt. And then you’ll always have something to fall back on just in case you’re not Emily Dickinson.” “I suppose you’re right,” I said, and went home to sleep. Brian woke me up with a bang in June. I’m not exactly sure when the onset of it was, but sometime in mid-June, I noticed that he had become more manic than usual. He had stopped sleeping entirely. He wanted me to sit up all night with him and discuss heaven and hell. Not that this was so unusual for Brian. He’d always been extraordinarily interested in heaven and hell. But now he began talking about the Second Coming quite a lot and he talked about it in a new way. What if (he asked) Christ came back to earth as an obscure market research executive?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I started going to his high-ceilinged, badly heated office in Heidelberg and lying on the couch four times a week, I was twenty-four and totally panicked. I was afraid of riding on streetcars, afraid of writing letters, afraid of putting words on paper. I could scarcely believe that I had published some poems and gotten a B.A. and M.A. with all sorts of honors. Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. I used to search all the closets before I stayed alone at night. And even then couldn’t sleep. I used to lie awake nights wondering if I was driving my second husband crazy too—or if it just seemed that way. One of my most ingenious little self-tortures was the way I wrote letters. Or rather, failed to write them, especially letters concerning my work. If (as happened once or twice) some editor or agent wrote me asking to see some of my poems, my response was utter despair. What would I say? How could I answer such a difficult request? How could I phrase the letter? One of these requests sat in a drawer for two years while I deliberated. I tried writing various drafts. “Dear Mrs. Jones,” I began. But was that too presumptuous? Perhaps I should say “Mrs. Jones”; the “Dear” might be seen to be currying favor. How about no heading? Just launch into the letter? No. That was too stern. If I had this much trouble with the greeting, you can imagine what agonies I went through with the text. Thank you for your kind letter asking me to submit material. However… All wrong! It was too servile. Her letter wasn’t “kind” and why should I toady to her by thanking her? Better be self-confident and assertive: I have just received your letter asking me to submit poems for consideration… Too egotistical! (I crumpled up another sheet of paper.) Never, I once read, begin a letter with the personal pronoun. Besides, how could I say I had “just received” her letter when I had been holding it for a year? Try again. Your letter of November 12, 1967, has been on my mind for a long time. I am sorry to be such a poor correspondent but… Too personal. Does she want you to cry on her shoulder about your neurotic letter-writing problems? Does she care?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Meanwhile Pierre’s English Uncle Gavin—a displaced Cockney who married Aunt Françoise back in 1923 (and has been in Karkabi regretting it ever since)—produced a rabbit he’d shot that morning and started cleaning it. Inside the house, there were only about four rooms, with whitewashed walls and crucifixes over all the beds (Pierre’s family are Maronite Catholics) and kissed-over pictures of various saints ascending to heaven on slick magazine paper. There were also numerous tattered magazine photos of the Royal Family of England; and then there was Jesus Himself, wearing a toga, his face barely visible under a hail of kiss-prints. While supper was being made, Pierre led us out to show us “his domain.” Randy insisted on staying in the house with her feet up, but the rest of us trooped obediently over the rocks (followed by an entourage of barefoot cousins who kept pointing enthusiastically to the electricity tower). Pierre snapped at them in Arabic; he was after something more pastoral. And he found it, just over the next rocky hill, where a real live shepherd was guarding real live sheep under a wormy apple tree. That was all Pierre needed to see. He began spouting “poetry” as if he were Kahlil Gibran and Edgar Guest rolled into one. A shepherd! Sheep! An apple tree! It was charming. It was pastoral. It was Homer and Virgil and the Bible. So we walked over to the shepherd—a pimply kid of about fifteen—and found him listening to a little Japanese transistor radio which played Frank Sinatra followed immediately by a bunch of singing commercials in Arabic. Then saftig seventeen-year-old Chloe took out one of her menthol cigarettes and offered him one—which he accepted, trying to look as cool and sophisticated as possible. And then this charming shepherd reached into his charming pocket and pulled out a charming butane lighter. When he lit Chloe’s cigarette, you just knew he had spent practically his whole life at the movies. After supper, all the relatives in town (i.e. practically the whole town) came over. A lot of them came over to watch TV (since Pierre’s aunt is one of the few people in Karkabi who has one) but that night they came over to watch us too. Mostly they stood around and stared at us and looked embarrassed, but sometimes they’d touch my hair (or Chloe’s or Lalah’s) and make noises to indicate that they were really crazy about blondes. Or else they’d pat us everywhere as if they were blind. God—there’s nothing to compare with being patted by a dozen two-hundred-pound Lebanese women with mustaches. I was panicky. Could they tell by patting that we were Jewish? I was sure they could. But I was wrong.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Baby, you got to wake up. Sorry, honey. Honey?’ Zora opened her other eye and found her mother sitting on her bed.  On Beauty ‘The college just called me. Something’s happened – they want to see you. Jack French’s office. They sounded pretty het up. Zora?’ ‘It’s a Saturday . . .’ ‘They wouldn’t tell me anything. They said it was urgent. Are you in trouble?’ Zora sat up in bed. Her hangover had vanished. ‘Where’s Howard?’ she asked. She could not remember ever feeling as focused as she did this morning. The first day she wore glasses had been a little like this: lines sharper, colours clearer. The whole world like an old painting restored. Finally, she understood. ‘Howard? The Greenman. He walked in ’cos the weather’s nice. Zoor, do you want me to come with you?’ Zora declined this offer. For the first time in months, she got dressed without attention to anything else except the basic practical covering of her body. She didn’t do her hair. No make-up. No contact lenses. No heels. How much time she saved! How much more she would get done in this new life! She got into the Belsey family car and drove with hostile speed into town, cutting up other cars and swearing at innocent traffic signals. She parked illegally in a faculty space. It being a weekend, the department doors were locked. Liddy Cantalino buzzed her in. ‘Jack French?’ demanded Zora. ‘And good morning to you too, young lady,’ Liddy snapped back. ‘They’re all in his office.’ ‘All? Who?’ ‘Zora, dear, why don’t you go on in there and see for yourself ?’ For the very first time in a faculty building, Zora walked in without knocking. She was confronted with a bizarre composition of people: Jack French, Monty Kipps, Claire Malcolm and Erskine Jegede. All had taken up different poses of anxiety. Nobody was sitting, not even Jack. ‘Ah, Zora – come in,’ said Jack. Zora joined the standing party. She had no idea what it was all about, but she was not in any way nervous. She was still flying on fury, capable of anything. ‘What’s going on?’  on beauty and being wrong ‘I’m extremely sorry for dragging you out this morning,’ said Jack, ‘but it is an urgent matter and I did not feel it could wait until the end of spring break . . .’ Here Monty snorted derisively. ‘Or indeed even until Monday.’ ‘What’s going on?’ repeated Zora. ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘it seems that last night, after everybody had left for the evening – at about  p.m. we think, although we’re looking at the possibility that one of our own cleaners was still here at a later point and did, in some capacity, aid whoever it was who – ’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jack!’ cried Claire Malcolm. ‘I’m sorry –

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

  You’d be anxious all the time because sensations are unpredictable. In effect, you’d have a total breakdown of interoception, concepts, and social reality. In order to learn at all, you’d need your sensory input to be very consistent, even stereotyped, with as little variation as possible. I don’t know about you, but to me, this collection of symptoms sounds just like autism. 4 1 Clearly, autism is an incredibly complex condition and a gigantic area of research, and it can’t be summed up in a handful of paragraphs. Autism is also hugely variable, a term applied to a wide spectrum of symptoms that probably have multiple, complex causes. All I’m saying is: the possibility is intriguing that autism is a disorder of prediction. 4 2 People with autism who can describe their experiences say things consistent with the idea. Temple Grandin, one of the most famous and outspoken individuals with autism, writes clearly about her lack of prediction and her overwhelming prediction error. “Sudden loud noises hurt my ears like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve,” she writes in “An Inside View of Autism.” Grandin eloquently describes how she struggled to form concepts: “When I was a child, I categorized dogs from cats by sorting the animals by size. All the dogs in our neighborhood were large until our neighbors got a Dachshund. I remember looking at the small dog and trying to figure out why she was not a cat.” Naoki Higashida, a thirteen-year-old boy with autism who wrote The Reason I Jump, notes his efforts to categorize: “First, I scan my memory to find an experience closest to what’s happening now. When I’ve found a good close match, my next step is to try to recall what I said the last time. If I’m lucky, I hit upon a usable experience and all is well.” In other words, lacking a properly functioning conceptual system, Higashida has to work hard to do what other brains do automatically. 4 3 Other researchers too are now speculating that autism is a failure of prediction. Some believe that autism is primarily caused by a dysfunction of the control network, producing a model of the world that is too specific to each situation. Others see the problem as a deficit in the neurochemical called oxytocin, leading to problems in the interoceptive network. I suspect that there isn’t just one network problem in autism but a menu of different possibilities, owing to degeneracy. In fact, autism is characterized as a neurodevelopmental disorder that is extremely variable in its genetics, neurobiology, and symptoms. I speculate that the problems begin with body-budgeting circuitry because it’s present at birth, and all statistical learning is grounded in body-budget regulation (chapters 4 and 5 ). Alterations in the circuitry will change the trajectory of brain development. Without a fully loaded predictive brain, you’d be at the mercy of your environment.

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

  Some of these hubs also happen to sit in the control network. These weakened connections likely translate into an anxious brain that is clumsy at crafting predictions to match the immediate circumstances, and that fails to learn effectively from experience. You might predict threats needlessly, or create uncertainty by predicting imprecisely or not at all. In addition, your interoceptive inputs become even more noisy than usual when your body budget has been in the red for a while; as a consequence, your brain ignores them. These situations leave you open to a lot of uncertainty and a lot of prediction error that you can’t resolve. And uncertainty is more unpleasant and arousing than assured harm, because if the future is a mystery, you can’t prepare for it. For example, when people are seriously ill but have an excellent chance of recovery, they are less satisfied with life than people who know their disease is permanent. 38 Based on the evidence, it appears that anxiety, like depression, is a constructed category in the same fashion as emotion, pain, and stress. The misery you feel in anxiety and depression tells you that something is seriously wrong with your body budget. Either your brain is trying to secure a deposit, ramping up unpleasant affect, or it’s attempting to reduce your need for the deposit by remaining still, resulting in fatigue. Your brain may categorize these sensations as anxiety, depression, or, for that matter, pain or stress or emotion. To be clear, I am not saying that major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders are interchangeable. I’m suggesting that every category of mental illness is a diverse population of instances, and certain collections of symptoms could reasonably be categorized equally well as an anxiety disorder or as depression. There’s also the issue of severity—some of Helen Mayberg’s severely depressed patients, such as those who are near-catatonic, would clearly not be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. However, some of her other patients who are in agony might reasonably be diagnosed with anxiety, chronic stress, or even chronic pain. In general, moderately severe depression and anxiety can have overlapping symptom profiles with one another, and with chronic stress and chronic pain, and also with chronic fatigue syndrome. 39 These observations provide a solution to the mystery that opened chapter 1: why did test subjects in my graduate school experiments seem unable to distinguish between anxious and depressed feelings? One reason we’ve covered already is emotional granularity: some of my subjects could probably construct more finely tailored emotions than others could. But now a second reason comes to light: that “Anxiety” and “Depression” are concepts for categorizing similar sensations. When my subjects were feeling unpleasant, I handed them rating scales to report their feeling, but only in terms of anxiety and depression.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

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

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

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

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

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was wide awake now and could hear birds making a racket in the garden behind the hotel. At first they comforted me. Then I remembered that they were German birds and I got depressed. Secretly, I hate traveling. I’m restless at home, but the minute I get away I feel the threat of doom hanging over my most trivial actions. Why had I come back to Europe anyway? My whole life was in pieces. For two years I had lain in bed with Bennett and thought of other men. For two years I had debated whether to get pregnant or strike out on my own and see some more of the world before settling down to anything that permanent. How did people decide to get pregnant, I wondered. It was such an awesome decision. In a way, it was such an arrogant decision. To undertake responsibility for a new life when you had no way of knowing what it would be like. I assumed that most women got pregnant without thinking about it because if they ever once considered what it really meant, they would surely be overwhelmed with doubt. I had none of that blind faith in chance which other women seemed to have. I always wanted to be in control of my fate. Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life. I had been compulsively using a diaphragm for so long that pregnancy could never be accidental for me. Even during the two years I took the pill, I never missed a day. Slob that I was about everything else, I had never messed up on that score. I was virtually the only one of my friends who’d never had an abortion. What was wrong with me? Was I unnatural? I just hadn’t the normal female compulsion to get knocked up. All I could think of was me with my restlessness, with my longings for zipless fucks and strangers on trains—being tied down with a baby. How could I wish that on a baby? “If it weren’t for you, I’d have been a famous artist,” my furious redheaded mother used to say. She had studied art in Paris, learned anatomy and cast-drawing, water color and graphics, and even how to grind her own pigments. She had met famous artists and famous writers and famous musicians and famous hangers-on (she said). She had danced naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said), sat in Les Deux Magots in a black velvet cloak (she said), driven through the streets of Paris on the fenders of Bugattis (she said), gone to the Greek islands three and a half decades before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she said), and then she had come home, married a Catskill Mountains comedian who was about to make a killing in the tzatzka business, and had had four daughters all of whom received the most poetic names: Gundra Miranda, Isadora Zelda, Lalah Justine, and Chloe Camille.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

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

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

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