Awe

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 The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Her seductions—and by the end of her life they numbered well into the hundreds—all had a similar quality: she took the victim outside herself, directing her attention toward beauty, poetry, the in- nocence of Sapphic love. She invited her women to participate in a kind of cult in which they would worship these sublimities. To heighten the cult- like feeling, she involved them in little rituals: they would call each other by new names, send each other poems in daily telegrams, wear costumes, make pilgrimages to holy sites. Two things would inevitably happen: the women would start to direct some of the worshipful feelings they were ex- periencing toward Natalie, who seemed as lofty and beautiful as the things she held up to be adored; and, pleasantly diverted into this spiritualized realm, they would also lose any heaviness they had felt about their bodies, their selves, their identities. Their repression of their sexuality would melt away. By the time Natalie kissed or caressed them, it would feel like some- thing innocent, pure, as if they had returned to the Garden of Eden before the fall. Religion is the great balm of existence because it takes us outside our- selves, connects us to something larger. As we contemplate the object of worship (God, nature), our burdens are lifted away. It is wonderful to feel raised up from the earth, to experience that kind of lightness. No matter how progressive the times, many of us feel uncomfortable with our bodies, our animal drives. A seducer who focuses too much attention on the physical will stir up self-consciousness, and a residue of disgust. So focus attention on something else. Invite the other person to worship some- thing beautiful in the world. It could be nature, a work of art, even God (or gods—paganism never goes out of fashion); people are dying to be- lieve in something. Add some rituals. If you can make yourself seem to resemble the thing you are worshiping—you are natural, aesthetic, noble, and sublime—your targets will transfer their worship to you.

• From The Lover (1984)

  It’s there, in that last house, the one on the Loire, when she finally gives up her ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing, that I see the madness clearly for the first time. I see my mother is clearly mad. I see that Dô and my brother have always had access to that madness. But that I, no, I’ve never seen it before. Never seen my mother in the state of being mad. Which she was. From birth. In the blood. She wasn’t ill with it, for her it was like health, flanked by Dô and her elder son. No one else but they realized. She always had lots of friends, she kept the same friends for years and years and was always making new ones, often very young, among the officials from upcountry, or later on among the people in Touraine, where there were some who had retired from the French colonies. She always had people around her, all her life, because of what they called her lively intelligence, her cheerfulness, and her peerless, indefatigable poise. I don’t know who took the photo with the despair. The one in the courtyard of the house in Hanoi. Perhaps my father, one last time. A few months later he’d be sent back to France because of his health. Before that he’d go to a new job, in Phnom Penh. He was only there a few weeks. He died in less than a year. My mother wouldn’t go back with him to France, she stayed where she was, stuck there. In Phnom Penh. In the fine house overlooking the Mekong, once the palace of the king of Cambodia, in the midst of those terrifying grounds, acres of them, where my mother is afraid. At night she makes us afraid too. All four of us sleep in the same bed. She says she’s afraid of the dark. It’s in this house she’ll hear of my father’s death. She’ll know about it before the telegram comes, the night before, because of a sign only she saw and could understand, because of the bird that called in the middle of the night, frightened and lost in the office in the north front of the palace, my father’s office. It’s there, too, a few days after her husband’s death, that my mother finds herself face to face with her own father. She switches the light on. There he is, standing by the table in the big octagonal drawing room. Looking at her. I remember a shriek, a call. She woke us up, told us what had happened, how he was dressed, in his Sunday best, grey, how he stood, how he looked at her, straight at her. She said, I wasn’t afraid. She ran toward the vanished image. Both of them died on the day and at the time of the bird or the image. Hence, no doubt, our admiration for our mother’s knowledge, about everything, including all that had to do with death.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  25 Bernoulli’s Errors One day in the early 1970s, Amos handed me a mimeographed essay by a Swiss economist named Bruno Frey, which discussed the psychological assumptions of economic theory. I vividly remember the color of the cover: dark red. Bruno Frey barely recalls writing the piece, but I can still recite its first sentence: “The agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change.” I was astonished. My economist colleagues worked in the building next door, but I had not appreciated the profound difference between our intellectual worlds. To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable. Our two disciplines seemed to be studying different species, which the behavioral economist Richard Thaler later dubbed Econs and Humans. Unlike Econs, the Humans that psychologists know have a System 1. Their view of the world is limited by the information that is available at a given moment (WYSIATI), and therefore they cannot be as consistent and logical as Econs. They are sometimes generous and often willing to contribute to the group to which they are attached. And they often have little idea of what they will like next year or even tomorrow. Here was an opportunity for an interesting conversation across the boundaries of the disciplines. I did not anticipate that my career would be defined by that conversation. Soon after he showed me Frey’s article, Amos suggested that we make the study of decision making our next project. I knew next to nothing about the topic, but Amos was an expert and a star of the field, and he said he would coach me. While still a graduate student he had coauthored a textbook, Mathematical Psychology, and he directed me to a few chapters that he thought would be a good introduction. I soon learned that our subject matter would be people’s attitudes to risky options and that we would seek to answer a specific question: What rules govern people’s choices between different simple gambles and between gambles and sure things? Simple gambles (such as “40% chance to win $300”) are to students of

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My father and I had an afternoon and evening left before our return flight to New York. We rented a car and drove to Tijuana, where we bought a slightly soiled pi$nTata—a shocking-pink donkey. We walked the streets together commenting on the “local color,” making predictable remarks about the poverty of the people and the opulence of the churches. My father is a still good-looking man who seems about fifteen years younger than his sixty years, is vain about his physique and thinning hair, and walks with a springing up-and-down motion which has also become my characteristic walk. We look alike, walk alike, are both addicted to puns and wisecracks, and yet somehow can scarcely communicate. We are always slightly abashed in each other’s presence—as if we each knew a terrible secret about our relationship, but could not speak of it. What could this secret be? I remember him knocking on the wall between our bedrooms to comfort me and assuage my fear of the dark. I remember him changing my sheet when I wet my bed at age three, and making me hot milk when I was eight and had insomnia. I remember him telling me once (after I witnessed a terrifying fight between my parents) that they would stay together “for my sake…” but if there was more—a childhood seduction or a primal scene—my overanalyzed memory still does not go back that far. Sometimes the smell of a cake of soap (or some other homely substance) will suddenly bring back a long-forgotten memory from childhood. And then I will find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven’t yet built the right vehicle—spaceship or submarine or poem—which will take us to them. It’s for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It was the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts—that last mad immortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished. I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectacles—the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the sea” in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them. I have no illusions, however. My judges will regard all this as a piece of mummery on the part of a madman with a gross liking for the fruit vert. Au fond, ça m’est bien égal. All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and— “That was my Lo,” she said, “and these are my lilies.” “Yes,” I said, “yes. They are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!” 11Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if it were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phœnix.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of the sham worlds of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, to worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation marks); yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov, and the originality of Lolita derives from this very paradox. The puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visible to the discerning eye—that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fictions and thus accustomed to novelistic trompe- l’oeil. Lolita is a great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance the reader from its dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard (the figurations are detailed in the Notes). As a lecturer, Nabokov was a considerable Thespian, able to manipulate audiences in a similar manner. His rehearsal of Gogol’s death agonies remains in one’s mind: how the hack doctors alternately bled him and purged him and plunged him into icy baths, Gogol so frail that his spine could be felt through his stomach, the six fat white bloodletting leeches clinging to his nose, Gogol begging to have them removed—“Please lift them, lift them, keep them away!”— and, sinking behind the lectern, now a tub, Nabokov for several moments was Gogol, shuddering and shivering, his hands held down by a husky attendant, his head thrown back in pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments filling the large lecture hall. Even the sea of C-minuses in the back of the room could not help being moved. And then, after a pause, Nabokov would very quietly say, in a sentence taken word-for-word from his Gogol, “Although the scene is unpleasant and has a human appeal which I deplore, it is necessary to dwell upon it a little longer in order to bring out the curiously physical side of Gogol’s genius.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  in that they bare garlands and flowers upon their heads, bespread the way with herbs, which they bare in their aprons, where this regal and devout pro- cession should pass. Others carried shining mirrors behind them which were turned towards the goddess as she came, to shew to her those which came after as though they would meet her. Others bare combs of ivory, and declared by their gesture and motions of their arms and fingers that they were ordained and ready to dress and adorn the goddess’s hair. Others dropped in the ways, as they went, balm and other precious ointments. Then came a great number, as well of men as of women, with lamps, candles, torches, and other lights, doing honour thereby to her that was born of the celestial stars. After that sounded the musical harmony of instruments, pipes and flutes in most pleasant measure. Then came a fair company of youth apparelled in white vestments and festal array, singing both metre and verse with a comely race which some studious poet had made by favour of the Muses, the words whereof did set forth the first ceremonies of this great worship. In the mean season arrived the blowers of trumpets, which were dedicate unto mighty Sarapis, who, holding the same reed sidelong towards their right ears, did give forth a ditty proper to the temple and the god : and like- wise were there many officers and beadles, crying room for the goddess to pass. Then came the great company of men and women of all stations and of every age which were initiate and had taken divine orders, whose garments, being of the whitest linen, glistened all the streets over. The women had their hair anointed, and their heads covered with light linen; but the men had their crowns shaven and shining bright, as being the terrene stars of the 555 11 LUCIUS APULEIUS immo vero aureis etiam sistris argutum tinnitum con- strepentes. Sed antistites sacrorum proceres illi ,qui candido linteamine cinctum pectoralem adusque ves- tigia strictim iniecti potentissimorum deum profere- bant insignes exuvias: quorum primus lucernam claro praemicantem porrigebat lumine, non adeo nostris illis consimilem quae vespertinas illuminant epulas, sed aureum cymbium medio sui patore flammulam suscitans largiorem : secundus vestitu quidem similis, sed manibus ambabus gerebat auxillas! quibus nomen dedit proprium deae summatis auxiliaris providentia: ibat tertius attollens palmam auro subtiliter foliatam necnon Mercuriale etiam cadu- ceum: quartus aequitatis ostendebat indicium, de- formatam manum sinistram porrecta palmula, quae genuina pigritia, nulla calliditate, nulla sollertia praedita, videbatur aequitati magis aptior quam dex- tera; idem gerebat et aureum vasculum in modum | papillae rotundatum de quo lacte libabat: quintus auream vannum aureis congestam ramulis, et alius ferebat amphoram.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  6A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her—and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I have always been devoted to cultural shrines: the house where Keats died in Rome, the house where he lived in Hampstead, Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, Alexander Pope’s Grotto, Rembrandt’s house in the Amsterdam ghetto, Wagner’s villa on Lake Lucerne, Beethoven’s meager two-room flat in Vienna…. Any place where some genius had been born, lived, worked, ate, farted, spilled his seed, loved, or died—was sacred to me. As sacred as Delphi or the Parthenon. More sacred, in fact, because the wonder of everyday life fascinates me even more than the wonder of great shrines and temples. That Beethoven could write such music while living in two shabby rooms in Vienna—this was the miracle. I had stared with awe at all his mundane artifacts—and the more mundane the better: his tarnished salt box, his cheap clock, his battered ledger book. The very ordinariness of his needs comforted me and made me feel hopeful. I would sniff around the houses of the great like a bloodhound, trying to catch the scent of genius. Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom, somewhere between eating an egg and taking a crap, the muse alights. She does not usually appear where your banal Hollywood notions have led you to most expect her: in a gorgeous sunset over Ischia, in the pounding surf of Big Sur, on a mountaintop in Delphi (right between the navel of the earth and the place where Oedipus killed his papa)—but she wings in while you are peeling onions or eating eggplant or lining the garbage can with the book-review section of The New York Times. The most interesting modern writers know this. Leopold Bloom fries kidneys, takes a crap, and considers the universe. Ponge sees the soul of man in an oyster (as Blake saw it in a wild flower). Plath cuts her finger and experiences revelation. But Hollywood insists on imagining the artist as a dreamy-eyed matinee idol with a flowing bow tie, Dmitri Tiomkin’s music in the background, and a violent orange sunset above his head—and, to some extent, all of us (even those of us who should know better) try to live up to this image. I was still, in short, tempted to take off with Adrian. And Bennett, sensing this, trundled me off to Freud’s house at Berggasse, 19, to try (once more) to bring me back to my senses. I agreed with Bennett that Freud was an intuitive genius, but I did not agree with the psychoanalytic doctrine of His Infallibility: geniuses are always fallible; otherwise they’d be gods. And who wants perfection, anyway? Or consistency? After you outgrow adolescence, Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and the belief in your parents’ transcendent evil—you shouldn’t even want consistency. But alas, so many of us do. And are ready to tear our lives apart just for the lack of it. Like me.

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

  It’s hard to give up the classical view when it represents deeply held beliefs about what it means to be human. Nevertheless, the facts remain that no one has found even a single reliable, broadly replicable, objectively measurable essence of emotion. When mountains of contrary data don’t force people to give up their ideas, then they are no longer following the scientific method. They are following an ideology. And as an ideology, the classical view has wasted billions of research dollars and misdirected the course of scientific inquiry for over a hundred years. If people had followed evidence instead of ideology seventy years ago, when the Lost Chorus pretty solidly did away with emotion essences, who knows where we’d be today regarding treatments for mental illness or best practices for rearing our children.39 … Every scientific journey is a story. Sometimes it’s a story of gradual discovery: “Once upon a time, people didn’t know very much, but we learned more and more over the years, and today we know lots of stuff.” Other times, it’s a tale of radical change: “Everyone used to believe something that seemed correct, but boy were we wrong! Now the fascinating truth is here.” Our journey is more of a story within a story. The inner story is how emotions are made, wrapped in an outer story of what it means to be human. “For two thousand years, people believed something about emotions, despite abundant counterevidence all around us. The human brain, you see, is wired to mistake its perceptions for reality. Today, powerful tools have yielded a more evidence-based explanation that’s almost impossible to ignore . . . yet some people still manage.” The good news is that we’re in a golden age of mind and brain research. Many scientists are now on a path forged by the data, rather than ideology, to understand emotion and ourselves. This new, data-driven understanding leads to innovative ideas about how to live a fulfilling and healthful life. If your brain operates by prediction and construction and rewires itself through experience, then it’s no overstatement to say that if you change your current experiences today, you can change who you become tomorrow. The next few chapters delve into these implications in the areas of emotional intelligence, health, law, and our relationships with other animals.40 9Mastering Your EmotionsEvery time you bite into a juicy peach or munch a bag of crunchy potato chips, you’re not simply replenishing your energy. You’re having an experience that is pleasant, unpleasant, or something in between. You bathe not only to stave off disease but also to enjoy warm water against your skin. You seek out other people not to stand in a herd for protection from predators but to feel the glow of friendship or to unload when you’re feeling burdened. And sex is clearly for more than propagating your genes.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  THE CASTLE AND THE GREAT HALL BEAUTY WAS breathless and flushed as they left the Inn; but it was not so much on account of the crowds that lined the village streets, nor those she would see ahead following the ribbon of road as it ran through the wheat fields. The Prince had sent couriers ahead, and as Beauty's hair was dressed with white flowers, he told her they would reach his castle by afternoon if they were to hurry. "We shall be in my Kingdom," he announced proudly, "as soon as we are on the other side of the mountains." Beauty could not quite anatomize the feeling this aroused in her. But the Prince, as if sensing her strange confusion, kissed her full on the mouth before mounting his horse, and said in a soft voice so that only those around them could hear: "When you enter my Kingdom, you shall be mine more completely than ever. You will be mine beyond reprieve, and it will be easier for you to forget all that went before that time, and devote your life to me only." And now they left the village, the Prince walking his magnificent horse just behind Beauty as she made her way quickly over the warm cobblestones. The sun was hotter than before, and the crowds were very great, the farmers having all come to the road, and people were pointing and staring, and standing on tiptoe all the better to see, as Beauty felt the soft gravel under her feet and now and then tufts of silken grass or wildflower. She walked with her head up as the Prince commanded her, but her eyes were half closed, and she felt the cool air soothing her naked limbs, and she could not stop thinking of the Prince's castle. Now and then a low voice from the crowd would make her suddenly and painfully aware of her nakedness, and even once or twice a hand shot out to touch her thigh before the Prince behind her cracked his whip immediately. Finally they entered the dark wooded pass that led through the mountains, and there were only occasional clusters of peasants here and there peeping out from the thick-limbed oaks, and a mist lay upon the ground, and Beauty felt herself drowsy and soft even as she walked. Beauty felt herself drowsy and soft even as she walked. Her breasts felt heavy and soft to her, and her nakedness felt oddly natural. But her heart became a tiny hammer when the sunlight streamed ahead to reveal an ever-widening green valley. A great cry rose from the soldiers behind her, and she realized that indeed the Prince was home, and up ahead, across the sloping green, she saw upon a great precipice overhanging the valley the Prince's castle. It was far greater in size than Beauty's home, a wilderness of dark towers.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty Anne Rice Writing as A. N. Roquelaure The First of the Classic Erotic Trilogy of Sleeping Beauty an erotic novel of tenderness and cruelty for men and women CONTENTS THE CLAIMING OF SLEEPING BEAUTY THE JOURNEY AND THE PUNISHMENT AT THE INN BEAUTY THE CASTLE AND THE GREAT HALL THE PRINCE'S BED CHAMBER PRINCE ALEXI PRINCE ALEXI AND FELIX THE SLAVE'S HALL THE TRAINING HALL THE HALL OF PUNISHMENTS DUTIES IN THE PRINCE'S CHAMBER SERVING MAID THE BRIDLE PATH THE QUEEN'S CHAMBER LADY JULIANA IN THE QUEEN'S CHAMBER WITH PRINCE ALEXI PRINCE ALEXI TELLS OF HIS CAPTURE AND ENSLAVEMENT PRINCE ALEXI'S EDUCATION CONTINUES THE VILLAGE THE CLAIMING OF SLEEPING BEAUTY THE PRINCE had all his young life known the story of Sleeping Beauty, cursed to sleep for a hundred years, with her parents, the King and Queen, and all of the Court, after pricking her finger on a spindle. But he did not believe it until he was inside the castle. Even the bodies of those other Princes caught in the thorns of the rose vines that covered the walls had not made him believe it. They had come believing it, true enough, but he must see for himself inside the castle. Careless with grief for the death of his father, and too powerful under his mother's rule for his own good, he cut these awesome vines at their roots, and immediately prevented them from ensnaring him. It was not his desire to die so much as to conquer. And picking his way through the bones of those who had failed to solve the mystery, he stepped alone into the great banquet hall. The sun was high in the sky and those vines had fallen away, so the light fell in dusty shafts from the lofty windows. And all along the banquet table, the Prince saw the men and women of the old Court, sleeping under layers of dust, their ruddy and slack faces spun over with spider webs. He gasped to see the servants dozing against the walls, their clothing rotted to tatters. But it was true, this old tale. And, fearless as before, he went in search of the Sleeping Beauty who must be at the core of it. In the topmost bedchamber of the house he found her. He had stepped over sleeping chambermaids and valets, and, breathing the dust and damp of the place, he finally stood in the door of her sanctuary. Her flaxen hair lay long and straight over the deep green velvet of her bed, and her dress in loose folds revealed the rounded breasts and limbs of a young woman. He opened the shuttered windows. The sunlight flooded down on her. And approaching her, he gave a soft gasp as he touched her cheek, and her teeth through her parted lips, and then her tender rounded eyelids.

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

  I experienced these benefits firsthand when my family spent a few summer weeks at a beach house in Rhode Island. A symphony of crickets surrounded us each evening, resonating with an intensity I’d never heard before. I hadn’t paid much attention to crickets before that, but now they entered my affective niche. I began to look forward to them every evening and to find their song comforting while falling asleep. When we returned from our vacation, I discovered that I could hear crickets through the thick walls of my home if I lay quietly enough. Now, whenever I wake in the middle of a summer night, feeling anxious after a stressful day in the lab, the crickets help me drift back to sleep. I developed an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck. This concept helps me change my body budget whenever I want. I can notice a tiny weed forcing its way through a crack in the sidewalk, proving yet again that nature cannot be tamed by civilization, and employ the same concept to take comfort in my insignificance.43 You can experience similar awe when hearing ocean waves crash against rocks on a beach, gazing at the stars, walking under storm clouds in the middle of the day, hiking deep into uncharted territory, or taking part in spiritual ceremonies. People who report feeling awe more frequently also have the lowest levels of those nasty cytokines that cause inflammation (though nobody has proved cause and effect).44 Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment. When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal. Your feelings might just be noise. You might just need some sleep. … At this point you’ve seen how to work on becoming more emotionally intelligent about your experiences. Now let’s turn to perceiving emotion intelligently in other people around you, and the subsequent benefits for your well-being. My husband, Dan, went through a brief, difficult time a few decades ago, before we knew each other, and was referred to a psychiatrist. About thirty seconds into the first session, Dan knitted his brow and scowled, as he often does when he is concentrating, and the psychiatrist, trusting his perceptions as accurate, pronounced that Dan was “filled with pent-up anger.” The thing is, Dan is one of the calmest people I know. When Dan assured the psychiatrist that he wasn’t angry, the psychiatrist, confident in his ability to read his patients, insisted, “Yes, you are.” Well, Dan was out the door before the second hand had completed its first revolution. He may well hold the world record for the shortest therapy session.

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

  If you are interested in taking this strategy further, try meditation. Mindfulness meditation, just one type of many, teaches you to stay alert and present in the moment but to observe sensations as they come and go, non-judgmentally.* This state (which requires tremendous practice) reminds me of the quiet, alert state of newborn babies when they observe the world, their brains comfortably awash in prediction error, with no anxiety in sight. They experience sensations and release them. Meditation achieves something similar. This state may take years of practice to achieve, so the next best thing is to recategorize your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as physical sensations, which are easier to let go of. You can use meditation, at least at first, to prioritize categorizations that focus on the physical, and deprioritize those that add more psychological meaning about you or your place in the world. Meditation has a potent effect on brain structure and function, though scientists have not sorted out the exact details yet. Key regions in the interoceptive and control networks are larger for meditators, and connections between these regions are stronger. This matches what we might expect, since the interoceptive network is critical to constructing mental concepts and representing physical sensations from the body, and the control network is critical to regulating categorization. In some studies, we see stronger connections even after only a few hours of training. Other studies find that meditation reduces stress, improves the detection and processing of prediction error, facilitates recategorization (termed “emotion regulation”), and reduces unpleasant affect, although the findings are often inconsistent from one study to the next because not all the experiments have been well-controlled.41 Sometimes deconstructing the self is too challenging. You can achieve some of the same benefits more simply by cultivating and experiencing awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself. It helps you get some distance from your self.42

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The vertiginous conclusion of a Nabokov novel calls for a complicated response which many readers, after a lifetime of realistic novels, are incapable of making. Children, however, are aware of other possibilities, as their art reveals. My own children, then three and six years old, reminded me of this one summer when they inadvertently demonstrated that, unless they change, they will be among Nabokov’s ideal readers. One afternoon my wife and I built them a puppet theater. After propping the theater on the top edge of the living room couch, I crouched down behind it and began manipulating the two hand puppets in the stage above me. The couch and the theater’s scenery provided good cover, enabling me to peer over the edge and watch the children immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story’s violent climax, knocked over the entire theater, which clattered onto the floor, collapsing into a heap of cardboard, wood, and cloth—leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visible over the couch’s rim, my puppeted hands, with their naked wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before—and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new awareness. When in 1966 I visited Vladimir Nabokov for four days in Montreux, to interview him for Wisconsin Studies and in regard to my critical study of his work, I told him about this incident, and how for me it defined literary involution and the response which he hoped to elicit from his readers at “the end” of a novel. “Exactly, exactly,” he said as I finished. “You must put that in your book.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The wives felt sure they had im- pressed their hosts. At the Audience Hall they were greeted by princes and princesses, as well as lower royalty. The Chinese women were wearing magnificent Manchu costumes with the traditional high, jewel-encrusted black headdresses; they were arranged in a hierarchical order reflected in the color of their dresses, an astounding rainbow of color. The wives were served tea in the most delicate porcelain cups, then The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, \Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; \ Purple the sails, and so perfumed that \ The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, \ Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made \ The water which they beat to follow faster, \ As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, \ It beggar'd all description: she did lie \ In her pavilion—cloth-of-gold of tissue— \ O'er picturing that Venus where we see \ The fancy outwork nature: on each side her \ Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, \ With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem \ To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, \ And what they undid did. . . . \ Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, \ So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, \ And made their bends adornings: at the helm \ A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle \ Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands \ That yarely frame the office. From the barge \ A strange invisible perfume hits the sense \ Of the 267 268 • The Art of Seduction were escorted into the presence of the empress dowager. The sight took their breath away. The empress was seated on the Dragon Throne, which was studded with jewels. She wore heavily brocaded robes, a magnificent headdress bearing diamonds, pearls, and jade, and an enormous necklace of perfectly matched pearls. She was a tiny woman, but on the throne, in that dress, she seemed a giant. She smiled at the ladies with much warmth and sincerity. To their relief, seated below her on a smaller throne was her nephew the emperor. He looked pale, but he greeted them enthusiastically and seemed in good spirits. Maybe he was indeed simply ill. The empress shook the hand of each of the women. As she did so, an attendant eunuch handed her a large gold ring set with a large pearl, which she slipped onto each woman's hand.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Last summer, I ran into her during intermission at a performance of Hamlet at the Park Avenue Armory. She was with her grandson. She was able to recount for me nearly every rendition of Hamlet she’d ever seen, plus give me the Columbia ABD’s halftime commentary on the one we were seeing now. As she spoke, I had the same thought that I’ve had every time I’ve spoken with her—the same thought I had standing at that bookstand in Tel Aviv: There is nothing else like this. There is no one like this. There is nothing like Fear of Flying. There is no other Erica Jong. There never will be again. —Taffy Brodesser-Akner May 18, 2023 Alas! the love of women! it is known To be a lovely and a fearful thing; For all of theirs upon that die is thrown, And if ‘tis lost, life hath no more to bring To them but mockeries of the past alone, And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring, Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel. They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust, Is always so to women; one sole bond Awaits them—treachery is all their trust; Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond Over their idol, till some wealthier lust Buys them in marriage—and what rests beyond? A thankless husband—next, a faithless lover— Then dressing, nursing, praying—and all’s over. Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers, Some mind their household, others dissipation, Some run away, and but exchange their cares, Losing the advantage of a virtuous station; Few changes e’er can better their affairs, Theirs being an unnatural situation, From the dull palace to the dirty hovel: Some play the devil, and then write a novel. —Lord Byron (from Don Juan) ONEEn Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same. —Anonymous (a woman) There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier. My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake. About the Author Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Wat’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Smoke was rising from the incense, when Pygmalion, having made his offering, stood by the altar and timidly prayed, saying: "If you gods can give all things, may I have as my wife, I pray—"he did not dare to say: "the ivory maiden," but finished: "one like the ivory maid." However, golden Venus, present at her festival in person, understood what his prayers meant, and as a sign that the gods were kindly disposed, the flames burned up three times, shooting a tongue of fire into the air. When Pygmalion returned home, he made straight for the statue of the girl he loved, leaned over the couch, and kissed her. She seemed warm: he laid his lips on hers again, and touched her breast with his hands—at his touch the ivory lost its hardness, and grew soft. —OVID, METAMORPHOSES, TRANSLATED BY MARY M. INNES [John F.] Kennedy brought to television news and photojournalism the components most prevalent in the world of film: star quality and mythic story. With his telegenic looks, skills at self presentation, heroic fantasies, and creative intelligence, Kennedy was brilliantly prepared to project a major screen persona. He appropriated the discourses of mass culture, especially of Hollywood, and transferred them to the 124 • The Art of Seduction the answers to the questions and debated with aplomb, quoting statistics on the accomplishments of the Eisenhower administration, in which he had served as vice-president. But beneath the glare of the cameras, on black and white television, he was a ghastly figure—his five o'clock shadow covered up with powder, streaks of sweat on his brow and cheeks, his face drooping with fatigue, his eyes shifting and blinking, his body rigid. What was he so worried about? The contrast with Kennedy was startling. If Nixon looked only at his opponent, Kennedy looked out at the audience, making eye contact with his viewers, addressing them in their living rooms as no politi- cian had ever done before. If Nixon talked data and niggling points of de- bate, Kennedy spoke of freedom, of building a new society, of recapturing America's pioneer spirit. His manner was sincere and emphatic. His words were not specific, but he made his listeners imagine a wonderful future. The day after the debate, Kennedy's poll numbers soared miraculously, and wherever he went he was greeted by crowds of young girls, screaming and jumping. His beautiful wife Jackie by his side, he was a kind of demo- cratic prince. Now his television appearances were events. He was in due course elected president, and his inaugural address, also broadcast on televi- sion, was stirring. It was a cold and wintry day. In the background, Eisen- hower sat huddled in coat and scarf, looking old and beaten.

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

  H. Cooley. Still, do you ever find yourself acting and feeling very differently when you are in a new context where no one knows who you are (like when traveling on an airplane)? be a self by yourself: This is a signature phrase of social psychologist Hazel Markus. Wilson out of a volleyball: The volleyball had the name “Wilson” stamped on it because it was made by the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. [back] 35. “Stinging Insects,” and “Fear”: The self is a concept, but not in the way that social psychologists mean it; see heam.info/self-4. [back] 36. that we have multiple selves: After the pioneering research of psychologist Hazel Markus; see heam.info/markus-1. goal shifts based on context: Could it be that the population of instances which are “your self” are held together by a word—perhaps your name? See heam.info/self-5. [back] 37. relation to the same body: Lebrecht et al. 2012. of your sense of self: Other scientists and philosophers have had similar intuitions (Damasio 1999; Craig 2015). [back] 38. lose your sense of self: Prebble et al. 2012. [back] 39. “Wealth” become unnecessary: Deconstructing the self means putting aside mental poisons to reveal the true nature of experience, i.e., the dharmas in the traditional Abhidarma Buddhist account. [back] 40. an antacid tablet in water: Heartbreak from being dumped is a little trickier, because forming an attachment with someone means that you two are co- regulating each other’s body budgets, so separation and loss actually involve some recalibration of your body budget to account for this. [back] 41. between these regions are stronger: Tang et al. 2015; Creswell et al., in press. For a summary of the brain-related influences on three types of meditation practice, see heam.info/meditation-1. [not all] have been well-controlled: How meditation helps one deconstruct the self and be mindful is an open question; see heam.info/meditation-2. [back] 42. something vastly greater than yourself: Keltner and Haidt 2003. Awe in atheists is similar to faith in those who are believers (Caldwell-Harris et al. 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.