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)

  Over the years, the world became more rational. Eventually people came to hold power not by divine right but because they won votes, or proved their competence. The great early-twentieth-century German soci- "Charisma" shall be understood to refer to an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged or presumed. "Charismatic authority," hence, shall refer to a rule over men, whether predominately ex tern al or p redominately internal, to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person. —MAX WEBER, FROM MAX WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY, EDITED BY HANS GERTH AND C. WRIGHT MILLS 97 98 • The Art of Seduction ologist Max Weber, however, noticed that despite our supposed progress, there were more Charismatics than ever. What characterized a modern Charismatic, according to Weber, was the appearance of an extraordinary quality in their character, the equivalent of a sign of God's favor. How else to explain the power of a Robespierre or a Lenin? More than anything it was the force of their magnetic personalities that made these men stand out and was the source of their power. They did not speak of God but of a great cause, visions of a future society. Their appeal was emotional; they seemed possessed. And their audiences reacted as euphorically as earlier au- diences had to a prophet. When Lenin died, in 1924, a cult formed around his memory, transforming the communist leader into a deity. Today, anyone who has presence, who attracts attention when he or she enters a room, is said to possess charisma. But even these less-exalted types reveal a trace of the quality suggested by the word's original meaning. Their charisma is mysterious and inexplicable, never obvious. They have an unusual confidence. They have a gift—often a smoothness with language— that makes them stand out from the crowd. They express a vision. We may not realize it, but in their presence we have a kind of religious experience: we believe in these people, without having any rational evidence for doing so. When trying to concoct an effect of charisma, never forget the religious source of its power. You must radiate an inward quality that has a saintly or spiritual edge to it. Your eyes must glow with the fire of a prophet. Your charisma must seem natural, as if it came from something mysteriously be- yond your control, a gift of the gods. In our rational, disenchanted world, people crave a religious experience, particularly on a group level. Any sign of charisma plays to this desire to believe in something. And there is noth- ing more seductive than giving people something to believe in and follow. Charisma must seem mystical, but that does not mean you cannot learn certain tricks that will enhance the charisma you already possess, or will give you the outward appearance of it. The following are basic qualities that will help create the illusion of charisma: Purpose.

• 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)

  Consider two neurons that are connected by a synapse. Clearly these brain cells exist in an objective sense. But there is no objective way to tell whether the two neurons are part of a unit called a “circuit” or “system,” or whether each neuron belongs to a separate circuit where one “regulates” the other. The answer depends entirely on human perspective. Similarly, your brain’s interconnections are not inevitable consequences of your genes alone. We know today that experience is a contributing factor. Your genes turn on and off in different contexts, including the genes that shape your brain’s wiring. (Scientists call this phenomenon plasticity.) That means some of your synapses literally come into existence because other people talked to you or treated you in a certain way. In other words, construction extends all the way down to the cellular level. The macro structure of your brain is largely predetermined, but the microwiring is not. As a consequence, past experience helps determine your future experiences and perceptions. Neuroconstruction explains how human infants are born without the ability to recognize a face but can develop that capacity within the first few days after birth. It also explains how early cultural experiences—for instance, how often your caregivers were in physical contact with you, and whether you slept alone in a crib or in a family bed—differentially shape the wiring of the brain. 15 The theory of constructed emotion incorporates elements of all three flavors of construction. From social construction, it acknowledges the importance of culture and concepts. From psychological construction, it considers emotions to be constructed by core systems in the brain and body. And from neuroconstruction, it adopts the idea that experience wires the brain. ... The theory of constructed emotion tosses away the most basic assumptions of the classical view. For instance, the classical view assumes that happiness, anger, and other emotion categories each have a distinctive bodily fingerprint. In the theory of constructed emotion, variation is the norm. When you are angry, you might scowl, frown mildly or severely, shout, laugh, or even stand in eerie calmness, depending on what works best in the situation. Your heart rate likewise might increase, decrease, or stay the same, whatever is necessary to support the action you are performing. When you perceive someone else as angry, your perceptions are similarly varied. An emotion word such as “anger,” therefore, names a population of diverse instances, each one constructed to best guide action in the immediate circumstance. There is no single difference between anger and fear, because there’s no single “Anger” and no single “Fear.” These ideas are inspired by William James, who wrote at length on the variability of emotional life, and by Charles Darwin’s revolutionary idea that a biological category, such as a species, is a population of unique individuals. 16 You can think about emotion categories like cookies. There are crisp ones, chewy ones, sweet ones, savory ones, large, small, flat, rounded, rolled, sandwiched, floured, flourless, and more.

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

  One of these creatures was the amphioxus. If you ever glimpsed one, you’d probably mistake it for a little worm until you noticed the gill-like slits on either side of its body. Amphioxi populated the oceans about 550 million years ago, and they lived simple lives. An amphioxus could propel itself through the water, thanks to a very basic system for movement. It also had an exceedingly simple way of eating: it planted itself in the seafloor, like a blade of grass, and consumed any minuscule creatures that happened to drift into its mouth. Taste and smell were of no concern because an amphioxus didn’t have senses like yours. It had no eyes, just a few cells to detect changes in light, and it could not hear. Its meager nervous system included a teeny clump of cells that was not quite a brain. An amphioxus, you could say, was a stomach on a stick. Amphioxi are your distant cousins, and they’re still around today. When you look at a modern amphioxus, you behold a creature very similar to your own ancient, tiny ancestor who roamed the same seas. Can you picture a little wormy creature, two inches long, swaying in the current of a prehistoric ocean, and glimpse humanity’s evolutionary journey? It’s difficult. You have so much that the ancient amphioxus did not: a few hundred bones, an abundance of internal organs, some limbs, a nose, a charming smile, and, most important, a brain. The amphioxus didn’t need a brain. Its cells for sensing were connected to its cells for moving, so it reacted to its watery world without much processing. You, however, have an intricate, powerful brain that gives rise to mental events as diverse as thoughts, emotions, memories, and dreams​—​an internal life that shapes so much of what is distinctive and meaningful about your existence. Why did a brain like yours evolve? The obvious answer is to think. It’s common to assume that brains evolved in some kind of upward progression​—​say, from lower animals to higher animals, with the most sophisticated, thinking brain of all, the human brain, at the top. After all, thinking is the human superpower, right? Well, the obvious answer turns out to be wrong. In fact, the idea that our brains evolved for thinking has been the source of many profound misconceptions about human nature. Once you give up that cherished belief, you will have taken the first step toward understanding how your brain actually works and what its most important job is​—​and, ultimately, what kind of creature you really are. [image file=image_rsrc7BJ.jpg] Amphioxi were not our direct ancestors, but we had a common ancestor that was very likely similar to a modern-day amphioxus.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At the end of the book he describes how he and his wife first perceived, through the stratagems thrown up to confound the eye, the ocean liner waiting to take them and their son to America: “It was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture— Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” The Eye (1930) is well titled; the apprehension of “reality” (a word that Nabokov says must always have quotes around it) is first of all a miracle of vision, and our existence is a sequence of attempts to unscramble the “pictures” glimpsed in that “brief crack of light.” Both art and nature are to Nabokov “a game of intricate enchantment and deception,” and the process of reading and rereading his novels is a game of perception, like those E. H. Gombrich writes about in Art and Illusion—everything is there, in sight (no symbols lurking in murky depths), but one must penetrate the trompe-l’oeil, which eventually reveals something totally different from what one had expected. This is how Nabokov seems to envision the game of life and the effect of his novels: each time a “scrambled picture” has been discerned “the finder cannot unsee” it; consciousness has been expanded or created. The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Pnin is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures. Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs—Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck’s-Doe’s; while lost in an artist’s dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out—scarred but still untamed—from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it. At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang for a moment, old-fashionedly square and high, in the hot haze. And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

• 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 Art of Seduction (2001)

  Uninhibitedness. Most people are repressed, and have little access to their unconscious—a problem that creates opportunities for the Charismatic, who can become a kind of screen on which others project their secret fantasies and longings. You will first have to show that you are less inhibited than your audience—that you radiate a dangerous sexuality, have no fear of death, are delightfully spontaneous. Even a hint of these qualities will make people think you more powerful than you are. In the 1850s a bohemian American actress, Adah Isaacs Menken, took the world by storm through her unbridled sexual energy, and her fearlessness. She would appear on stage half-naked, performing death-defying acts; few women could dare such things in the Victorian period, and a rather mediocre actress became a figure of cultlike adoration. An extension of your being uninhibited is a dreamlike quality in your work and character that reveals your openness to your unconscious. It was the possession of this quality that transformed artists like Wagner and Picasso into charismatic idols. Its cousin is a fluidity of body and spirit; while the repressed are rigid, Charismatics have an ease and an adaptability that show their openness to experience. The Charismatic • 101 Fervency. You need to believe in something, and to believe in it strongly enough for it to animate all your gestures and make your eyes light up. This cannot be faked. Politicians inevitably lie to the public; what distinguishes Charismatics is that they believe their own lies, which makes them that much more believable. A prerequisite for fiery belief is some great cause to rally around—a crusade. Become the rallying point for people's discontent, and show that you share none of the doubts that plague normal humans. In 1490, the Florentine Girolamo Savonarola railed at the immorality of the pope and the Catholic Church. Claiming to be divinely inspired, he became so animated during his sermons that hysteria would sweep the crowd. Savonarola developed such a following that he briefly took over the city, until the pope had him captured and burned at the stake. People believed in him because of the depth of his conviction. His example has more rele-vance today than ever: people are more and more isolated, and long for communal experience. Let your own fervent and contagious faith, in virtually anything, give them something to believe in. Vulnerability. Charismatics display a need for love and affection. They are open to their audience, and in fact feed off its energy; the audience in turn is electrified by the Charismatic, the current increasing as it passes back and forth. This vulnerable side to charisma softens the self-confident side, which can seem fanatical and frightening.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  On a late autumn afternoon in 1838, what may have been the brightest bolt of illumination ever to flash out of an overcast English sky struck Charles Darwin right upside the head, leaving him stunned by what Richard Dawkins has called “the most powerful idea that has ever occurred to a man.” At the very moment the great insight underlying natural selection came to him, Darwin was reading An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus.1 If the measure of an idea is its endurance through time, Thomas Malthus deserves his spot as Wikipedia’s eightieth Most Influential Person in History. More than two centuries later, one would be hard pressed to find a single student of economics unfamiliar with the simple argument put forth by the world’s first professor of economics. You’ll recall that Malthus argued that each generation doubles geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32…), but farmers can only increase food supply arithmetically, as new fields are cleared and productive capacity is added in a linear fashion (2, 3, 4, 5, 6…). From this crystalline reasoning follows Malthus’s brutal conclusion: chronic overpopulation, desperation, and widespread starvation are intrinsic to human existence. Not a thing to be done about it. Helping the poor is like feeding London’s pigeons; they’ll just reproduce back to the brink of starvation anyway, so what’s the point? “The poverty and misery which prevail among the lower classes of society,” Malthus asserts, “are absolutely irremediable.” Malthus based his estimates of human reproductive rates on the recorded increase of (European) population in North America in the previous 150 years (1650–1800). He concluded that the colonial population had doubled every twenty-five years or so, which he took to be a reasonable estimate of the rates of human population growth in general. In his autobiography, Darwin recalled that when he applied these dire Malthusian computations to the natural world, “it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work…”2 Science writer Matt Ridley believes Malthus taught Darwin the “bleak lesson” that “overbreeding must end in pestilence, famine or violence,” convincing him that the secret of natural selection was embedded in the struggle for existence. Thus was Darwin’s brilliance sparked by the darkest Malthusian gloom.3 Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the mechanism underlying natural selection independently of Darwin, experienced his own flash of insight while reading the same essay between bouts of fever in a hut on the banks of a malarial Malaysian river. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, “When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you.” Shaw lamented natural selection’s “hideous fatalism,” and complained of its “damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.”4

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

  And from one moment to another, your billions of neurons continually reconfigure themselves from one pattern into another. Chemicals called neurotransmitters make this possible. They enable signals to pass between neurons, and they dial up or dial down neural connections in a split second, so information flows along different paths. Neurotransmitters empower a single brain with a single set of networks to construct diverse mental events, creating something greater than the sum of the parts.4 Then, of course, we have degeneracy: different sets of neurons produce the same outcomes. Plus, no matter how finely or coarsely you look at brain tissue—as networks, regions, or individual neurons—that tissue contributes to more than one category of mental event, such as anger, attention, or even vision or hearing.5 Microwiring. Neurotransmitters. Plasticity. Degeneracy. Multipurpose circuitry. Neuroscientists sum up this incredible well of variation by calling the brain a “complex system.” I don’t mean complexity colloquially, as in “gosh, that brain sure is complicated,” but something more formal. Complexity is a metric to describe any structure that efficiently creates and transmits information. A system with high complexity can create many new patterns by combining bits and pieces of old patterns. You can find complex systems in neuroscience, physics, mathematics, economics, and other scholarly disciplines.6 The human brain is a high-complexity system because, within one physical structure, it can reconfigure its billions of neurons to construct a huge repertoire of experiences, perceptions, and behaviors. It achieves high complexity via an ultra-efficient arrangement for communication centered on the critical “hubs” mentioned in chapter 6. This organization permits the brain to integrate so much information from multiple sources so efficiently that it can support consciousness. In contrast, the model of the brain posited by the classical view—independent blobs with distinct functions —would be a low-complexity system because each blob would accomplish its single function by itself.7 A brain with high complexity and degeneracy brings distinct advantages. It can create and carry more information. It’s more robust and reliable, with multiple paths to get to the same end. It’s more resistant to injury and illness; you’ve seen living examples in the twins with amygdala damage (chapter 1) and Roger with his ravaged predictive brain circuitry (chapter 4). Such a brain therefore makes you more likely to survive and pass your genes to the next generation.8 Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind.9

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

  Fei Xu and her students have demonstrated this experimentally by showing objects to ten-month-old infants, giving the objects nonsense names like “wug” or “dak.” The objects were wildly dissimilar, including dog-like and fish-like toys, cylinders with multicolored beads, and rectangles covered in foam flowers. Each one also made a ringing or rattling noise. Nevertheless, the infants learned patterns. Infants who heard the same nonsense name across several objects, regardless of their appearance, expected those objects to make the same noise. Likewise, if two objects had different names, the infants expected them to make different noises. This is a remarkable feat for infants because they used the sounds of a word to predict whether objects made the same noise or not, learning a pattern that transcended mere physical appearance. Words encourage infants to form goal-based concepts by inspiring them to represent things as equivalent. In fact, studies show that infants can more easily learn a goal-based concept, given a word, than a concept defined by physical similarity without a word.31 I don’t know about you, but every time I think about this, I find it bloody amazing. Any animal can view a bunch of similar-looking objects and form a concept of them. But you can show human infants a bunch of objects that look different, sound different, and feel different, and merely add a word—a WORD—and these little babies form a concept that overcomes the physical differences. They understand that the objects have some kind of psychological similarity that can’t be immediately perceived through the five senses. This similarity is what we called the goal of the concept. The infant creates a new piece of reality, a thing called a “wug” with the goal “to make a ringing noise.” From an infant’s perspective, the concept “Wug” did not exist in the world before an adult taught it to her. This sort of social reality, in which two or more people agree that something purely mental is real, is a foundation of human culture and civilization. Infants thereby learn to categorize the world in ways that are consistent, meaningful, and predictable to us (the speakers), and eventually to themselves. Their mental model of the world becomes similar to ours, so we can communicate, share experiences, and perceive the same world.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  appears before us in reality, Joseph discussed the war with Turkey. Joseph reiterated his concerns. Sud-or when a symbol takes denly Potemkin interrupted: "I have 100,000 troops waiting for me to say over the full functions of 'Go!' " At that moment the windows of the palace were flung open, and to the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor the sounds of booming cannons they saw lines of troops as far as the eye which contributes not a could see, and a fleet of ships filling the harbor. Awed by the sight, images little to the uncanny effect of Eastern European cities retaken from the Turks dancing in his mind, attaching to magical practices. The infantile Joseph II finally signed the treaty. Catherine was ecstatic, and her love for element in this, which also Potemkin reached new heights. He had made her dreams come true. dominates the minds of Catherine never suspected that almost everything she had seen was pure neurotics, is the overaccentuation of fakery, perhaps the most elaborate illusion ever conjured up by one man. psychical reality in comparison with material reality— a feature closely Interpretation. In the four years that he had been governor of the Crimea, allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. Potemkin had accomplished little, for this backwater would take decades to — S I G M U N D FREUD, improve. But in the few months before Catherine's visit he had done the " T H E U N C A N N Y , " I N following: every building that faced the road or the shore was given a fresh PSYCHOLOGICAL WRITINGS coat of paint; artificial trees were set up to hide unseemly spots in the view; AND LETTERS broken roofs were repaired with flimsy boards painted to look like tile; everyone the party would see was instructed to wear their best clothes and look happy; everyone old and infirm was to stay indoors. Floating in their palaces down the Dnieper, the imperial entourage saw brand-new villages, but most of the buildings were only facades. The herds of cattle were shipped from great distances, and were moved at night to fresh fields along the route. The dancing peasants were trained for the entertainments; after each one they were loaded into carts and hurriedly transported to a new downriver location, as were the marching soldiers who seemed to be everywhere. The gardens of the new palaces were filled with transplanted trees that died a few days later. The palaces themselves were quickly and badly built, but were so magnificently furnished that no one noticed. One fortress along the way had been built of sand, and was destroyed a little later by a thunderstorm.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Miracles and saintliness aside, Joan of Arc had certain basic qualities that made her exceptional. Her visions were intense; she could describe them in such detail that they had to be real. Details have that effect: they lend a sense of reality to even the most preposterous statements. Furthermore, in a time of great disorder, she was supremely focused, as if her strength came from somewhere unworldly. She spoke with authority, and she predicted things people wanted: the English would be defeated, prosperity would return. She also had a peasant's earthy common sense. She had surely heard descriptions of Charles on the road to Chinon; once at court, she could 104 • The Art of Seduction "How peculiar have sensed the trick he was playing on her, and could have confidently [ Rasputin's] eyes are," picked out his pampered face in the crowd. The following year, her visions confesses a woman who abandoned her, and her confidence as well—she made many mistakes, had made efforts to resist his influence. She goes on leading to her capture by the English. She was indeed human. to say that every time she We may no longer believe in miracles, but anything that hints at met him she was always strange, unworldly, even supernatural powers will create charisma. The psy-amazed afresh at the power of his glance, which it was chology is the same: you have visions of the future, and of the wondrous impossible to withstand for things you can accomplish. Describe these things in great detail, with an air any considerable time. of authority, and suddenly you stand out. And if your prophecy—of pros-There was something oppressive in this kind and perity, say—is just what people want to hear, they are likely to fall under gentle, but at the same your spell and to see later events as a confirmation of your predictions. Ex-time sly and cunning, hibit remarkable confidence and people will think your confidence comes glance; people were helpless from real knowledge. You will create a self-fulfilling prophecy: people's be-under the spell of the powerful will which could lief in you will translate into actions that help realize your visions. Any hint be felt in his whole being. of success will make them see miracles, uncanny powers, the glow of However tired you might charisma. be of this charm, and however much you wanted to escape it, somehow or other you always found The authentic animal. One day in 1905, the St. Petersburg salon of yourself attracted back and Countess Ignatiev was unusually full. Politicians, society ladies, and courtiers held. • A young girl who had heard of the strange had all arrived early to await the remarkable guest of honor: Grigori Efi-new saint came from her movich Rasputin, a forty-year-old Siberian monk who had made a name province to the capital, and for himself throughout Russia as a healer, perhaps a saint. When Rasputin visited him in search of edification and spiritual

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Not only words insinuate; pay attention to gestures and looks. Madame Glances are the heavy Récamier's favorite technique was to keep her words banal and the look in artillery of the flirt: her eyes enticing. The flow of conversation would keep men from thinking everything can be conveyed too deeply about these occasional looks, but they would be haunted by in a look, yet that look can always be denied, for it them. Lord Byron had his famous "underlook": while everyone was dis- cannot be quoted word for cussing some uninteresting subject, he would seem to hang his head, but word. then a young woman (the target) would see him glancing upward at her, his —STENDHAL, QUOTED IN head still tilted. It was a look that seemed dangerous, challenging, but also RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES, ambiguous; many women were hooked by it. The face speaks its own lan- ED., VICE: AN ANTHOLOGY guage. We are used to trying to read people's faces, which are often better indicators of their feelings than what they say, which is so easy to control. 218 • The Art of Seduction Since people are always reading your looks, use them to transmit the insinuating signals you choose. Finally, the reason insinuation works so well is not just that it bypasses people's natural resistance. It is also the language of pleasure. There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want. We yearn for something enigmatic, for something to feed our fantasies. Because of the lack of suggestion and ambiguity in daily life, the person who uses them suddenly seems to have something alluring and full of promise. It is a kind of titillating game—what is this person up to? What does he or she mean? Hints, suggestions, and insinuations create a seductive atmosphere, signaling that their victim is no longer involved in the routines of daily life but has entered another realm. Symbol: The Seed. The soil is carefully prepared. The seeds are planted months in advance. Once they are in the ground, no one knows what hand threw them there. They are part of the earth. Disguise your manipulations by planting seeds that take root on their own. Reversal The danger in insinuation is that when you leave things ambiguous your target may misread them. There are moments, particularly later on in a seduction, when it is best to communicate your idea directly, particularly once you know the target will welcome it, Casanova often played things that way. When he could sense that a woman desired him, and needed little preparation, he would use a direct, sincere, gushing comment to go straight to her head like a drug and make her fall under his spell. When the rake and writer Gabriele D'Annunzio met a woman he desired, he rarely delayed. Flattery flowed from his mouth and pen. He would charm with his

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The guru. According to the beliefs of the Theosophical Society, every two which others cannot thousand years or so the spirit of the World Teacher, Lord Maitreya, inhab- altogether fathom, which its the body of a human. First there was Sri Krishna, born two thousand puzzles them, stirs them, and rivets their years before Christ; then there was Jesus himself; and at the start of the attention . . . to hold in twentieth century another incarnation was due. One day in 1909, the reserve some piece of secret theosophist Charles Leadbeater saw a boy on an Indian beach and had an knowledge which may any moment intervene, and the epiphany: this fourteen-year-old lad, Jiddu Krishnamurti, would be the more effectively from being World Teacher's next vehicle. Leadbeater was struck by the simplicity of in the nature of a surprise. the boy, who seemed to lack the slightest trace of selfishness. The members The latent faith of the of the Theosophical Society agreed with his assessment and adopted this masses will do the rest. Once the leader has been scraggly underfed youth, whose teachers had repeatedly beaten him for stu- fudged capable of adding pidity. They fed and clothed him and began his spiritual instruction. The the weight of his scruffy urchin turned into a devilishly handsome young man. personality to the known factors of any situation, the In 1911, the theosophists formed the Order of the Star in the East, a ensuing hope and group intended to prepare the way for the coming of the World Teacher. confidence will add Krishnamurti was made head of the order. He was taken to England, where immensely to the faith reposed in him. his education continued, and everywhere he went he was pampered and revered. His air of simplicity and contentment could not help but impress. —CHARLES DE GAULLE, THE E D G E OF THE SWORD, IN DAVID Soon Krishnamurti began to have visions. In 1922 he declared, "I have SCHOENBRUN, THE THREE drunk at the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated." LIVES OF CHARLES DE GAULLE Over the next few years he had psychic experiences that the theosophists interpreted as visits from the World Teacher. But Krishnamurti had actually had a different kind of revelation: the truth of the universe came from within. No god, no guru, no dogma could ever make one realize it. He himself was no god or messiah, but just another man. The reverence that he was treated with disgusted him. In 1929, much to his followers' shock, he disbanded the Order of the Star and resigned from the Theosophical Society.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women. I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow)—and was, indeed, looking forward to surrender myself to many hands, without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me, relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors—for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company—both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader!

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  It was with this in mind that the great scholar Clement of Alexandria (about AD 230) arrived at one of the most famous and true of all verdicts about the origin and aim of the Fourth Gospel. It was his view that the gospels containing the genealogies had been written first - that is, Luke and Matthew; that then Mark, at the request of many who had heard Peter preach, composed his gospel, which embodied the preaching material of Peter; and that then `last of all, John, perceiving that what had reference to the bodily things of Jesus' ministry had been sufficiently related, and encouraged by his friends, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote a spiritual gospel' (quoted in Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, 6:14). What Clement meant was that John was interested not so much in the mere facts as in the meaning of the facts, that it was not facts he was after but truth. John did not see the events of Jesus' life simply as events in time; he saw them as windows looking into eternity, and he pressed towards the spiritual meaning of the events and the words of Jesus' life in a way that the other three gospels did not attempt. That is still one of the truest verdicts on the Fourth Gospel ever reached. John did write, not a historical, but a spiritual gospel. So, first of all, John presented Jesus as the mind of God in a person come to earth, and as the one person who possesses reality instead of shadows and is able to lead men and women out of the shadows into the real world of which Plato and the great Greeks had dreamed. The Christianity which had once been clothed in Jewish categories had taken to itself the greatness of the thought of the Greeks. The Rise of the Heresies The second of the great facts confronting the Church when the Fourth Gospel was written was the rise of heresy. It was now about seventy years since Jesus had been crucified. By this time, the Church was an organization and an institution. Theologies and creeds were being thought out and stated; and inevitably the thoughts of some people went down mistaken ways, and heresies resulted. A heresy is seldom a complete untruth; it usually results when one facet of the truth is unduly emphasized. We can see at least two of the heresies which the writer of the Fourth Gospel sought to combat.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 347,254 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2007, making it the nation’s most commonly performed surgical procedure. What gives the female breast such transcendent influence over heterosexual male consciousness? First, let’s dispense with any purely utilitarian interpretations. While the mammary glands contained in women’s breasts exist for the feeding of infants, the fatty tissue that confers the magical curve of the human breast—the swell, sway, and jiggle—has nothing to do with milk production. Given the clear physiological costs of having pendulous breasts (back strain, loss of balance, difficulty running), if they aren’t meant to advertise milk for babies, why did human females evolve and retain these cumbersome appendages? Theories range from the belief that breasts serve as signaling devices announcing fertility and fat deposits sufficient to withstand the rigors of pregnancy and breastfeeding12 to “genital echo theory”: females developed pendulous breasts around the time hominids began walking upright in order to provoke the excitation males formerly felt when gazing at the fatty deposits on the buttocks.13 Theorists supporting genital echo theory have noted that swellings like those of chimpanzees and bonobos would interfere with locomotion in a bipedal primate, so when our distant ancestors began walking upright, they reason that some of the female’s fertility signaling moved from the rear office, as it were, to the front showroom. In a bit of historical ping-pong, the dictates of fashion have moved the swelling back and forth over the centuries with high heels, Victorian bustles, and other derrière enhancements. The visual similarity between these two bits of female anatomy has been facilitated by the recent popularity of low-cut jeans that teasingly reveal the nether cleavage. “The butt crack is the new cleavage,” writes journalist Janelle Brown, “reclaimed to peek seductively from the pants of supermodels and commoners alike…. It’s naughty and slightly tawdry,” she continues, “but with the soft round charm of a perfect pair of breasts.”14 If your moon is waning, you can always don a “butt bra” from Bubbles Bodywear, which promises to create the effect that’s been turning male heads since before men existed. Like the Victorian bustle, the butt bra mimics the full curves of the ovulating chimp or bonobo. Speaking of waning moons, it’s worth noting that unless her breasts are artificially enhanced, as a woman’s fertility fades with age, so do her breasts—further supporting the claim that they evolved to signal fertility. Female bonobo. Photo: www.friendsofbonobos.org Victorian bustle. Photo: Strawbridge & Clothier’s Quarterly (Winter 1885–86) The Butt Bra. Photo: Sweet and Vicious LLC Company slogan: “Take Your Gluteus to the Maximus!”

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

  It’s all very systematic, and yet, the result is sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier, sometimes sweeter. That’s because baking has additional context that the recipe doesn’t men tion, like the amount of force I use in kneading, the humidity in the kitchen, and the precise temperature at which the dough rises. Holism explains why bread baked in my home in Boston is never as tasty as bread baked at my friend Ann’s house in Berkeley, California. The Berkeley loaf has a superior flavor because of the different yeasts floating naturally in the air and the elevation above sea level. These additional variables can dramatically impact the end product, and expert bakers know this. Holism, emergent properties, and degeneracy are the very antithesis of fingerprints. 2 1 After bodily and neural fingerprints, the next core assumption of the classical view we discard is how emotions evolved. The classical view proposes that we have a gift-wrapped animal brain—ancient emotion circuits passed down from ancestral animals, wrapped in uniquely human circuitry for rational thought—like icing on an already-baked cake. This view is often touted as “the” evolutionary theory of emotion, when in reality it is just one evolutionary theory. Construction incorporates the latest scientific findings about Darwinian natural selection and population thinking. For example, the many-to-one principle of degeneracy—many different sets of neurons can produce the same outcome—brings about greater robustness for survival. The one-to-many principle—any single neuron can contribute to more than one outcome—is metabolically efficient and increases the computational power of the brain. This kind of brain creates a flexible mind without fingerprints. 2 2 The final major assumption of the classical view is that certain emotions are inborn and universal: all healthy people around the world are supposed to display and recognize them. The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, proposes that emotions are not inborn, and if they are universal, it’s due to shared concepts. What’s universal is the ability to form concepts that make our physical sensations meaningful, from the Western concept “Sadness” to the Dutch concept Gezellig (a specific experience of comfort with friends), which has no exact English translation. By analogy, think about cupcakes and muffins. These two types of baked goods have the same shape and are based on the same set of ingredients: flour, sugar, shortening, and salt. Both have similar accompanying ingredients such as raisins, nuts, chocolate, carrots, and bananas. You cannot distinguish a muffin from a cupcake by its chemistry, in the way you can easily distinguish flour from salt, or a bee from a bird. And yet, one is a breakfast food while the other is a dessert. Their major distinguishing feature is the time of day at which they are eaten. This difference is entirely cultural and learned, not physical. The muffin-cupcake distinction is social reality: when objects in the physical world, like baked goods, take on additional functions by social agreement.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I took the letter with me on a walk in Central Park. The humidity carried in the warm wind mixed the sweat of the city and its dirt and grime with the heady fragrant lushness of the grass and trees. Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing. “What kind of bird is that?” I heard a child ask his young mother, pointing to a bird that looked like a psychedelic crow. Its feathers were iridescent black, a rainbow reflected in the gleaming darkness, eyes bright white and alive, vigilant. “A grackle,” the woman replied. I breathed and walked and sat on a bench and watched a bee circle the heads of a flock of passing teenagers. There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now. I could survive without the house. I understood that it would soon be someone else’s store of memories, and that was beautiful. I could move on. I found a pay phone on Second Avenue. “OK,” I said into the realtor’s answering machine. “Sell it. And tell them to throw out whatever’s in the attic. I don’t need it. Just mail me whatever I have to sign.” Then I called Reva. She answered on the fourth ring, panting and tense. “I’m at the gym,” she said. “Can we talk later?” We never did. Eight ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. 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