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)

  plays on repressed sexuality, creates an erotic charge. Yet the origins of the internal, to which the word lie not in sexuality but in religion, and religion remains deeply em- governed submit because of bedded in modern charisma. their belief in the extraordinary quality of the Thousands of years ago, people believed in gods and spirits, but few specific person. could ever say that they had witnessed a miracle, a physical demonstration —MAX WEBER, FROM MAX of divine power. A man, however, who seemed possessed by a divine WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY, spirit—speaking in tongues, ecstatic raptures, the expression of intense EDITED BY HANS GERTH AND C . W R I G H T M I L L S visions—would stand out as one whom the gods had singled out. And this man, a priest or a prophet, gained great power over others. What made the Hebrews believe in Moses, follow him out of Egypt, and remain loyal to him despite their endless wandering in the desert? The look in his eye, his inspired and inspiring words, the face that literally glowed when he came down from Mount Sinai—all these things gave him the appearance of having direct communication with God, and were the source of his authority. And these were what was meant by "charisma," a Greek word referring to prophets and to Christ himself. In early Christianity, charisma was a gift or talent vouchsafed by God's grace and revealing His presence. Most of the great religions were founded by a Charismatic, a person who physically displayed the signs of God's favor. 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-97 98 • The Art of Seduction And the Lord said to ologist Max Weber, however, noticed that despite our supposed progress, Moses, "Write these there were more Charismatics than ever. What characterized a modern words; in accordance with Charismatic, according to Weber, was the appearance of an extraordinary these words I have made a covenant with you and quality in their character, the equivalent of a sign of God's favor. How else with Israel." And he was to explain the power of a Robespierre or a Lenin? More than anything it there with the Lord forty was the force of their magnetic personalities that made these men stand out days and forty nights; he and was the source of their power. They did not speak of God but of a neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote upon great cause, visions of a future society. Their appeal was emotional; they the tables the words of the seemed possessed. And their audiences reacted as euphorically as earlier au-covenant, the ten diences had to a prophet. When Lenin died, in 1924, a cult formed around commandments. When Moses came down from his memory, transforming the communist leader into a deity. Mount Sinai, with the two

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  the emperor was quite ill, and that the empress dowager had taken power. strokes. For her own They suspected foul play; the empress had probably acted to stop the re- person, \ It beggar'd all forms. The emperor was being mistreated, probably poisoned— description: she did lie \ In perhaps he was already dead. When the seven ambassadors' wives were her pavilion— cloth-of-gold of tissue— \ O'er picturing preparing for their unusual visit, their husbands warned them: Do not trust that Venus where we see \ the empress dowager. A wily woman with a cruel streak, she had risen from The fancy outwork nature: obscurity to become the concubine of a previous emperor and had man- on each side her \ Stood pretty dimpled boys, like aged over the years to accumulate great power. Far more than the emperor, smiling Cupids, \ With she was the most feared person in China. divers-colour'd fans, whose On the appointed day, the women were borne into the Forbidden City wind did seem \ To glow the delicate cheeks which in a procession of sedan chairs carried by court eunuchs in dazzling uni- they did cool, \ And forms. The women themselves, not to be outdone, wore the latest Western what they undid did. . . . \ fashions—tight corsets, long velvet dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, bil- Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, \ So many lowing petticoats, tall plumed hats. The residents of the Forbidden City mermaids, tended her i' the looked at their clothes in amazement, and particularly at the way their eyes, \ And made their dresses displayed their prominent bosoms. The wives felt sure they had im- bends adornings: at the pressed their hosts. At the Audience Hall they were greeted by princes and helm \ A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle \ princesses, as well as lower royalty. The Chinese women were wearing Swell with the touches of magnificent Manchu costumes with the traditional high, jewel-encrusted those flower-soft hands \ black headdresses; they were arranged in a hierarchical order reflected in That yarely frame the office. From the barge \ A the color of their dresses, an astounding rainbow of color. strange invisible perfume The wives were served tea in the most delicate porcelain cups, then hits the sense \ Of the 267 268 • The Art of Seduction adjacent wharfs. The city were escorted into the presence of the empress dowager. The sight took cast \ Her people out upon their breath away. The empress was seated on the Dragon Throne, which her; and Antony, \ was studded with jewels. She wore heavily brocaded robes, a magnificent Enthron'd i' the marketplace, did sit alone, \ headdress bearing diamonds, pearls, and jade, and an enormous necklace of Whistling to the air; perfectly matched pearls. She was a tiny woman, but on the throne, in that which, but for vacancy, \ dress, she seemed a giant. She smiled at the ladies with much warmth and Had gone to gaze on

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Today, anyone who has presence, who attracts attention when he or she tables of the testimony in enters a room, is said to possess charisma. But even these less-exalted types his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses reveal a trace of the quality suggested by the word's original meaning. did not know that the skin Their charisma is mysterious and inexplicable, never obvious. They have an of his face shone because he unusual confidence. They have a gift—often a smoothness with language— had been talking with God. And when Aaron that makes them stand out from the crowd. They express a vision. We may and all the people of Israel not realize it, but in their presence we have a kind of religious experience: saw Moses, behold, the we believe in these people, without having any rational evidence for doing skin of his face shone, and so. When trying to concoct an effect of charisma, never forget the religious they were afraid to come near him. But Moses source of its power. You must radiate an inward quality that has a saintly or called to them; and Aaron spiritual edge to it. Your eyes must glow with the fire of a prophet. Your and all the leaders of the charisma must seem natural, as if it came from something mysteriously be-congregation returned to him, and Moses talked yond your control, a gift of the gods. In our rational, disenchanted world, with them. And afterward people crave a religious experience, particularly on a group level. Any sign all the people of Israel came of charisma plays to this desire to believe in something. And there is noth-near, and he gave them in commandment all that the ing more seductive than giving people something to believe in and follow. Lord had spoken with him Charisma must seem mystical, but that does not mean you cannot learn in Mount Sinai. And certain tricks that will enhance the charisma you already possess, or will when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put give you the outward appearance of it. The following are basic qualities a veil on his face; but that will help create the illusion of charisma: whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the veil off, until he came out; and Purpose. If people believe you have a plan, that you know where you are when he came out, and going, they will follow you instinctively. The direction does not matter: told the people of Israel pick a cause, an ideal, a vision and show that you will not sway from your what he was commanded, the people of Israel saw the goal. People will imagine that your confidence comes from something face of Moses, that the skin real—just as the ancient Hebrews believed Moses was in communion with of Moses's face shone; and God, simply because he showed the outward signs. Moses would put the veil upon his face again, until

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  “The origins of farming,” says archaeologist Steven Mithen, “is the defining event of human history—the one turning point that has resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition to all other animals and past types of humans.”10 The most important pivot point in the story of our species, the shift to agriculture redirected the trajectory of human life more fundamentally than the control of fire, the Magna Carta, the printing press, the steam engine, nuclear fission, or anything else has or, perhaps, ever will. With agriculture, virtually everything changed: the nature of status and power, social and family structures, how humans interacted with the natural world, the gods they worshipped, the likelihood and nature of warfare between groups, quality of life, longevity, and certainly, the rules governing sexuality. His survey of the relevant archaeological evidence led archaeologist Timothy Taylor, author of The Prehistory of Sex, to state, “While hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity, early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction.” “Afraid of the wild,” he concludes, “farmers set out to destroy it.”11 Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now had to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought, and sold. Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed, and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern. But the standard narrative insists that paternity certainty has always been of utmost importance to our species, that our very genes dictate we organize our sexual lives around it. Why, then, is the anthropological record so rich with examples of societies where biological paternity is of little or no importance? Where paternity is unimportant, men tend to be relatively unconcerned about women’s sexual fidelity. But before we get into these real-life examples, let’s take a quick trip to the Yucatán. PART I On the Origin of the Specious CHAPTER ONE Remember the Yucatán! The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange. G. K. CHESTERTON Forget the Alamo. The Yucatán provides a more useful lesson. It was early spring, 1519. Hernán Cortés and his men had just arrived off the coast of the Mexican mainland. The conquistador ordered his men to bring one of the natives to the deck of the ship, where Cortés asked him the name of this exotic place they’d found. The man responded, “Ma c’ubah than,” which the Spanish heard as Yucatán. Close enough. Cortés proclaimed that from that day onward, Yucatán and any gold it contained belonged to Spain, and so on. Four and a half centuries later, in the 1970s, linguists researching archaic Mayan dialects concluded that Ma c’ubah than meant “I do not understand you.”1

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  chards with rare fruits from the Orient, silkworm farms, new towns with Apollo Belvedere. This bustling marketplaces. On a visit to the empress in 1785, Potemkin talked much is certain: as a of these things as if they already existed, so vivid were his descriptions. The performance it's like empress was delighted, but her ministers were skeptical—Potemkin loved nothing you ever saw before in your life. We have to talk. Ignoring their warnings, in 1787 Catherine arranged for a tour already enjoyed it on two of the area. She asked Joseph II to join her—he would be so impressed evenings." with the modernization of the Crimea that he would immediately sign on —FLORA FRASER, for the war against Turkey. Potemkin, naturally, was to organize the whole EMMA, LADY HAMILTON affair. And so, in May of that year, after the Dnieper had thawed, Catherine prepared for a journey from Kiev, in the Ukraine, to Sebastopol, in the For this uncanny is in Crimea. Potemkin arranged for seven floating palaces to carry Catherine reality nothing new or and her retinue down the river. The journey began, and as Catherine, alien, but something which is familiar and old-Joseph, and the courtiers looked at the shores to either side, they saw tri- established in the mind umphal arches in front of clean-looking towns, their walls freshly painted; and which has become healthy-looking cattle grazing in the pastures; streams of marching troops alienated from it only through the process of on the roads; buildings going up everywhere. At dusk they were enter- repression. This reference to tained by bright-costumed peasants, and smiling girls with flowers in their the factor of repression hair, dancing on the shore. Catherine had traveled through this area many enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's years before, and the poverty of the peasantry there had saddened her—she definition of the uncanny had determined then that she would somehow change their lot. To see be- as something which ought fore her eyes the signs of such a transformation overwhelmed her, and she to have remained hidden berated Potemkin's critics: Look at what my favorite has accomplished, but has come to light. . . . • . . . There is one more look at these miracles! point of general application They anchored at three towns along the way, staying in each place in a which I should like to add. magnificent, newly built palace with artificial waterfalls in the English-style . . . This is that an uncanny efect is often and gardens. On land they moved through villages with vibrant marketplaces; easily produced when the the peasants were happily at work, building and repairing. Everywhere they distinction between spent the night, some spectacle filled their eyes—dances, parades, mytho- imagination and reality is effaced, as when something logical tableaux vivants, artificial volcanoes illuminating Moorish gardens. that we have hitherto Finally, at the end of the trip, in the palace at Sebastopol, Catherine and regarded as imaginary 302 • The Art of Seduction

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  CR: So many things come to mind, but probably the most mind-blowing was the information about the first “key parties” having been started by elite WWII pilots who were facing very high fatality rates, the highest in the whole military. It was so moving to think about what motivated them to open their marriages with other couples. They were cultivating these webs of love, or at least real affection, because they knew that some of the men wouldn’t survive the war, and they wanted the widows to have as much support and love as possible. This confluence of selflessness and sexuality seemed to connect so directly to the hunter-gatherer groups, where men also have a high mortality rate from hunting accidents, falls, animal attacks, and so on. It was an unexpected yet very clear reflection of the distant past. DS: Has the experience of publishing this book changed you in any way? CR: Interesting question. It has. It’s made me much less critical of other people’s books. I don’t think I could write a negative review at this point. When I was younger, it was easy to point out the flaws in books, but at this point, I’m much more aware that there’s a person on the other side who did their best. If I were writing Sex at Dawn again, I’d probably tone down some of the snarkier bits. I’m also more aware of just how impossible it is to please everyone. We’ve been incredibly fortunate in the response to this book, but still, for every nine comments we get congratulating us for writing the book with humor, we’ll get one or two describing the writing style as “sophomoric” or “unserious.” Some people think serious issues can only be discussed in serious tones. It’s interesting to have become a public figure, even in the very limited way I’m experiencing it. People have the right to their responses to your work, positive or negative. I’ve learned not to take it personally, in either case. Read on Sex at Dawn Online FOR MORE INFORMATION about Sex at Dawn and the authors’ current doings, please visit sexatdawn.com, where you’ll find a selection of reviews, reader responses, TV and radio interviews, podcasts, and a reader-maintained forum for discussing anything and everything related to the book. Additionally, the authors maintain a Facebook page with a lively discussion of current events related to the book at www.facebook.com/sexatdawn. They can also be followed on Twitter: @SexatDawn. Don’t miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com. ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR SEX AT DAWN “Ideas like [these] might do more to save marriage than anything else in today’s social-theory landscape. Seriously.” —Amy L. Keyishian, AOL “Sex at Dawn is an absolute must-read because this is the first book about sex that’s as fun to read as it is to…you know, do it.” —Moses Ma, editor, Tantric News

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair! She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality. The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis—without any utilitarian results. As Edusa’s sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsating hard bench watching Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): “Dolly has a magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?” Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip. It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop. That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments, immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan to-day with frustration.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Emma Hart came from a prosaic background, her father a country blacksmith in eighteenth-century England. Emma was beautiful, but had no other talents to her credit. Yet she rose to become one of the greatest seductresses in history, seducing first Sir William Hamilton, the English ambassador to the court of Naples, and then (as Lady Hamilton, Sir William's wife) Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson. What was strangest when you met her was an uncanny sense that she was a figure from the past, a woman out of Greek myth or ancient history. Sir William was a collector of Greek and Roman antiquities; to seduce him, Emma cleverly made herself resemble a Greek statue, and mythical figures in paintings of the time. It was not just the way she wore her hair, or dressed, but her poses, the way she carried herself. It was as if one of the paintings he collected had come to life. Soon Sir William began to host parties in his home in Naples at which Emma would wear costumes and pose, re-creating images from mythology and history. Dozens of men fell in love with her, for she embodied an image from their childhood, an image of beauty and perfection. The key to this fantasy creation was some shared cultural association—mythology, historical seductresses like Cleopatra. Every culture has a pool of such figures from the distant and not-so-distant past. You hint at a similarity, in spirit and in appearance—but you are flesh and blood. What could be more thrilling than the sense of being in the presence of some fantasy figure going back to your earliest memories? One night Pauline Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon, held a gala affair Confuse Desire and Reality— The Perfect Illusion • 305 in her house. Afterward, a handsome German officer approached her in the garden and asked for her help in passing along a request to the emperor. Pauline said she would do her best, and then, with a rather mysterious look in her eye, asked him to come back to the same spot the next night. The officer returned, and was greeted by a young woman who led him to some rooms near the garden and then to a magnificent salon, complete with an extravagant bath. Moments later, another young woman entered through a side door, dressed in the sheerest garments. It was Pauline. Bells were rung, ropes were pulled, and maids appeared, preparing the bath, giving the officer a dressing gown, then disappearing. The officer later described the evening as something out of a fairy tale, and he had the feeling that Pauline was deliberately acting the part of some mythical seductress. Pauline was beautiful and powerful enough to get almost any man she wanted, and she wasn't interested simply in luring a man into bed; she wanted to envelop him in romantic adventure, seduce his mind. Part of the adventure was the feeling that she was playing a role, and was inviting her target along into this shared fantasy.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  That was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice.” Her account of her travails among these befuddled beauties, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations. The second of four daughters of a would-be paintress and a father who designed “ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets,” Isadora grew up in a fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. She heavy pets (let’s call it) at thirteen, remorsefully tries to starve herself at fourteen, embarks upon a series of psychiatrists (the first one is Dr. Schrift; he’s short, of course, and tells her, “Ackzept being a vohman”), enters Barnard at seventeen, meets the brilliant Brian Stollerman when she is a freshman, seduces him and terminates her virginity, marries him after graduation, endures his growing madness while she attends graduate school, commits and divorces him at twenty-two, takes up with an unwashed musical loser called Charlie Fielding, is betrayed by him, embarks upon a swinging tour of Europe with a girlfriend at the age of twenty-three, returns to New York, meets a silent thirty-one-year-old Chinese psychiatrist named Bennett Wing, marries him, and now, five years later, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1971, attends with her husband an international congress of psychologists in Vienna, where she meets, loves at first sight, and runs away with an English Laingian psychiatrist called (yes) Adrian Goodlove. This life history is scattered carefreely backward and forward throughout three hundred and forty pages that should be read, one sometimes suspects, in fifty-minute doses. A pattern and a person emerge, amid the wisecracks, postcards (“Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed.”), and reflections upon the hard and curious lot of Woman. Intellectual condescension, physical intimidation, deodorant-selling insinuation—women suffer them all. The case for marriage is nailed in a sentence: “Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better.” Motherhood is another distrusted institution: her own mother, a frustrated artist, is full of “misplaced artistic aggression,” and Isadora thinks sadly of young wives “making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why.” The smaller discomforts of femininity are vividly, comically detailed. The one female complaint not registered, surprisingly, is the one most conspicuous in seriously sexy male fiction, such as Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time.” However adverse her circumstances, Isadora Wing seems to have no trouble achieving sexual satisfaction. And maybe this is what makes her saga so uncranky, for all its intelligent pain, and lends its prose a spun-sugar halo of wonder and fun, and gives its conclusion the smug snap of a shopping expedition satisfactorily completed: “A nice body. Mine.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Evolutionary theorists love to seek explanations for species’ most outstanding features: the elk’s antlers, the giraffe’s neck, the cheetah’s breakaway speed. These features reflect the environment in which the species evolved and the particular niche it occupies in this environment. What’s our species’s outstanding feature? Other than our super-sized male genitalia (see Part IV), we’re not very impressive from a physical perspective. With less than half our body weight, the average chimp has the strength of any four or five mustachioed firefighters. Plenty of animals can run faster, dive deeper, fight better, see farther, detect fainter smells, and hear tonal subtleties in what sounds like silence to us. So what do we bring to the party? What’s so special about human beings? Our endlessly complex interactions with each other. We know what you’re thinking: big brains. True, but our unique brains result from our chatty sociability. Though debate rages concerning precisely why the human brain grew so large so quickly, most would agree with anthropologist Terrence W. Deacon when he writes, “The human brain has been shaped by evolutionary processes that elaborated the capacities needed for language, and not just by a general demand for greater intelligence.”4 In a classic feedback loop, our big brains both serve our need for complex, subtle communication and result from it. Language, in turn, enables our deepest, most human feature: the ability to form and maintain a flexible, multidimensional, adaptive social network. Before and beyond anything else, human beings are the most social of all creatures. We have another quality that is especially human in addition to our disproportionately large brains and associated capacity for language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also something woven into our all-important social fabric: our exaggerated sexuality. No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens—not even the famously libidinous bonobo. Although we and the bonobo both average well into the hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of intercourse per birth—way ahead of any other primate—their “acts” are far briefer than ours. Pair-bonded “monogamous” animals are almost always hyposexual, having sex as the Vatican recommends: infrequently, quietly, and for reproduction only. Human beings, regardless of religion, are at the other end of the libidinal spectrum: hypersexuality personified. Human beings and bonobos use eroticism for pleasure, for solidifying friendship, and for cementing a deal (recall that historically, marriage is more akin to a corporate merger than a declaration of eternal love). For these two species (and apparently only these two species), nonreproductive sex is “natural,” a defining characteristic.5

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (Commentary, for example, held rather grubby gatherings at which bilious-looking Semites—all of whom were named Irving—worried each other to death about Jewishness, Blackness, and Consciousness, while dipping into bowls of chopped liver and platters of Nova Scotia.) These soirées amused me, but it was for The New Yorker that I reserved my awe. I never would have dared to send my own puny efforts there, so it outraged and amazed me to find someone I had actually known frequenting its pages. I had, anyway, an altogether exalted notion of what it meant to be an author. I imagined them as a mysterious fraternity of mortals who walked around more nimbly and lightly than other people—as if they somehow had invisible wings on their shoulders. They smiled wryly, recognizing each other by means of a certain something—maybe like the radar bats are said to possess. Certainly nothing so crude as a secret handshake. Bennett was indirectly involved with my writing too, though he seldom read a word I wrote. I did not really need anyone to read my work at that point (because the work was mostly a preparation for the work to come) but I very much needed someone to approve of the act of writing. He did that. At times it was not clear whether he approved of my writing just so that I would not bother him in his depression or whether he enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. But the fact was that he believed in me long before I believed in myself. It was as if during that long bad time in our marriage we reached each other indirectly through my writing. Though we did not read it together, we were united by it in our retreat from the world. We were both learning how to fish the unconscious. Bennett was sitting almost motionless in the living room pondering his father’s death, his grandfather’s death, all the deaths that had been heaped on his shoulders when he was barely old enough to grasp his own life. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. I began two novels in Heidelberg.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  He lifted her chin, kissed her throat, and drawing his organ out of her tight sex, heard her moan beneath him. She was stunned. He lifted her until she sat naked, one knee crooked on the ruin of her velvet gown on the bed which was as flat and hard as a table. "I've awakened you, my dear," he said to her. "For a hundred years you've slept and so have all those who loved you. Listen. Listen! You'll hear this castle come alive as no one before you has ever heard it." Already a shriek had come from the passage outside. The serving girl was standing there with her hands to her lips. And the Prince went to the door to speak to her. "Go to your master, the King. Tell him the Prince has come who was foretold to remove the curse on this household. Tell him I shall be closeted now with his daughter." He shut the door, bolting it, and turned to look at Beauty. Beauty was covering her breasts with her hands, and her long straight golden hair, heavy and full of a great silky density, flared down to the bed around her. She bowed her head so that the hair covered her. But she looked at the Prince and her eyes struck him as devoid of fear or cunning. She was like those tender animals of the wood just before he slew them in the hung: eyes wide, expressionless. Her bosom heaved with anxious breath. And now he laughed, drawing near, and lifting her hair back from her right shoulder. She looked up at him steadily, her cheeks suffused with a raw blush, and again he kissed her. He opened her mouth with his lips, and taking her hands in his left hand he laid the down on her naked lap so that he might lift her breasts now and better examine them. "Innocent beauty," he whispered. He knew what she was seeing as she looked at him. He was only three years older than she had been. Eighteen, newly a man, but afraid of nothing and no one. He was tall, black haired; he had a lean build which made him agile. He liked to think of himself as a sword -- light, straight, and very deft, and utterly dangerous. And he had left behind him many who would concur with this. He had not so much pride in himself no as immense satisfaction. He had gotten to the core of the accursed castle. There were knocks at the door, cries. He didn't bother to answer them. He laid Beauty down again. "I'm your Prince," he said, "and that is how you will address me, and that is why you will obey me."

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  men were virtually deified after they died. Albert Einstein too had a saintly aura—childlike, unwilling to compromise, lost in his own world. The key is that you must already have some deeply held values; that part cannot be faked, at least not without risking accusations of charlatanry that will destroy your charisma in the long run. The next step is to show, as simply and subtly as possible, that you live what you believe. Finally, the appearance of being mild and unassuming can eventually turn into charisma, as long as you seem completely comfortable with it. The source of Harry Truman's charisma, and even of Abraham Lincoln's, was to appear to be an Everyman. Eloquence. A Charismatic relies on the power of words. The reason is simple: words are the quickest way to create emotional disturbance. They can uplift, elevate, stir anger, without referring to anything real. During the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Gómez Ibarruri, known as La Pasionaria, gave pro-Communist speeches that were so emotionally powerful as to determine several key moments in the war. To bring off this kind of eloquence, it helps if the speaker is as emotional, as caught up in words, as the audience is. Yet eloquence can be learned: the devices La Pasionaria used— 100 • The Art of Seduction catchwords, slogans, rhythmic repetitions, phrases for the audience to repeat—can easily be acquired. Roosevelt, a calm, patrician type, was able to make himself a dynamic speaker, both through his style of delivery, which was slow and hypnotic, and through his brilliant use of imagery, allitera-tion, and biblical rhetoric. The crowds at his rallies were often moved to tears. The slow, authoritative style is often more effective than passion in the long run, for it is more subtly spellbinding, and less tiring. Theatricality. A Charismatic is larger than life, has extra presence. Actors have studied this kind of presence for centuries; they know how to stand on a crowded stage and command attention. Surprisingly, it is not the actor who screams the loudest or gestures the most wildly who works this magic best, but the actor who stays calm, radiating self-assurance. The effect is ruined by trying too hard. It is essential to be self-aware, to have the ability to see yourself as others see you. De Gaulle understood that self-awareness was key to his charisma; in the most turbulent circumstances—the Nazi occupation of France, the national reconstruction after World War II, an army rebellion in Algeria—he retained an Olympian composure that played beautifully against the hysteria of his colleagues. When he spoke, no one could take their eyes off him. Once you know how to command attention this way, heighten the effect by appearing in ceremonial and ritual events that are full of exciting imagery, making you look regal and godlike. Flamboyancy has nothing to do with charisma—it attracts the wrong kind of attention.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  — I H A R A SAIKAKU, THE LIFE OF emperor was fine, and the empress could be trusted. AN AMOROUS WOMAN, AND OTHER WRITINGS, TRANSLATED BY IVAN M O R R I S Interpretation. The foreign contingent in China had no idea what was really happening in the Forbidden City. In truth, the emperor had conFor such men as have spired to arrest and possibly murder his aunt. Discovering the plot, a terri-practised love, have ever ble crime in Confucian terms, she forced him to sign his own abdication, held this a sound maxim had him confined, and told the outside world that he was ill. As part of his that there is naught to be punishment, he was to appear at state functions and act as if nothing had compared with a woman in her clothes. Again when happened. you reflect how a man doth The empress dowager loathed Westerners, whom she considered bar-brave, rumple, squeeze and barians. She disliked the ambassadors' wives, with their ugly fashions and make light of his lady's finery, and how he doth simpering ways. The banquet was a show, a seduction, to appease the West- Pay Attention to Detail • 269 ern powers, which had been threatening invasion if the emperor had been work ruin and loss to the killed. The goal of the seduction was simple: dazzle the wives with color, grand cloth of gold and web of silver, to tinsel spectacle, theater. The empress applied all her expertise to the task, and she and silken stuffs, pearls and was a genius for detail. She had designed the spectacles in a rising order— precious stones, 'tis plain the uniformed eunuchs first, then the Manchu ladies in their headdresses, how his ardour and and finally the empress herself. It was pure theater, and it was overwhelm- satisfaction be increased manifold— far more than ing. Then the empress brought the spectacle down a notch, humanizing it with some simple with gifts, warm greetings, the reassuring presence of the emperor, teas, shepherdess or other woman and entertainments, which were in no way inferior to anything in the West. of like quality, be she as fair as she may. • And why She ended the banquet on another high note—the little drama with the of yore was Venus found so sharing of the teacups, followed by even more magnificent gifts. The fair and so desirable, if not women's heads were spinning when they left. In truth they had never seen that with all her beauty she was always gracefully such exotic splendor—and they never understood how carefully its details attired likewise, and had been orchestrated by the empress. Charmed by the spectacle, they trans- generally scented, that she ferred their happy feelings to the empress and gave her their approval—all did ever smell sweet an hundred paces away? For it that she required. hath ever been held of all

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Purposefulness is doubly charismatic in times of trouble. Since most he went in to speak people hesitate before taking bold action (even when action is what is re-with him. quired), single-minded self-assurance will make you the focus of attention. — E X O D U S 34:27 O L D People will believe in you through the simple force of your character. When TESTAMENT Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power amidst the Depression, much of the public had little faith he could turn things around. But in his first few months in office he displayed such confidence, such decisiveness and clarity The Charismatic • 99 in dealing with the country's many problems, that the public began to see That devil of a man him as their savior, someone with intense charisma. exercises a fascination on me that I cannot explain even to myself, and in such a degree that, though I fear Mystery. Mystery lies at charisma's heart, but it is a particular kind of neither God nor devil, mystery—a mystery expressed by contradiction. The Charismatic may be when I am in his presence I am ready to tremble like both proletarian and aristocratic (Mao Zedong), both cruel and kind (Peter a child, and he could make the Great), both excitable and icily detached (Charles de Gaulle), both inti- me go through the eye of a mate and distant (Sigmund Freud). Since most people are predictable, the needle to throw myself into the fire. effect of these contradictions is devastatingly charismatic. They make you —GENERAL VANDAMME, ON hard to fathom, add richness to your character, make people talk about you. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE It is often better to reveal your contradictions slowly and subtly—if you throw them out one on top of the other, people may think you have an er-ratic personality. Show your mysteriousness gradually and word will spread. [ The masses] have never You must also keep people at arm's length, to keep them from figuring thirsted after truth. They you out. demand illusions, and Another aspect of mystery is a hint of the uncanny. The appearance of cannot do without them. They constantly give what prophetic or psychic gifts will add to your aura. Predict things authorita- is unreal precedence over tively and people will often imagine that what you have said has come true. what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. Saintliness. Most of us must compromise constantly to survive; saints do They have an evident not. They must live out their ideals without caring about the consequences. tendency not to distinguish between the two. The saintly effect bestows charisma. Saintliness goes far beyond religion: politicians as disparate as George —SIGMUND FREUD, THE STANDARD EDITION OFTHE Washington and Lenin won saintly reputations by living simply, despite COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL their power—by matching their political values to their personal lives. Both WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD, VOLUME I8

• 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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Like us, chimps and bonobos are African great apes. Like all apes, they have no tail. They spend a good part of their lives on the ground and are both highly intelligent, intensely social creatures. For bonobos, a turbocharged sexuality utterly divorced from reproduction is a central feature of social interaction and group cohesion. Anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that bonobos get a “reproductive payoff that compensates them for their wasteful approach to hitting the ovulatory target.” The payoff is “a more intense form of social cooperation between males and females” leading to “a more intensely cooperative social group, a more secure milieu for rearing infants, and hence a higher degree of reproductive success for sexier males and females.”3 The bonobo’s promiscuity, in other words, confers significant evolutionary benefits on the apes. The only monogamous ape, the gibbon, lives in Southeast Asia in small family units consisting of a male/female couple and their young—isolated in a territory of thirty to fifty square kilometers. They never leave the trees, have little to no interaction with other gibbon groups, not much advanced intelligence to speak of, and infrequent, reproduction-only copulation. Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except—if the standard narrative is to be believed—us. Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, “Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”4 Primates and Human Nature If Thomas Hobbes had been offered the opportunity to design an animal that embodied his darkest convictions about human nature, he might have come up with something like a chimpanzee. This ape appears to confirm every dire Hobbesian assumption about the inherent nastiness of pre-state existence. Chimps are reported to be power-mad, jealous, quick to violence, devious, and aggressive. Murder, organized warfare between groups, rape, and infanticide are prominent in accounts of their behavior. Once these chilling observations were published in the 1960s, theorists quickly proposed the “killer ape” theory of human origins. Primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson summarize this demonic theory in stark terms, finding in chimpanzee behavior evidence of ancient human blood-lust, writing, “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”5

• From Querelle (1953)

  Querelle was an exact replica of his brother. Robert, perhaps a little more taciturn, the other, a little hotter in temper ( nuances by which one could tell them from each other, except if one was a furious girl ) . It so happens that we ourselves acquired our sense of Querelle's existence on a particular day, we could give the exact date and hour of-when we decided to write this story (and that is a word not to be used to describe some adventure or series of adventures that has already been lived through ) . Little by little, we saw how Querelle-already contained in our flesh-was beginning to grow in our soul, to feed on what is best in us, above all on our despair at not being in any way inside him, while having him inside of ourselves. After this discovery of Querelle we want him to become the Hero, even to those who may despise him. Following, within ourselves, his destiny, his development, we shall see how he lends himself to this in order to realize himself in a conclusion that appears to be ( from then on ) in complete accordance with his very own will, his very own fate. The scene we are about to describe is a transposition of the 18 I JEAN GENET event which revealed Querelle to us. (We are sb11 referring to that ideal and heroic personage, the fruit of our secret loves. ) We must say, of that event, that it was of equal import to the Visitation. No doubt it was only long after it had taken place that we recognized it as being "big" with consequences, yet there and then we may be said to have felt a true Annunciatory thrill. Finaiiy: to become visible to you, to become a character in a novel, Querelle must be shown apart from ourselves. Only then will you get to know the apparent, and real, beauty of his body, his attitudes, his exploits, and their slow disintegration. The farther you descend toward the port of Brest, the denser the fog seems to grow. It is so thick at Recouvrance, after you cross the Penfeld bridge, that the houses, their walls and roofs appear to be afloat. In the alleys leading down to the quayside you find yourself alone. Here and there you encounter the dim, fringed sun, like a light from a half-open dairy doorway. On you go through that vaporous twilight, until confronted once more by the opaque matter, the dangerous fog that shelters : a drunken sailor reeling home on heavy legs-a docker hunched over a girl-a hoodlum, perhaps armed with a knife-usyoq-hearts pounding. The fog brought Gil and Roger closer together. It gave them mutual confidence and friendship.

• From Querelle (1953)

  examined every crack in the stone wall along the ditch . At one spot the brambles grew thicker and closer to the wall. Their roots were caught in the masonry. Querelle looked closer. The place appealed to him. No one had followed him there. No one was behind him, nor was there anyone on top of the wall. He was all alone in the old moat. \Vith his hands thrust deep into his pockets, to protect them from being scratched, he deliberately forced his way through the shrubs. Then, for a moment, he just stood at the foot of the wall, looking at the masonry. He discovered the stone he would have to pry loose in order to create a niche in the wall : a small sailcloth bag, containing some gold, rings, broken bracelets, earrings, and some Italian gold coins, did not need a lot of space. He stared at the wall for a long time. He hypnotized himself. Soon he had induced a form of sleep, of self-forgetfulness, and this allowed him to become part of his surroundings. He saw himself entering the wall, its every detail clearly apparent. His body penetrated it. There were eyes in the tips of his ten fingers; even all his muscles had eyes. Soon he became the wall, and remained so for a moment; he felt every detail of its stones alive in him, the cracks like wounds, invisible blood flowing from them, with his soul and his silent cries; he felt a spider tickling the minute cavern between two of his fingers, a leaf gently attach ing itself to one of h is damp stones. Finally, becoming aware of himself again, flattened against the wall and feeling its damp, rough contours, he made an effort to leave it gain, to step out of it, but as he did so he was marked by 1t forever, by this most particular spot near the ramparts, and i t would remain in his bodily memory and he would be certain to find it again in five or ten years' time. As he turned to leave he remembered, without giving it much thought, that there had been another murder in Brest. In the morning paper he had seen a photograph of Gil, and he had recognized the smiling singer. Aboard Le Vengeur, Qucrelle had lost nothing of his sulky arrogance and irritability. Despite his duties as a steward he 132 I JEAN GENET

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The neat rectangles of two-story, red brick barracks for political prisoners at Auschwitz—and the rows of wood sheds at the nearby Birkenau camp for the extermination of Jews—are built on a grid. 185 Birkenau means “Birch Wood.” The empty fields among the birch trees had once been farmland. The men’s camp at Birkenau, opposite a railroad siding, was almost a perfect square. Inside, the wood sheds were separated by packed earth. Each one was on its own rectangular island, oriented precisely east and west. Each shed was 36 feet wide and 116 feet long. Each had been built to house 550 prisoners. When more space was required, the number of men in each shed was increased to 744. Expansion did not require remodeling the structure. The men were simply packed closer together on the three tiers of square, wooden shelves on which they slept. Oriented north and south on each shelf, four bodies could lie where three once had. Other aspects of the camp’s design were less efficient initially. When spring thawed the waterlogged ground of Birkenau, frozen corpses rose to the surface. 186 Louis Boyar’s wife told her husband to redesign the street plan he had sketched. She wanted him to add parkway panels and parallel service roads to separate the residential streets from highway traffic. She told her husband that children like to play in the street, and how dangerous the streets were in Chicago where she grew up. When construction began in 1950, the Los Angeles Daily News said the new community was “scientifically planned.” 187 Louis Boyar took his engineering drawings to Los Angeles to meet with the county planning commission in 1950, shortly before the sale of the Montana Land Company was complete. The commissioners met in the Hall of Administration, a few hundred feet from where Colonel de Neve had opened his notebook and begun to draw. 188 The planning commission was responsible for approving Louis Boyar’s subdivision plan. The commissioners unrolled the thick bundle of blueprints that Boyar handed them. He pointed out the relevant sections. The first sheet of blueprints showed the street grid. Beneath it lay more sheets with plans of water lines, sewer laterals, and storm drains. 189 The county planning commission was not impressed with the original design of Ben Weingart’s shopping center. The commissioners felt that a pedestrian shopping mall surrounded by 10,580 parking spaces, each one nine feet wide, would probably fail. They allowed Weingart to build, but only on condition that the subdivision’s street grid break up the shopping center’s parking lots. If the center went bankrupt, its acres of parking could be subdivided for business lots without forcing the county to pay for streets. 190 The commissioners were more impressed with another design feature. The intersections of the main streets in the new suburb, each one exactly a mile apart, were to be developed as neighborhood shopping centers. There would be sixteen of them.