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

  41 Sometimes deconstructing the self is too challenging. You can achieve some of the same benefits more simply by cultivating and experiencing awe, the feeling of being in the presence of something vastly greater than yourself. It helps you get some distance from your self. 42 I experienced these benefits firsthand when my family spent a few summer weeks at a beach house in Rhode Island. A symphony of crickets surrounded us each evening, resonating with an intensity I’d never heard before. I hadn’t paid much attention to crickets before that, but now they entered my affective niche. I began to look forward to them every evening and to find their song comforting while falling asleep. When we returned from our vacation, I discovered that I could hear crickets through the thick walls of my home if I lay quietly enough. Now, whenever I wake in the middle of a summer night, feeling anxious after a stressful day in the lab, the crickets help me drift back to sleep. I developed an awe-inspired concept of being enveloped within nature and feeling like a tiny speck. This concept helps me change my body budget whenever I want. I can notice a tiny weed forcing its way through a crack in the sidewalk, proving yet again that nature cannot be tamed by civilization, and employ the same concept to take comfort in my insignificance. 43 You can experience similar awe when hearing ocean waves crash against rocks on a beach, gazing at the stars, walking under storm clouds in the middle of the day, hiking deep into uncharted territory, or taking part in spiritual ceremonies. People who report feeling awe more frequently also have the lowest levels of those nasty cytokines that cause inflammation (though nobody has proved cause and effect). 44 Whether you cultivate awe, meditate, or find other ways to deconstruct your experience into physical sensations, recategorization is a critical tool for mastering your emotions in the moment. When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal. Your feelings might just be noise. You might just need some sleep. ... At this point you’ve seen how to work on becoming more emotionally intelligent about your experiences. Now let’s turn to perceiving emotion intelligently in other people around you, and the subsequent benefits for your well-being. My husband, Dan, went through a brief, difficult time a few decades ago, before we knew each other, and was referred to a psychiatrist. About thirty seconds into the first session, Dan knitted his brow and scowled, as he often does when he is concentrating, and the psychiatrist, trusting his perceptions as accurate, pronounced that Dan was “filled with pent-up anger.” The thing is, Dan is one of the calmest people I know. When Dan assured the psychiatrist that he wasn’t angry, the psychiatrist, confident in his ability to read his patients, insisted, “Yes, you are.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91) “But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.

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

  4-6 : Photo courtesy of Helen Mayberg. Fig. 4-7 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 5-1 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 5-2 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 5-3 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 6-1 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 6-2 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 7-1 : Photo courtesy of the author. Fig. 7-2 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. 12-1 : Photo courtesy of Ann Kring and Angie Hawk. Fig. 12-2 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-1 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-2 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-3 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-4 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-5 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AA-6 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AB-1 : Photo (top) courtesy of Richard Enfield. Modification (bottom) courtesy of Daniel J. Barrett. Fig. AC-1 : Photo courtesy of Barton Silverman/New York Times/Redux. Fig. AD-1 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Fig. AD-2 : Photo courtesy of Dr. Tor Wager and the author. Fig. AD-3 : Illustration by Aaron Scott. Buy the Book Visit marinerbooks.com or your favorite retailer to purchase the book in its entirety. The Half-Lesson Your Brain Is Not for Thinking O NCE UPON A TIME , the Earth was ruled by creatures without brains. This is not a political statement, just a biological one. 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov’s greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, an epic, and a philosophical treatise on the nature of time; a parody of the history of the novel; and an erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. Fiction/Literature BEND SINISTER Filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, Bend Sinister is a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country’s foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, Paduk’s government attempts to co-opt Krug’s support in order to validate the new regime. Fiction/Literature INVITATION TO A BEHEADING In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude,” an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When he is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence, and they and the whole world disappear. Fiction/Literature THE DEFENSE As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, an enigma to his parents, and an object of ridicule to his classmates. Taking up chess, he prodigiously rises to the rank of grandmaster, but in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when his intricate defense withers under his opponent’s unexpected and unpredictable lines of assault. Fiction/Literature THE ENCHANTER The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom. Fiction/Literature THE EYE The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife. Fiction/Literature DESPAIR Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965—thirty years after its original publication—Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder. Fiction/Literature THE GIFT

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Jack brought his hand to his chin. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to freshen my memory as to the precise nature of a pantoum . . . I’m rather rusty on my Old French verse forms . . .’ ‘It’s Malay originally.’ ‘Malay!’ ‘It travelled. Victor Hugo did use it, but it’s Malay originally. It’s basically interlinked quatrains, usually rhyming a-b-a-b, and the second and fourth line of each stanza go on to be the first and third . . . is that right? So long since I . . . no, that’s right – the first and third lines of the next stanza – mine’s a broken pantoum, anyway. It’s kind of hard to explain . . . it’s better just to look at one,’ she said and opened the book to the relevant page, handing it to Jack.  the anatomy lesson On Beauty No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can’t forgive us. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. It is always beginning to snow. Of sins they can’t forgive us speech is beautifully useless. It is always beginning to snow. The beautiful know this. Speech is beautifully useless. They are the damned. The beautiful know this. They stand around unnatural as statuary. They are the damned and so their sadness is perfect, delicate as an egg placed in your palm. Hard, it is decorated with their face and so their sadness is perfect. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. Hard, it is decorated with their face. No, we could not itemize the list. Cape Cod, May   On Beauty Jack was now faced with a task he dreaded: saying something after reading a poem. Saying something to the poet . It was a strange fact of his tenure as Dean of the Humanities Faculty that Jack himself was not overly enamoured of either poetry or fictional prose; his great love was the essay, and, if he were really honest with himself, beyond essays themselves, the tools of the essayist: dictionaries. It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love, bowed his head in awe and thrilled at an unlikely tale, for example, the bizarre etymology of the intransitive verb ‘ramble’. ‘Beautiful,’ said Jack at last. ‘Oh, it’s just old crap – but a useful illustration. Anyway – Jack, I really have to run – ’ ‘I’ve sent someone over to your classroom, Claire, they know you’re going to be late.’ ‘You have? Is something wrong, Jack?’ ‘I do actually need a quick word with you,’ said Jack, oxy-moronically. ‘Just in my office if that’s possible.’  Here they all were, Howard’s imaginary class. Howard indulged in a quick visual catalogue of their interesting bits, knowing that this would very likely be the last time he saw them. The punk boy with black-painted fingernails, the Indian girl with the disproportionate eyes of a Disney character, another girl who looked no older than fourteen with a railroad on her teeth.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  In fact it was the countryside that had receded. Only a hundred years earlier, a mere five hundred souls had lived in this parish of sheep fields and orchards, land that they rented from an Oxford college, which institution still counts much of Willesden Green among its possessions. This was a country church. Standing in the pebbled forecourt under the bare branches of a cherry tree, Howard could almost imagine the busy main road completely vanished and in its place paddocks, hedgerows and eglantine, cobbled lanes.  On Beauty A crowd was gathering. It pooled around the First World War memorial, a simple pillar with an illegible inscription, every single word smoothed into the recess of its own stone. Most people were wearing black, but there were many, like the Belseys, who were not. A wiry little man, in a street cleaner’s orange tabard, was running two identical white bull terriers up and over the small mound of remaining garden between the vicarage and the church. He did not seem to be of the party. People looked after him disapprovingly; some tuts were heard. He continued to throw his stick. The two terriers persisted in bringing it back, their jaws clamped round it at either end, forming a new, perfectly coordinated eight-legged beast. ‘Every kind of person,’ whispered Jerome, because everybody was whispering. ‘You can tell she knew every type of person. Can you imagine a funeral – any event – this mixed, back home?’ The Belseys looked around themselves and saw the truth of this. Every age, every colour and several faiths; people dressed very finely – hats and handbags, pearls and rings – and people who were clearly of a different world again, in jeans and baseball caps, saris and duffle coats. And among them – joyfully – Erskine Jegede! It was not appropriate to whoop and wave; Levi was sent over to fetch him. He came over doing his bull’s stomp, dressed in natty racing-green tweed and brandishing an umbrella like a cane. All that was missing was the monocle. Looking at him now, Kiki could not work out why she hadn’t noticed it before. Despite Erskine’s more dandified stylings, sartorially, Monty and Erskine were a match. ‘Ersk, thank God you’re here,’ said Howard, hugging his friend. ‘But how come?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Wherefore accordant to the colour of the locks7 of such grace, needs must the lofty light enchaplet them after their worth. Wherefore, without reward for their own ways, they are placed in different ranks, differing only in their primal keenness.8 Thus, in the new-born ages the parents’ faith alone sufficed, with innocence, to secure salvation; when the first ages were complete male children behoved to gather power to their innocent wings by circumcision. But when the time of grace had come, then without perfect baptism of Christ such innocence was held back there below.9 Look now upon the face which is most likened unto Christ; for its brightness, and no other, hath power to fit thee to see Christ.” I saw rain down upon that face such joyance (borne on the sacred minds created for flying through that lofty region), that all which I had seen before held me not in suspense of so great marvelling, nor showed me so great semblance of God. And that Love which first descended to her, singing: Hail, Mary, full of grace now spread his wings before her. The divine canticle was answered from every side by the blest Court, so that every face thereby gathered serenity. “O holy Father, who for my sake acceptest being here below, leaving the sweet place wherein thou sittest by eternal lot, what is that angel who with such delight looketh our Queen in the eyes, enamoured so he seemeth all aflame?” So did I turn again unto his teaching who drew beauty from Mary, as from the sun the morning star. And he to me, “Exultancy and winsomeness as much as there may be in angel or in soul, is all in him; and we would have it so, for he it is who brought down the palm to Mary, when the Son of God willed to load him with our burden. But come now with thine eyes even as I shall traverse in discourse, and note the great patricians of this most just and pious empire. Those two who sit up there, most blest by being nearest to the Empress, are as two roots of this our rose. He who neighboureth her upon the left is that Father because of whose audacious tasting the human race tasteth such bitterness. On the right, look upon that ancient Father of Holy Church to whom Christ commended the keys of this lovesome flower. And he who, ere he died, saw all the grievous seasons of that fair spouse who with the lance and with the nails was won,10 sitteth by his side; and by the other resteth that leader under whom was fed by manna the folk ungrateful, fickle and mutinous. Over against Peter see Anna sit, so satisfied to gaze upon her daughter that she removeth not her eyes to sing Hosanna. And o’er against the greatest of housefathers sitteth Lucy who moved thy Lady when thou wert stooping down thy brows to thy destruction.11

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  In like manner the Angels are manifested in the ninth heaven or Primum Mobile. But none of these nine heavens is the true abode of any spirit. They are but the symbolically appropriate meeting places appointed for Dante and the several groups of spirits. God and all blessed spirits, whether men or angels, dwell where all space is here and all time is now in the Empyrean Heaven, which the Poet’s vision finally reaches and where it ends. [image file=image_rsrcA66.jpg] 1 Essays on Dante. By Dr. Karl Witte, &C.C A N T O ISubject matter and invocation. The sun is in the equinoctial point. It is midday at Purgatory and midnight at Jerusalem, when Dante sees Beatrice gazing at the sun and instinctively imitates her gesture, looking away from her and straight at the sun. The light glows as though God had made a second sun, and Dante now turns once more to Beatrice who is gazing heavenward. As he looks his human nature is transmuted to the quality of heaven and he knows not whether he is still in the flesh or no. They pass through the sphere of fire and hear the harmonies of heaven, but Dante is bewildered because he knows not that they have left the earth, and when enlightened by Beatrice he is still perplexed to know how he can rise, counter to gravitation. Beatrice, pitying the delirium of his earthly mind, explains to him the law of universal (material and spiritual) gravitation. All things seek their true place, and in the orderly movement thereto, and rest therein, consists the likeness of the universe to God. Man’s place is God, and to rise to him is therefore natural to man. It is departing from him that (like fire darting downwards) is the anomaly that needs to be explained. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] THE ALL-MOVER’S glory penetrates through the universe, and regloweth in one region more, and less in another.1 In that heaven which most receiveth of his light, have I been; and have seen things which whoso descendeth from up there hath not knowledge nor power to re-tell: because, as it draweth nigh to its desire, our intellect sinketh so deep, that memory cannot go back upon the track. Nathless, whatever of the holy realm I had the power to treasure in my memory, shall now be matter of my song. O good Apollo,2 for the crowning task, make me a so-fashioned vessel of thy worth, as thou demandest for the grant of thy beloved laurel. Up till here one peak of Parnassus3 hath sufficed me; but now, with both the two, needs must I enter this last wrestling-ground. Into my bosom enter thou, and so breathe as when thou drewest Marsyas from out what sheathed his limbs.4 O divine Virtue, if thou dost so far lend thyself to me, that I make manifest the shadow of the blessed realm imprinted on my brain,

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Here, in Willesden Green, in the little local church she had loved, Monty had brought the woman he loved, before a congregation who cared for her. Kiki now chastised herself over her first, typically Belseyian opinion. Had she become unable to recognize real emotion when it was right in front of her? Here were simple people who loved their God, here was a church that wished to make its parishioners comfortable, here was an honest man who loved his wife – were these things really beneath consideration? ‘Mom,’ hissed Zora, pulling her mother’s sleeve. ‘ Mom . Isn’t that Chantelle?’ Kiki, thus separated from uneasy thoughts, looked obediently to where Zora was pointing, although the name meant nothing to her. ‘That can’t be her. She’s in my class,’ said Zora, squinting. ‘Well, not exactly in it but . . .’ The double doors of the church opened. Ribbons of daylight threaded through the shady interior, tying up a stack of gilt hymn books in their radiance, highlighting the blonde hair of a pretty child, the brass edging on the octangular font. All heads turned at once, in an awful echo of a wedding, to see Carlene Kipps, boxed in wood, coming up the aisle. Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction. Anything but this. He was greeted instead with a wash of music. It poured down on his head from above, from a balcony. There eight young men, with neat curtains of hair and boyish, rosy faces, were lending their lungs to an ideal of the human voice larger than any one of them. Howard, who had long ago given up on this ideal, now found himself – in a manner both sudden and horrible – mortally affected  on beauty and being wrong by it.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  for the divine light so penetrateth through the universe, in measure of its worthiness, that nought hath power to oppose it. This realm, secure and gladsome,2 thronged with ancient folk and new, had look and love all turned unto one mark. O threefold light, which in a single star, glinting upon their sight doth so content them, look down upon our storm! If the Barbarians coming from such region as every day is spanned by Helice,3 wheeling with her son towards whom she yearneth,4 on seeing Rome and her mighty works—what time the Lateran transcended mortal things—were stupefied;5 what then of me, who to the divine from the human, to the eternal from time had passed, and from Florence to a people just and sane, with what stupor must I needs be filled! verily, what with it and what with joy, my will was to hear nought and to be dumb myself. As the pilgrim who doth draw fresh life in the temple of his vow as he gazeth, and already hopeth to tell again how it be placed, so, traversing the living light, I led mine eyes along the ranks, now up, now down, and now round circling. I saw countenances suasive of love, adorned by another’s light and their own smile, and gestures graced with every dignity. The general form of Paradise my glance had already taken in, in its entirety, and on no part as yet had my sight paused; and I turned me with rekindled will to question my Lady concerning things whereanent my mind was in suspense. One thing I purposed, and another answered me; I thought to see Beatrice, and I saw an elder clad like the folk in glory. His eyes and cheeks were overpoured with benign gladness, in kindly gesture as befits a tender father. And: “Where is she?” all sudden I exclaimed; whereunto he: “To bring thy desire to its goal Beatrice moved me from my place;6 and if thou look up to the circle third from the highest rank, thou shalt re-behold her, on the throne her merits have assigned to her.” Without answering I lifted up mine eyes and saw her, making to herself a crown as she reflected from her the eternal rays. From that region which thundereth most high, no mortal eye is so far distant, though plunged most deep within the sea, as there from Beatrice was my sight; but that wrought not upon me, for her image descended not to me mingled with any medium.7 “O Lady, in whom my hope hath vigour, and who for my salvation didst endure to leave in Hell thy footprints; of all the things which I have seen I recognize the grace and might, by thy power and by thine excellence. Thou hast drawn me from a slave to liberty by all those paths, by all those methods by which thou hadst the power so to do.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  She smiled from the right bank opposite, gathering more flowers with her hands, which the high land bears without seed. Three paces the river kept us distant; but Hellespont, where Xerxes crossed, to this day a curb to all human pride, endured not more hatred from Leander for its turbulent waves ’twixt Sestos and Abydos, than that did from me, because it opened not then. “New-comers are ye,” she began, “and perchance, because I am smiling in this place, chosen for nest of the human race, some doubt doth hold you marvelling; but the psalm Delectasti7 giveth light which may clear the mist from your understanding. And thou, who art in front, and didst entreat me, say if aught else thou wouldst hear: for I came ready to all thy questioning till thou be satisfied.” “The water,” said I, “and the music of the forest, are combating within me a new belief in a thing which I have heard contrary to this.”8 Wherefore she: “I will tell from what cause that arises which makes thee marvel, and I will purge away the mist that offends thee. The highest Good, who himself alone doth please, made man good and for goodness, and gave this place to him as an earnest of eternal peace. Through his default, small time he sojourned here; through his default, for tears and sweat he exchanged honest laughter and sweet play. In order that the storms, which the exhalations of the water and of the earth cause below it, and which follow so far as they can after the heat, should do no hurt to man, this mount rose thus far towards heaven, and stands clear of them from where it is locked.9 Now since the whole of the air revolves in a circle with the primal motion, unless its circuit is broken in some direction, such motion strikes on this eminence, which is all free in the pure air, and makes the wood to sound because it is dense;10 and the smitten plant has such power that with its virtue it impregnates the air, and that in its revolution then scatters it abroad; and the other land, according as it is worthy of itself and of its climate, conceives and brings forth divers trees of divers virtues. Were this understood, it would not then seem a marvel yonder when some plant takes root there without manifest seed.11 And thou must know that the holy plain where thou art, is full of every seed, and bears fruit in it which yonder is not plucked. The water which thou seest wells not from a spring that is fed by moisture which cold condenses, like a river that gains and loses volume,12 but issues from a fount, constant and sure, which regains by God’s will, so much as it pours forth freely on either side.13

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  He further reveals to her the wonder of his pilgrimage and receives her petition for his own prayers, and her commission to bear news of her to bet kinsfolk among the vain and light-minded Sienese.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Ere now have I seen, at dawn of day, the eastern part all rosy red, and the rest of heaven adorned with fair clear sky, and the face of the sun rise shadowed, so that by the tempering of the mists the eye long time endured him: so within a cloud of flowers, which rose from the angelic hands and fell down again within and without, olive-crowned over a white veil, a lady appeared to me, clad, under a green mantle, with hue of living flame.7 And my spirit, that now so long a time had passed, since, trembling in her presence, it had been broken down with awe, without having further knowledge by mine eyes through hidden virtue which went out from her, felt the mighty power of ancient love. Soon as on my sight the lofty virtue smote, which already had pierced me ere I was out of my boyhood, I turned me to the left with the trust with which the little child runs to his mother when he is frightened or when he is afflicted, to say to Virgil: “Less than a drachm of blood is left in me that trembleth not; I recognize the tokens of the ancient flame.”8 But Virgil had left us bereft of himself, Virgil sweetest Father, Virgil to whom for my weal I gave me up; nor did all that our ancient mother lost,9 avail to keep my dew-washed cheeks10 from turning dark again with tears. “Dante,11 for that Virgil goeth away, weep not yet, weep not yet, for thou must weep for other sword.” Even as an admiral, who at stern and at bow, comes to see the folk that man the other ships, and heartens them to brave deeds, so on the left side of the car, when I turned me at sound of my name, which of necessity here is recorded,11 I saw the lady, who first appeared to me veiled beneath the angelic festival, directing her eyes to me on this side the stream. Albeit the veil which fell from her head, crowned with Minerva’s leaves, did not let her appear manifest, queenlike, in bearing yet stern, she continued, like one who speaks and holdeth back the hottest words till the last: “Look at me well; verily am I, verily am I Beatrice. How didst thou deign to draw nigh the mount? knewest thou not that here man is happy?” Mine eyes drooped down to the clear fount; but beholding me therein, I drew them back to the grass, so great a shame weighed down my brow. So doth the mother seem stern to her child, as she seemed to me; for the savour of harsh pity tasteth of bitterness. She was silent, and straightway the angels sang: In te, Domine, speravi”; but beyond “pedes meos” they passed not.12 As the snow amid the living rafters along Italia’s back is frozen under blast and stress of Slavonian winds,

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Oh, and before I forget, God, it’s our wedding anniversary in a week and a half – we’re gonna have like a shin-dig, nothing much, some Marvin Gaye, some soul-food – you know, very mellow . . .’ Jack asked the date. Kiki told him. Jack’s face gave in to that tiny, involuntary shudder with which Kiki had, in recent years, become familiar. ‘But of course it’s your actual anniversary, so . . .’ said Jack, meaning to have said that to himself. ‘Yep – and since by the fifteenth everybody’s crazy busy anyway, we thought we might as well just have it on the actual day . . . and it might be an opportunity to . . . you know, everybody say hello, meet the new faces before semester begins, etcetera.’ ‘Although your own faces,’ said Jack, his face alight with private delight at the thought of the rest of his sentence, ‘of course, will not be so new to each other, will they? Is it twenty-five years?’ ‘Honey,’ said Kiki, laying her big bejewelled hand on Jack’s shoulder, ‘confidentially, it’s thirty .’ Some emotion came into Kiki’s voice as she said this. ‘Now, in the proverbial way of things,’ considered Jack, ‘would that be silver? Or is it gold?’ ‘Adamantine chains,’ joked Howard, pulled his wife to him and kissed her wetly on her cheek. Kiki laughed deeply, shaking everything on her. ‘But you’ll come?’ asked Kiki. ‘It will be a great – ’ began Jack, beaming, but just then came the divine intervention of a voice over a tannoy system, asking people to take their seats.  kipps and belsey  Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have had no meaning were it not for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman. This choir is the heavenly host and simultaneously the devil’s army.

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

  Think back to Darwin’s ideas about the importance of variation within a species (chapter 1). Each animal species is a population of unique individuals who vary from one another. No feature or set of features is necessary, sufficient, or even frequent or typical of every individual in the population. Any summary of the population is a statistical fiction that applies to no individual. And most importantly, variation within a species is meaningfully related to the environment in which individuals live. Some individuals are more fit than others to pass their genetic material to the next generation. In a similar manner, some instances of concepts are more effective in a particular context to achieve a particular goal. Their competition in your brain is like Darwin’s theory of natural selection but carried out in milliseconds; the most suitable instances outlive all rivals to fit your goal in the moment. That is categorization.18 … Where do emotion concepts come from? How can a concept like “Awe” have such diversity: awe of the vastness of the universe; awe of Erik Weihenmayer, who scaled Mount Everest while blind; and awe that a tiny worker ant can carry five thousand times its body weight? The classical view proposes that you are born with these concepts, or that your brain finds emotion fingerprints in people’s expressions and internalizes them as concepts. But we know that scientists haven’t found such fingerprints, and infants show no evidence of being born knowing “Awe.” The human brain, it turns out, bootstraps a conceptual system into its wiring within the first year of life. This system is responsible for the wealth of emotion concepts that you now employ to experience and perceive emotions. The newborn brain has the ability to learn patterns, a process called statistical learning. The moment that you burst into this strange new world as a baby, you were bombarded with noisy, ambiguous signals from the world and from your body. This barrage of sensory input was not random: it had some structure. Regularities. Your little brain began computing probabilities of which sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, and interoceptive sensations go together and which don’t. “Those edges form a boundary. Those two blobs are part of a bigger blob. That brief silence was a separator.” Little by little, but with surprising speed, your brain learned to resolve this ocean of vague sensation into patterns: sights and sounds, smells and tastes, touches and interoceptive sensations, and combinations thereof.19 Scientists have debated for hundreds of years over what you’re born with versus what you learn, and I won’t enter that debate. Let’s just say that one thing you’re born with is a fundamental ability to learn from regularities and probabilities around you. (In fact, you learn statistically even in utero, which makes it complicated to determine whether certain concepts are innate or learned.) Your prodigious capacity for statistical learning set you on the path toward the particular kind of mind, with the particular system of concepts, that you have today.20

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

  And so, as animals gradually evolved bigger bodies with more systems to maintain, their handful of body-budgeting cells also evolved to become brains of greater and greater complexity. Fast-forward a few hundred million years, and the Earth is now littered with complicated brains of all kinds, including yours​—​a brain that efficiently supervises over six hundred muscles in motion, balances dozens of different hormones, pumps blood at a rate of two thousand gallons per day, regulates the energy of billions of brain cells, digests food, excretes waste, and fights illness, all of it nonstop for seventy-two years, give or take. Your body budget is like thousands of financial accounts in a giant, multinational corporation, and you have a brain that’s up to the task. And all your body budgeting takes place in a massively complicated world made even more challenging by the other brains-in-bodies that you share it with. So, returning to our original question: Why did a brain like yours evolve? That question is not answerable because evolution does not act with purpose ​— ​there is no “why.” But we can say what is your brain’s most important job. It’s not rationality. Not emotion. Not imagination, or creativity, or empathy. Your brain’s most important job is to control your body​— ​to manage allostasis​—​ by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. Your brain continually invests your energy in the hopes of earning a good return, such as food, shelter, affection, or physical protection, so you can perform nature’s most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation. In short, your brain’s most important job is not thinking. It’s running a little worm body that has become very, very complicated. Of course, your brain does think and feel and imagine and create hundreds of other experiences, such as letting you read and understand this book. But all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget. Everything your brain creates, from memories to hallucinations, from ecstasy to shame, is part of this mission. Sometimes your brain budgets for the short term, like when you drink coffee to stay up late and finish a project, knowing that you are borrowing energy that you’ll pay for tomorrow. Other times, your brain budgets for the long term, like when you spend years to learn a difficult skill, such as math or carpentry, that requires a sustained investment but ultimately helps you survive and prosper. You and I do not experience our every thought, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe, every hug we give or receive, every kindness we extend, and every insult we bear as a deposit or withdrawal in our metabolic budgets, but under the hood, that is what’s happening.

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

  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. When my daughter, Sophia, was a toddler and I bought her a toy car, I didn’t realize I was helping to extend her goal-based categories, honing her conceptual system for creating social reality. She’d hold that car close to a toy truck, and they’d transform into “mama” and “baby” as she made them “kiss.” Sometimes our goddaughter, Olivia, would visit, who is the same age, and the two girls would climb into the bathtub and engage in elaborate, imaginary dramas for hours, imposing new functions on toys, bars of soap, towels, and various bathroom items as the props in their water opera. A defining moment of humanity occurs when one child becomes an all-powerful being by draping a washcloth over her head and brandishing a toothbrush, and the second child kneels before her in supplication. When we, as adults, speak a word to a child, an act of great significance takes place without fanfare.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. Bennett and I linked arms and walked to Freud’s house. It was our unspoken agreement that we would not mention the night before. The night before might as well have been a dream, and now that we were together again in the sunlight, the dream was being burned away like early-morning fog. We walked up the stairs to Freud’s consulting room like two patients going for marital therapy. I have always been devoted to cultural shrines: the house where Keats died in Rome, the house where he lived in Hampstead, Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, Alexander Pope’s Grotto, Rembrandt’s house in the Amsterdam ghetto, Wagner’s villa on Lake Lucerne, Beethoven’s meager two-room flat in Vienna…. Any place where some genius had been born, lived, worked, ate, farted, spilled his seed, loved, or died—was sacred to me. As sacred as Delphi or the Parthenon. More sacred, in fact, because the wonder of everyday life fascinates me even more than the wonder of great shrines and temples. That Beethoven could write such music while living in two shabby rooms in Vienna—this was the miracle. I had stared with awe at all his mundane artifacts—and the more mundane the better: his tarnished salt box, his cheap clock, his battered ledger book. The very ordinariness of his needs comforted me and made me feel hopeful. I would sniff around the houses of the great like a bloodhound, trying to catch the scent of genius. Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom, somewhere between eating an egg and taking a crap, the muse alights. She does not usually appear where your banal Hollywood notions have led you to most expect her: in a gorgeous sunset over Ischia, in the pounding surf of Big Sur, on a mountaintop in Delphi (right between the navel of the earth and the place where Oedipus killed his papa)—but she wings in while you are peeling onions or eating eggplant or lining the garbage can with the book-review section of The New York Times. The most interesting modern writers know this. Leopold Bloom fries kidneys, takes a crap, and considers the universe. Ponge sees the soul of man in an oyster (as Blake saw it in a wild flower).

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I went through them. Something was definitely not right there,’ added Michael. Kiki smiled. ‘Sure thing,’ she said. ‘Rain check – another day.’  the anatomy lesson ‘Do you need a lift?’ Monty asked Kiki gruffly, as the family turned to go. ‘Oh – thank you, no . . . there’s four of you, and a cab wouldn’t . . .’ The happy clan bustled away back down the platform, laughing and speaking over each other, as the Amherst train pulled away and Kiki stood with Carlene’s hot chocolate in her hand. on beauty and being wrong When I say I hate time, Paul says how else could we find depth of character, or grow souls? Mark Doty  A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in the autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its fac¸ade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy from there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white upturned bells of blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy. It is late December now; the Heath wears its austere winter cloak. The sky is colourless. The trees are black and starkly cut back. The grass is hoary with a crunch underfoot, and the only relief is the occasional scarlet flash of the holly-berries. In a tall, narrow house that backs on to all this wonder, the Belseys are spending their Christmas break with Rachel and Adam Miller, very old college friends of Howard who have been married longer even than the Belseys. They have no children and do not celebrate Christmas. The Belseys have always loved visiting the Millers. Not for the house itself, which is a chaos of cats, dogs, half-finished canvases, jars of unidentifiable food, dusty African masks, twelve thousand books, too many knicks and a dangerous density of  On Beauty knacks. But the Heath! From every window the view commands you to come outside and enjoy it. The guests obey despite the cold.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] WITH OUTSTRETCHED wings appeared before me the fair image which those enwoven souls, rejoicing in their sweet fruition, made. Each one appeared as a ruby whereon the sun’s ray should burn, enkindled so as to re-cast it on mine eyes. And that which I must now retrace, nor ever voice conveyed, nor ink did write, nor ere by fantasy was comprehended; for I saw and eke I heard the beak discourse and utter in its voice both I and Mine, when in conception it was We and Our. And it began: “In that I was just and duteous am I here exalted to this glory which suffereth not itself to be surpassed by longing; and upon earth have I left a memory, so fashioned that there the evil folk commend it, though they follow not the tale.” So do we feel one glow from many coals as from those many loves there issued forth one only sound out of that image. Whereon straightway I: “O perpetual flowers of the eternal gladness, ye who make all your odours seem to me but one, solve, as ye breathe, the great fast which long hath held me hungering, because on earth I found no food for it. Well do I know that if the divine justice maketh any other realm of heaven its mirror, yours apprehendeth it without a veil. Ye know how eager I prepare me to hearken; ye know what is that question which hath been to me a fast of so long date.”1 As the falcon issuing from the hood shaketh head and clappeth wings, showing his will and making himself beauteous, such did I see that ensign which was woven of the praises of divine grace, with songs such as be known to whoso up there rejoiceth. Then it began: “He who rolled the compass round the limit of the universe, and within it marked out so much both hidden and revealed, could not so stamp his worth on all the universe but that his word remained in infinite excess. And this is certified by that first proud being, who was the summit of all creation, because he would not wait for light, falling unripe;2 and hence it is apparent that each lesser nature is a receptacle too scant for that good which hath not end, and itself measureth with itself. Wherefore our3 sight, which needs must be one of the rays of that mind whereby all things are filled, cannot of its nature have so great power but that its principle should discern far beyond that which unto it appeareth. Wherefore in the eternal justice such sight as your world doth receive, like the eye in the ocean, is absorbed; for, albeit it can see the bottom by the shore, in the open sea it seeth it not, and none the less ’tis there, but the depth it hath concealeth it.