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)

  Known for her virtue and goodness, she could surely keep Antony away from the "Egyptian whore." The ploy worked for a while, but Antony was unable to forget Cleopatra, and after three years he went back to her. This time it was for good: he had in essence become Cleopatra's slave, granting her immense powers, adopting Egyptian dress and customs, and renouncing the ways of Rome. Only one image of Cleopatra survives—a barely visible profile on a coin— but we have numerous written descriptions. She had a long thin face and a somewhat pointed nose; her dominant features were her wonderfully large eyes. Her seductive power, however, did not lie in her looks—indeed many among the women of Alexandria were considered more beautiful than she. What she did have above all other women was the ability to distract a man. In reality, Cleopatra was physically unexceptional and had no political power, yet both Caesar and Antony, brave and clever men, saw none of this. What they saw was a woman who constantly transformed herself be- fore their eyes, a one-woman spectacle. Her dress and makeup changed from day to day, but always gave her a heightened, goddesslike appearance. down upon them, and broke into their liquid song. • "Draw near," they sang, "illustrious Odysseus, flower of Achaean chivalry, and bring your ship to rest so that you may hear our voices. No seaman ever sailed his black ship past this spot without listening to the sweet tones that flow from our lips . . ." • The lovely voices came to me across the water, and my heart was filled with such a longing to listen that with nod and frown I signed to my men to set me free. —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY, BOOK XII, TRANSLATED BY E.V. RIEU The charm of [Cleopatra's] presence was irresistible, and there was an attraction in her person and talk, together with a peculiar force of character, which pervaded her every word and action, and laid all who associated with her under its spell. It was a delight merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another. —PLUTARCH, MAKERS OF ROME, TRANSLATED BY IAN SCOTT-KILVERT The immediate attraction of a song, a voice, or scent. The attraction of the panther with his perfumed scent . . . According to the ancients, the panther is the only animal who emits a perfumed odor. It uses this scent to draw and capture its victims. . . .

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  No single woman really possesses him—he is too elusive—but all can fantasize about doing so. The key is ambiguity: your sexuality is decidedly heterosexual, but your body and psychology float delightfully back and forth between the two poles. I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot be true artists because they like men, and since they them- selves are women they are reverting to normality. —PABLO PICASSO The Masculine Dandy I n the 1870s, Pastor Henrik Gillot was the darling of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. He was young, handsome, well-read in philosophy and lit- erature, and he preached a kind of enlightened Christianity. Dozens of young girls had crushes on him and would flock to his sermons just to look at him. In 1878, however, he met a girl who changed his life. Her name was Lou von Salomé (later known as Lou Andreas-Salomé), and she was seventeen; he was forty-two. Salomé was pretty, with radiant blue eyes. She had read a lot, particu- larly for a girl her age, and was interested in the gravest philosophical and religious issues. Her intensity, her intelligence, her responsiveness to ideas cast a spell over Gillot. When she entered his office for her increasingly fre- quent discussions with him, the place seemed brighter and more alive. Per- haps she was flirting with him, in the unconscious manner of a young girl—yet when Gillot admitted to himself that he was in love with her, and proposed marriage, Salomé was horrified. The confused pastor never quite got over Lou von Salomé, becoming the first of a long string of famous men to be the victim of a lifelong unfulfilled infatuation with her. In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was wandering around Italy alone. In Genoa he received a letter from his friend Paul Rée, a Prussian philosopher whom he admired, recounting his discussions with a remarkable young Russian woman, Lou von Salomé, in Rome. Salomé was his body, dived quickly into the stream. As he raised first one arm and then the other, his body gleamed in the clear water, as if someone had encased anivory statue or white lilies in transparent glass.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  One incontrovertible demonstra- tion of how far you are willing to go will overwhelm all doubts. It will also defeat your rivals, since most people are timid, worried about making fools of themselves, and so rarely risk anything. When dealing with difficult or resistant targets, it is usually best to im- provise, the way Grammont did. If your action seems sudden and a sur- prise, it will make them more emotional, loosen them up. A little roundabout accumulation of information—a little spying—is always a good idea. Most important is the spirit in which you enact your proof. If you are lighthearted and playful, if you make the target laugh, proving yourself and amusing them at the same time, it won't matter if you mess up, or if they see you have employed a little trickery. They will give in to the pleasant mood you have created. Notice that the count never whined or grew angry or defensive. All he had to do was pull back the curtain and reveal the duke walking his horse, melting de l'Orme's resistance with laughter. In one well-executed act, he showed what he would do for a night of her favors. began to cry and to run in the direction of her house, where upon arriving, she fainted. As soon as she could speak, she ordered that someone go and see what had happened to Saint-Preuil, who in truth had not stayed very long in the canal, and having quickly put his clothes back on, hurried to Paris where he hid himself for several days. Meanwhile, the rumor spread that he had died. Madame de la Maisnnfort was deeply moved by the extreme measures he had adopted to prove his sentiments. This act of his appeared to her to be a sign of an extraordinary love; and having perhaps noticed some charms in his naked presence that she had not seen fully clothed, she deeply regretted her cruelty, and publicly stated her feeling of loss. Word of this reached Saint-Preuil, and he immediately resurrected himself and did not lose time in taking advantage of such a favorable feeling in his mistress. —COUNT BUSSY-RABUTIN, HISTOIRES AMOUREUSES DES GAULES To become a lady's vassal . . . the troubadour was expected to pass through four stages, i.e.: aspirant, supplicant, postulant, and lover. When he had attained the last stage of amorous initiation he made a vow of fidelity and this homage was sealed by a kiss. • In this idealistic form of courtly love reserved for the aristocratic elite of chivalry, the phenomenon of love was considered to be a state 326 • The Art of Seduction 2. Pauline Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon, had so many affairs with dif- ferent men over the years that doctors were afraid for her health. She could not stay with one man for more than a few weeks; novelty was her only pleasure. After Napoleon married her off to Prince Camillo Borghese, in 1803, her affairs only multiplied.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  We have grown increasingly cynical. Try to persuade a person by appealing to their con- sciousness, by saying outright what you want, by showing all your cards, and what hope do you have? You are just one more irritation to be tuned out. To avoid this fate you must learn the art of insinuation, of reaching the unconscious. The most eloquent expression of the unconscious is the dream, which is intricately connected to myth; waking from a dream, we are often haunted by its images and ambiguous messages. Dreams obsess us because they mix the real and the unreal. They are filled with real charac- ters, and often deal with real situations, yet they are delightfully irrational, pushing realities to the extremes of delirium. If everything in a dream were realistic, it would have no power over us; if everything were unreal, we would feel less involved in its pleasures and fears. Its fusion of the two is what makes it haunting. This is what Freud called the "uncanny": some- thing that seems simultaneously strange and familiar. We sometimes experience the uncanny in waking life—in a déjà vu, a miraculous coincidence, a weird event that recalls a childhood experience. People can have a similar effect. The gestures, the words, the very being of men like Kennedy or Andy Warhol, for example, evoke both the real and the unreal: we may not realize it (and how could we, really), but they are like dream figures to us. They have qualities that anchor them in reality— sincerity, playfulness, sensuality—but at the same time their aloofness, their superiority, their almost surreal quality makes them seem like something out of a movie. These types have a haunting, obsessive effect on people. Whether in public or in private, they seduce us, making us want to possess them both physically and psychologically. But how can we possess a person from a dream, or a movie star or political star, or even one of those real-life fasci- nators, like a Warhol, who may cross our path? Unable to have them, we become obsessed with them—they haunt our thoughts, our dreams, our fantasies. We imitate them unconsciously. The psychologist Sandor Fer- enczi calls this "introjection": another person becomes part of our ego, we internalize their character.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Never forget this while fashioning yourself as a Star. First, you must have such a large presence that you can fill your target's mind the way a close-up fills the screen. You must have a style or presence that makes you stand out from everyone else. Be vague and dreamlike, yet not distant or absent—you don't want people to be unable to focus on or remember you. They have to be seeing you in their minds when you're not there. Second, cultivate a blank, mysterious face, the center that radiates Star- ness. This allows people to read into you whatever they want to, imagining they can see your character, even your soul. Instead of signaling moods and emotions, instead of emoting or overemoting, the Star draws in interpreta- tions. That is the obsessive power in the face of Garbo or Dietrich, or even of Kennedy, who molded his expressions on James Dean's. A living thing is dynamic and changing while an object or image is pas- sive, but in its passivity it stimulates our fantasies. A person can gain that power by becoming a kind of object. The great eighteenth-century charla- tan Count Saint-Germain was in many ways a precursor of the Star. He would suddenly appear in town, no one knew from where; he spoke many languages, but his accent belonged to no single country. Nor was it clear how old he was—not young, clearly, but his face had a healthy glow. The count only went out at night. He always wore black, and also spectacular jewels. Arriving at the court of Louis XV, he was an instant sensation; he reeked wealth, but no one knew its source. He made the king and Madame de Pompadour believe he had fantastic powers, including even the ability to turn base matter into gold (the gift of the Philosopher's Stone), but he never made any great claims for himself; it was all insinuation. He never said yes or no, only perhaps. He would sit down for dinner but was never seen eating. He once gave Madame de Pompadour a gift of candies in a box that changed color and aspect depending on how she held it; this entrancing object, she said, reminded her of the count himself. Saint- Germain painted the strangest paintings anyone had ever seen—the colors above all a woman) linked to the ravishing but specious power of the cinematographic image itself. ...• The star is by no means an ideal or sublime being: she is artificial. . . . Her presence serves to submerge all sensibility and expression beneath a ritual fascination with the void, beneath ecstasy of her gaze and the nullity of her smile. This is how she achieves mythical status and becomes subject to collective rites of sacrificial adulation. • The ascension of the cinema idols, the masses' divinities, was and remains a central story of modern times. . . .

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Under the entry for “The Nymphs” in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969), Jorge Luis Borges notes that “Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs… [some] Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years … The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand … Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this.” H.H. echoes these definitions. Here and on the following pages he alludes to “spells,” “magic,” “fantastic powers,” and “deadly demons” (for various enchantments, see Mirana [Fata Morgana], it was Lilith [Lilith], Percy Elphinstone [elves], Little Carmen [ Carmen ], incubus [an incubus], and heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit [king of the elves]). Lolita’s “inhuman” and “bewitching charms” suggest that she is Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) in bobby socks (Nabokov translated the poem into Russian in The Empyrean Path , 1923), and that the novel is in part a unique variant of the archetypal tale of a mortal destroyed by his love for a supernatural femme fatale , “The Lovely Lady Without Pity” of ballad, folk tale, and fairy tale. Nabokov calls Lolita a “fairy tale,” and his nymph a “ fairy princess ”; see Percy Elphinstone . One of Nabokov’s lepidopterological finds is known as “Nabokov’s Wood-Nymph” (belonging to the family Nymphalidae; see powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness ), and he is not unaware that a “nymph” is also defined as “a pupa,” or “the young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis.” Crucial to an understanding of Lolita is some sense of the various but simultaneous metamorphoses undergone by Lolita, H.H., the book, the author, and the reader, who is manipulated by the novel’s game-element and illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations—an experience which is bound to change him. The butterfly is thus a controlling metaphor that enriches Lolita in a more fundamental and organic manner than, say, the Odyssey does Joyce’s Ulysses . Just as the nymph undergoes a metamorphosis in becoming the butterfly, so everything in Lolita is constantly in the process of metamorphosis, including the novel itself—a set of “notes” being compiled by an imprisoned man during a fifty-six-day period for possible use at his trial, emerging as a book after his death, and then only after it has passed through yet another stage, the nominal “editorship” of John Ray, Jr. As Lolita turns from a girl into a woman, so H.H.’s lust becomes love.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I’d see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they’d crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they’d lived wrongly. Their greatness might have poisoned them. Did they wonder about things like that? Maybe they couldn’t sleep at night. Were they plagued by nightmares? Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another. Maybe they lived as real artists knowing all along that there were no pearly gates. Neither creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven. Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lifes without having to swat away any more flies. “Step back, please,” I heard a guard say. I was too close to the painting. “Step away!” The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive. I didn’t know what was true. So I did not step back. Instead, I put my hand out. I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no God stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things. “Ma’am!” the guard yelled, and then there were hands gripping my shoulders, pulling me to the side. But that was all that happened. “Sorry, I got dizzy,” I explained. That was it. I was free. The real estate agent upstate sent a handwritten note the next day to say there’d been an offer on my parents’ house. “Ten K below asking, but you might as well. We’ll put it in stocks. Your phone seems to be out of order and has been for quite some time.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Religion and where, catching sight of a small hut in the distance, she stumbled toward it, and in the doorway she found a holy man, who was astonished to see her in those parts and asked her what she was doing there. She told him that she had been inspired by God, and that she was trying, not only to serve Him, but also to find someone who could teach her how she should go about it. • On observing how young and exceedingly pretty she was, the good man was afraid to take her under his wing lest the devil should catch him unawares. So he praised her for her good intentions, and having given her a quantity of herb roots, wild apples, and dates to eat, and some water to drink, he said to her: • "My daughter, not- very far from here there is a holy man who is much more capable than I of teaching you what you want to know. Go along to him." And he sent her upon her way. • When she came to this second man, she was told precisely the same thing, and so she went on until she arrived at the cell of a young hermit, a very devout and kindly fellow called Rustico, to whom she put the same inquiry as she had addressed to the others. Being anxious to prove to himself that he possessed a will of iron, he did not, like the others, send her away or direct her elsewhere, but kept her with him in his cell, in a corner of which, when night descended, he prepared a makeshift bed out of palm leaves, upon which he invited her to lie down and rest. • Once he 364 • The Art of Seduction spirituality are full of sexual undertones that can be brought to the surface once you have made your targets lose their self-awareness. From spiritual ecstasy to sexual ecstasy is but one small step. Come back to take me, quickly, and lead me far away. Pu- rify me with a great fire of divine love, none of the animal kind. You are all soul when you want to be, when you feel it, take me far away from my body. —LIANE DE POUGY Keys to Seduction R eligion is the most seductive system that mankind has created. Death is our greatest fear, and religion offers us the illusion that we are im- mortal, that something about us will live on. The idea that we are an infini- tesimal part of a vast and indifferent universe is terrifying; religion humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Ah, but before you answer, I should like to know the truth from you, not what you think I should like to hear, or what would be best for you to say, you understand me?" "Yes, my Prince," she whispered. She seemed calmer. He reached out, massaged her right breast lightly, and then stroked her downy underarms, feeling the little curve of the muscle there beneath the tiny wisp of golden hair, and then he stroked that full, most hair between her legs so that she sighed and trembled. "Now," he said, "answer my question, and describe what you see. Describe me as if you had only just met me and were confiding in your chambermaid." Again she bit her lip, which he dearly loved, and then, her voice a little diminished by uncertainty, she said: "You are very handsome, my Prince, no one could deny that. And for one...for one..." "Go on," he said. He drew her just a little closer so that her sex was against his knee, and putting his right are about her, he cradled her breast in his left hand and let his lips touch her cheek. "And for one so young to be so commanding," she said, "it's not what one might expect." "And tell me how does that show itself in me, other than my actions?" "Your manner, my Prince," she said, her voice gaining a little strength. "The look of your eyes, such dark eyes...your face. There are none of the doubts of youth in it." He smiled and kissed her ear. He wondered why the wet little cleft between her legs was so very hot. His fingers could not keep from touching it. Twice already he's had her today, and he would have her again, but he was thinking he should go about it more slowly. "Would you like it if I were older?" he whispered. "I had thought," she said, "that it would be easier. To be commanded by one so very young," she said, "is to feel one's helplessness." It seemed the tears had welled up and were spilling out of her eyes, so he pushed her gently back so he might see them. "My darling, I have awakened you from a century's sleep, and restored your father's Kingdom. You're mine. And you won't find me such a hard master. Only a very thorough master. When you think night and day and every moment only of pleasing me, things will be very easy for you." And as she struggled not to look away, he could see again the relief in her face, and that she was in complete awe of him. "Now," he said, pushing his left fingers between her legs, and drawing her close again so that she let out a little gasp before she could stop herself, "I want more of you than I've had before. Do you know what I mean, my Sleeping Beauty?" She shook her head; for this moment she was in terror.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Do not leave such an important attribute to chance. Practice the effect you desire. Genuine charisma thus means the ability to internally gen- erate and externally express extreme excitement, an ability which makes one the object of intense attention and unre- flective imitation by others. —LIAH GREENFIELD Charismatic Types—Historical Examples The miraculous prophet. In the year 1425, Joan of Arc, a peasant girl from the French village of Domrémy, had her first vision: "I was in my thirteenth year when God sent a voice to guide me." The voice was that of Saint Michael and he came with a message from God: Joan had been cho- sen to rid France of the English invaders who now ruled most of the country, and of the resulting chaos and war. She was also to restore the French crown to the prince—the Dauphin, later Charles VII—who was its rightful heir. Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret also spoke to Joan. Her visions were extraordinarily vivid: she saw Saint Michael, touched him, smelled him. In such conditions, where half the battle was hand- to-hand, concentrated into a small space, the spirit and example of the leader counted for much. When we remember this, it becomes easier to understand the astonishing effect of Joan's presence upon the French troops. Her position as a leader was a unique one. She was not a professional soldier; she was not really a soldier at all; she was not even a man. She was ignorant of war. She was a girl dressed up. But she believed, and had made others willing to believe, that she was the mouthpiece of God. • On Friday, April 29th, 1429, the news spread in Orléans that a force, led by the Pucelle of Domrémy, was on its way to the relief of the city, a piece of news which, as the chronicler remarks, comforted them greatly. —VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, SAINT JOAN OF ARC The Charismatic • 103 At first Joan told no one what she had seen; for all anyone knew, she was a quiet farm girl. But the visions became even more intense, and so in 1429 she left Domrémy, determined to realize the mission for which God had chosen her. Her goal was to meet Charles in the town of Chinon, where he had established his court in exile. The obstacles were enor- mous: Chinon was far, the journey was dangerous, and Charles, even if she reached him, was a lazy and cowardly young man who was unlikely to cru- sade against the English. Undaunted, she moved from village to village, ex- plaining her mission to soldiers and asking them to escort her to Chinon. Young girls with religious visions were a dime a dozen at the time, and there was nothing in Joan's appearance to inspire confidence; one soldier, however, Jean de Metz, was intrigued with her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  With a skill that amazed Beauty he unsnapped the hooks that concealed the Prince's bulging sex, and revealed it. The organ was enlarged and hardened, and Prince Alexi freed it from the cloth now and tenderly kissed it. But he was in great pain still and when the Prince thrust the organ into Prince Alexi's mouth he was not prepared for it. He fell backward a little on his knees and had to reach for the Prince, caressingly, to stop himself from falling. But immediately he sucked the Prince's organ, and he did it with great back and forth motions that amazed Beauty, his eyes closed, his hands hovering at his sides ready for the Prince's command. The Prince stopped him rather quickly. It was clear he did not want his passion brought to a pinnacle. Nothing so simple would happen. "Go to the chest in the corner," he said to Prince Alexi, "and bring me the ring that is in it." Prince Alexi went on his hands and knees to obey. But obviously the Prince wasn't satisfied. He snapped his finger, and Squire Felix at once drove Prince Alexi with his paddle. He drove him to the chest and continued to torment him with the paddle while he opened the chest and with his teeth removed a large leather ring and brought it back to the Prince. Only then did the Prince send Squire Felix back to his corner, and Prince Alexi was out of breath and trembling. "Put it on," said the Prince. Prince Alexi was holding the leather ring not by the leather itself but by some small piece of gold attached to it. And still holding it this way in his teeth, he slipped the ring over the Prince's penis, but he did not release it. "You serve me, you go where I go," said the Prince, and now he proceeded to walk slowly about the room, his hands on his hips as he looked down on the Prince, struggling on his knees, his teeth to the leather ring, to follow him. It was as if Prince Alexi were kissing the Prince or tethered to him. He scrambled backwards, his hands out so as not to touch the Prince disrespectfully. The Prince with ordinary strides that took no cognizance of the difficulty of his slave approached the bed, and then turning, made his way back to the fire, his slave struggling before him. Suddenly he turned his body hard to the left to face Beauty, and when he did Prince Alexi had to take hold of him for balance. Prince Alexi clung to him for a moment and when he did, he pressed his forehead against the Prince's thigh, and the Prince rather idly stroked his hair. It seemed almost affectionate.

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

  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. 1 8 … 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. 1 9 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. 2 0 Statistical learning in humans was first discovered in studies of language development. Babies have a natural interest in listening to speech, perhaps because the sounds occurred alongside body budgeting from birth, and even in utero. As they hear the sounds streaming along, they gradually infer the boundaries between phonemes, syllables, and words.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  This quality radiates outward, permeating the gestures of Charismatics, making them seem extraordinary and superior, and making us imagine there is more to them than meets the eye: they are gods, saints, stars. Charismatics can learn to heighten their charisma with a piercing gaze, fiery oratory, an air of mystery. They can seduce on a grand scale. Learn to create the charismatic illusion by radiating intensity while remain- ing detached. Charisma and Seduction C harisma is seduction on a mass level. Charismatics make crowds of people fall in love with them, then lead them along. The process of making them fall in love is simple and follows a path similar to that of a one-on-one seduction. Charismatics have certain qualities that are power- fully attractive and that make them stand out. This could be their self- belief, their boldness, their serenity. They keep the source of these qualities mysterious. They do not explain where their confidence or contentment comes from, but it can be felt by everyone; it radiates outward, without the appearance of conscious effort. The face of the Charismatic is usually ani- mated, full of energy, desire, alertness—the look of a lover, one that is in- stantly appealing, even vaguely sexual. We happily follow Charismatics because we like to be led, particularly by people who promise adventure or prosperity. We lose ourselves in their cause, become emotionally attached to them, feel more alive by believing in them—we fall in love. Charisma plays on repressed sexuality, creates an erotic charge. Yet the origins of the word lie not in sexuality but in religion, and religion remains deeply em- bedded in modern charisma. Thousands of years ago, people believed in gods and spirits, but few could ever say that they had witnessed a miracle, a physical demonstration of divine power. A man, however, who seemed possessed by a divine spirit—speaking in tongues, ecstatic raptures, the expression of intense 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 hav- ing 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 dis- played the signs of God's favor.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Mystery lies at charisma's heart, but it is a particular kind of mystery—a mystery expressed by contradiction. The Charismatic may be both proletarian and aristocratic (Mao Zedong), both cruel and kind (Peter the Great), both excitable and icily detached (Charles de Gaulle), both inti- mate and distant (Sigmund Freud). Since most people are predictable, the effect of these contradictions is devastatingly charismatic. They make you hard to fathom, add richness to your character, make people talk about you. 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. You must also keep people at arm's length, to keep them from figuring you out. Another aspect of mystery is a hint of the uncanny. The appearance of prophetic or psychic gifts will add to your aura. Predict things authorita- tively and people will often imagine that what you have said has come true. Saintliness. Most of us must compromise constantly to survive; saints do not. They must live out their ideals without caring about the consequences. The saintly effect bestows charisma. Saintliness goes far beyond religion: politicians as disparate as George Washington and Lenin won saintly reputations by living simply, despite their power—by matching their political values to their personal lives. Both 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 de- stroy 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. That devil of a man exercises a fascination on me that I cannot explain even to myself, and in such a degree that, though I fear neither God nor devil, when I am in his presence I am ready to tremble like a child, and he could make me go through the eye of a needle to throw myself into the fire. —GENERAL VANDAMME, ON NAPOLEON BONAPARTE [The masses] have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true.

• 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 IOn the Origin of the SpeciousCHAPTER ONERemember 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)

  The result was a charismatic aura that was immediate and preverbal; it radiated from his eyes, and from the touch of his hands. Most of us are a mix of the devil and the saint, the noble and the igno- ble, and we spend our lives trying to repress the dark side. Few of us can give free rein to both sides, as Rasputin did, but we can create charisma to a smaller degree by ridding ourselves of self-consciousness, and of the dis- comfort most of us feel about our complicated natures. You cannot help being the way you are, so be genuine. That is what attracts us to animals: beautiful and cruel, they have no self-doubt. That quality is doubly fasci- nating in humans. Outwardly people may condemn your dark side, but it is not virtue alone that creates charisma; anything extraordinary will do. Do not apologize or go halfway. The more unbridled you seem, the more mag- netic the effect. dark. A keen glance reached her from the corner of his eyes, bored into her, and held her fascinated. A leaden heaviness overpowered her limbs as his great wrinkled face, distorted with desire, came closer to hers. She felt his hot breath on her cheeks, and saw how his eyes, burning from the depths of their sockets, furtively roved over her helpless body, until he dropped his lids with a sensuous expression. His voice had fallen to a passionate whisper, and he murmured strange, voluptuous words in her ear. • Just as she was on the point of abandoning herself to her seducer, a memory stirred in her dimly and as if from some far distance; she recalled that she had come to ask him about God. —RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER, RASPUTIN: THE HOLY DEVIL 106 • The Art of Seduction The demonic performer. Throughout his childhood Elvis Presley was thought a strange boy who kept pretty much to himself. In high school in Memphis, Tennessee, he attracted attention with his pompadoured hair and sideburns, his pink and black clothing, but people who tried to talk to him found nothing there—he was either terribly bland or hopelessly shy. At the high school prom, he was the only boy who didn't dance. He seemed lost in a private world, in love with the guitar he took everywhere. At the Ellis Auditorium, at the end of an evening of gospel music or wrestling, the concessions manager would often find Elvis onstage, miming a perfor- mance and taking bows before an imaginary audience. Asked to leave, he would quietly walk away. He was a very polite young man.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  What fascinated him was the detail of her visions: she would liberate the besieged town of Orléans, have the king crowned at the cathedral in Reims, lead the army to Paris; she knew how she would be wounded, and where; the words she attributed to Saint Michael were quite unlike the language of a farm girl; and she was so calmly confident, she glowed with conviction. De Metz fell under her spell. He swore allegiance and set out with her for Chinon. Soon others of- fered assistance, too, and word reached Charles of the strange young girl on her way to meet him. On the 350-mile road to Chinon, accompanied only by a handful of soldiers, through a land infested with warring bands, Joan showed neither fear nor hesitation. The journey took several months. When she finally ar- rived, the Dauphin decided to meet the girl who had promised to restore him to his throne, despite the advice of his counselors; but he was bored, and wanted amusement, and decided to play a trick on her. She was to meet him in a hall packed with courtiers; to test her prophetic powers, he disguised himself as one of these men, and dressed another man as the prince. Yet when Joan arrived, to the amazement of the crowd, she walked straight up to Charles and curtseyed: "The King of Heaven sends me to you with the message that you shall be the lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is the king of France." In the talk that followed, Joan seemed to echo Charles's most private thoughts, while once again recounting in extraordinary detail the feats she would accomplish. Days later, this indeci- sive, flighty man declared himself convinced and gave her his blessing to lead a French army against the English. Miracles and saintliness aside, Joan of Arc had certain basic qualities that made her exceptional. Her visions were intense; she could describe them in such detail that they had to be real. Details have that effect: they lend a sense of reality to even the most preposterous statements. Furthermore, in a time of great disorder, she was supremely focused, as if her strength came from somewhere unworldly. She spoke with authority, and she predicted things people wanted: the English would be defeated, prosperity would re- turn.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Instead, what you aim for is what Freud called the "uncanny," something strange and familiar at the same time, like a deja vu, or a childhood memory—anything slightly irra- tional and dreamlike. The uncanny, the mix of the real and the unreal, has immense power over our imaginations. The fantasies you bring to life for your targets should not be bizarre or exceptional; they should be rooted in reality, with a hint of the strange, the theatrical, the occult (in talk of des- tiny, for example). You vaguely remind people of something in their child- hood, or a character in a film or book. Even before Bouriscout heard Pei Pu's story, he had the uncanny feeling of something remarkable and fantas- tical in this normal-looking man. The secret to creating an uncanny effect is to keep it subtle and suggestive. 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 Wil- liam'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.

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

  Why do humans and macaques have such differently sized affective niches? For starters, a macaque’s interoceptive network is less developed than a human’s, particularly the circuitry that helps control prediction error. This means a macaque is not as nimble in directing attention to stuff in the world based on past experience. More importantly, a human brain is almost five times as large as a macaque brain. We have much greater connectivity in our control network and in parts of our interoceptive network. The human brain employs this heavy-duty machinery to compress and summarize prediction error in the way we discussed in chapter 6. This allows us to integrate and process more sensory information from more sources more efficiently than a macaque can, to learn purely mental concepts. That’s why you can have majestic mountains in your affective niche and a macaque cannot.11 … An interoceptive network, along with the affective niche it helps create, is not sufficient for feeling and perceiving emotions. For that, a brain must also be equipped to build a conceptual system, to construct emotion concepts, and to make sensations meaningful as emotions in themselves and others. A hypothetical macaque with the capacity for emotions must be able to look at another macaque swinging in a tree and see not only the physical movement but an instance of “Joy.” Animals can definitely learn concepts. Monkeys, sheep, goats, cows, raccoons, hamsters, pandas, harbor seals, bottlenose dolphins, and plenty of other animals learn concepts by smell. You might not think of smell as conceptual knowledge, but each time you smell the same aroma, such as popcorn in a movie theater, you’re categorizing. The mix of chemicals in the air differs each time, and yet you perceive buttered popcorn. Similarly, most mammals use olfactory concepts to recognize friends, foes, and offspring. Many other animals learn concepts by sight or sound as well. Sheep apparently recognize one another by face (!), and goats by vocal bleats.12 In the lab, animals can learn additional concepts if you reward them with food or drink, widening their affective niche. Baboons can learn to distinguish a “B” from a “3” regardless of font, and macaques can distinguish animal images from food images. Rhesus macaques can learn the concept “Rhesus macaque” as distinct from “Japanese macaque,” even though they are the same species and differ only by color. (Does this remind you of something that humans do?) Macaques can even learn concepts to distinguish painting styles by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Salvador Dalí.13 The concepts that animals learn will not be the same as human concepts, however. Humans construct goal-based concepts, and a macaque brain simply lacks the necessary wiring to do so. It’s the same lack of wiring that accounts for their smaller affective niche.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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