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 Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

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

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

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

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

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

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

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

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

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

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

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

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I took the letter with me on a walk in Central Park. The humidity carried in the warm wind mixed the sweat of the city and its dirt and grime with the heady fragrant lushness of the grass and trees. Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing. “What kind of bird is that?” I heard a child ask his young mother, pointing to a bird that looked like a psychedelic crow. Its feathers were iridescent black, a rainbow reflected in the gleaming darkness, eyes bright white and alive, vigilant. “A grackle,” the woman replied. I breathed and walked and sat on a bench and watched a bee circle the heads of a flock of passing teenagers. There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now. I could survive without the house. I understood that it would soon be someone else’s store of memories, and that was beautiful. I could move on. I found a pay phone on Second Avenue. “OK,” I said into the realtor’s answering machine. “Sell it. And tell them to throw out whatever’s in the attic. I don’t need it. Just mail me whatever I have to sign.” Then I called Reva. She answered on the fourth ring, panting and tense. “I’m at the gym,” she said. “Can we talk later?” We never did. Eight ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake. About the Author

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

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