Bewilderment

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 Middlesex (2002)

  It was hard to argue with the comparison. In Smyrna people had taken their furniture down to the waterfront; and on television now people were carrying furniture, too. Men were lugging brand-new sofas out of stores. Refrigerators were sailing along the avenues, as were stoves and dishwashers. And just like in Smyrna everyone seemed to have packed all their clothes. Women were wearing minks despite the July heat. Men were trying on new suits and running at the same time. "Smyrna! Smyrna! Smyrna!" Desdemona kept wail- ing, and I'd already heard so much about Smyrna in my seven years that I watched the screen closely to see what it had been like. But I didn't understand. Sure, buildings were burning, bodies were lying in the street, but the mood wasn't one of desperation. I'd never seen people so happy in my entire life. Men were playing instruments taken from a music store. Other men were handing whiskey bottles through a shattered window and passing them around. It looked more like a block party than it did a riot. Up until that night, our neighborhood's basic feeling about our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, "You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want." That was how we felt. (Even me back then, I won't deny it, because we're all the children of our parents.) We were ready to accept the Negroes. We weren't prejudiced against them. We wanted to include them in our society if they would only act normall In their support for Johnson's Great Society, in their applause af- ter To Sir with Love, our neighbors and relatives made clear their well- intentioned belief that the Negroes were fully capable of being just like white people— but then what was this? they asked themselves as they saw the pictures on television. What were those young men do- ing carrying a sofa down the street? Would Sidney Poitier ever take a sofa or a large kitchen appliance from a store without paying? Would he dance like that in front of a burning building? "No respect for pri- vate property whatsoever," cried Mr. Benz, who lived next door. And his wife Phyllis: "Where are they going to live if they burn down their own neighborhood?" Only Aunt Zo seemed to sympathize: "I 240 don't know. If I was walking down the street and there was a mink coat just sitting there, I might take it." "Zoe!" Father Mike was shocked. "That's stealing!" "Oh, what isn't, when you come right down to it. This whole country's stolen." For three days and two nights we waited in the attic to hear from Milton. The fires had knocked out phone service, and when my mother called the restaurant, all she got was a recorded message with an operator's voice.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  She cared for my sister and brother, wrote the magazine, duplicated tapes for the radio broadcast, kept up the house and its surrounding thirty acres, and fed and saw to the care of the menagerie of birds, monkeys, dogs, horses, and livestock Brother Terrell brought home. Then there were the preparations for the end-time: planting and harvesting two vegetable gardens large enough to feed a small community and canning and freezing the produce from those gardens. Plus, she was pregnant again, with twins. She broke the news with a dazed look on her face as Gary and I slurped cereal one morning. My brother laughed—twins, ha, how funny—and went out to play in his tree house. I was stunned.“Mama, y’all aren’t married. He’s not even divorced.”She stared past me. “He’s working everything out.”“But what will you tell the kids when they grow up?”“Jesus will come before then. David said so.”I studied my cereal bowl in utter defeat.For the first two or three years of my sisters’ lives, we dropped them off for long weekends with a neighbor once or twice a year while we attended one of Brother Terrell’s tent revivals. We climbed into the car as the middle-class Ter-rell family from Groesbeck and emerged a few hours later in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, or wherever the revival happened to be, transformed into Sister Johnson, Brother Terrell’s longtime associate and ghostwriter (the one secret everyone seemed to know), and her two obedient kids. Gary replaced his sleeveless T-shirts with a long-sleeved button-down, and I traded my jeans for a dress. We looked the part. People under the tent congratulated Mama on bringing us up with God-fearing ways.“It’s like the Bible says, you train your children up the way they should go and they shall not depart from it.”Under the tent I became the person believers thought I was: a good and virtuous Holy Ghost girl. When I wriggled into my jeans and played with my sisters at home, I was my other self, and still another when I smoked a joint and went skinny-dipping, and yet another when I read Yeats and scribbled bad poetry, and someone else altogether when I pinned on my homecoming mum with its long red and white ribbons and plastic dangling footballs. I was all of these people. Maybe that’s why Brother Terrell’s latest incarnation did not shock me.He walked onto the platform dressed all in black, carrying a sevenfoot staff with a crook on the end, a far cry from the dandy who zipped in and out of Groesbeck in a powder-blue Mercedes. He walked down the prayer ramp, stood level with the audience, and stretched out the staff. He was Moses parting the water. Ezekiel calling up the dry bones. Elijah calling down the fire.“The Lord God Almighty has called for a famine on this land. Hordes of locusts, clouds of grasshoppers darkening the sky. Crops are destroyed. They’re eating everything: corn, beans, tomatoes, wheat. I see hungry people everywhere. Hungry children.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  If the club is not crowded— which it rarely is downstairs any- more—Flora will sometimes give Mr. Go her company for three or four songs. For a dollar she will ride him for one song, but she will sit through one or two more songs for free. This is one of Flora's rec- ommendations in Mr. Go's mind. She is not young, Flora, but she has nice, clear skin. Mr. Go feels she is healthy. Tonight, however, after only two songs, Flora slides off Mr. Go, grumbling. "I'm not a credit bureau, you know." She stalks off. Mr. Go rises, adjusting his pants, and right then the swimming pool smell hits him again and his curiosity gets the better of him. He shuffles out of the Show Room and gazes up the stairs at the printed sign: G&RsftEscNr* KW/.6 1fce NerffloiJ dlfo «J far U«K|U! AncI ovr SpeciALfOtWfcofl No q,M[fflci<f n* u Mc (Dorf 481 " And now Mr. Go's curiosity has gotten the better of him. He buys a ticket and a handful of tokens and waits in line with the others. When the bouncer lets him through, he climbs up the blinking stairs. The booths on the second floor have no numbers, only lights indicating whether they are occupied. He finds an empty one, closes the door behind him, and puts a token in the slot. Immediately, the screen slides away to reveal a porthole looking onto underwater depths. Music plays from a speaker in the roof and a deep voice begins nar- rating a story: "Once upon a time in ancient Greece, there was an enchanted pool. This pool was sacred to Salmacis, the water nymph. And one day Hermaphroditus, a beautiful boy, went swimming there." The voice continues, but Mr. Go is no longer paying attention. He is looking into the pool, which is blue and empty. He is wondering where the girls are. He is beginning to regret buying a ticket to Oc- topussy's Garden. But just then the voice intones: "Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the god Hermaphroditus! Half woman, half man ! There is a splash from above. The water in the pool goes white, then pink. Only inches away on the other side of the porthole's glass is a body, a living body. Mr. Go looks. He squints. He presses his face right up to the porthole. He has never seen anything like what he is seeing now. Not in all his years of visiting the Dark Room. He isn't sure he likes what he sees. But the sight makes him feel strange, light- headed, weightless, and somehow younger. Suddenly the screen slides shut. Without hesitation Mr. Go drops another token in the slot.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  It’s Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes. And then I felt much better, because she had not died at all. I walked back into the gym, and everyone seemed to be in various stages of disintegration. It was like something you see on TV, like a National Geographic special on funeral rituals. I saw Takumi standing over Lara, his hands on her shoulders. I saw Kevin with his crew cut, his head buried between his knees. A girl named Molly Tan, who’d studied with us for precalc, wailed, beating balled fists against her thighs. All these people I sort of knew and sort of didn’t, and all of them disintegrating, and then I saw the Colonel, his knees tucked into his chest, lying on his side on the bleachers, Madame O’Malley sitting next to him, reaching toward his shoulder but not actually touching it. The Colonel was screaming. He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream. I thought, at first, that it was only yelling. But after a few breaths, I noticed a rhythm. And after a few more, I realized that the Colonel was saying words. He was screaming, “I’m so sorry.” Madame O’Malley grabbed his hand. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Chip. There was nothing you could have done.” But if only she knew. And I just stood there, looking at the scene, thinking about her not dead, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the Eagle, and I said, “I think she’s playing a dumb prank,” and he said, “No, Miles, no, I’m sorry,” and I felt the heat in my cheeks and said, “She’s really good. She could pull this off,” and he said, “I saw her. I’m sorry.” “What happened?” “Somebody was setting off firecrackers in the woods,” he said, and I closed my eyes tight, the ineluctable fact of the matter at hand: I had killed her. “I went out after them, and I guess she drove off campus. It was late. She was on I-65 just south of downtown. A truck had jackknifed, blocking both lanes. A police car had just gotten to the scene. She hit the cruiser without ever swerving. I believe she must have been very intoxicated. The police said they smelled alcohol.” “How do you know?” I asked. “I saw her, Miles. I talked to the police. It was instant. The steering wheel hit her chest. I’m so sorry.” And I said, you saw her and he said yes and I said how did she look and he said, just a bit of blood coming out of her nose, and I sat down on the floor of the gym.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Patrick worked night shifts at the Red Roof Inn. He didn’t like the job, and spoke of it with bewilderment, somehow baffled as to how it had come to be his. He had been the manager at a Blockbuster Video before that, but it had closed. He’d gotten a divorce at the same time, and a judge had ordered him to pay child support for his two daughters, five and seven. “My bitch ex-wife doesn’t work, though,” he said, and Amy flinched a little. Patrick hadn’t previously come anywhere near language so strong. This guy is such a loser, Amy thought. But the assessment gave her a feeling of security. They occupied worlds and concerns miles apart. No one could tie them together. They would barely understand each other. She had found a truly safe man with whom to dress up. “Had you heard of the Glamour Boutique before this?” Patrick asked as they came out of the Berkshires and into central Massachusetts. He glanced at her with the same smirk that kids wore when they asked each other about a weed hookup. Amy could see he wanted a particular answer. “No, should I have?” “Just wondering if you like the same kind of stories I like.” He emphasized the word “stories,” drawing it out. “Like what stories?” “Erotica.” “Yeah.” Amy adjusted her seatbelt so she could lean subtly against the door and watch him. “TI like erotica.” “Glamour Boutique is the sponsor for the Fictionmania archive. Do you read Fictionmania?” As if he had physically shown it to her, Amy could picture the Glamour Boutique ad banner, depicting a line drawing of a Victorian-looking woman lacing up another woman’s corset, an ad banner that floated at the bottom of the fictionmania.tv site. Amy didn’t answer. The car banked through a turn on the highway. She had never spoken about what she masturbated to with anyone. The stories of women forcing boys into girlhood. The online archive of Fictionmania stored twenty thousand of these stories, and anonymous writers all across the world added more every day. From the sheer number of stories, Amy understood there had to be thousands of writers, and therefore exponentially more readers, tens or hundreds of thousands of people—an entire literary subculture whose existence required that that subculture itself never be acknowledged. The stories formed a trans samizdat so clandestine that you’d have to be a certain sort of trans to ever think about looking for it in the first place. You must be this trans to ride this ride. The first rule of Fictionmania Club is never talk about Fictionmania Club.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  said.He tooknotes onour"ideationsystems" and"ritualsofkin bonding." He saidalmostnothinghimself,claiming thathedidn't wantto influence thefindings.Everynow andthen,however, while observing ourextended family eatandjokeandargue, Chapter Eleven wouldletoutalaugh, a private Eurekathatmadehimfall back inhis chairandlifthisEarthshoes offthefloor.Thenhewould lean forwardandbeginwritingmadlyinhis notebook. AsI've mentioned,mybrotherdidn't paymuchattentiontome whileweweregrowingup.Thatweekend,however,spurredon by hisnew maniaforobservation,Chapter Eleventookanewinterestin me. OnFridayafternoonwhileIwasdiligentiydoing some advance homeworkatthekitchen table, he came andsatdown.He stared at methoughtfullyfor a longtime. "Latin,huh?Thatwhatthey're teaching youinthat school?" "I like it." "You a necrophiliac?" "Awhat?" "That'ssomeonewhogetsoffondead people.Latin's dead, isn't it?" "I don'tknow." "IknowsomeLatin." "Youdo?" "Cunnilingus." "Don'tbegross." "Fellatio." "Haha." "Monsveneris." "I'm dyingoflaughter.You'rekillingme. Look, I'm dead." Chapter Elevenwas quietfor a while.I triedtogoon studying butfelt him staringatme.Finally, exasperated, Iclosedmybook. "What are youlooking at?" Isaid. There was apause characteristicofmy brother. Behindhisgranny glasseshis eyes looked bland, but themind behindthemwas work- ing things out. "I'mlooking atmylittle sister,"hesaid. "Okay. You saw her.Nowgo." "I'm looking at mylittle sisterand thinking shedoesn'tlook like mylittle sister anymore." "What's that supposed to mean?"Iasked. 314 Againthe pause. "Idon't know,"saidmy brother. "I'mtryingto figure itout." "Well, when you figureitout,letme know.Bightnow I'vegot stuff todo." OnSaturday morning, ChapterEleven'sgirlfriend arrived.Meg Zemkawas as smallasmy motherandasflat-chestedas me.Herhair was a mousybrown, herteeth, owingtoanimpoverished childhood, not wellcaredfor. Shewasa waif,anorphan,arunt,andsixtimesas powerfulasmy brother. "Whatare youstudyingup atcollege, Meg?" my father askedat dinner. "Poli. sci." "That soundsinteresting." "Idoubtyou'd likemy emphasis. I'ma Marxist." "Oh,youare,areyou?" "Yourunabunchof restaurants,right?" "That'sright.HerculesHotDogs.Haven'tyou ever hadone? We'llhavetotakeyoudowntooneofourstands." "Megdoesn'teatmeat,"mymotherreminded. "Ohyeah,Iforgot,"saidMilton."Well,youcanhavesomefrench fries. We've gotfrenchfries." "What doyoupayyourworkers?"Meg asked. "Theones behindthecounter?They get minimumwage." "And youliveouthereinthisbig house inGrossePointe." "That's becauseIhandlethe entire businessandaccepttherisk." "Soundslike exploitationtome." "It does, does it?" Miltonsmiled."Well,ifgivingsomebody a job isexploiting them, thenI guess I'manexploiter.Thosejobsdidn't existbeforeI startedthe business." "That'slike saying thattheslavesdidn'thavejobs until theybuilt theplantations." "You gotareallive wirehere,"Miltonsaid,turningtomy brother. "Where didyou findher?" "Ifound him," saidMeg."Ontop of anelevator." That waswhen welearnedhow ChapterElevenwasspendinghis time atcollege. His favoritepastimewastounscrewthe ceilingpanel on thedorm elevator andclimb upontop. He sattherefor hours, riding up and downinthedarkness. "The first timeIdidit," ChapterElevennow confessed, "the car 315 started goinguptothetop.IthoughtImight getcrushed. Butthey leave some airspace." "Thisis whatwe'repayingyour tuitionfor?"Milton asked. "That's whatyou'reexploiting yourworkersfor," saidMeg. TessiemadeChapterElevenandMeg sleepinseparate bedrooms, butin themiddleofthenightthere was alotoftiptoeingand gig- glinginthedark. Trying tobethebig sisterIneverhad,Meggave meacopy ofOurBodies,Ourselves. Chapter Eleven, sweptupinthesexualrevolution, tried toedu- cate me,too. "Youevermasturbate,Cal?" "What!" "Youdon'thavetobeembarrassed.It's natural. This friendof minetold me you could doitwithyourhand. So Iwent intothe bathroom—" "Idon'twanttohearabout—" "—and triedit out. Allof sudden,allthemusclesinmypenis startedcontracting—" "Inour bathroom?" "—AndthenIejaculated.Itfeltreallyamazing.Youshouldtry it, Cal,if you haven'talready. Girlsarealittle different, butphysiologi- callyit'sprettymuchthesame.Imean,thepenisandtheclitorisare analogous structures.Yougottaexperimenttosee whatworks." I putmyfingersinmyearsandstartedhumming. "Youdon't havetohaveanyhang-ups withme,"ChapterEleven saidloudly. "I'myourbrother." Therockmusic, thereverencefor MaharishiMaheshYogi,theav- ocadopits sproutingonthewindowsill,the rainbow-coloredrolling papers.What else?Oh yeah: mybrotherhad stoppedusingdeodor- ant. "Youstink!" Iobjectedone day, sitting nextto him intheTV room. Chapter Eleven gave thetiniestof shrugs. "I'mahuman,"hesaid. "Thisiswhathumans smelllike." "Then humans stink." "Do you thinkIstink,Meg?" "Noway," nuzzling uptohisarmpit."It turnsmeonV "Willyouguys getout ofhere!I'mtrying towatch this show." 316

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Look,” Ricky said, reading Amy’s skepticism. “Here’s a story: One time I slept over at her house. If you know her, you already know she is incapable of hanging up a towel after using it. She left early to meet someone for coffee, so I stayed in bed for a while, then I took a shower, picked up her towel from the floor—she only had one —dried off with it, and carefully folded it in thirds and hung it up over the top of her closet door. Then I left. Three days later we go to her house. And the towel is exactly where I left it. But she’s freshly showered and made-up.” “Uh-huh,” Amy said. She wasn’t sure she was going to believe any story that turned on a towel. But on the other hand, it was true: Reese left all her clothes and towels wherever they fell when she was done with them. Ricky dropped the ratchet to focus on telling his story. It hit the concrete sidewalk with a clink. He needed to wave his hands around in order to express how much this incident exasperated him. “So I ask her where she got ready, and she gives me a look like I’m crazy and says, ‘At home, of course.’ So I point to the towel and I was like, ‘How did you dry off? That towel hasn’t moved in three days.’”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Let’s go for a walk.” I felt nervous, as I invariably do when someone says my name twice with a hmm in between. But I got up, leaving my books behind, and walked toward the Smoking Hole. But as soon as we got to the edge of the woods, Takumi turned away from the dirt road. “Not sure the Hole is safe,” he said. Not safe? I thought. It’s the safest place to smoke a cigarette in the known universe. But I just followed him through the thick brush, weaving through pine trees and threatening, chest-high brambly bushes. After a while, he just sat down. I cupped my hand around my lighter to protect the flame from the slight breeze and lit up. “Alaska ratted out Marya,” he said. “So the Eagle might know about the Smoking Hole, too. I don’t know. I’ve never seen him down that way, but who knows what she told him.” “Wait, how do you know?” I asked, dubious. “Well, for one thing, I figured it out. And for another, Alaska admitted it. She told me at least part of the truth, that right at the end of school last year, she tried to sneak off campus one night after lights-out to go visit Jake and then got busted. She said she was careful—no headlights or anything—but the Eagle caught her, and she had a bottle of wine in her car, so she was fucked. And the Eagle took her into his house and gave her the same offer he gives to everyone when they get fatally busted. ‘Either tell me everything you know or go to your room and pack up your stuff.’ So Alaska broke and told him that Marya and Paul were drunk and in her room right then. And then she told him God knows what else. And so the Eagle let her go, because he needs rats to do his job. She was smart, really, to rat on one of her friends, because no one ever thinks to blame the friends. That’s why the Colonel is so sure it was Kevin and his boys. I didn’t believe it could be Alaska, either, until I figured out that she was the only person on campus who could’ve known what Marya was doing. I suspected Paul’s roommate, Longwell—one of the guys who pulled the armless-mermaid bit on you. Turns out he was at home that night. His aunt had died. I checked the obit in the paper. Hollis Burnis Chase—hell of a name for a woman.” “So the Colonel doesn’t know?” I asked, stunned. I put out my cigarette, even though I wasn’t quite finished, because I felt spooked. I’d never suspected Alaska could be disloyal. Moody, yes. But not a rat. “No, and he can’t know, because he’ll go crazy and get her expelled.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  And for my brother and sisters. There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make individuals exceptional and eccentric. William James,The Varieties of Religious Experience I understood the stillness behind the skyBut never the words of men. Friedrich Hölderlin,“In My Boyhood Days” Prologue“DONNA, I DON’T KNOW IF YOU’RE COMING TO THE FUNERAL, BUT I HEARD Daddy’s gonna try to raise Randall from the dead. Call me.”My sister left the message as my husband and I stumbled into our darkened kitchen hauling groceries, deli takeout, and briefcases. We had finished another twelve mind-numbing hours at our marketing firm, making deals, finessing budgets, and placating clients, employees, and sometimes each other, racing toward every deadline as though it were life or death. The red light of the answering machine winked at us from the counter. My husband flipped on the overhead light.“That preacher’s going to resurrect his son? We’re going, right?”I shook my head no and said yes. Randall Terrell had been dead twenty-four hours. I was still deciding whether to attend his funeral and everyone else had moved on to resurrection. Even Jesus stayed in the tomb three days, but my family had not followed convention, not in life and apparently not in death.Randall, his sister Pam, and my brother Gary and I spent our formative years traveling the revival circuit known as the sawdust trail. Our families formed the inner circle of a Holy Roller tribe that preached, prayed, and scared sinners into the fold under giant gospel tents that eventually included the world’s largest—a red, white, and blue canvas almost as long as two football fields. I was three and Gary was one when my mother signed on as organist for Randall’s daddy. She sold everything and joined the caravan of eighteen-wheelers, faded station wagons, leaky campers, and other gimpy vehicles that limped and lurched from one breakdown to the next. In later years a fleet of Mercedes and a small jet would join the convoy, churning a wake of suspicion that eventually led to the downfall of Brother David Terrell: healer, end-time prophet, and as close to a father figure as I would get.We descended on towns like a flock of magpies, our public-address system crackling and squawking with cries of “Repent” and “Be Saved,” “Jesus Is Coming Soon” and “Be Healed,” the phrase that drew multitudes. When Brother Terrell asked those in need of prayer to come forward, most of the congregation rushed toward him. The lines looped around the tent in a human labyrinth of suffering. Strangers pressed against one another, sweat and breath mingling in a collective desire to be touched by that hand. As believers passed under him, they were caught for a moment in a fierce blue gaze just before he squeezed his eyes shut, rolled his head upward, and slapped his right palm on their foreheads. “In the name of Je-sus.” They reeled and hit the ground as dead weight.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Adams, who was used to doing puff pieces on third-rate celebrities, was Spell out what turned you confused. She knew Sukarno had a reputation as a devilish Don Juan— le on. \ Though she may grand seducteur, the French called him. He had had four wives and hundreds show fiercer in action than any Medusa, \ Her lover of conquests. He was handsome, and obviously he was attracted to her, but will always describe her as why choose her for this prestigious task? Perhaps his libido was too power- kind \ And gentle. But ful for him to care about such things. Nevertheless, it was an offer she could take care not to give yourself away while \ not refuse. Making such tongue-in- In January of 1964, Adams returned to Indonesia. Her strategy, she had cheek compliments, don't decided, would stay the same: she would be the brassy, straight-talking lady allow \ Your expression to ruin the message. Art's who had seemed to charm Sukarno three years earlier. During her first in- most effective \ When terview with him for the book, she complained in rather strong terms concealed. Detection about the rooms she had been given as lodgings. As if he were her secre- discredits you for good. tary, she dictated a letter to him, which he was to sign, detailing the special — O V I D , THE ART OF LOVE, treatment she was to be given by one and all. To her amazement, he duti- TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN fully copied out the letter, and signed it. Next on Adams's schedule was a tour of Indonesia to interview people who had known Sukarno in his youth. So she complained to him about the The little boy (or girl) seeks to fascinate his or her plane she had to fly on, which she said was unsafe. "I tell you what, honey," parents. In Oriental she told him, "I think you should give me my own plane." "Okay," he an- literature, imitation is 221 222 • The Art of Seduction reckoned to be one of the swered, apparently somewhat abashed. One, however, was not enough, she ways of attracting. The went on; she required several planes, and a helicopter, and her own per-Sanskrit texts, for sonal pilot, a good one. He agreed to everything. The leader of Indonesia example, give an important part to the trick of the seemed to be not just intimidated by Adams but totally under her spell. He woman copying the dress, praised her intelligence and wit. At one point he confided, "Do you know expressions, and speech of why I'm doing this biography? . . . Only because of you, that's why." He her beloved. This kind of mimetic drama is urged on paid attention to her clothes, complimenting her outfits, noticing any the woman who, "being change in them. He was more like a fawning suitor than the "Hitler of unable to unite with her Asia." beloved, imitates him to

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  A prince lacks the latitude afforded to the philosopher in this respect: he cannot allow himself to be different on too many points at a time; and the gods know that my points of difference were already too numerous, though I flattered myself that many were invisible. As to the religious scruples of the Gymnosophist and his disgust at the sight of bleeding flesh, I should be more affected thereby if I had not sometimes asked myself in what essentials the suffering of grass, when it is cut, differs from the suffering of slaughtered sheep, and if our horror in presence of murdered beasts does not arise from the fact that our sensations belong to the same physical order as theirs. But at certain times of life, for example in periods of ritual fasting or in the course of religious initiations, I have learned the advantage for the mind (and also the dangers) of different forms of abstinence, or even of voluntary starvation, those states approaching giddiness where the body, partly lightened of ballast, enters into a world for which it is not made, and which affords it a foretaste of the cold and emptiness of death. At other moments such experiences have given me the chance to toy with the idea of slow suicide, of decease by inanition which certain philosophers have employed, a kind of debauch in reverse, continued to the point of exhaustion of the human substance. But it never would have pleased me to adhere too closely to a system, and I should not have allowed a scruple to take away my right, say, to stuff myself with sausages, if by chance I so desired, or if that particular food were the only one at hand. The cynics and the moralists agree in placing the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross, that is, between the desire for drinking and the need for eating, though at the same time they call love less indispensable, since it is something which, they assert, one can go without. I expect about anything from the moralist, but am astonished that the cynic should go thus astray. Probably both fear their own demons, whether resisting or surrendering to them, and they oblige themselves to scorn their pleasure in order to reduce its almost terrifying power, which overwhelms them, and its strange mystery, wherein they feel lost.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Patrick worked night shifts at the Red Roof Inn. He didn’t like the job, and spoke of it with bewilderment, somehow baffled as to how it had come to be his. He had been the manager at a Blockbuster Video before that, but it had closed. He’d gotten a divorce at the same time, and a judge had ordered him to pay child support for his two daughters, five and seven. “My bitch ex-wife doesn’t work, though,” he said, and Amy flinched a little. Patrick hadn’t previously come anywhere near language so strong. This guy is such a loser, Amy thought. But the assessment gave her a feeling of security. They occupied worlds and concerns miles apart. No one could tie them together. They would barely understand each other. She had found a truly safe man with whom to dress up. “Had you heard of the Glamour Boutique before this?” Patrick asked as they came out of the Berkshires and into central Massachusetts. He glanced at her with the same smirk that kids wore when they asked each other about a weed hookup. Amy could see he wanted a particular answer. “No, should I have?” “Just wondering if you like the same kind of stories I like.” He emphasized the word “stories,” drawing it out. “Like what stories?” “Erotica.” “Yeah.” Amy adjusted her seatbelt so she could lean subtly against the door and watch him. “TI like erotica.” “Glamour Boutique is the sponsor for the Fictionmania archive. Do you read Fictionmania?” As if he had physically shown it to her, Amy could picture the Glamour Boutique ad banner, depicting a line drawing of a Victorian-looking woman lacing up another woman’s corset, an ad banner that floated at the bottom of the fictionmania.tv site. Amy didn’t answer. The car banked through a turn on the highway. She had never spoken about what she masturbated to with anyone. The stories of women forcing boys into girlhood. The online archive of Fictionmania stored twenty thousand of these stories, and anonymous writers all across the world added more every day. From the sheer number of stories, Amy understood there had to be thousands of writers, and therefore exponentially more readers, tens or hundreds of thousands of people—an entire literary subculture whose existence required that that subculture itself never be acknowledged. The stories formed a trans samizdat so clandestine that you’d have to be a certain sort of trans to ever think about looking for it in the first place. You must be this trans to ride this ride. The first rule of Fictionmania Club is never talk about Fictionmania Club.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Look,” Ricky said, reading Amy’s skepticism. “Here’s a story: One time I slept over at her house. If you know her, you already know she is incapable of hanging up a towel after using it. She left early to meet someone for coffee, so I stayed in bed for a while, then I took a shower, picked up her towel from the floor—she only had one —dried off with it, and carefully folded it in thirds and hung it up over the top of her closet door. Then I left. Three days later we go to her house. And the towel is exactly where I left it. But she’s freshly showered and made-up.” “Uh-huh,” Amy said. She wasn’t sure she was going to believe any story that turned on a towel. But on the other hand, it was true: Reese left all her clothes and towels wherever they fell when she was done with them. Ricky dropped the ratchet to focus on telling his story. It hit the concrete sidewalk with a clink. He needed to wave his hands around in order to express how much this incident exasperated him. “So I ask her where she got ready, and she gives me a look like I’m crazy and says, ‘At home, of course.’ So I point to the towel and I was like, ‘How did you dry off? That towel hasn’t moved in three days.’”

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won’t prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of complicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives. As for the fact that Simone dared to piss on the corpse, whether in boredom or, at worst, in irritation: it mainly goes to prove how impossible it was for us to understand what was happening, and of course, it is no more understandable today than it was then. Simone, being truly incapable of conceiving death such as one normally considers it, was frightened and furious, but in no way awe-struck. Marcelle belonged to us so deeply in our isolation that we could not see her as just another corpse. Nothing about her death could be measured by a common standard, and the contradictory impulses overtaking us in this circumstance neutralized one another, leaving us blind and, as it were, very remote from anything we touched, in a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless. 9. Lewd Animals To avoid the bother of a police investigation, we instantly took off for Spain, where Simone was counting on our disappearing with the help of a fabulously rich Englishman, who had offered to support her and would be more likely than anyone else to show interest in our plight. The villa was abandoned in the middle of the night. We had no trouble stealing a boat, reaching an obscure point on the Spanish coast, and burning the vessel with the aid of two drums of petrol that we had taken along, as a precautionary measure, from the garage of the villa. Simone left me concealed in a wood during the day and went to look for the Englishman in San Sebastian.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  You are asked to choose between a safe bet and a riskier one: an almost certain win of a modest amount, or a small chance to win a substantially larger amount and a high probability of losing. Safety prevails, and B is clearly the more popular choice. Now consider each bet separately: If you owned that bet, what is the lowest price at which you would sell it? Remember that you are not negotiating with anyone—your task is to determine the lowest price at which you would truly be willing to give up the bet. Try it. You may find that the prize that can be won is salient in this task, and that your evaluation of what the bet is worth is anchored on that value. The results support this conjecture, and the selling price is higher for bet A than for bet B. This is a preference reversal: people choose B over A, but if they imagine owning only one of them, they set a higher value on A than on B. As in the burglary scenarios, the preference reversal occurs because joint evaluation focuses attention on an aspect of the situation—the fact that bet A is much less safe than bet B—which was less salient in single evaluation. The features that caused the difference between the judgments of the options in single evaluation—the poignancy of the victim being in the wrong grocery store and the anchoring on the prize—are suppressed or irrelevant when the options are evaluated jointly. The emotional reactions of System 1 are much more likely to determine single evaluation; the comparison that occurs in joint evaluation always involves a more careful and effortful assessment, which calls for System 2. The preference reversal can be confirmed in a within-subject experiment, in which subjects set prices on both sets as part of a long list, and also choose between them. Participants are unaware of the inconsistency, and their reactions when confronted with it can be entertaining. A 1968 interview of a participant in the experiment, conducted by Sarah Lichtenstein, is an enduring classic of the field. The experimenter talks at length with a bewildered participant, who chooses one bet over another but is then willing to pay money to exchange the item he just chose for the one he just rejected, and goes through the cycle repeatedly. Rational Econs would surely not be susceptible to preference reversals, and the phenomenon was therefore a challenge to the rational-agent model and to the economic theory that is built on this model. The challenge could have been ignored, but it was not. A few years after the preference reversals were reported, two respected economists, David Grether and Charles Plott, published an article in the prestigious American Economic Review, in which they reported their own studies of the phenomenon that Lichtenstein and Slovic had described. This was probably the first finding by experimental psychologists that ever attracted the

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that particular way strikes me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me as a piece of the highest insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated lines, slot machines, newspapers, telephones, cops, doorknobs, flophouses, screens, toilet paper, everything. Everything could just as well not be and not only nothing lost but a whole universe gained. I look at the people brushing by me to see if by chance one of them might agree with me. Supposing I intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question. Supposing I just said to him suddenly: “Why do you go on living the way you do?” He would probably call a cop. I ask myself—does any one ever talk to himself the way I do? I ask myself if there isn’t something wrong with me. The only conclusion I can come to is that I am different . And that’s a very grave matter, view it how you will. Henry, I say to myself, rising slowly from the stoop, stretching myself, brushing my trousers and spitting out the gum, Henry, I say to myself, you are young yet, you are just a spring chicken and if you let them get you by the balls you’re an idiot because you’re a better man than any of them only you need to get rid of your false notions about humanity. You have to realize, Henry me boy, that you’re dealing with cutthroats, with cannibals, only they’re dressed up, shaved, perfumed, but that’s all they are—cutthroats, cannibals. The best thing for you to do now, Henry, is to go and get yourself a frosted chocolate and when you sit at the soda fountain keep your eyes peeled and forget about the destiny of man because you might still find yourself a nice lay and a good lay will clean your ballbearings out and leave a good taste in your mouth whereas this only brings on dyspepsia, dandruff, halitosis, encephalitis. And while I’m soothing myself thus a guy comes up to me to bum a dime and I hand him a quarter for good measure thinking to myself that if I had had a little more sense I’d have had a juicy pork chop with that instead of the lousy meat balls but what’s the difference now it’s all food and food makes energy and energy is what makes the world go round. Instead of the frosted chocolate I keep walking and soon I’m exactly where I intended to be all the time, which is in front of the ticket window of the Roseland. And now, Henry, says I to myself, if you’re lucky your old pal MacGregor will be here and first he’ll bawl the shit out of you for running away and then he’ll lend you a five spot, and if you just hold your breath while climbing the stairs maybe you’ll see the nymphomaniac too and you’ll get a dry fuck.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  I suppose if anyone had come along, Sir Edmund and I wouldn’t have given him much time to be scandalized. But no matter. Simone gradually emerged from her stupor and sought protection with Sir Edmund, who stood motionless, his back to the wall; we could hear the fly flitting over the corpse. “Sir Edmund,” she said, rubbing her cheek gently on his shoulder, “I want you to do something.” “I shall do anything you like,” he replied. She made me come over to the corpse: she knelt down and completely opened the eye that the fly had perched on. “Do you see the eye?” she asked me. “Well?” “It’s an egg,” she concluded in all simplicity. “All right,” I urged her, extremely disturbed, “what are you getting at?” “I want to play with this eye.” “What do you mean?” “Listen, Sir Edmund,” she finally let it out, “you must give me this at once, tear it out at once, I want it!” Sir Edmund was always poker-faced except when he turned purple. Nor did he bat an eyelash now; but the blood did shoot to his face. He removed a pair of fine scissors from his wallet, knelt down, then nimbly inserted the fingers of his left hand into the socket and drew out the eye, while his right hand snipped the obstinate ligaments. Next, he presented the small whitish eyeball in a hand reddened with blood. Simone gazed at the absurdity and finally took it in her hand, completely distraught; yet she had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing. Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her arse, and after lying down on her back and raising her legs and bottom, she tried to keep the eye there simply by squeezing her buttocks together. But all at once, it spat out like a stone squeezed from a cherry, and dropped on the thin belly of the corpse, an inch or so from the cock.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Marie-Claude Carpenter. She was American—from Boston, I seem to remember. Very pale eyes, grey-blue. 1943. Marie-Claude Carpenter was fair. Scarcely faded. Quite good-looking, I think. With a brief smile that froze very quickly, disappeared in a flash. With a voice that suddenly comes back to me, low, slightly grating in the high notes. She was forty-five, old already, old age itself. She lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the place de l’Alma. Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine. People went to dinner there in the winter. Or to lunch in the summer. The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris. Always passable, almost. But only just enough, skimpy. She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out. Sometimes there was an expert on Mallarmé there. And often one, two, or three literary people, they’d come once and never be seen again. I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them. I never heard anyone else refer to any of them, and I never read or heard of their work. The meals didn’t last very long. We talked a lot about the war, it was the time of Stalingrad, the end of the winter of ’42. Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn’t say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she’d laugh. Straightway after the meal she’d apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said. She never said what. When there were enough of us we’d stay on for an hour or two after she left. She used to say, Stay as long as you like. No one spoke about her when she wasn’t there. I don’t think anyone could have, because no one knew her. You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other. It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors’ waiting rooms, hotels, airports. In summer we had lunch on a big terrace looking over the river, and coffee was served in the garden covering the whole roof. There was a swimming pool. But no one went in. We just sat and looked at Paris. The empty avenues, the river, the streets. In the empty streets, catalpas in flower. Marie-Claude Carpenter. I looked at her a lot, practically all the time, it embarrassed her but I couldn’t help it. I looked at her to try to find out, find out who she was, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Why she was there rather than somewhere else, why she was from so far away too, from Boston, why she was rich, why no one knew anything about her, not anything, no one, why these seemingly compulsory parties. And why, why, in her eyes, deep down in the depths of sight, that particle of death? Marie-Claude Carpenter. Why did all her dresses have something indefinable in common that made them look as if they didn’t quite belong to her, as if they might just as well have been on some other body? Dresses that were neutral, plain, very light in color, white, like summer in the middle of winter.

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

  2 1 The major hubs in your interoceptive and control networks make possible what I describe in chapter 4 , that your everyday decisions are driven by your body-budgeting regions—your inner, loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses. You see, your brain’s body-budgeting regions are major hubs. Through their massive connections, they broadcast predictions that alter what you see, hear, and oth erwise perceive and do. That’s why, at the level of brain circuitry, no decision can be free of affect. … I’ve said several times that the brain acts like a scientist. It forms hypotheses through prediction and tests them against the “data” of sensory input. It corrects its predictions by way of prediction error, like a scientist adjusts his or her hypotheses in the face of contrary evidence. When the brain’s predictions match the sensory input, this constitutes a model of the world in that instant, just like a scientist judges that a correct hypothesis is the path to scientific certainty. Several years ago, my family was eating dinner in our kitchen in Boston when suddenly, simultaneously, all of us had a sensation that was entirely new. Our chairs tipped backward for a moment, then righted themselves, but in a curvy sort of way like cresting an ocean wave. This completely novel experience left us in a state of experiential blindness, so we started forming hypotheses. Did we all simply lose our balance momentarily? No, that wasn’t likely to happen to three people at once. Did a car crash outside the house? No, we hadn’t heard anything. Had a building exploded far away, out of audible range, making the ground tremble? Maybe, but the feeling wasn’t so much a tremble as a swoop. What about an earthquake? Maybe, but we’d never been in an earthquake before, and ours had lasted only one second, much shorter than earthquakes we’d seen in disaster movies. However, the rising and falling shape, an almost sinusoidal motion, was consistent with our understanding of earthquakes. An earthquake was the best match to our knowledge, so we settled on that hypothesis. A few hours later, we learned that a magnitude 4.5 earthquake had struck in nearby Maine and rippled throughout New England. This same process of elimination that my family performed consciously, the brain does naturally, automatically, and extremely rapidly. Your brain has a mental model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed from past experience. This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the world and the body using concepts. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. I’ve been calling this process “categorization,” but it’s known by many other names in science. Experience. Perception. Conceptualization. Pattern completion. Perceptual inference. Memory. Simulation. Attention. Morality. Mental Inference.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  My coat was still sopping wet in the tub, so I put on a denim jacket, pulled a pilly knit hat on, stuck my feet into my slippers, my debit card into my pocket, and went down to the Egyptians to get my coffees, shivering violently along the salted path in the dirty snow. The Christmas decorations at the bodega had been taken down already. The date on the newspapers was December 28, 2000. “You owe this much now,” said one of the smaller Egyptians, pointing to a scrap of paper taped to the counter. He looked like a lapdog, cute and small and squirrelly. “Forty-six fifty. Last night, you bought seven ice creams.” “I did?” He could have been messing with me. I wouldn’t have known the difference. “Seven ice creams,” he repeated, shaking his head and stretching to reach for a pack of menthols from the back wall for the customer behind me. I wasn’t going to argue. The Egyptians weren’t like the people at Rite Aid. So I got cash out of the ATM and paid what I owed. At home, I found seven pints of old Häagen-Dazs on the kitchen counter. I must have exerted great effort in removing them from the depths of the bodega’s freezer: Coffee Toffee Crunch, Vanilla Fudge, Raspberry Fudge, Rum Raisin, Strawberry, Bourbon Pecan Praline, and Watermelon gelato. It had all melted. I wondered if I’d been expecting guests. The Chinese food spread out on the coffee table indicated a celebration perhaps, but it seemed as though I’d fallen asleep or gotten frustrated with the chopsticks and left it all there to stink up my apartment while I dreamt. The apartment still smelled strongly of a deep fryer. I opened a window in the living room a few inches, then sat on the sofa and started in on my second coffee. One by one, I lifted each greasy container of Chinese food, guessed its contents, then unfolded the top to see if I’d guessed correctly. What I guessed was pork fried rice was actually slippery lo mein jiggling around slivers of carrot and onion and dotted with tiny shrimp that made me think of pubic lice. My guess of broccoli in garlic sauce was wrong. That container was full of glimmering yellow curried chicken. My guess of white rice was a farty, cabbage-filled egg roll. White rice was a vegetable medley. White rice was spare ribs. When I found the rice, it was brown. I tasted it with my fingers. Nutty and smushy and cold. As I chewed, I could hear my phone ring.