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 The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the secondrate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned to South America and had decided that whatever affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski champion. They were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was “building a family” as he put it, he would have no time henceforth for my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.” Busybodies—a whole committee of them, it appeared—had informed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were unknown, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. He had broken his leg.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Yours is the station after.” He plucked my ticket from where it was stuck on the seat back in front of me. “You can sleep for a few more minutes,” he winked. I couldn’t sleep now. I stared out the window. The sun was definitely rising. The train rumbled, then slowed. Across the platform at Bethpage, a small crowd of long-coated middle-aged people with coffee cups stood waiting for the train coming in the opposite direction. I figured I could get off there and catch that train back into Manhattan. Once the train came to a stop, I stood. The fur coat swept down to the floor. It was heavy fur and tied with a white leather belt around my waist. My bare feet were damp inside my sneakers. I wasn’t wearing a bra, either. My nipples rubbed against the soft fuzz on the inside of my sweatshirt, which felt new and cheap, the kind of sweatshirt you can buy for five dollars at Walgreens or Rite Aid. A bell clanged. I had to hurry. But as I gathered up my things, I had a sudden and overwhelming urge to shit. I left my bag and the roses on the seat and hurried down the aisle to the toilet. I had to take the coat off and turn it inside out before hanging it up so that only the silky pink lining rested against the grimy wall of the toilet stall. I don’t know what I’d eaten, but it certainly was not the usual animal crackers or salad from the diner. I felt the train start back up as I sat there. I pushed up the large sleeves of the sweatshirt to survey my arms, looking for a stamp or mark or bruise or Band-Aid. I found nothing. I felt again in the pockets of my coat for my phone, found only a receipt for a bubble tea in Koreatown and a rubber band. I used it to tie back my hair. From what I could make out in the dull, scratched-up mirror, I didn’t look so bad. I slapped my cheeks and dug the sleep out of my eyes. I still looked pretty. I noticed that my hair was shorter. I must have gotten it cut in the blackout. I could look at my bank card statement to figure out what I’d done on the Infermiterol, I thought, but I didn’t really care, as long I was intact, I wasn’t bleeding. I wasn’t bruised or broken. I knew where I was. I had my credit card and keys. That was all that mattered. I wasn’t ashamed. One Infermiterol had taken days of my life away. It was the perfect drug in that sense. I splashed my face with water, gargled, rubbed the plaque off my teeth with a paper towel. When I got back to my seat, I took a swig of gin, swished it around in my mouth and spit it back into the bottle.

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

  My first two attempts to find objective fingerprints of emotion—in the face and body—had led me smack into a closed door. But as they say, when a door closes, sometimes a window opens. My window was the unexpected realization that an emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety. Anger, for example, varies far more than the classical view of emotion predicts or can explain. When you’re angry at someone, do you shout and swear or do you seethe quietly? Do you tease back in reproach? How about widening your eyes and raising your eyebrows? During these times, your blood pressure might go up or down or stay the same. You might feel your heart beating in your chest, or not. Your hands might become clammy, or they might remain dry . . . whatever best prepares your body for action in that situation. How does your brain create and keep track of all these diverse angers? How does it know which one fits the situation best? If I asked how you felt in each of these situations, would you give a detailed answer like “aggravated,” “irritated,” “outraged,” or “vengeful” automatically with little effort? Or would you answer “angry” in each case, or simply, “I feel bad”? How do you even know the answer? These are mysteries that the classical view of emotion doesn’t acknowledge. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I considered emotion categories in all their diversity, I was unwittingly applying a standard way of thinking in biology called population thinking, which was proposed by Darwin. A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms. Just as no American family consists of 3.13 people, no instance of anger must include an average anger pattern (should we be able to identify one). Nor will any instance necessarily resemble the elusive fingerprint of anger. What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype.29 Once I adopted a mindset of population thinking, my whole landscape shifted, scientifically speaking. I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable. I continued my quest for an objective way to distinguish one emotion from another, but it wasn’t quite the same quest anymore. With growing skepticism, I had only one place left to look for fingerprints. It was time to turn to the brain.*

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “She is still shuttling,” said Miss Pratt, showing how with her liver-spotted hands, “between the anal and genital zones of development. Basically she is a lovely—” “I beg your pardon,” I said, “what zones?” “That’s the old-fashioned European in you!” cried Pratt delivering a slight tap on my wrist watch and suddenly disclosing her dentures. “All I mean is that biologic and psychologic drives—do you smoke?—are not fused in Dolly, do not fall so to speak into a—into a rounded pattern.” Her hands held for a moment an invisible melon. “She is attractive, bright though careless” (breathing heavily, without leaving her perch, the woman took time out to look at the lovely child’s report sheet on the desk at her right). “Her marks are getting worse and worse. Now I wonder, Mr. Haze—” Again the false meditation. “Well,” she went on with zest, “as for me, I do smoke, and, as dear Dr. Pierce used to say: I’m not proud of it but I jeest love it.” She lit up and the smoke she exhaled from her nostrils was like a pair of tusks.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands together in a let’s-get-down-to-business manner, and again fixed her beady eyes upon me. “Dolly Haze,” she said, “is a lovely child, but the onset of sexual maturing seems to give her trouble.” I bowed slightly. What else could I do? “She is still shuttling,” said Miss Pratt, showing how with her liver-spotted hands, “between the anal and genital zones of development. Basically she is a lovely—” “I beg your pardon,” I said, “what zones?” “That’s the old-fashioned European in you!” cried Pratt delivering a slight tap on my wrist watch and suddenly disclosing her dentures. “All I mean is that biologic and psychologic drives—do you smoke?—are not fused in Dolly, do not fall so to speak into a—into a rounded pattern.” Her hands held for a moment an invisible melon. “She is attractive, bright though careless” (breathing heavily, without leaving her perch, the woman took time out to look at the lovely child’s report sheet on the desk at her right). “Her marks are getting worse and worse. Now I wonder, Mr. Haze—” Again the false meditation. “Well,” she went on with zest, “as for me, I do smoke, and, as dear Dr. Pierce used to say: I’m not proud of it but I jeest love it.” She lit up and the smoke she exhaled from her nostrils was like a pair of tusks. “Let me give you a few details, it won’t take a moment. Now let me see [rummaging among her papers]. She is defiant toward Miss Redcock and impossibly rude to Miss Cormorant. Now here is one of our special research reports: Enjoys singing with group in class though mind seems to wander. Crosses her knees and wags left leg to rhythm. Type of by-words: a two-hundred-forty-two word area of the commonest pubescent slang fenced in by a number of obviously European polysyllables. Sighs a good deal in class. Let me see. Yes. Now comes the last week in November. Sighs a good deal in class. Chews gum vehemently. Does not bite her nails though if she did, this would conform better to her general pattern—scientifically speaking, of course. Menstruation, according to the subject, well established. Belongs at present to no church organization. By the way, Mr. Haze, her mother was—? Oh, I see. And you are—? Nobody’s business is, I suppose, God’s business. Something else we wanted to know. She has no regular home duties, I understand. Making a princess of your Dolly, Mr. Haze, eh? Well, what else have we got here? Handles books gracefully. Voice pleasant. Giggles rather often. A littly dreamy. Has private jokes of her own, transposing for instance the first letters of some of her teachers’ names. Hair light and dark brown, lustrous—well [laughing] you are aware of that, I suppose. Nose unobstructed, feet high-arched, eyes—let me see, I had here somewhere a still more recent report.

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

  Is the muzzle straight, blending smoothly with the skull? Is the coat a rich, dense, lustrous gold? Any differences from the ideal dog are regarded as error, and the dog with the smallest amount of error wins. In the same manner, influential thinkers of the early nineteenth century saw the world of living creatures as one big dog show. If you looked at a Golden Retriever and observed that its stride was longer than average, then its stride was too long compared to the ideal, or even wrong. 9 Then along came Darwin, who argued that variations within a species, such as length of stride, are not errors. Instead, variations are expected and are meaningfully related to the species’ environment. Any population of Golden Retrievers has a variety of stride lengths, some of which provide a functional advantage for running, climbing, or hunting. The individuals with strides that best fit their environment will live longer and produce more offspring. This is Darwin’s theory of evolution from Origin in action, known as natural selection and sometimes called “survival of the fittest.” To Darwin, each species was a conceptual category—a population of unique individuals who vary from one another, with no essence at their core. The ideal dog doesn’t exist: it’s a statistical summary of many diverse dogs. No features are necessary, sufficient, or even typical of every individual in the population. This observation, known as population thinking, is central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. 1 0 Population thinking is based on variation, whereas essentialism is based on sameness. The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible. Origin is therefore a profoundly anti-essentialist book. So it is baffling that where emotion is concerned, Darwin reversed his greatest achievement by writing Expression. 1 1 It is equally baffling, not to mention ironic, that the classical view of emotion is based on the very essentialism that Darwin is famous for vanquishing in biology. The classical view explicitly labels itself as “evolutionary” and assumes that emotions and their expressions are products of natural selection, yet natural selection is completely absent from Darwin’s thinking on emotion. Any essentialist view that wraps itself in the cloak of Darwin is demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of Darwin’s central ideas about evolution. The compelling power of essentialism led Darwin to some beautifully ridiculous ideas about emotion. “Even insects,” he wrote in Expression, “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love” when they rub their body parts together to make sounds. Think about that the next time you’re chasing a fly in your kitchen. Darwin also wrote that emotional imbalance could cause frizzy hair. 1 2 Essentialism is not only powerful but also infectious. Darwin’s perplexing belief in unvarying emotion essences lived on after his death and distorted the legacy of other famous scientists. In the process, the classical view of emotion gained momentum. The most important example is that of William James, considered by many to be the father of American psychology.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Of course, Charlie lost the conducting competition. And in the first round. Despite his ostentatious studying, he never could remember scores. He was not cut out to be a conductor, either. On the podium, he always seemed to go as limp as he had that first night in bed. His whole body sagged. His shoulders curled over and his back arched like an overcooked cannelloni which had lost its stuffing. Poor Charlie had no charisma. The opposite of Brian exactly. I often thought (while watching Charlie perform) that if only he could have had a little of Brian’s charisma he would have been phenomenal. Brian, of course, had no talent for music. But if only I could have combined them! Why do I always wind up with two men who would make one great man? Is that somehow the secret of my Oedipal problem? My father and my grandfather? My father who always goes off to play the piano when things get hot and my grandfather who hangs in there like the fireball he is, arguing Marxism, Modernism, Darwinism or any other ism—as if his life depended on it? Am I doomed to spend my life running between two men? One diffident and mild and almost indifferent and one so fiery and restless that he uses up all my oxygen? A typical scene at the White-Stoloff dinner table. My mother, Jude, screaming about Robert Ardrey and territoriality. My grandfather Stoloff (known to everyone as Papa) quoting Lenin and Pushkin to prove that Picasso is a phony. My sister Chloe telling Jude to shut up, Randy screaming for Chloe to shut up, Bob and Lalah upstairs nursing the quints, Pierre arguing economics with Abel. Chloe baiting Bennett about psychiatry, Bennett coughing nervously and being inscrutable, Randy attacking my poetry, my grandmother (Mama) sewing and admonishing us not to “talk like truck drivers,” and me thumbing through a magazine to shield myself somehow (always with the printed word!) from my family. chloe: Isadora’s always reading something. Can’t you put down the goddamned magazine? me: Why? So I can yell along with everyone else? chloe: Well it would be better than reading a goddamned magazine all the time. my father (humming “Chattanooga Choo Choo”): “Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore….” chloe (eyes heavenward as if in supplication): And Daddy’s always humming or making wisecracks. Can’t we ever have a serious conversation around here? me (reading): Who wants a serious conversation? chloe: You’re a hostile bitch. me: For someone who hates psychiatry, you go pretty heavy on the jargon. chloe: Fuck you. mama (looking up from her sewing): You should be ashamed. I never brought up my granddaughters that they should talk like truck drivers. papa (looking up from his debate with Jude): Disgusting. chloe (at the top of her lungs): WILL EVERYONE SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE AND LISTEN TO ME!

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

  Then along came Darwin, who argued that variations within a species, such as length of stride, are not errors. Instead, variations are expected and are meaningfully related to the species’ environment. Any population of Golden Retrievers has a variety of stride lengths, some of which provide a functional advantage for running, climbing, or hunting. The individuals with strides that best fit their environment will live longer and produce more offspring. This is Darwin’s theory of evolution from Origin in action, known as natural selection and sometimes called “survival of the fittest.” To Darwin, each species was a conceptual category—a population of unique individuals who vary from one another, with no essence at their core. The ideal dog doesn’t exist: it’s a statistical summary of many diverse dogs. No features are necessary, sufficient, or even typical of every individual in the population. This observation, known as population thinking, is central to Darwin’s theory of evolution.10 Population thinking is based on variation, whereas essentialism is based on sameness. The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible. Origin is therefore a profoundly anti-essentialist book. So it is baffling that where emotion is concerned, Darwin reversed his greatest achievement by writing Expression.11 It is equally baffling, not to mention ironic, that the classical view of emotion is based on the very essentialism that Darwin is famous for vanquishing in biology. The classical view explicitly labels itself as “evolutionary” and assumes that emotions and their expressions are products of natural selection, yet natural selection is completely absent from Darwin’s thinking on emotion. Any essentialist view that wraps itself in the cloak of Darwin is demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of Darwin’s central ideas about evolution. The compelling power of essentialism led Darwin to some beautifully ridiculous ideas about emotion. “Even insects,” he wrote in Expression, “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love” when they rub their body parts together to make sounds. Think about that the next time you’re chasing a fly in your kitchen. Darwin also wrote that emotional imbalance could cause frizzy hair.12 Essentialism is not only powerful but also infectious. Darwin’s perplexing belief in unvarying emotion essences lived on after his death and distorted the legacy of other famous scientists. In the process, the classical view of emotion gained momentum. The most important example is that of William James, considered by many to be the father of American psychology. James might not be the household name that Darwin is, but he was, quite simply, an intellectual giant. His 1,200-page tome Principles of Psychology contains most of Western psychology’s most important ideas and remains, after more than a century, the foundation of the field. His name graces the highest honor that can be bestowed on a scientist from the Association of Psychological Science, the William James Prize, and Harvard’s psychology building is named William James Hall.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter. I knew his wife had died but I certainly expected him to remain, throughout a devout widowhood, the dull, sedate and reliable person he had always been. Now he wrote that after a brief visit to the U.S. he had returned to South America and had decided that whatever affairs he had controlled at Ramsdale he would hand over to Jack Windmuller of that town, a lawyer whom we both knew. He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze “complications.” He had married a Spanish girl. He had stopped smoking and had gained thirty pounds. She was very young and a ski champion. They were going to India for their honeymonsoon. Since he was “building a family” as he put it, he would have no time henceforth for my affairs which he termed “very strange and very aggravating.” Busybodies—a whole committee of them, it appeared—had informed him that the whereabouts of little Dolly Haze were unknown, and that I was living with a notorious divorcee in California. His father-in-law was a count, and exceedingly wealthy. The people who had been renting the Haze house for some years now wished to buy it. He suggested that I better produce Dolly quick. He had broken his leg. He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a brunette in white wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile. I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down—when the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice: D EAR D AD : How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we get there the dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship. Yours expecting, D OLLY (M RS .

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

  Why does such a small change make such a large difference? Because the short list of emotion words in the basic emotion method—a technique called a forced choice—is an unintentional cheat sheet for the test subjects. The words not only limit the available choices but also prompt the subjects to simulate facial configurations for the corresponding emotion concepts, preparing them to see certain emotions and not others. This process is called priming. When you first looked at Serena Williams’s face, I primed you in a similar way by telling you the woman was “screaming in terror.” Your simulation influenced how you categorized the sensory input from her face to see a meaningful expression. Likewise, test subjects who see a list of emotion words are primed with (i.e., they simulate) the corresponding emotion concepts to categorize the posed faces they see. Your knowledge of concepts is a key ingredient for experiencing other people as emotional, and emotion words invoke this ingredient. And they could be largely responsible for producing what looks like universal emotion perception in the hundreds of studies that use the basic emotion method.7 Free labeling reduced the ingredient of concept knowledge, but only somewhat. In my own lab, we went a step further and removed all emotion words, printed or spoken. If the theory of constructed emotion is correct, then this small change should impair emotion perception even more. On each trial of an experiment, we presented subjects with two wordless photographs side by side (figure 3-4) and asked, “Do these people feel the same emotion?” The expected answer was merely yes or no. The results of this face-matching task were telling: subjects identified the expected matches only 42 percent of the time.8 [image file=image_rsrc7AM.jpg] Figure 3-4: Basic emotion method with no words at all. Do these faces show the same emotion? Next, our team reduced the ingredients even further. We actively interfered with our test subjects’ access to their own emotion concepts, using a simple experimental technique. We had them repeat an emotion word like “anger” over and over. Eventually, the word becomes just a sound to the subject (“ang-gurr”) that’s mentally disconnected from its meaning. This technique has the same effect as creating a temporary brain lesion, but it’s completely safe and lasts less than one second. Then we immediately showed subjects two wordless faces side by side as before. Their performance dropped to a dismal 36 percent: nearly two-thirds of their yes/no decisions were incorrect!9

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  A delicate puff under the eyes. She used hemorrhoid cream to bring down the swelling. I figured this out after she was dead, when I cleaned out her makeup drawer. Preparation H and Sweet Champagne eye shadow and Ivory Silk foundation, which she wore even just around the house. Fetish Pink lipstick. She hated where we lived, said it was “barbaric” because it was so far from the city. “There’s no culture here,” she said. But if there had been an opera house or a symphony orchestra—that’s what she meant by “culture”—she never would have gone. She thought she was sophisticated—she liked fine clothes, good liquor—but she knew nothing about art. She didn’t read anything but romance novels. There were no freshly cut flowers around the house. She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her “culture.” Around Christmas each year, she’d take me to the mall. She’d buy me a single chocolate at the Godiva store, then we’d walk around all the shops and my mother would call things “cheap” and “hick-style” and “a blouse for the Devil’s whore.” She kind of came alive at the perfume counter. “This one smells like a hooker’s panties.” Those outings to the mall were the few times we had any fun together. My father was joyless, too, at home. He was dull and quiet. When I was growing up, we’d pass each other in the hallway in the morning like strangers. He was serious, sterile, a scientist. He seemed much more at ease around his students than with me or my mother. He was from Boston, the son of a surgeon and a French teacher. The most personal thing he’d told me was that his parents had died in a boating accident the year after I was born. And he had a sister in Mexico. She moved there in the early eighties to “be a beatnik,” my father said. “We look nothing alike.” Pondering all this down in Reva’s black room under her sad, pilly sheets, I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best—a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system—a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Maturin’s novel most likely supplied Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) with his post-prison pseudonym of “Sebastian Melmoth.” In addition, added Nabokov, “Melmoth may come from Mellonella Moth (which breeds in beehives) or, more likely, from Meal Moth (which breeds in grain).” For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. grays ... his favorite cryptochromism: a coinage; “secret colors.” It is also an authorial favorite, in view of the puns on Haze, shadow, and ombre. “ordeal of the orb”: changing the tire. gigantic truck ... impossible to pass: a fear confirmed; see slow truck ... road. CHAPTER 20 “Love Under the Lindens”: planted between famous plays by Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) is a combination of Desire Under the Elms (1924), by Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), and Unter den Linden (a boulevard in Berlin). See also Keys, p. 15on. The portmanteau title, credited to “Eelmann” (O’Neill plus Thomas Mann), is mentioned in Ada (p. 403). Nabokov’s low opinion of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra is expressed in Gogol (p. 55). flashlight: a corrected author’s error (instead of “torchlight” in the 1958 edition). The quotation marks which enclosed this extract in the 1958 edition have also been corrected. Cyrano ... sleeping stranger: after rereading this passage in 1968, Nabokov belatedly put words in H.H.’s mouth: “Cyrano’s big nose. Cyranose. Sorry myself to have missed that portmantoid pun. ‘A sleeping stranger,’ ” he added, “is enchanting and haunting.” Edmond Rostand’s famous play (1897) is based on the life of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), French writer and soldier. “Cyraniana” in Ada (p. 339) alludes to his most famous work, Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune (1656; modern edition: A Voyage to the Moon). petit rat: a young ballet student at the Paris Opera (ages nine to fourteen). Electra: “The name is based on that of a close ally of the Clouded Yellow butterfly,” said Nabokov, “and has nothing to do with the Greek Electra.” See Edusa Gold. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. Ned Litam: the anagrammatic (it reads backwards) pseudonym under which the great tennis player William T. (Bill) Tilden II wrote fiction. See a famous coach ... with a harem of ball boys, where Lolita takes lessons from him. endorsing a Dromedary: like Quilty; see Morell ... “conquering hero”. Note how H.H. is continually providing oblique clues; see Quilty, Clare for a summary of Quilty allusions. fifty-three: the 1958 edition omitted the hyphen; the error has been corrected. susceptible to the magic of games ...

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  He stood bewildered for a moment, not knowing where to turn his steps, and then advanced to the far end of the hall. There, among the cushions, reclined a handsome old man with a long beard, whom my brother recognized at once as the master of the house. • "What can I do for you, my friend?" asked the old man, as he rose to welcome my brother. • When Shakashik replied that he was a hungry beggar, the old man expressed the deepest compassion and rent his fine robes, crying: "Is it possible that there should be a man as hungry as yourself in a city where I am living? It is, indeed, a disgrace that I cannot endure!" Then he comforted my brother, adding: "I insist that you stay with me and partake of my dinner." • With this the master of the house clapped his hands and called out to one of the slaves: "Bring in the basin and ewer." Then he said to my brother: "Come forward, my friend, and wash your hands." • Shakashik rose to do so, but saw neither ewer nor basin. He was bewildered to see his host make gestures as though he were pouring water on his hands 224 • The Art of Seduction against people, as if they were stone walls. But instead of complaining about how misunderstood or ignored you are, why not try something dif- ferent: instead of seeing other people as spiteful or indifferent, instead of trying to figure out why they act the way they do, look at them through the eyes of the seducer. The way to lure people out of their natural in- tractability and self-obsession is to enter their spirit. All of us are narcissists. When we were children our narcissism was physical: we were interested in our own image, our own body, as if it were a separate being. As we grow older, our narcissism grows more psychologi- cal: we become absorbed in our own tastes, opinions, experiences. A hard shell forms around us. Paradoxically, the way to entice people out of this shell is to become more like them, in fact a kind of mirror image of them. You do not have to spend days studying their minds; simply conform to their moods, adapt to their tastes, play along with whatever they send your way. In doing so you will lower their natural defensiveness. Their sense of self-esteem does not feel threatened by your strangeness or different habits. People truly love themselves, but what they love most of all is to see their ideas and tastes reflected in another person. This validates them. Their ha- bitual insecurity vanishes. Hypnotized by their mirror image, they relax.

• 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. I knew it would be Reva calling to make sure I understood about the funeral, wanting me to promise that I’d be there for her, that I’d show up on time, and to confirm that I was so terribly sorry about her mother’s passing, that I cared, that I felt her pain, that I’d do anything to ease her suffering, so help me God.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Like everyone else, the miners fell under his spell, even naming a mine after him. One cowboy was heard to say, "That fellow is some art guy, but he can drink any of us under the table and afterwards carry us home two at a time." Interpretation. In a fable he improvised at dinner once, Oscar Wilde talked about some steel filings that had a sudden desire to visit a nearby magnet. As they talked to each other about this, they found themselves moving closer to the magnet without realizing how or why. Finally they were swept in one mass to the magnet's side. "Then the magnet smiled—for the steel filings had no doubt at all but that they were paying that visit of their own free will." Such was the effect that Wilde himself had on everyone around him. Wilde's attractiveness was more than just a by-product of his character, it was quite calculated. An adorer of paradox, he consciously played up his own weirdness and ambiguity, the contrast between his mannered appear- ance and his witty, effortless performance. Naturally warm and sponta- neous, he constructed an image that ran counter to his nature. People were repelled, confused, intrigued, and finally drawn to this man who seemed impossible to figure out. Paradox is seductive because it plays with meaning. We are secretly op- pressed by the rationality in our lives, where everything is meant to mean something; seduction, by contrast, thrives on ambiguity, on mixed signals, on anything that eludes interpretation. Most people are painfully obvious. If their character is showy, we may be momentarily attracted, but the at- traction wears off; there is no depth, no contrary motion, to pull us in. The key to both attracting and holding attention is to radiate mystery. And no one is naturally mysterious, at least not for long; mystery is something you have to work at, a ploy on your part, and something that must be used early on in the seduction. Let one part of your character show, so everyone no- tices it. (In the example of Wilde, this was the mannered affectation con- insensibly drawing nearer to their neighbor; and the more they talked, the more they felt the impulse growing stronger, till the more impatient ones declared that they would go that day, whatever the rest did. Some were heard to say that it was their duty to visit the magnet, and they ought to have gone long ago. And, while they talked, they moved always nearer and nearer, without realizing that they had moved. Then, at last, the impatient ones prevailed, and, with one irresistible impulse, the whole body cried out, "There is no use waiting. We will go today.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  People's natural insecurities are heightened in group settings; by room but ourselves. • . . . I swear by all the gods in heaven that for anything that had happened between us when I got up after sleeping with Socrates, I might have been sleeping with my father or elder brother. • What do you suppose to have been my state of mind after that? On the one hand I realized that I had been slighted, but on the other I felt a reverence for Socrates' character, his self-control and courage . . . The result was that I could neither bring myself to be angry with him and tear myself away from his society, nor find a way of subduing him to my will. . . . I was utterly disconcerted, and wandered about in a state of enslavement to the man the like of which has never been known. —ALCIBIADES, QUOTED IN PLATO, THE SYMPOSIUM The Coquette • 77 maintaining aloofness, Coquettes start a competition to win their favor. If the ability to use third parties to make targets jealous is a critical seductive skill, Sigmund Freud was a grand Coquette. All of the tactics of the Coquette have been adapted by political leaders to make the public fall in love. While exciting the masses, these leaders re- main inwardly detached, which keeps them in control. The political scientist Roberto Michels has even referred to such politicians as Cold Coquettes. Napoleon played the Coquette with the French: after the grand successes of the Italian campaign had made him a beloved hero, he left France to con- quer Egypt, knowing that in his absence the government would fall apart, the people would hunger for his return, and their love would serve as the base for an expansion of his power. After exciting the masses with a rousing speech, Mao Zedong would disappear from sight for days on end, making himself an object of cultish worship. And no one was more of a Coquette than Yugoslav leader Josef Tito, who alternated between distance from and emotional identification with his people. All of these political leaders were confirmed narcissists. In times of trouble, when people feel insecure, the ef- fect of such political coquetry is even more powerful. It is important to real- ize that coquetry is extremely effective on a group, stimulating jealousy, love, and intense devotion. If you play such a role with a group, remember to keep an emotional and physical distance. This will allow you to cry and laugh on command, project self-sufficiency, and with such detachment you will be able play people's emotions like a piano. Symbol: The Shadow. It cannot be grasped. Chase your shadow and it will flee; turn your back on it and it will follow you.

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

  The theory of constructed emotion and the classical view of emotion tell vastly different stories of how we experience the world. The classical view is intuitive—events in the world trigger emotional reactions inside of us. Its story features familiar characters like thoughts and feelings that live in distinct brain areas. The theory of constructed emotion, in contrast, tells a story that doesn’t match your daily life—your brain invisibly constructs everything you experience, including emotions. Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once. This unfamiliar story creates a challenge because people expect stories with familiar structures. Every superhero story is assumed to have a villain. Every romantic comedy requires an attractive couple faced with a humorous misunderstanding that turns out all right in the end. Our challenge here is that the dynamics of the brain, and how emotions are made, do not follow a linear, cause-and-effect sort of story. (This challenge is common in science; for example, in quantum mechanics, the distinction between a cause and an effect is not meaningful.) Nevertheless, every book must tell a story, even for a nonlinear subject like brain function. Mine will occasionally have to defy the usual linear framework of human storytelling. For now, my aim is simply to give you some intuition about the construction of emotion and why this scientific explanation makes sense. We’ll see later that this theory incorporates the most up-to-date, neuroscientific understanding of how the brain works, and it explains the great variation in emotional experiences and perceptions in everyday life. It can help us figure out how instances of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and other emotion categories are constructed by the same brain mechanism that constructed the blobby bee, the juicy apple, and the smell of poo from mashed baby food, with no need for emotion circuits or other biological fingerprints. … I’m not the first person to propose that emotions are made. The theory of constructed emotion belongs to a broader scientific tradition called construction, which holds that your experiences and behaviors are created in the moment by biological processes within your brain and body. Construction is based on a very old set of ideas that date back to Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Heraclitus famously wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” because only a mind perceives an ever-changing river as a distinct body of water. Today, constructionism spans many topics including memory, perception, mental illness, and, of course, emotion.11 A constructionist approach to emotion has a couple of core ideas. One idea is that an emotion category such as anger or disgust does not have a fingerprint. One instance of anger need not look or feel like another, nor will it be caused by the same neurons. Variation is the norm. Your range of angers is not necessarily the same as mine, although if we were raised in similar circumstances, we will likely have some overlap.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze—dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat—the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which, in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we were in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  There are, however, some serious problems with turning to chimpanzee behavior to understand prehistoric human societies. While chimps are extremely hierarchical, groups of human foragers are vehemently egalitarian. Meat sharing is precisely the occasion when chimp hierarchy is most evident, yet a successful hunt triggers the leveling mechanisms most important to human foraging societies. Most primatologists agree about the prominence of power-consciousness in chimpanzees. But it may be premature to generalize from observations made at Gombe, given that observations made at different sites—Taï, on the Ivory Coast of western Africa, for example—suggest some wild chimps handle the sharing of meat in ways more reminiscent of human foragers. Primatologist Craig Stanford found that while the chimps at Gombe are “utterly nepotistic and Machiavellian” about meat distribution, the chimps at Taï share the meat among every individual in the hunting group, whether friend or foe, close relative or relative stranger.8 So, while data from the chimps studied by Goodall and others at Gombe appear to support the idea that a ruthless and calculating selfishness is typical of chimpanzee behavior, information from other study sites may contradict or undermine this finding. Given the difficulties inherent in observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild, we should be cautious about generalizing from the limited data we have available on free-ranging chimps. And given their indisputable intelligence and social nature, we should be equally suspicious of data collected from captive chimps, which would appear to be no more generalizable than human prisoner behavior would be to humans. There are also questions concerning how violent chimps are if left undisturbed in their natural habitat. As we discuss in Chapter 13, several factors could have profoundly altered the chimps’ observed behavior. Cultural historian Morris Berman explains that if we “change things such as food supplies, population densities, and the possibilities for spontaneous group formation and dissolution,…all hell breaks loose—no less for apes than for humans.”9