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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Faced with the mysteries of woman, Sigmund Freud, who seemed to have an answer for everything else, came up empty. “Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul,” he wrote, “I have not yet been able to answer…the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?” It’s no accident that what the BBC called “the most famous image in the history of art” is a study of the inscrutable feminine created by a homosexual male artist. For centuries, men have been wondering what Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was thinking. Is she smiling? Is she angry? Disappointed? Unwell? Nauseated? Sad? Shy? Turned on? None of the above? Probably closer to all of the above. Does she contradict herself? Very well, then. The Mona Lisa is large. Like all women, but more—like all that is feminine—she reflects every phase of the moon. She contains multitudes. Our journey into a deeper understanding of the “feminine soul” begins in a muddy field in the English countryside. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Keith Kendrick and his colleagues exchanged that season’s newborn sheep and goats (the baby sheep were raised by adult goats, and vice versa). Upon reaching sexual maturity a few years later, the animals were reunited with their own species and their mating behavior was observed. The females adopted a love-the-one-you’re-with approach, showing themselves willing to mate with males of either species. But the males, even after being back with their own species for three years, would mate only with the species with which they were raised.1 Research like this suggests strong differences in degrees of “erotic plasticity” (changeability) in the males and females of many species—including ours.2 The human female’s sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male’s. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire. Young males pass through a brief period in which their sexuality is like hot wax waiting to be imprinted, but the wax soon cools and solidifies, leaving the imprint for life. For females, the wax appears to stay soft and malleable throughout their lives. This greater erotic plasticity appears to manifest in women’s more holistic responses to sexual imagery and thoughts. In 2006, psychologist Meredith Chivers set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to men and women, both straight and gay. The videos included a wide range of possible erotic configurations: man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, lone man masturbating, lone woman masturbating, a muscular guy walking naked on a beach, and a fit woman working out in the nude. To top it all off, she also included a short film clip of bonobos mating.3

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The underlying motivation for claiming that female orgasm was unique to human beings probably lay in the role it played in the standard narrative. According to this view, orgasm evolved in the human female to facilitate and sustain the long-term pair bond at the heart of the nuclear family.18 Once you’ve swallowed that story, it becomes problematic to admit that the females of other primate species are orgasmic, too. Your problem gets worse if the most orgasmic species happen to be the most promiscuous as well, which appears to be the case. As Alan Dixson writes, this monogamy-maintenance explanation for female orgasm “seems far-fetched. After all,” he writes, “females of other primate species, and particularly those with multimale–multifemale [promiscuous] mating systems such as macaques and chimpanzees, exhibit orgasmic responses in the absence of such bonding or the formation of stable family units.” On the other hand, Dixson goes on to note, “Gibbons, which are primarily monogamous, do not exhibit obvious signs of female orgasm.”19 Although Dixson classifies humans as mildly polygynous in his survey of primate sexuality, he seems to have doubts, as when he writes, “One might argue that…the female’s orgasm is rewarding, increases her willingness to copulate with a variety of males rather than one partner, and thus promotes sperm competition.”20 Donald Symons and others have argued that “orgasm is most parsimoniously interpreted as a potential all female mammals possess.” What helps realize this “potential” in some human societies, argues Symons, are “techniques of foreplay and intercourse [that] provide sufficiently intense and uninterrupted stimulation for females to orgasm.”21 In other words, Symons thinks women have more orgasms than mares simply because men are better lovers than stallions. Stomp your foot three times if you believe this. In support of his theory, Symons cites studies like Kinsey’s showing that fewer than half of women questioned (Americans in the 1950s) experienced orgasm at least nine out of ten times they had intercourse, whereas in other societies (he refers to Mangaia, in the South Pacific), elaborate and extended sexual play result in nearly universal orgasm for women. “Orgasm,” Symons concludes, “never is considered to be a spontaneous and inevitable occurrence for females as it always is for males.” For Symons, Stephen Jay Gould, Elisabeth Lloyd,22 and others, some women have orgasms sometimes because all men do every time. For them, the female orgasm is the equivalent of male nipples: a structural echo without function in one sex of a trait vital in the other.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Once pointed out, the color motif need not be identified further; but the reader is reminded again that Nabokov is no “symbolist.” After reading the first draft of these Notes, Nabokov thought that this point had not been made clear enough, and, moved too by the annotator’s loose play with some “red” images, wrote the following for my information, under the heading “A Note about Symbols and Colors re ‘Annotated Lolita. ’ ” It is included here because I think it is one of the most significant statements Nabokov made about his own art. He writes: There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who deliberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense. The type of writer I am, half-painter, half-naturalist, finds the use of symbols hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a live specific impression. I am therefore puzzled and distressed by the significance you lend to the general idea of “red” in my book. When the intellect limits itself to the general notion, or primitive notion, of a certain color it deprives the senses of its shades. In different languages different colors were used in a general sense before shades were distinguished. (In French, for example, the “redness” of hair is now expressed by “ roux ” meaning rufous, or russet, or fulvous with a reddish cast.) For me the shades, or rather colors, of, say, a fox, a ruby, a carrot, a pink rose, a dark cherry, a flushed cheek, are as different as blue is from green or the royal purple of blood (Fr. “ pourpre ”) from the English sense of violet blue. I think your students, your readers, should be taught to see things, to discriminate between visual shades as the author does, and not to lump them under such arbitrary labels as “red” (using it, moreover, as a sexual symbol, though actually the dominant shades in males are mauve—to bright blue, in certain monkeys).… Roses may be white, and even black-red. Only cartoonists, having three colors at their disposal, use red for hair, cheek and blood. See Orange … and Emerald for further remarks on color. Miss Phalen : from the French phalène : moth. For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr. . C HAPTER 13 friable : easily crumbled or pulverized. parkled : H.H.’s coinage. safely solipsized : see solipsism . An important phrase (see second half of not human, but nymphic ). The verbal form of solipsist is of course H.H.’s coinage—a most significant portmanteau suggesting that Lolita has been reduced in more than size, as H.H. comes to realize.

• From Querelle (1953)

  around it, after he had stopped laughing. She knew for certain that this was a happy young man, and it gave her an almost imperceptible shock-caused a little crack to open, through which the incredible me?ange of her sentiments now flowed freely. Unbeknownst to the women who only saw her calm face, her beautiful eyes, who were always impressed by the melancholy majesty of her bearing, supported as it was by her heavy, ample, in the best sense of the word, hospitable haunches ( initially destined for motherhood ) -in her, whose bosom appeared so deep and calm, there was a constant swirling, hvisting and untangling, for some mysterious reason, of these long and wide black veils, consisting of a soft and opaque material, mourning silks with shadowy folds : there was nothing else going on inside her but this at times rapid, at times languorous to-and-fro motion of those sheets of black, and she could neither pull them out through her mouth to expose them to the sunlight, nor could she blow them out her asshole, like a solitary worm. "It's ridiculous to arrive at such a state, at my age, and I can't afford to make any mistakes. Not me. Nobody's going to fool Josephine. Just to think of it, in five years I'll turn fifty. Above all, I mustn't throw myself at the mercy of some notion. And it is a crazy notion, of my own making. When I say that they resemble one another, to the point where they are j ust one, in reality 'they' are two. There's Robert, on one side, and Jo on the other." These tranquilizing daydreams which she indulged in in the daytime and during the moments of respite she granted herself while watching over the transactions in the parlor, were continuously interrupted by everyday concerns. Thus, slowly, Madame Lysiane began to regard her own life, with its thousands of incidents, as something completely stupid and trivial compared to the dimensions of the phenomenon whose witness and stage she had become. 216 I JEAN GENET "Two dirty pillow covers? And so what about them? Get them washed. What on earth do they want me to do, do it myself?" Quickly she abandoned that degrading idea, to return to observing the spellbinding choreography of her black veils.

• From Querelle (1953)

  " Those traits, poorly interpreted, combined to create a picture of a faggot such as none of the masons could ever have seen. All they knew about the "autnies" and "fairies'' was what they said about them themselves, what Theo used to say, a hysterical babble of catch phrases : "Sure as hell, that's a pederast's pet! . . . You take it straight, sideways, or inbetween? . . . To the highest bidder, eh? . . . 'Why don't you just fuck off to your sugar daddy, you ain't fit to work here! . . ." While they were able to spout this stuff with the greatest of ease, it did not really represent any reality. As their emotions weren't involved in the subject, no conversation could 149 I QUERELLE ever add to their knowledge of it, but they found it engrossing nevertheless. \Vhat we want to say is that it was exactly this ignorance that left them in a slightly troubled state, indestructible by its very imprecision and haziness : unknown, finally, for lack of a name, yet visible in a thousand reflections. They were unanimous in suspecting the existence of a universe that was both abominable and marvelous, and they felt themselves hovering on the brink of it. Their distance from that universe was, in fact, the same that separates you from the word you are trying to ren1ember, the one floating around at the back of your mind : ''I have it on the tip of my tongue." \Vhen they had to talk about Gil, they gave each one of those characteristics of his that reminded them, no matter how superficially, of what they knew about homosexuals, such a caricaturistic treatment that the result turned out to be a horrifyingly naturalistic image of a young male prostitute. They talked about the goings-on between Gil and Theo. "They were inseparable." ''But then they must have had some sort of argmnent. Maybe Gil had been doing a number with someone else . . . " At first they never thought of mentioning Roger. Only when one ·of the detectives said : "And what about that young boy who was with Gil on the afternoon of the murder?" they came up with their stories about Roger's visits to the building site. It was a great new vein to quarry. In their opinion, "those guys" were an amorphous bunch, not much to choose between them, and thus they considered it quite natural for an eighteen-yearold youngster to blithely disengage himself from the arms of a forty-year-old 1nason to go and n1ake love to a child of fifteen. "You never saw him with a sailor?" Well, they weren't sure, but they supposed they had. It wasn't always so easy to distinguish people in the fog. But there were far too many sailors in the city of Brest for Gil not to hav� known several. Besides, he used to wear bell-bottom pants, like a sailor. tso I JEAN GENET

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But the bonobo’s conspicuous absence is notable not just in discussions of war. Look for the missing bonobo wherever someone claims an ancient pedigree for human male violence of any sort. See if you can find the bonobo in this account of the origins of rape, from The Dark Side of Man: “Men did not invent rape. Instead, they very likely inherited rape behavior from our ape ancestral lineage. Rape is a standard male reproductive strategy and likely has been one for millions of years. Male humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans routinely rape females. Wild gorillas violently abduct females to mate with them. Captive gorillas also rape females.”14 (Emphasis is in the original.) Leaving aside the complications of defining rape in nonhuman species unable to communicate their experiences and motivations, rape—along with infanticide, war, and murder—has never been witnessed among bonobos in several decades of observation. Not in the wild. Not in the zoo. Never. Doesn’t that warrant a footnote, even? The Mysterious Disappearance of Margaret Power Even apart from doubts raised by bonobos, there are serious questions worth asking about the nature of chimp “warfare.” In the 1970s, Richard Wrangham was a graduate student studying the relation between food supply and chimp behavior at Jane Goodall’s research center at Gombe, Tanzania. In 1991, five years before Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males came out, Margaret Power published a carefully researched book, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, that asked important questions concerning some of Goodall’s research on chimpanzees (without, it must be said, ever expressing anything but admiration for Goodall’s scientific integrity and intentions). But Power’s name and her doubts are nowhere to be found in Demonic Males. Power noticed that data Goodall collected in her first years at Gombe (from 1961 to 1965) painted a different picture of chimpanzee social interaction than the accounts of chimpanzee warfare she and her colleagues published to global acclaim a few years later. Observations from those first four years at Gombe had left Goodall with the impression that the chimps were “far more peaceable than humans.” She saw no evidence of “war” between groups and only sporadic outbreaks of violence between individuals. These initial impressions of overall primate peace mesh with research published four decades later, in 2002, by primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber, who conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on social behavior in primates. After reviewing more than eighty studies of how various primates spend their waking hours, they found that “in almost all species across the board, from diurnal lemurs—the most primitive primates—to apes…usually less than 5 percent of their day is spent in any active social behavior whatsoever.” Sussman and Garber found that “usually less than 1 percent of their day is spent fighting or competing, and it’s unusually much less than 1 percent.” They found cooperative, affiliative behavior like playing and grooming to be ten to twenty times more common than conflict in all primate species.15

• From Querelle (1953)

  He frowned, \Vrinkled his brow. Quereiie's face, present and impassive, interfered with Robert's image; The two mugs fused, became muddled, fought, became identical again. That evening there was nothing to differentiate them, not even the smile that turned Quereiie into his brother's shadow ( Quereiie's smile spread rippling over his whole body, like a veil in motion, trembling, very thin with shadowy folds, and thus enhancing the charm of his devil-may-care, supple and fuiiy alive body, while Robert's glumness consisted of a passion for himself: instead of darkening him, this self-love became a hearth without warmth, a light that seemed stifling because his body was so rigid, moved so heavily and deliberately) . Then the speii of enchantment 243 I QUERELLE was over. The detective returned from the stupefying whirlpool. 44\Vhich one of them?" he thought. But there seemed to be no doubt to him that Querelle was the murderer. "\Vhat are you thinking about?''_ "Oh, nothing." He refused to be deceived by this great resemblance, although it had a tremendous effect on him. His feelings for Querelle expressed themselves in a slightly scornful thought: ··r can see you're trying to stack the deck, buddy, but that won't work with me." He decided, deliberately, to ignore this further complication as being beyond his realm of investigation. It had not been created for him, I\1ario, to throw himself into it and come out as the winner. In other words, it wasn't really any of his business. Yet he heard himself saying : • 'Y ou 're a strange guy." .. Why d'you say that?" • • 1 don't kn ow, no reason . I just said it." \Vhen Mario experienced that sense of great relief, this was also due to a "flash" he had that the sailor's guilt might serve him in another context. Without knowing the reason for it, without even formulating the thought to himself, he simply knew that he had to keep his discovery to himself forever. !-Je swore himself to a vow of silence. If he protected the murderer • and became a willing accessory to the crime, perhaps this would earn him absolution from his treachery toward Tony the Docker. It wasn't so much that Mario went in fear of that old buddy's or even the collective dock workers' taking bloody revenge : a general sense of scorn, directed against him, was what he was most afraid of. Although we hardly feel qualified to discuss the psychology of the police, we would like to demonstrate how the development and the use made of certain stock reactions-cultivated by them-fosters the g�owth of that astonishing plant some find so delightful : the cop. Mario's 2.44 I JEAN GENET

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Unlike her closest primate cousins, the standard human female doesn’t come equipped with private parts that swell up to double their normal size and turn bright red when she is about to ovulate. In fact, a foundational premise of the standard narrative is that men have no way of knowing when a woman is fertile. As we’re supposed to be the smartest creatures around, it’s interesting that humans are thought to be almost unique in this ignorance. The vast majority of other female mammals advertise when they are fertile, and are decidedly not interested in sex at other times. Concealed ovulation is said to be a significant human exception. Among primates, the female capacity and willingness to have sex any time, any place is characteristic only of bonobos and humans. “Extended receptivity” is just a scientific way of saying that women can be sexually active throughout their menstrual cycle, whereas most mammals have sex only when it “matters”—that is, when pregnancy can occur. If we accept the assumption that women are not particularly interested in sex, other than as a way to manipulate men into sharing resources, why would human females have evolved this unusually abundant sexual capacity? Why not reserve sex for those few days in the cycle when pregnancy is most probable, as does practically every other mammal? Two principal theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, and they couldn’t be more different. What anthropologist Helen Fisher has called “the classic explanation” goes like this: both concealed ovulation and extended (or, more accurately, constant) sexual receptivity evolved among early human females as a way of developing and cementing the pair bond by holding the attention of a constantly horny male mate. This capacity supposedly worked in two ways. First, because she was always available for sex, even when not ovulating, there was no reason for him to seek other females for sexual pleasure. Second, because her fertility was hidden, he would be motivated to stick around all the time to maximize his own probability of impregnating her and to ensure that no other males mated with her at any time—not just during a brief estrus phase. Fisher says, “Silent ovulation kept a special friend in constant close proximity, providing protection and food the female prized.”18 Known as “mate guarding behavior” to scientists, contemporary women might call it “that insecure pest who never leaves me alone.”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  It wasn’t easy for some young couples to come up with the $695 down payment. They might have to wait a year to save that much from a young man’s salary. 291 In 1954, a few months after my suburb had incorporated as a city, Louis Boyar and Ben Weingart were subpoenaed to testify before a Senate subcommittee. The subcommittee asked more than a dozen developers to explain irregularities in their federally backed mortgages and construction loans. Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, the chairman of the subcommittee, was bewildered by Weingart’s answers. Weingart explained that he was a director of 200 to 300 development companies and he couldn’t be expected to remember how each one operated. Senator Capehart said “We seem to know more about your companies than you do yourself.” Weingart smiled and said, “You probably do, but you don’t have as many companies as I do.” When Senator Capehart asked if most of these were dummy corporations, Weingart said, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Boyar.” Weingart answered so many questions with “ask Mr. Boyar” that Senator Capehart wondered aloud how Weingart, with investments worth $200 million, could know so little about his own business. Weingart said, “That’s why I have Mr. Boyar.” 292 Senator Capehart accused Weingart of setting up 200 or 300 dummy corporations merely to shield his investments. If any one of Weingart’s companies failed, the FHA loan it controlled would default to the federal government. Weingart had nothing to lose. Senator Capehart asked if that was true. Weingart said, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Boyar.” 293 Louis Boyar and Ben Weingart financed the building of most of the houses in

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions. Sviazhsky was an extremely advanced man. He despised the nobility, and believed the mass of the nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and only concealing their views from cowardice. He regarded Russia as a ruined country, rather after the style of Turkey, and the government of Russia as so bad that he never permitted himself to criticize its doings seriously, and yet he was a functionary of that government and a model marshal of nobility, and when he drove about he always wore the cockade of office and the cap with the red band. He considered human life only tolerable abroad, and went abroad to stay at every opportunity, and at the same time he carried on a complex and improved system of agriculture in Russia, and with extreme interest followed everything and knew everything that was being done in Russia. He considered the Russian peasant as occupying a stage of development intermediate between the ape and the man, and at the same time in the local assemblies no one was readier to shake hands with the peasants and listen to their opinion. He believed neither in God nor the devil, but was much concerned about the question of the improvement of the clergy and the maintenance of their revenues, and took special trouble to keep up the church in his village. On the woman question he was on the side of the extreme advocates of complete liberty for women, and especially their right to labor. But he lived with his wife on such terms that their affectionate childless home life was the admiration of everyone, and arranged his wife’s life so that she did nothing and could do nothing but share her husband’s efforts that her time should pass as happily and as agreeably as possible. If it had not been a characteristic of Levin’s to put the most favorable interpretation on people, Sviazhsky’s character would have presented no doubt or difficulty to him: he would have said to himself, “a fool or a knave,” and everything would have seemed clear. But he could not say “a fool,” because Sviazhsky was unmistakably clever, and moreover, a highly cultivated man, who was exceptionally modest over his culture. There was not a subject he knew nothing of. But he did not display his knowledge except when he was compelled to do so. Still less could Levin say that he was a knave, as Sviazhsky was unmistakably an honest, good-hearted, sensible man, who worked good-humoredly, keenly, and perseveringly at his work; he was held in high honor by everyone about him, and certainly he had never consciously done, and was indeed incapable of doing, anything base.

• From Querelle (1953)

  149 I QUERELLE ever add to th eir knowledge of it, but they found it engrossing nevertheless. \Vhat we want to say is that it was exactly this ignorance that left them in a slightly troubled state, indestruc tible by its very imprecision and haziness : unknown, finally, for lack of a name, yet visible in a thousand reflections. They were unanimo us in suspecting the existence of a universe that was both abominable and marvelous, and they felt themselves hovering on the brink of it. Their distance from that universe was, in fact, the same that separates you from the word you are trying to ren1ember, the one floating around at the back of your mind: ''I have it on the tip of my tongue." \Vhen they had to ta lk about Gil, they gave each one of those characteristics of his that reminded them, no matter how superficially, of what they knew about homosexuals, such a caricaturistic treatment that the result turned out to be a horrifyingly naturalistic image of a young male prostitute. They talked about the goings-on be tween Gil and Theo. "They were inseparable." ''But then they must have had some sort of argmnent. Maybe Gil had been doing a number with someone else ... " At first they never thought of mentioning Roger. Only when one ·of the detectives said: "And what about that young boy who was with Gil on th e afternoon of the murder?" they ca me up with their stories about Roger's visits to the building site. It was a great new vein to quarry. In their opinion, "those guys" were an amorphous bunch, not much to choose between them, and thus they considered it quite natural for an eighteen-year old youngster to blithely disengage himself from the arms of a forty-year-old 1nason to go and n1ake love to a child of fifteen. "You never saw him with a sailor?" Well, they weren't sure, but they supposed they had. It wasn't always so easy to distinguish people in the fog. But there were far too many sailors in the city of Brest for Gil not to hav� known several. Besides, he used to wear bell-bottom pants, like a sailor.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The supposed universality of human marriage—and the linked omnipresence of the nuclear family—is a case in point. A cornerstone of the standard model of human sexual evolution, the claim for this universal human tendency to marry appears to be beyond question or doubt—“unquestioningly correct” in Malinowski’s words. Though the tendency has been assumed since before Darwin, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers’s now-classic paper Parental Investment and Sexual Selection, published in 1972, consolidated the position of marriage as foundational to most theories of human sexual evolution.3 Recall that marriage, as defined by these theories, represents the fundamental exchange underlying human sexual evolution. In his BBC television series The Human Animal, Desmond Morris flatly declares, “The pair bond is the fundamental condition of the human species.” Michael Ghiglieri, biologist and protégé of Jane Goodall, writes, “Marriage…is the ultimate human contract. Men and women in all societies marry in nearly the same way. Marriage,” continues Ghiglieri, “is normally a ‘permanent’ mating between a man and a woman…with the woman nurturing the infants, while the man supports and defends them. The institution of marriage,” he concludes, “is older than states, churches, and laws.”4 Oh my. The fundamental condition? The ultimate human contract? Hard to argue with that. But let’s try, because slippery use of the word marriage in the anthropological literature has resulted in a huge headache for anyone trying to understand how marriage and the nuclear family really fit into human nature—if at all. The word, we’ll find, is used to refer to a whole slew of different relationships. In Female Choices, her survey of female primate sexuality, primatologist Meredith Small writes of the confusion that resulted when the term consortship drifted away from its original meaning—a striking parallel to the confusion over marriage. Small explains, “The word ‘consortship’ was used initially to define the close male-female sexual bond seen in savannah baboons and then usage of the word spread to the relationship of other mating pairs.” This semantic leap, says Small, was a mistake. “Researchers began to think that all primates form consortships, and they applied the word to any short or long, exclusive or nonexclusive mating.” This is a problem because “what was originally intended to describe a specific male-female association that lasted during the days surrounding ovulation became an all-inclusive word for mating…. Once a female is described as ‘being in consort,’ no one sees the importance of her regular copulations with other males.”5 Biologist Joan Roughgarden has noted the same problematic application of present-day human mating ideals to animals. She writes, “Sexual selection’s primary literature describes extrapair parentage as ‘cheating’ on the pair bond; the male is said to be ‘cuckolded’; offspring of extrapair parentage are said to be ‘illegitimate’; and females who do not participate in extrapair copulations are said to be ‘faithful.’ This judgmental terminology,” concludes Roughgarden, “amounts to applying a contemporary definition of Western marriage to animals.”6

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to long-term pair bond rather than marriage is no better. As Donald Symons put it, “The lexicon of the English language is woefully inadequate to reflect accurately the texture of human experience…. To shrink the present vocabulary to one phrase—pair-bond—and to imagine that in so doing one is being scientific…is simply to delude oneself.”9 On Matrimonial Whoredom Even if we overlook the ubiquitous linguistic confusion, people who consider themselves to be married can have strikingly different notions of what their marriage involves. The Aché of Paraguay say that a man and woman sleeping in the same hut are married. But if one of them takes his or her hammock to another hut, they’re not married anymore. That’s it. The original no-fault divorce. Among the !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) of Botswana, most girls marry several times before they settle into a long-term relationship. For the Curripaco of Brazil, marriage is a gradual, undefined process. One scientist who lived with them explains, “When a woman comes to hang her hammock next to her man and cook for him, then some younger Curripaco say they are married (kainukana). But older informants disagree; they say they are married only when they have demonstrated that they can support and sustain each other. Having a baby, and going through the fast together, cements a marriage.”10 In contemporary Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there is a form of marriage known as Nikah Misyar (normally translated as “traveler’s marriage”). According to a recent article from Reuters: Misyar appeals to men of reduced means, as well as men looking for a flexible arrangement—the husband can walk away from a misyar and can marry other women without informing his first wife. Wealthy Muslims sometimes contract misyar when on holiday to allow them to have sexual relations without breaching the tenets of their faith. Suhaila Zein al-Abideen, of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Medina, said almost 80 percent of misyar marriages end in divorce. “A woman loses all her rights. Even how often she sees her husband is decided by his moods,” she said.11

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This casual approach to what anthropologists call “marriage” is anything but unusual. Early explorers, whalers, and fur trappers of the frigid north found the Inuit to be jaw-droppingly hospitable hosts. Imagine their confused gratitude when they realized the village head-man was offering his own bed (wife included) to the weary, freezing traveler. In fact, the welcome Knud Rasmussen and others had stumbled into was a system of spouse exchange central to Inuit culture, with clear advantages in that unforgiving climate. Erotic exchange played an important role in linking families from distant villages in a durable web of certain aid in times of crisis. Though the harsh ecology of the Arctic dictated a much lower population density than the Amazon or even the Kalahari Desert, extra-pair sexual interaction helped cement bonds that offered the same insurance against unforeseen difficulties. None of this behavior is considered adultery by the people involved. But then, adultery is as slippery a term as marriage. It’s not just thy neighbor’s wife who can lead a man astray, but thine own as well. A well-known moral guide of the Middle Ages, the Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine), written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.” The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love his wife with his judgment, not his affections.”13 Vincent of Beauvais would have enjoyed the company of Daniel Defoe (of London), famous still as the author of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe scandalized Britain in 1727 with the publication of a nonfiction essay with the catchy title Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom. Apparently that title was a bit much. For a later edition, he toned it down to A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. This was no desert island adventure but a moralizing lecture on the physical and spiritual dangers of enjoying sex with one’s spouse. Defoe would have appreciated the Nayar people, native to southern India, who have a type of marriage that doesn’t necessarily include any sexual activity at all, has no expectation of permanence, and no cohabitation—indeed the bride may never see the groom again once the marriage ritual has been performed. But since divorce is not permitted in this system, the stability of these marriages must be exemplary, according to the anthropological surveys. As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universal: sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Neither “O” nor “I” was ever written so quickly as he took fire, and burnt, and dropt down all changed to ashes; and after he was thus dissolved upon the ground, the powder reunited of itself and at once resumed the former shape: thus by great sages ’tis confest the Phœnix 5 dies, and then is born again, when it approaches the five-hundredth year; in its life it eats no herb or grain, but only tears of incense and amomum; and nard and myrrh are its last swathings. And as one who falls, and knows not how, through force of Demon which drags him to the ground, or of other obstruction that fetters men; who, when he rises, looks fixedly round him, all bewildered by the great anguish he has undergone, and looking sighs: 6 such was the sinner when he rose. Power of God! O how severe, that showers such blows in vengeance! The Guide then asked him who he was; whereupon he answered: “I rained from Tuscany, short while ago, into this fierce gullet.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  No holts so rough or dense have those wild beasts, that hat the cultivated tracts, between Cecina and Corneto.1 Here the unseemly Harpies make their nests, who chased the Trojans from the Strophades2 with dismal note of future woe. Wide wings they have, and necks and faces human, feet with claws, and their large belly feathered; they make rueful cries on the strange trees. The kind Master began to say to me: “Before thou goest farther, know that thou art in the second round; and shalt be, until thou comest to the horrid sand. Therefore look well, and thou shalt sec things which would take away belief from my speech.” Already I heard wailings uttered on every side, and saw no one to make them: wherefore I, all bewildered, stood still. I think he thought that I was thinking so many voices came, amongst those stumps, from people who hid themselves on our account. Therefore the Master said: “If thou breakest off any little shoot from one of these plants, the thoughts, which thou hast, will all become defective.” Then I stretched my hand a little forward, and plucked a branchlet from a great thorn; and the trunk of it cried, “Why dost thou rend me?”3 And when it had grown dark with blood, it again began to cry: “Why dost thou tear me? hast thou no breath of pity? Men we were, and now are turned to trees: truly thy hand should be more merciful, had we been souls of serpents.” As a green brand, that is burning at one end, at the other drops, and hisses with the wind which is escaping: so from that broken splint, words and blood came forth together: whereat I let fall the top, and stood like one who is afraid. “If he, O wounded Spirit!” my Sage replied, “could have believed before, what he has seen only in my verse,4 he would not have stretched forth his hand against thee; but the incredibility of the thing made me prompt him to do what grieves myself. But tell him who thou wast; so that, to make thee some amends, he may refresh thy fame up in the world, to which he is permitted to return.” And the trunk: “Thou so allurest me with thy sweet words, that I cannot keep silent; and let it not seem burdensome to you, if I enlarge a little in discourse. I am he, who held both keys5 of Frederick’s heart, and turned them, locking and unlocking so softly, that from his secrets I excluded almost every other man; so great fidelity I bore to the glorious office, that I lost thereby both sleep and life. The harlet,6 that never from Caesar’s dwelling turned her adulterous eyes, common bane, and vice of courts, inflamed all minds against me; and these, being inflamed, so inflamed Augustus, that my joyous honours were changed to dismal sorrows.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Oh, yes, there’s a very interesting article here,” said Sviazhsky of the review Levin was holding in his hand. “It appears,” he went on, with eager interest, “that Friedrich was not, after all, the person chiefly responsible for the partition of Poland. It is proved....” And with his characteristic clearness, he summed up those new, very important, and interesting revelations. Although Levin was engrossed at the moment by his ideas about the problem of the land, he wondered, as he heard Sviazhsky: “What is there inside of him? And why, why is he interested in the partition of Poland?” When Sviazhsky had finished, Levin could not help asking: “Well, and what then?” But there was nothing to follow. It was simply interesting that it had been proved to be so and so. But Sviazhsky did not explain, and saw no need to explain why it was interesting to him. “Yes, but I was very much interested by your irritable neighbor,” said Levin, sighing. “He’s a clever fellow, and said a lot that was true.” “Oh, get along with you! An inveterate supporter of serfdom at heart, like all of them!” said Sviazhsky. “Whose marshal you are.” “Yes, only I marshal them in the other direction,” said Sviazhsky, laughing. “I’ll tell you what interests me very much,” said Levin. “He’s right that our system, that’s to say of rational farming, doesn’t answer, that the only thing that answers is the money-lender system, like that meek-looking gentleman’s, or else the very simplest.... Whose fault is it?” “Our own, of course. Besides, it’s not true that it doesn’t answer. It answers with Vassiltchikov.” “A factory....” “But I really don’t know what it is you are surprised at. The people are at such a low stage of rational and moral development, that it’s obvious they’re bound to oppose everything that’s strange to them. In Europe, a rational system answers because the people are educated; it follows that we must educate the people—that’s all.” “But how are we to educate the people?” “To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools, and schools.” “But you said yourself the people are at such a low stage of material development: what help are schools for that?” “Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to the sick man—You should try purgative medicine. Taken: worse. Try leeches. Tried them: worse. Well, then, there’s nothing left but to pray to God. Tried it: worse. That’s just how it is with us. I say political economy; you say—worse. I say socialism: worse. Education: worse.” “But how do schools help matters?” “They give the peasant fresh wants.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless strain on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew. “Marvelous!” Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass. “How are you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia’s approach, where woman, _das ewig Weibliche,_ enters into conflict with fate. Isn’t it?” “You mean ... what has Cordelia to do with it?” Levin asked timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King Lear. “Cordelia comes in ... see here!” said Pestsov, tapping his finger on the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it to Levin. Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made haste to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare that were printed on the back of the program. “You can’t follow it without that,” said Pestsov, addressing Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had no one to talk to. In the _entr’acte_ Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. “These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder,” said Levin. The comparison pleased him, but he could not remember whether he had not used the same phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he said it he felt confused. Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art. The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov, who was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time, condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting. As he went out Levin met many more acquaintances, with whom he talked of politics, of music, and of common acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had utterly forgotten to call upon.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled aspen beams of the new thatch roof. He gazed through the open door in which the dry bitter dust of the thrashing whirled and played, at the grass of the thrashing floor in the sunlight and the fresh straw that had been brought in from the barn, then at the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in under the roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the crevices of the doorway, then at the peasants bustling in the dark, dusty barn, and he thought strange thoughts. “Why is it all being done?” he thought. “Why am I standing here, making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before me? What is that old Matrona, my old friend, toiling for? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the fire)” he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the uneven, rough floor. “Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or in ten years she won’t; they’ll bury her, and nothing will be left either of her or of that smart girl in the red jacket, who with that skillful, soft action shakes the ears out of their husks. They’ll bury her and this piebald horse, and very soon too,” he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him. “And they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher with his curly beard full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders—they will bury him. He’s untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what’s more, it’s not them alone—me they’ll bury too, and nothing will be left. What for?” He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how much they thrashed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as to judge by it the task to set for the day. “It’ll soon be one, and they’re only beginning the third sheaf,” thought Levin. He went up to the man that was feeding the machine, and shouting over the roar of the machine he told him to put it in more slowly. “You put in too much at a time, Fyodor. Do you see—it gets choked, that’s why it isn’t getting on. Do it evenly.” Fyodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted something in response, but still went on doing it as Levin did not want him to.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The cloven tail assumed the figure that was lost in the other; and its skin grew soft, the other’s hard. I saw the arms enter at the armpits, and the two feet of the brute, which were short, lengthen themselves as much as those arms were shortened. Then the two hinder feet, twisted together, became the member which man conceals; and the wretch from his had two thrust forth. Whilst the smoke with a new colour veils them both, and generates on one part hair, and strips it from another, the one rose upright, and prostrate the other fell, not therefore turning the impious lights, under which they mutually exchanged visages. He that was erect, drew his towards the temples; and from the too much matter that went thither, ears came out of the smooth cheeks; that which went not back, but was retained, of its superfluity formed a nose, and enlarged the lips to a fit size. He that lay prone, thrusts forward his sharpened visage, and draws back his ears into the head, as the snail does its horns; and his tongue, which was before united and apt for speech, cleaves itself; and in the other the forked tongue recloses; and the smoke now rests. The soul that had become a brute, fled hissing along the valley, and after it the other talking and sputtering. Then he turned his novel shoulder towards it, and said to the other: “Buoso shall run crawling, as I have done, along this road!” Thus I beheld the seventh ballast change and rechange; and here let the novelty excuse me, if my pen goes aught astray. And though my eyes were somewhat perplexed, and my mind dismayed, those could not flee so covertly, But that I well distinguished Puccio Sciancato: and it was he alone, of the three companions that first came, who was not changed; the other was he whom thou, Gaville, lamentest. 1. This obscene and insulting gesture, the origin of which has been variously explained, was made by inserting the thumb between the index and middle finger. 2. Pistoia was said to have been founded by the remnants of Catiline’s army. 3. Referring to Capaneus, for whom see Canto xiv. 4. Cacus was a monster inhabiting a cave in Mount Aventine and noted for his thefts. He dragged into his cave, by their tails, some of the oxen that Hercules had stolen from Geryon, and was slain by that hero. In the mode of his death Dante follows Livy’s account, but in other respects Virgil served as his model. Cacus was not really a Centaur: Dante was evidently led astray by Virgil. (See Canto xii.) 5. The five noble Florentines punished in this circle are (a) three spirits: Agnello of the Brunelleschi, a Ghibelline family; Buoso degli Abati, or, perhaps, de’ Donati (if the latter is intended, he is identical with the Buoso mentioned in Canto xxx); and Puccio Sciancato (“The Lame”) de’ Galigai; (b) Cianfa de’ Donati, who is merged with Agnello; (c) Francesco de’ Cavalcanti who assumes Buoso’s human shape, while Buoso becomes a serpent. He was slain by the people of Gaville (a village in the upper Val d’Arno), the murderers being summarily dealt with by his kinsmen. 6. Sabellus and Nasidius, two soldiers of Cato’s army, who, in their march across the Libyan desert, were stung by serpents, with the result that the former was reduced to a kind of puddle, while the latter swelled to such a size that his coat of mail gave way (Lucan, Pharsalia, ix). The transformations of Cadmus and Arethusa are narrated by Ovid in Metam. iv and v.