Confusion

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 My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But how had I found him? Or had he found me? I collected the photos and stuffed them under the sofa cushion, then got up to peek into my bedroom to make sure nobody was there. All my bedding was in a heap on the floor, the mattress bare. I stepped closer to make sure there was no human-sized bloodstain, nobody wrapped up in the sheets, no corpse tucked under the bed. I opened the closet and found nobody bound and gagged. Just the little plastic Baggies of Victoria’s Secret lingerie spilled out. Nothing was amiss. I was alone. Back in the living room, my phone was dead on the windowsill next to a single sneaker I’d used as an ashtray. I snagged down a slat in the blinds to look out the window. The snow was already beginning to fall. That was good, I thought—I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine. And I wouldn’t take any more Infermiterol, at least for a while. It was working against my goal of doing nothing. I plugged my phone in to charge and threw the sneaker away in the kitchen. The trash was filled with the brittle peels of clementines and cloudy plastic packaging from single-serving slices of cheese, which I couldn’t remember buying or eating. The fridge contained only the small, light wood crate the clementines came in, and a second gallon jug of distilled water. I took off the white fur and the bustier and the fishnets and went to the bathroom to run the hot water in the shower. My toenails were painted lilac, my previously flaky calloused soles now smooth and soft. I used the toilet and watched a vein throb in my thigh. What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing? It seemed preposterous. Had Reva convinced me to go “enjoy myself” or something just as idiotic? I peed, and when I wiped myself, it was slick. I had recently been aroused, it seemed. Who had aroused me? I remembered nothing. A wave of nausea made me lurch over and regurgitate an acrid globule of phlegm, which I spat into the sink. From the sandy feel of my mouth, I was expecting to see granules of dirt or the grit of a crushed pill speckling my saliva. Instead, it was pink glitter. I opened the medicine cabinet and took two Valiums and two Ativans, guzzled water from the tap. When I righted myself, someone appeared in the mirror as if through a porthole window, and it startled me. My own startled face startled me. Mascara had streaked down my cheeks like a masquerade mask. Remnants of bright pink lipstick stained the outer edges and corners of my lips. I brushed my teeth and tried my best to scrub the makeup off.

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

  My point here isn’t to knock the mental-health profession but to illustrate the false confidence that one’s perceptions of other people’s mental states are—or ever can be—“right.” It comes from the classical view, which proposes that Dan broadcasts anger with a distinct fingerprint and the therapist detects it, even if Dan is unaware. If you want to gain mastery at perceiving other people’s emotional experiences, you must let go of this essentialist assumption. What happened during Dan’s minute in therapy? He constructed an experience of concentration, and the therapist constructed a perception of anger. Both constructions were real, not in the objective sense but in the social sense. Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism.45 To improve at emotion perception, we must all give up the fiction that we know how other people feel. When you and a friend disagree about feelings, don’t assume that your friend is wrong like Dan’s ex-therapist did. Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right. So, if our perceptions are just guesses, how do we ever communicate with each other? If you tell me that you’re proud of your child’s accomplishments in school, and “Pride” is a population of diverse instances with no consistent fingerprint, how can I know which “Pride” you mean? (This question doesn’t arise in the classical view, where pride has a distinct essence; you simply broadcast pride and I recognize it.) You and I communicate emotion, in the face of huge variability, by way of the brain’s predictive machinery. Your emotions are guided by your predictions. And as I observe you, the emotions I perceive are guided by my predictions. Emotional communication happens, therefore, when you and I predict and categorize in synchrony.46 Scientists and bartenders know that people synchronize in various ways when they communicate, especially if they like or trust each other. I nod, then you nod. You touch my arm and a moment later I touch yours. Our nonverbal behaviors coordinate. There’s also biological synchrony; a mother’s and child’s heart rates will synchronize if they are securely bonded, and the same can happen to anyone during an engaging conversation. The mechanism is still a mystery. I suspect it’s because their breathing synchronizes as they unconsciously observe each other’s chests rising and falling. When I was a training therapist, I learned to intentionally synchronize my breathing with my clients’ to prepare them for hypnosis.47

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  “All I can say,” you say, “is that a lot of people are going to read this as rape.” “But it isn’t,” he says, weakly, sounding more like he’s trying to convince himself than you. “It wasn’t.” The third story comes to you in a creative nonfiction class. The narrator gets very drunk at a party. She kisses one guy and another kisses her. She runs away and bumps into an acquaintance, who she barely recognizes through a haze of cheap beer. He is aggressive, putting his penis inside of her while she tries to stammer, “wait, wait.” You start the workshop by asking your students to give a quick summary of the piece. Someone offers, “It’s about a girl who goes to a party and gets drunk and hooks up with a bunch of dudes.” Interesting. “Does anyone have anything to add or a different read?” The students shake their heads. “Well,” you offer, “I think this first part is a hookup, and the second part, maybe a misunderstanding, but I read this last section pretty straightforwardly as being assault.” All of the students look down, rereading the last section. Some of them tilt their heads, as if to say, Hm. The essay never uses the word rape, but it does say “wrong.” It says “wasted” and “sick” and “dizzy” and “vomit.” It says “ignore.” How is it possible they haven’t seen this? How is it possible they are learning about consent from their teacher? The author of the essay is forbidden to speak by the rules of the workshop, but you study her as she takes notes in silence. Did she know? you wonder. Does she know now? YOU RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN “I AM A BODY” AND “I have a body,” but you are unable to resolve it. “Have” implies that this body is just a possession, that it can be lost or thrown away. That you can do without it. It implies, perhaps, that someone else could have your body and that your body would be not your own. That it would belong to another. That doesn’t feel quite right. But “am” doesn’t seem right either. To “be” a body suggests that you are only a body. You are meat and some blood. You are hard bones and flexing cartilage. You are tangled veins and skin. Is that all, though? You stand in front of the full-length mirror on your closet door and take inventory. Here are your knees; there are two of them. Two elbows. A chin. A torso with breasts that are heavy with milk. Feet. Hands. Knuckles. Two earlobes. Ten toenails. Several dime-sized bruises. Thousands and thousands of hairs. There are things you can’t see, but you know they’re there. Two lungs. A liver. The stacked cups of your backbone. Your heart you saw once on an ultrasound machine. Your womb you’ve seen four times, but never when it was empty. Nerves. Ball joints. The intricate pleating of your brain.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And she had said that a small percentage of people taking the kind of medications she prescribed for me reported having hallucinations during their waking hours. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter. Hallucinating is completely harmless. And it happens mostly to Asians. What, may I ask, is your ethnic background?” “English, French, Swedish, German.” “You’ll be fine.” The LIRR wasn’t exactly celestial, but I wondered if I might be lucid dreaming. I looked down at my hands. It was hard to move them. They smelled like cigarettes and perfume. I blew on them, petted the cool white fur of the coat, made fists and punched down at my thighs. I hummed. It all felt real enough. I took stock of myself. I wasn’t bleeding. I hadn’t pissed myself. I wasn’t wearing any socks. My teeth felt gummy, my mouth tasted like peanuts and cigarettes, though I found no cigarettes in my coat pockets. My debit card and keys were in the back pocket of my jeans. At my feet was a Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s. Inside the bag, a size two Theory black skirt suit and a Calvin Klein matching nude bra and panty set. A small velveteen jewelry box contained an ugly topaz pendant necklace set in fake gold. On the seat beside me was an enormous bouquet of white roses. A square envelope was tucked beneath it, my handwriting on the front: “For Reva.” Beside the flowers, there was a People magazine, a half-empty water bottle, and the wrappers from two Snickers bars. I took a sip from the water bottle and discovered it was filled with gin. Out the window, the sun throbbed pale and yellow on the horizon. Was the sun coming up, or was it setting? Which way was the train headed? I looked at my hands again, at the gray line of dirt under my chewed-up fingernails. When a man in uniform passed, I stopped him. I was too shy to ask the important questions—“What day is it? Where am I going? Is it night or morning?”—so I asked him what the next stop on the train would be instead. “Bethpage coming up. 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.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And during this lull in the drama of sleep, I entered a stranger, less certain reality. Days slipped by obliquely, with little to remember, just the familiar dent in the sofa cushions, a froth of scum in the bathroom sink like some lunar landscape, craters bubbling on the porcelain when I washed my face or brushed my teeth. But that was all that went on. And I might have just dreamt up the scum. Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream. Three IN NOVEMBER, however, an unfortunate shift occurred. The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion—I began to do things while I was unconscious. I’d fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor. Furniture got rearranged. I started to misplace things. I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I’d go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I’d acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I’d been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted? The Egyptians were generally indifferent and returned the standard chitchat or flat out ignored me, so it was hard to tell. It concerned me that I was venturing out of the apartment while unconscious. It seemed antithetical to my hibernation project. If I committed a crime or got hit by a bus, the chance for a new and better life would be lost. If my unconscious excursions went only as far as the bodega around the corner, that was okay, I thought. I could live. The worst that could happen was I’d make a fool of myself in front of the Egyptians and would have to start going to the deli a few blocks farther down First Avenue. I prayed that my subconscious understood the value of convenience. Amen.

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

  My internal critic taunted me: not everyone is cut out to be a scientist. When I looked closely at all the evidence I had collected, however, I noticed something consistently odd across all eight experiments. Many of my subjects appeared to be unwilling, or unable, to distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. Instead, they had indicated feeling both or neither; rarely did a subject report feeling just one. This made no sense. Everybody knows that anxiety and depression, when measured as emotions, are decidedly different. When you’re anxious, you feel worked up, jittery, like you’re worried something bad will happen. In depression you feel miserable and sluggish; everything seems horrible and life is a struggle. These emotions should leave your body in completely opposite physical states, and so they should feel different and be trivial for any healthy person to tell apart. Nevertheless, the data declared that my test subjects weren’t doing so. The question was . . . why? As it turned out, my experiments weren’t failing after all. My first “botched” experiment actually revealed a genuine discovery—that people often did not distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. My next seven experiments hadn’t failed either; they’d replicated the first one. I also began noticing the same effect lurking in other scientists’ data. After completing my Ph.D. and becoming a university professor, I continued pursuing this mystery. I directed a lab that asked hundreds of test subjects to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months as they went about their lives. My students and I inquired about a wide variety of emotional experiences, not just anxious and depressed feelings, to see if the discovery generalized. These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like “angry,” “sad,” and “afraid” to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing. Some test subjects made fine distinctions with their word use: for example, they experienced sadness and fear as qualitatively different. Other subjects, however, lumped together words like “sad” and “afraid” and “anxious” and “depressed” to mean “I feel crappy” (or, more scientifically, “I feel unpleasant”). The effect was the same for pleasant emotions like happiness, calmness, and pride. After testing over seven hundred American subjects, we discovered that people vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences. A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity. 2 Here’s where the classical view of emotion entered the picture. Emotional granularity, in terms of this view, must be about accurately reading your internal emotional states.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind I happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole matter much thought really, supposed that mural, name and title had all been derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know. In consequence I was under the impression (all this quite casually, you understand, quite outside any orbit of importance) that the accursed playlet belonged to the type of whimsey for juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times, such as Hansel and Gretel by Richard Roe, or The Sleeping Beauty by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor’s New Clothes by Maurice Vermont and Marion Rumpelmeyer—all this to be found in any Plays for School Actors or Let’s Have a Play! In other words, I did not know—and would not have cared, if I did—that actually The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and technically original composition which had been produced for the first time only three or four months ago by a highbrow group in New York. To me—inasmuch as I could judge from my charmer’s part—it seemed to be a pretty dismal kind of fancy work, with echoes from Lenormand and Maeterlinck and various quiet British dreamers.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  But I don’t remember getting into the water, bathing, washing my hair. I don’t remember leaving the house, walking around, getting into a cab, going places, or doing anything else I may have done that night or the next day or the day after that. As if I’d just blinked, I woke up on an LIRR train wearing jeans and my old running shoes and a long white fur coat, the theme from Tootsie running through my head. Four DR. TUTTLE HAD WARNED ME of “extended nightmares” and “clock-true mind trips,” “paralysis of the imagination,” “perceived space-time anomalies,” “dreams that feel like forays across the multiverse,” and “trips to ulterior dimensions,” et cetera. And she had said that a small percentage of people taking the kind of medications she prescribed for me reported having hallucinations during their waking hours. “They’re mostly pleasant visions, ethereal spirits, celestial light patterns, angels, friendly ghosts. Sprites. Nymphs. Glitter. Hallucinating is completely harmless. And it happens mostly to Asians. What, may I ask, is your ethnic background?” “English, French, Swedish, German.” “You’ll be fine.” The LIRR wasn’t exactly celestial, but I wondered if I might be lucid dreaming. I looked down at my hands. It was hard to move them. They smelled like cigarettes and perfume. I blew on them, petted the cool white fur of the coat, made fists and punched down at my thighs. I hummed. It all felt real enough. I took stock of myself. I wasn’t bleeding. I hadn’t pissed myself. I wasn’t wearing any socks. My teeth felt gummy, my mouth tasted like peanuts and cigarettes, though I found no cigarettes in my coat pockets. My debit card and keys were in the back pocket of my jeans. At my feet was a Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s. Inside the bag, a size two Theory black skirt suit and a Calvin Klein matching nude bra and panty set. A small velveteen jewelry box contained an ugly topaz pendant necklace set in fake gold. On the seat beside me was an enormous bouquet of white roses. A square envelope was tucked beneath it, my handwriting on the front: “For Reva.” Beside the flowers, there was a People magazine, a half-empty water bottle, and the wrappers from two Snickers bars. I took a sip from the water bottle and discovered it was filled with gin. Out the window, the sun throbbed pale and yellow on the horizon. Was the sun coming up, or was it setting? Which way was the train headed? I looked at my hands again, at the gray line of dirt under my chewed-up fingernails. When a man in uniform passed, I stopped him. I was too shy to ask the important questions—“What day is it? Where am I going? Is it night or morning?”—so I asked him what the next stop on the train would be instead. “Bethpage coming up.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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)

  It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious. My first experiment in grad school was simply to replicate this well-known phenomenon before building on it to test my own hypotheses. In the course of this experiment, I asked a large number of volunteers if they felt anxious or depressed using well-established checklists of symptoms.1 I’d done more complicated experiments as an undergraduate student, so this one should have been a piece of cake. Instead, it crashed and burned. My volunteers did not report anxious or depressed feelings in the expected pattern. So I tried to replicate a second published experiment, and it failed too. I tried again, over and over, each experiment taking months. After three years, all I’d achieved was the same failure eight times in a row. In science, experiments often don’t replicate, but eight consecutive failures is an impressive record. My internal critic taunted me: not everyone is cut out to be a scientist. When I looked closely at all the evidence I had collected, however, I noticed something consistently odd across all eight experiments. Many of my subjects appeared to be unwilling, or unable, to distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. Instead, they had indicated feeling both or neither; rarely did a subject report feeling just one. This made no sense. Everybody knows that anxiety and depression, when measured as emotions, are decidedly different. When you’re anxious, you feel worked up, jittery, like you’re worried something bad will happen. In depression you feel miserable and sluggish; everything seems horrible and life is a struggle. These emotions should leave your body in completely opposite physical states, and so they should feel different and be trivial for any healthy person to tell apart. Nevertheless, the data declared that my test subjects weren’t doing so. The question was . . . why? As it turned out, my experiments weren’t failing after all. My first “botched” experiment actually revealed a genuine discovery—that people often did not distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. My next seven experiments hadn’t failed either; they’d replicated the first one. I also began noticing the same effect lurking in other scientists’ data. After completing my Ph.D. and becoming a university professor, I continued pursuing this mystery. I directed a lab that asked hundreds of test subjects to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months as they went about their lives. My students and I inquired about a wide variety of emotional experiences, not just anxious and depressed feelings, to see if the discovery generalized.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I didn't quite see the importance of it—I tried to do justice to Paul's sense of a moral conundrum whilst wondering who in the busy outside world gave a fuck about Edgard Orst anyway. Who were the Orst admirers? I imagined them like the fans of some eccentric minor composer, the Delius-nuts who turned out when my father did A Mass of Life at the Fairfield Hall—snuff-stained old sex-maniacs who sat conducting in their laps and collected bulging leather shopping-bags from the cloak-room afterwards. You couldn't tell from the rare bewintered visitors to the Museum, but the Orstians must be a similarly dodgy lot, joss-scented fantasists, nineties queens in velvet—perhaps still flared—suits. It was fairly clear to me that Paul himself wasn't one of them. He had admitted yesterday that Orst was something of a come-down after Rembrandt, that brilliant though he could be he lacked the range and sympathy of a major artist, that his was a "world of impossibilities". But that only seemed to make his personal loyalty firmer. I thought about what he'd said of their meetings, though in retrospect his words seemed cautious and inconclusive: Orst and his last days remained as yet in the deep shadow of his reticence. I felt sure some primary promise had been made to the blind old man by this clever teenager who came to talk to him or (as Helene had evoked it for me) to go through the print-drawers describing the pictures. Paul had come back to him decades later without much enthusiasm, but it may have seemed like destiny. There was a deep slow tempo to it, the half-hidden line of another life, that demanded respect and acceptance, and could never be changed. On reflection I saw that yesterday's lesson had been as much about the pleasure of having a pupil as about Orst's techniques and preoccupations. It wasn't that Paul was lonely exactly, but that the painter's secrets were offered, very deftly and instructively, as symbolic of secrets—or not even secrets, discomforts—of his own. There was a sense, as he locked the nude pictures back in the drawer, that something else had been revealed; and he gave me an optimistic smile. I was surprised, slow-witted, had the feeling of some benign plan unfolding in which I played a useful part without knowing quite what it was—the younger person who mysteriously performs what an older one despairs of. Not that I minded—I enjoyed being distracted by the Orst world and its nice problems, it had become a wonderful shadowy refuge from my own. I stepped into the Museum's inner glass lobby with an expectation of comfort and bookish peace.. Behind the table, with the postcards and cash-box, sat, not the pleasant student of the past few days but the repellently spruce figure of. . .I found I'd completely suppressed his name, for some reason Rex Stout came to mind, in the second or two that I stopped dead, wishing it wasn't true.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Men sought to co-opt their children as allies, to help bring the woman back. Often these men found a receptive audience for their pleas. Children tend to sympathize with the parent who wants the marriage restored. They identify with the father’s distress and come to feel that he is the aggrieved one, even when they have witnessed their mother being hurt or were themselves beaten or kicked. When a father begs his children to help bring his wife home, the children can be greatly moved by the transformation of the powerful man to the sad woebegone daddy. In this they are not unlike many abused women who take the man back again and again, out of pity or love, saying, “He didn’t mean to hurt me. He needs me.” Courts typically regard a child’s relationship with the father as being entirely separate from any assaults on the mother. Husbands who beat their wives are not barred from visiting their children. In most states they can still obtain joint custody, although in an increasing number this is no longer possible. The dominant perspective of the courts and mediators is that the child should have access to both parents after the breakup and that parent-child contact should resemble their predivorce relationship as much as possible. Basically it’s assumed that if the father attacked the mother, such violence is irrelevant to the child’s conscience formation or any other aspect of his future development. So following divorce, the woman no longer comes into contact with her ex-husband, except when children are exchanged within visiting arrangements, but the children are in regular contact with the man who beat her. According to the children when they were young and after they’d reached adulthood, no single father discussed or bothered to explain his past violent behavior during the visits. Nor were they instructed to do so by the courts or the mediators. Many didn’t even admit that they had been violent. Some said that maybe they had hit the children’s mother just once. Others denied it completely. Not one father said that he was sorry. No single father admitted that his behavior was wrong. Not one tried to convey any moral principles to his children. This vehement or blanket denial of events that the children had seen with their own eyes was terribly confusing. As some told me later, their pitiful confrontation—“But Daddy, I saw you!”—was met with ice-cold stares. Such children were unable to trust their own observations and withdrew in anguish with an impaired sense of reality and conscience. Since the mothers often did not discuss the violence either, the child’s traumatic experience was never touched. To compound matters, this conspiracy of silence was reinforced by court policy. Judges and mediators are often hostile to allegations of domestic violence, which almost always come from the mother. They may consider these accusations vengeful or manipulative strategies to withhold the child.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In her he has found all the antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere. This much is certain: as a performance it's like nothing you ever saw before in your life. We have already enjoyed it on two evenings." —FLORA FRASER, EMMA, LADY HAMILTON For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old- established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. . . . • ... There is one more point of general application which I should like to add. . . . This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary 302 • The Art of Seduction Joseph discussed the war with Turkey. Joseph reiterated his concerns. Sud- denly Potemkin interrupted: "I have 100,000 troops waiting for me to say 'Go!' " At that moment the windows of the palace were flung open, and to the sounds of booming cannons they saw lines of troops as far as the eye could see, and a fleet of ships filling the harbor. Awed by the sight, images of Eastern European cities retaken from the Turks dancing in his mind, Joseph II finally signed the treaty. Catherine was ecstatic, and her love for Potemkin reached new heights. He had made her dreams come true. Catherine never suspected that almost everything she had seen was pure fakery, perhaps the most elaborate illusion ever conjured up by one man. Interpretation. In the four years that he had been governor of the Crimea, Potemkin had accomplished little, for this backwater would take decades to improve. But in the few months before Catherine's visit he had done the following: every building that faced the road or the shore was given a fresh coat of paint; artificial trees were set up to hide unseemly spots in the view; broken roofs were repaired with flimsy boards painted to look like tile; everyone the party would see was instructed to wear their best clothes and look happy; everyone old and infirm was to stay indoors. Floating in their palaces down the Dnieper, the imperial entourage saw brand-new villages, but most of the buildings were only facades. The herds of cattle were shipped from great distances, and were moved at night to fresh fields along the route. The dancing peasants were trained for the entertainments; after each one they were loaded into carts and hurriedly transported to a new downriver location, as were the marching soldiers who seemed to be every- where. The gardens of the new palaces were filled with transplanted trees that died a few days later.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They took a box, where they could talk. She reassured him the child was not his. She said he only wanted her now because she belonged to another, because he could not have her. No, he said, he had changed; he would do anything to get her back. Disconcert- ingly, at moments her eyes seemed to be flirting with him. But then she seemed to be about to cry, and rested her head on his shoulder—only to get up immediately, as if realizing this was a mistake. This was their last meeting, she said, and quickly fled. Don Juan was beside himself. She was playing with him; she was a coquette. He had only been claiming to have changed, but perhaps it was true: no woman had ever treated him this way before. He would never have allowed it. For the next few nights Don Juan slept poorly. All he could think about was Cristeta. He had nightmares about killing her husband, about growing old and being alone. It was all too much. He had to leave town. He sent her a goodbye note, and to his amazement, she replied: she wanted to see him, she had something to tell him. By now he was too weak to resist. As she had requested, he met her on a bridge, at night. This time she made no effort to control herself: yes, she still loved Don Juan, and was ready to run away with him. But he should come to her house tomorrow, in broad day- light, and take her away. There could be no secrecy. Beside himself with joy, Don Juan agreed to her demands. The next day he showed up at her palace at the appointed hour, and asked for Señora Martinez. There was no one there by that name, said the woman at the door. Don Juan insisted: her name is Cristeta. Ah, Cristeta, the woman said: she lives in the back, with the other tenants. Confused, Don Juan went to the back of the palace. There he thought he saw her son, playing in the street in dirty clothes. But no, he said to himself, it must be some other child. He came to Cristeta's door, and instead of her servant, Cristeta herself opened it. He entered. It was the room of a poor person. Hanging on im- provised racks, however, were Cristeta's elegant clothes. As if in a dream, he sat down, dumbfounded, and listened as Cristeta revealed the truth. Don Juan: Arminta, listen to the truth—-for are not women friends of truth? I am a nobleman, heir to the ancient family of the Tenorios, the conquerors of Seville. After the king, my father is the most powerful and considered man at court. . . . By chance I happened on this road and saw you. Love sometimes behaves in a manner that surprises even himself. . . . • Arminta: I don't know if what you're saying is truth or lying rhetoric.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all? The trip to London proved purgatorial. First, there were my companions in the compartment: a stuffy American professor, his dowdy wife, and their drooly baby. The husband led off with the interrogation. Was I married? What answer could I make to that? I didn’t really know anymore. It might have been an easy enough situation for a more taciturn person, but I am one of those morons who feels compelled to spill the story of her life to any passerby who asks. It took all my will power to say quite simply: “No!” “Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?” I smiled. Isadora Sphinx. Should I begin a little tirade about marriage and the oppression of women? Should I plead for sympathy, saying my lover dumped me? Should I make a brave front of it and say my husband drowned in jargon in Vienna? Should I hint at lesbian mysteries beyond their ken? “I don’t know,” I said, smiling hard enough to crack my face. Change the subject fast, I thought, before I tell them. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s self-concealment. “Where are you headed for?” I asked brightly. They were off to London for a vacation. The husband talked and the wife fed the baby. The husband issued policy statements and the wife kept her mouth shut. “Why isn’t a nice girl like you single?” I thought. Oh shut up Isadora, don’t meddle.... The train wheels seemed to be saying: shut up...shut up...shut up.... The husband was a chemistry professor. He was teaching on a Fulbright at Toulouse. He really liked the French system. “Discipline,” he said. We needed more of it in America—didn’t I agree? “Not really,” I said. He looked vexed. Actually, I informed him, I’d taught in college myself. “Really?” This gave me new status. I might be a curious lone female, but at least I was not a bottle-washer like his wife. “Don’t you agree that our American educational system has misconstrued the meaning of democracy?” he asked, all pomposity and bile. “No,” I said, “I don’t agree.” Oh Isadora, you are getting crusty. When was the last time you said “I don’t agree...” and said it so calmly? I’m beginning to like me quite a lot, I thought. “We haven’t really figured out how to make democracy work in the schools,” I said, “but that isn’t reason enough to go back to an elitist system like they have here...” (and I gestured briefly to the dark countryside beyond the window) “...after all, America is the first society in history to confront these problems with a heterogeneous population.

• 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 Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And he thought it would make you love me less!" "He was wrong, so wrong!" Beauty said, but she sat up and put her hands to the sides of her head in consternation. She loved them both, that was the misery of it, the Crown Prince whom even now she could envision with his lean white face and those immaculate hands and those dark eyes so full of turbulence and dissatisfaction. It had been an agony to her that he had not taken her to his bed after the Bridle Path. "I want to help you because I love you," Alexi said. "I want to guide you. You are in rebellion." "Yes, but not always," she admitted in a vague whisper, looking off, as if she were suddenly ashamed to admit it. "I have...so many feelings." "Tell me," he said with authority. "Well, tonight...the rose, the last little pink but...whey did I pick it up in my teeth and offer it to Lady Juliana? Why? She had been so cruel to me." "You wanted to please her. She is your mistress. You are a slave. The highest thing that you can do is please, so you sought to do it, and not only in response to her paddling and her commands, but in that moment of your own will." "Ah, yes," said Beauty, that was it. "And...on the Bridle Path, how can I confess it, I felt some release in myself as if I were no longer locked in struggle, I was just a slave, a poor, desperate slave who must strive, strive purely." "You are eloquent," he said with feeling. "You know much already." "But I don't want to feel this. I want to rebel in my heart, I want to steel myself against them. They torment me endlessly. My Prince, were he the only one..." "But even if he were, he would find new ways to torment you, and he is not the only one. But tell me why you don't wish to give in to them." "Well, surely you know. Didn't you rebel? Don't you? Why, Leon said of you there is a core in you which no one touches." "Nonsense. I merely know and accept everything. There is no resistance." "But how can it be?" "Beauty, you must learn it. You must accept and yield, and then you shall see everything is simple." "I would not be here with you if I yielded because the Prince..." "Yes, you could be here with me. I adore my Queen and I am here with you. I love you both. I yield to that entirely as well as everything else and even the knowledge I may be punished. And when I am punished, I shall dread it, and suffer it and understand it and accept it.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  By slowly isolating your victims, you make them more vulnerable to your influence. Take them away from their normal milieu, friends, family, home. Give them the sense of being marginalized, in limbo—they are leaving one world behind and entering another. Once isolated like this, they have no outside support, and in their confusion they are easily led astray. Lure the seduced into your lair, where nothing is familiar. xvi • Contents Phase Three: The Precipice—Deepening the Effect Through Extreme Measures 16 Prove Yourself page 321 Most people want to be seduced. If they resist your efforts, it is probably because you ham' not gone far enough to allay their doubts—about your motives, the depth of your feelings, and so on. One well-timed action that shows how far you are willing to go to win them over will dis- pel their doubts. Do not worry about looking foolish or making a mistake—any kind of deed that is self-sacrificing and for your targets' sake will so overwhelm their emotions, they won't notice anything else. 17 Effect a Regression page 333 People who have experienced a certain kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it. The deepest-rooted and most pleasurable memories are usually those from earliest child- hood, and are often unconsciously associated with a parental figure. Bring your targets back to that point by placing yourself in the oedipal triangle and positioning them as the needy child. Unaware of the cause of their emotional response, they will fall in love with you. 18 Stir Up the Transgressive and Taboo page 349 There are always social limits on what one can do. Some of these, the most elemental taboos, go back centuries; others are more superficial, simply defining polite and acceptable behavior. Making your targets feel that you are leading them past either kind of limit is immensely se- ductive. People yearn to explore their dark side. Once the desire to transgress draws your tar- gets to you, it will be hard for them to stop. Take them farther than they imagined—the shared feeling of guilt and complicity will create a powerful bond. 19 Use Spiritual Lures page 359 Everyone has doubts and insecurities—about their body, their self-worth, their sexuality. If your seduction appeals exclusively to the physical, you will stir up these doubts and make your targets self-conscious. Instead, lure them out of their insecurities by making them focus on something sublime and spiritual: a religious experience, a lofty work of art, the occult. Lost in a spiritual mist, the target will feel light and uninhibited. Deepen the effect of your seduction by making its sexual culmination seem like the spiritual union of two souls. 20 Mix Pleasure with Pain page 369 The greatest mistake in seduction is being too nice.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Why don’t you go already?” “Where are you going? Where can I find you?” “I’m going to the airport. I’m going home. Maybe I’ll go to London and see if I can cash in the charter flight ticket or maybe I’ll go right home. I don’t care. What do you care?” “I care. I care.” “I’ll bet.” And with that I picked up my suitcase and walked out of the hotel. What else could I do? I had painted myself into a corner. I had written myself into this hackneyed plot. By now it was a bet, a dare, a game of Russian roulette, a test of Womanhood. There was no way to back out. Bennett stood there very calmly, saving face. He was wearing a bright red turtleneck. Why didn’t he run out and sock Adrian in the jaw? Why didn’t he fight for what was his? They might have had a duel in the Vienna woods using volumes of Freud and volumes of Laing as shields. They might have dueled with words at least. One word from Bennett and I would have stayed. But nothing was forthcoming. Bennett assumed it was my right to go. And I had to seize that right even if by now it sickened me. “You’ve been over an hour, ducks,” Adrian said, putting my suitcase into the trunk of the car, which he called “the boot.” And we beat it out of Vienna like a couple of exiles escaping from the Nazis. On the road past the airport I wanted to say “Stop! Leave me there! I don’t want to go!” I thought of Bennett standing alone in his red turtleneck, waiting for some plane or other to some place or other. But it was too late. I was in this adventure for better or worse and I had no idea where it would land me. W ELEVEN Existentialism Reconsidered ...existentialists declare That they are in complete despair, Yet go on writing. —W. H. Auden hen I threw in my lot with Adrian Goodlove, I entered a world in which the rules we lived by were his rules—although, of course, he pretended there were no rules. It was forbidden, for example, to inquire what we would do tomorrow. Existentialists were not supposed to mention the word “tomorrow.” It was to be banished from our vocabulary. We were forbidden to talk about the future or to act as if the future existed. The future did not exist. Only our driving existed and our campsites and hotels. Only our conversations existed and the view beyond the windshield (which Adrian called the “windscreen”).

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I opened my eyes. The room was dim, the shades were down. As I pushed myself upright, lifting my head slowly off the arm of the sofa, the blood drained out of my brain like sand in an hourglass. My vision pixelated, moiréed, then blurred and womped back into focus. I looked down at my feet. I had on Reva’s dead mother’s shoes, seascapes of salt rounding across the leather toes. Nude fishnet stockings. I undid the belt of my white fur coat and found that all I was wearing underneath was a flesh-colored bustier bodysuit. I looked down at my crotch. My pubic hair had been waxed off recently. A good waxing—my skin was neither red nor bumpy nor itchy. My fingernails, I saw, were French-manicured. I could smell my own sweat. It smelled like gin. It smelled like vinegar. A stamp across my knuckles showed I’d been to a club called Dawn’s Early. I’d never heard of it. I sat back and closed my eyes and tried to remember the previous night. It was all black, empty space. “Let’s take a look at the snowfall forecast for the New York metro area.” I opened my eyes. The meteorologist on TV looked like a black Rick Moranis. He pointed to a swirling white cartoon cloud. “Happy New Year, Reva,” I remember I’d said. That was all I could recall. The coffee table was spread over with empty ice-cube trays and a full gallon jug of distilled water and an empty half-gallon jug of Gordon’s gin and a ripped-out page from a book called The Art of Happiness. Reva had given it to me for my birthday a few years earlier, saying I’d “get a lot out of the Dalai Lama. He’s really insightful.” I’d never read the book. On the torn-out page, a single line had been underlined in blue ballpoint pen: “It didn’t happen overnight,” it read. I deduced that I’d been crushing Xanax with the handle of a butcher knife and snorting it with a rolled-up flyer for an open mic night at a club on Hester Street called Portnoy’s Porthole. I’d never heard of it. A few dozen Polaroids splattered between my videotapes and empty cases proved that my blackout activities had not gone undocumented, although I didn’t see my camera anywhere.