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 The Art of Seduction (2001)

  her motive— whether she the time made her seem somewhat masculine in spirit. These contrary had acted from enmity or qualities gave her complexity, and complexity gave her power. love—h e wavered in To capture and hold attention, you need to show attributes that go perplexity. He wavered in his thoughts now here, against your physical appearance, creating depth and mystery. If you have a now there. At one moment sweet face and an innocent air, let out hints of something dark, even he was off in one direction, vaguely cruel in your character. It is not advertised in your words, but in then suddenly in another, till he had so ensnared your manner. The actor Errol Flynn had a boyishly angelic face and a slight himself in the toils of his air of sadness. Beneath this outward appearance, however, women could own desire that he was sense an underlying cruelty, a criminal streak, an exciting kind of danger-powerless to escape . . . • ousness. This play of contrary qualities attracted obsessive interest. The His entanglement had placed him in a quandary, female equivalent is the type epitomized by Marilyn Monroe; she had for he did not know the face and voice of a little girl, but something sexual and naughty em-whether she wished him anated powerfully from her as well. Madame Récamier did it all with her well or ill; he could not make out whether she eyes—the gaze of an angel, suddenly interrupted by something sensual and loved or hated him. No flirtatious. hope or despair did he Playing with gender roles is a kind of intriguing paradox that has a long consider which did not forbid him either to advance history in seduction. The greatest Don Juans have had a touch of prettiness or retreat— hope and and femininity, and the most attractive courtesans have had a masculine despair led him to and fro streak. The strategy, though, is only powerful when the underquality is in unresolved dissension. merely hinted at; if the mix is too obvious or striking it will seem bizarre or Hope spoke to him of love, despair of hatred. Because even threatening. The great seventeenth-century French courtesan Ninon of this discord he could de l'Enclos was decidedly feminine in appearance, yet everyone who met yield his firm belief neither her was struck by a touch of aggressiveness and independence in her—but to hatred nor yet to love. Thus his feelings drifted in just a touch. The late nineteenth-century Italian novelist Gabriele d'An-an unsure haven— hope nunzio was certainly masculine in his approaches, but there was a gentle-bore him on, despair away. ness, a consideration, mixed in, and an interest in feminine finery The He found no constancy in either; they agreed neither combinations can be juggled every which way: Oscar Wilde was quite one way or another. When feminine in appearance and manner, but the underlying suggestion that he despair came and told him

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  or her attention. The attraction can be sexual, the lure of celebrity, what- time he came he rose to go ever it takes. At the same time, the Coquette sends contrary signals that away immediately after stimulate contrary responses, plunging the victim into confusion. The dinner, and on that occasion eponymous heroine of Marivaux's eighteenth-century French novel Mari- I was ashamed and let him go. But I returned to the anne is the consummate Coquette. Going to church, she dresses tastefully, attack, and this time I kept but leaves her hair slightly uncombed. In the middle of the service she him in conversation after seems to notice this error and starts to fix it, revealing her bare arm as she dinner far into the night, and then, when he wanted does so; such things were not to be seen in an eighteenth-century church, to be going, I compelled and all male eyes fix on her for that moment. The tension is much more him to stay, on the plea powerful than if she were outside, or were tartily dressed. Remember: ob- that it was too late for him to go. • So he betook vious flirting will reveal your intentions too clearly. Better to be ambiguous himself to rest, using as a and even contradictory, frustrating at the same time that you stimulate. bed the couch on which he The great spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti was an unconscious co- had reclined at dinner, next to mine, and there was quette. Revered by theosophists as their "World Teacher," Krishnamurti was nobody sleeping in the also a dandy. He loved elegant clothing and was devilishly handsome. At the 76 • The Art of Seduction room but ourselves. • . . . I same time, he practiced celibacy, and had a horror of being touched. In swear by all the gods in 1929 he shocked theosophists around the world by proclaiming that he was heaven that for anything that had happened between not a god or even a guru, and did not want any followers. This only height-us when I got up after ened his appeal: women fell in love with him in great numbers, and his ad-sleeping with Socrates, I visers grew even more devoted. Physically and psychologically, Krishnamurti might have been sleeping was sending contrary signals. While preaching a generalized love and accep-with my father or elder brother. • What do you tance, in his personal life he pushed people away His attractiveness and his suppose to have been my obsession with his appearance might have gained him attention but by state of mind after that? themselves would not have made women fall in love with him; his lessons of On the one hand I

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  the eyes saluted her most If their character is showy, we may be momentarily attracted, but the at-pleasantly. • "God save traction wears off; there is no depth, no contrary motion, to pull us in. The you, lovely woman!" • key to both attracting and holding attention is to radiate mystery. And no "Thank you," said the girl, and continued very one is naturally mysterious, at least not for long; mystery is something you bashfully, "may God have to work at, a ploy on your part, and something that must be used early Almighty, who makes all on in the seduction. Let one part of your character show, so everyone no-hearts glad, gladden your heart and mind! And my tices it. (In the example of Wilde, this was the mannered affectation con- Send Mixed Signals • 191 veyed by his clothes and poses.) But also send out a mixed signal—some grateful thanks to you! — sign that you are not what you seem, a paradox. Do not worry if this yet not forgetting a bone I have to pick with you." • underquality is a negative one, like danger, cruelty, or amorality; people "Ah, sweet woman, what will be drawn to the enigma anyway, and pure goodness is rarely seductive. have I done?" was courteous Rivalin's reply. • Paradox with him was only truth standing on its head to "You have annoyed me through a friend of mine, attract attention. the best I ever had. " • "Good heavens," thought — R I C H A R D LE GALLIENNE, ON HIS FRIEND OSCAR WILDE he, "what does this mean? What have I done to displease her? What does Keys to Seduction she say I have done?" and he imagined that unwittingly he must have Nothing can proceed in seduction unless you can attract and hold your injured a kinsman of hers victim's attention, your physical presence becoming a haunting men- some time at their knightly tal presence. It is actually quite easy to create that first stir—an alluring style sports and that was why she was vexed with him. of dress, a suggestive glance, something extreme about you. But what hap- But no, the friend she pens next? Our minds are barraged with images—not just from media but referred to was her heart, in from the disorder of daily life. And many of these images are quite striking. which he made her suffer: You become just one more thing screaming for attention; your attractive- that was the friend she spoke of But he knew ness will pass unless you spark the more enduring kind of spell that makes nothing of that. • "Lovely people think of you in your absence. That means engaging their imagina- woman," he said with all tions, making them think there is more to you than what they see. Once his accustomed charm, "I do not want you to be they start embellishing your image with their fantasies, they are hooked.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Experts inadvertently encourage us to confuse the two. Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love, a book referenced earlier, is far more concerned with shared parental responsibility for a child’s first few years than with the love joining the parents to one another. But we can’t blame Fisher, as the language itself works against clarity. We can “sleep with” someone without ever closing our eyes.1 When we read that the politician “made love” with the prostitute, we know love had little to do with it. When we report how many “lovers” we’ve had, are we claiming to have been “in love” with all of them? Similarly, if we “mate” with someone, does that make us “mates”? Show a guy a photo of a hot-looking woman and ask him if he’d like to “mate with her.” Chances are good he’ll say (or think), “Sure!” But chances are also high that marriage, children, and the prospect of a long future together never entered into his decision-making process. Everyone knows these are arbitrary expressions for an almost infinite range of situations and relationships—everyone, it appears, but the experts. Many evolutionary psychologists and other researchers seem to think that “love” and “sex” are interchangeable terms. And they throw together “copulating” and “mating” as well. This failure to define terminology often leads to confusion and allows cultural bias to contaminate our thinking about human sexual nature. Let’s try to hack a path through this tangled verbal undergrowth. Marriage: The “Fundamental Condition” of the Human Species? The intimate male-female relationship…which zoologists have dubbed a ‘pair bond,’ is bred into our bones. I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else. FRANS DE WAAL2 The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. HONORÉ DE BALZAC The holy grail of evolutionary psychology is the “human universal.” The whole point of the discipline is to tease out intrinsically human patterns of perception, cognition, and behavior from those determined on a cultural or personal level: Do you like baseball because you grew up watching games with Dad or because the sight of small groups of men strategizing and working together on a field connects to a primordial module in your brain? That’s the sort of question evolutionary psychologists love to ask and aspire to answer. Because evolutionary psychology is all about uncovering and elucidating the so-called psychic unity of humankind—and because of the considerable political and professional pressure to discover traits that conform to specific political agendas—readers need to be cautious about claims concerning such universals. Too often, the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Remember what Phil said about how sex with his wife had grown overly familiar, how he’d come to feel he and Helen were “siblings, almost”? Interesting word choice. The strongest explanation for the prevalence and intensity of the Coolidge effect among social mammals is that the male drive for sexual variety is evolution’s way of avoiding incest. Our species evolved on a sparsely populated planet—never more than a few million and probably fewer than 100,000 of us on Earth for most of our evolutionary past. To avoid the genetic stagnation that would have dragged our ancestors into extinction long ago, males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar. While this carrot-and-stick mechanism worked well to promote genetic diversity in the prehistoric environment, it’s causing lots of problems now. When a couple have been living together for years, when they’ve become family, this ancient anti-incest mechanism can effectively block eroticism for many men, leading to confusion and hurt feelings all around.22 Earlier, we discussed how men’s testosterone levels recede over the years, but it’s not just the passing of time that brings these levels down: monogamy itself seems to drain away a man’s testosterone. Married men consistently show lower levels of the hormone than single men of the same age; fathers of young children, even less. Men who are particularly responsive to infants show declines of 30 percent or more right after their child is born. Married men having affairs, however, were found to have higher testosterone levels than those who weren’t.23 Additionally, most of the men having affairs have told researchers they were actually quite happy in their marriages, while only one-third of women having affairs felt that way.24 Of course, sharp-thinking readers will point out that these correlations don’t imply causation: maybe men with higher levels of testosterone simply seek more affairs. Probably so, but there is good reason to believe that even casual contact with novel, attractive women can have a tonic effect on men’s hormonal health. In fact, researcher James Roney and his colleagues found that even a brief chat with an attractive woman raised men’s testosterone levels by an average of 14 percent. When these same men spent a few minutes talking with other men, their testosterone level fell by 2 percent.25

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  This passage is bizarre on several levels. After writing at length about how strikingly similar bonobo sexual behavior is to that of human beings, Fisher executes a double backflip to conclude that they don’t make a suitable model for our ancestors. To make matters even more confusing, she shifts the whole discussion to twenty million years ago as if she’d been talking about the last common ancestor of all apes as opposed to that shared by chimps, bonobos, and humans, who diverged from a common ancestor only five million years ago. In fact, Fisher wasn’t talking about such distant ancestors. The Anatomy of Love, the book from which we’ve been quoting, is a beautifully written popularization of her groundbreaking academic work on the “evolution of serial pair-bonding” in humans (not all apes) within the past few million years. Furthermore, note how Fisher refers to the very qualities bonobos share with humans as “extremes of primate sexuality.” Further hints of neo-Victorianism appear in Fisher’s description of the transition our ancestors made from the treetops to life on land: “Perhaps our primitive female ancestors living in the trees pursued sex with a variety of males to keep friends. Then, when our forbears were driven onto the grasslands of Africa some four million years ago and pair bonding evolved to raise the young, females turned from open promiscuity to clandestine copulations, reaping the benefits of resources and better or more varied genes as well.”24 Fisher assumes the advent of pair bonding four million years ago despite the absence of any supporting evidence. Continuing this circular reasoning, she writes: Because bonobos appear to be the smartest of the apes, because they have many physical traits quite similar to people’s, and because these chimps copulate with flair and frequency, some anthropologists conjecture that bonobos are much like the African hominoid prototype, our last common tree-dwelling ancestor. Maybe pygmy chimps are living relics of our past. But they certainly manifest some fundamental differences in their sexual behavior. For one thing, bonobos do not form long-term pair-bonds the way humans do. Nor do they raise their young as husband and wife. Males do care for infant siblings, but monogamy is no life for them. Promiscuity is their fare.25

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

  The rat’s brain and body respond as if expecting the shock. Scientists who adhere to the classical view say that the rat has learned to be afraid of the tone, calling this phenomenon “fear learning.” (This is the same type of experiment performed on SM, the woman with no amygdala who allegedly couldn’t learn fear, as described in chapter 1.) All over the world, for decades, scientists have been shocking rats, flies, and other animals to map how neurons in the amygdala allow them to learn to freeze. Having identified this freezing circuit, scientists then infer that the amygdala contains a fear circuit—the essence of fear—and the increased heart rate, blood pressure, and freezing is said to represent a consistent, biological fingerprint for fear. (I’ve never been sure why they decided it’s fear. Couldn’t the rat be learning surprise, or vigilance, or maybe just pain? If I were the rat, I’d be pretty pissed off about the shocks, so why isn’t it “anger learning”?) 41 Anyway, these scientists go on to say that their fear learning analysis extends from rats to humans, because the relevant fear circuitry in the amygdala has been passed to us through mammalian evolution à la the “triune brain.” These fear learning studies helped to establish the amygdala as the supposed brain location of fear. 42 In psychology and neuroscience, so-called fear learning has become an industry. Scientists use it to explain anxiety disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s employed to aid with drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry and to understand sleep disturbance. With over 100,000 hits on Google, “fear learning” is one of the most commonly used phrases in psychology and neuroscience. And yet, under the hood, fear learning is just a fancy name for another well-known phenomenon: classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning, named after the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered it with his famous experiments on salivating dogs. * The classic fear learning experiment demonstrates that a benign stimulus, such as a tone, can acquire the ability to trigger certain amygdala circuitry in anticipation of uncertain danger. Scientists have spent years mapping this circuitry in elegant detail. 43 Now comes the subtle mistake I alluded to. Freezing is a behavior, whereas fear is a much more complex mental state. The scientists who believe they study fear learning are categorizing a freezing behavior as “Fear” and the underlying circuit for freezing as a fear circuit. Just as I categorized Cupcake the guinea pig as happy, when she herself couldn’t construct an experience of happiness, these scientists unknowingly apply their own emotion concepts, construct perceptions of fear, and attribute fear to the freezing rat. I call this general scientific mistake the mental inference fallacy. Mental inference is normal; we all do it every day, automatically and effortlessly.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ness of any kind, she eventually left him. Consumed by her memory, Rilke leading men of Athens long continued to pursue her. In 1926, lying on his deathbed, he begged watched all this with his doctors, "Ask Lou what is wrong with me. She is the only one who disgust and indignation knows." and they were deeply disturbed by his One man wrote of Salomé, "There was something terrifying about her contemptuous and lawless embrace. Looking at you with her radiant blue eyes, she would say, 'The behaviour, which seemed to reception of the semen is for me the height of ecstasy.' And she had an in-them monstrous and suggested the habits of a satiable appetite for it. She was completely amoral . . . a vampire." The tyrant. The people's feelings Swedish psychotherapist Poul Bjerre, one of her later conquests, wrote, "I towards him have been very think Nietzsche was right when he said that Lou was a thoroughly evil aptly expressed by Aristophanes in the line: woman. Evil however in the Goethean sense: evil that produces good. . . . "They long for him, they She may have destroyed lives and marriages but her presence was exciting." hate him, they cannot do without him. . . ." • The fact was that his voluntary The two emotions that almost every male felt in the presence of Lou donations, the public shows Andreas-Salomé were confusion and excitement—the two prerequisite he supported, his unrivalled feelings for any successful seduction. People were intoxicated by her strange munificence to the state, the mix of the masculine and the feminine; she was beautiful, with a radiant fame of his ancestry, the power of his oratory and smile and a graceful, flirtatious manner, but her independence and her in- his physical strength and tensely analytical nature made her seem oddly male. This ambiguity was beauty . . . all combined to expressed in her eyes, which were both coquettish and probing. It was con-make the Athenians forgive him everything else, and fusion that kept men interested and curious: no other woman was like this. they were constantly finding They wanted to know more. The excitement stemmed from her ability to euphemisms for his lapses stir up repressed desires. She was a complete nonconformist, and to be in- and putting them down to youthful high spirits volved with her was to break all kinds of taboos. Her masculinity made the and honourable ambition. relationship seem vaguely homosexual; her slightly cruel, slightly domi- —PLUTARCH,"THE LIFE OF neering streak could stir up masochistic yearnings, as it did in Nietzsche. ALCIBIADES," THE RISE AND Salomé radiated a forbidden sexuality. Her powerful effect on men—the FALL OF ATHENS: NINE GREEK lifelong infatuations, the suicides (there were several), the periods of intense LIVES, TRANSLATED BY IAN SCOTT-KILVERT creativity, the descriptions of her as a vampire or a devil—attest to the ob-scure depths of the psyche that she was able to reach and disturb.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Now consider the confusion created by the words mate and mating. A mate sometimes refers to a sexual partner in a given copulation; other times, it refers to a partner in a recognized marriage, with whom children are raised and all sorts of behavioral and economic patterns are established. To mate with someone could mean to join together “till death do us part,” or it could refer to nothing more than a quickie with “Julio down by the schoolyard.” When evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women have different innate cognitive or emotional “modules,” which determine their reactions to a mate’s infidelity, we suppose that this refers to a mate in a long-term relationship. But you never know. When we read, “Sex differences in humans’ mate-selection criteria exist and persist because the mechanisms that mediate mate evaluation differ for men and women,” and that “a tendency to become sexually aroused by visual stimuli constitutes part of the mate-selection process in men,”14 we scratch our heads, wondering whether this is a discussion of how people choose that special someone to introduce to Mom or merely the immediate, visceral response patterns heterosexual men often experience in the presence of an attractive woman. Given that men have shown these same response patterns in response to photographs, films, attractively attired mannequins, and a Noah’s ark of farm animals—none of which are available for marriage—it seems that this language must refer to sexual attraction alone. But we’re not really sure. At what point does a mate become a mate with whom to mate? CHAPTER NINE Paternity Certainty: The Crumbling Cornerstone of the Standard Narrative According to anthropologist Robert Edgerton, the Marind-anim people of Melanesia believed: Semen was essential to human growth and development. They also married quite young, and to assure the bride’s fertility, she had to be filled with semen. On her wedding night, therefore, as many as ten members of her husband’s lineage had sexual intercourse with the bride, and if there were more men than this in the lineage, they had intercourse with her the following night…. A similar ritual was repeated at various intervals throughout a woman’s life.1 Welcome to the family. Have you met my cousins? Lest you think this a particularly unusual wedding celebration, it seems the ancestors of the Romans did something similar. Marriage was celebrated with a wedding orgy in which the husband’s friends had intercourse with the bride, with witnesses standing by. Otto Kiefer, in his 1934 Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, explains that from the Roman perspective, “Natural and physical laws are alien and even opposed to the marriage tie. Accordingly, the woman who is entering marriage must atone to Mother Nature for violating her, and go through a period of free prostitution, in which she purchases the chastity of marriage by preliminary unchastity.”2

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “I’m the only man you’ve ever met you can’t categorize,” he said triumphantly. And then he waited for me to categorize the others. And I obliged. Oh I knew I was making my life into a song-and-dance routine, a production number, a shaggy dog story, a sick joke, a bit. I thought of all the longing, the pain, the letters (sent and unsent), the crying jags, the telephone monologues, the suffering, the rationalizing, the analyzing which had gone into each of these relationships, each of these relationdinghies, each of these relationliners. I knew that the way I described them was a betrayal of their complexity, their humanity, their confusion. Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order. Even those writers who respect the beautiful anarchy of life and try to get it all into their books, wind up making it seem much more ordered than it ever was and do not, finally, tell the truth. Because no writer can ever tell the truth about life, namely that it is much more interesting than any book. And no writer can tell the truth about people—which is that they are much more interesting than any characters. “So stop philosophizing about bloody writing and tell me about your first husband,” Adrian said. “OK. OK.” TWELVEThe Madman Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name… —Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream You have to imagine him: short, dark, heavy brown beard—a combination of Peter Lorre, Alfred Drake, and Humphrey Bogart (as Pia and I would have said), or at times Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar. He liked to talk tough in the manner of the movie heroes of his youth. He was, as he put it, a movie-coholic, and even in college would sometimes go to two or three movies a day, preferably at (what he called) “the Vomit-houses"—those beat-up theaters on 42nd Street where derelicts went to sleep and perverts (Brian’s mother called them “preverts”) went to drool, and there were double or even triple bills of war movies, Westerns, or Roman Forum epics.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  So we peered at the curiously sterile rooms, the left-over paraphernalia of Freud’s life: his medical diploma, his military record, his application for assistant professorship, a contract with one of his publishers, his list of publications attached to an application for promotion. And then we inspected the photographs: Freud, cigar in hand, with the first psychoanalytic circle, Freud with a grandson, Freud with Anna Freud, Freud before death leaning on his wife’s arm in London, young Ernest Jones striking a glamour-boy profile, Sandor Ferenczi peering imperiously at the world, circa 1913, mild-mannered Karl Abraham looking mild-mannered, Hanns Sachs looking like Robert Morley, und so weiter. The artifacts were present, but the spirit of the enterprise was lacking. We trooped obediently from one display to the next wondering about our own sticky history, still in the writing. We had a quiet lunch together and again tried to repair the damages of the previous evening. I vowed to myself I would never see Adrian again. Bennett and I treated each other with utmost consideration. We were careful not to discuss anything of consequence. Instead we spoke anecdotally of Freud. According to Ernest Jones, he was a poor judge of character, a poor Menschenkenner. Often this trait—a certain naiveté about people—went with genius. Freud could penetrate the secrets of dreams, but he could also fall dupe to an ordinary con man. He could invent psychoanalysis, but he would inevitably put his faith in people who betrayed him. Also he was very indiscreet. He often gave away confidences which had been entrusted to him on the sole condition that he keep quiet about them. Suddenly we realized that we were talking about ourselves again. There was no topic neutral enough for conversation that afternoon. Everything came back to us. After lunch we went to the Hofburg once more to hear a paper on the psychology of artists. This paper posthumously analyzed Leonardo, Beethoven, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Donne, Virginia Woolf, and an unknown, unnamed woman artist who had been treated by the analyst. All his evidence proved overwhelmingly that artists were, as a group, weak, dependent, childlike, naive, masochistic, narcissistic, poor judges of character, and hopelessly immersed in Oedipal conflicts. Due to their extreme sensitivity as children and their greater-than-average need for mothering, they always felt deprived no matter how much mothering they in fact got. In adult life, they were doomed to look for mothers everywhere, and not finding them (ever, ever) they sought to invent their own ideal mothers through the artifice of their work. They sought to remake their own histories in an idealized image—even when this idealization came out seeming more like a brutalization than an idealization.

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

  Mental inference is so pervasive and automatic, at least in cultures of the West, that we’re usually unaware of doing it. We believe that our senses provide an accurate and objective representation of the world, as if we had X-ray vision for deciphering another person’s behavior to discover his intent (“I can see right through you”). In these moments, we experience our perceptions of other people as an obvious property of them—a phenomenon we’ve called affective realism—rather than a combination of their actions and the concepts in our own brain. When someone is on trial for a crime, and liberty and life are at stake, there can be a gaping chasm between appearance and reality. Deep down we know this, but at the same time we are supremely confident that we can discern truth from fiction more accurately than the other schmucks in the room. And herein lies the problem in court. Jurors and judges are charged with an almost impossible task: to be a mind reader, or if you’d rather, a lie detector. They must decide if a person intended to cause harm. According to the legal system, intent is a fact that is as plain as the nose on a defendant’s face. But in a predicting brain, a judgment about someone else’s intent is always a guess you construct based on the defendant’s actions, not a fact you detect; and just as with emotions, there is no objective, perceiver-independent criterion of intent. Seventy years of psychological research confirms that judgments like these are mental inferences, that is, guesses. Even if DNA evidence connects a defendant to the scene of a crime, it does not determine whether he had criminal intent.43 Judges and jurors infer intent, usually in line with their own beliefs, stereotypes, and current body states. Here is just one example of how this works. Test subjects watched a video of protestors being dispersed by police. They were told the protestors were pro-life activists picketing an abortion clinic. Those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to be pro-choice, inferred that the activists had violent intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred peaceful intentions. The researchers also showed the same video to a second set of subjects, describing the protestors this time as gay rights activists objecting to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. This time, those who were liberal Democrats, who tend to support gay rights, inferred that the activists had peaceful intentions, whereas socially conservative subjects inferred violent intentions.44

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Are you feeling better? The symptoms you described in your message, frankly, puzzle me.” I realized I was wearing a hot pink Juicy Couture sweat suit. A tag from the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop dangled from the cuff. There were new used VHS tapes stacked on the bare floor in the hallway, all Sydney Pollack movies: Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice, The Way We Were. Tootsie. Out of Africa. I had no memory of ordering Chinese food or going to the thrift store. And I had no memory of what I’d said in any message. Dr. Tuttle said she’d been “baffled by the emotional intensity” in my voice. “I’m concerned for you. I’m very, very, very concerned.” She sounded like she always sounded, her voice a breathy, high-pitched hoot. “When you say you’re questioning your own existence,” she asked, “do you mean you’re reading philosophy books? Or is this something you thought up on your own? Because if it’s suicide, I can give you something for that.” “No, no, nothing like suicide. I was just philosophizing, yes,” I said. “Just thinking too much, I guess.” “That’s not a good sign. It could lead to psychosis. How are you sleeping?” “Not enough,” I said. “I suspected as much. Try a hot shower and some chamomile tea. It should settle you down. And give the Infermiterol a try. Studies have shown it wipes out existential anxiety better than Prozac.” I didn’t want to admit that I’d already tried it, and it had resulted in this strange mess of food and thrift store purchases, at the very least. “Thank you, doctor,” I said. I hung up the phone and found a voice mail from Reva giving me the details for her mother’s funeral and reception in Long Island later that week. She sounded soft, sad, and a little scripted. “Things are moving forward. I guess time is like that—it just keeps going. I hope you can come to the funeral. My mom really liked you.” I’d met her mother once when she’d visited Reva at school senior year, but I’d completely forgotten it. “We set the date for New Year’s Eve. If you could come up early to the house, that would be good,” she said. “The train leaves from Penn Station every hour.” She gave me specific instructions for how to buy my train ticket, where to stand on the platform, which car to sit in, where to get off. “You’ll finally meet my dad.” I almost deleted the message, but then I thought I’d better keep it, and let my mailbox fill back up, so nobody could leave me any more voice mails.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  What drove women wild was that behind his somewhat cold and disdainful exterior, they could sense that he was actually quite romantic, even spiritual. Byron played this up with his melancholic airs and occasional kind deed. Transfixed and confused, many women thought that they could be the one to lead him back to goodness, to make him a faithful lover. Once a woman entertained such a thought, she was completely under his spell. It is not difficult to create such a seductive effect. Should you be known as eminently rational, say, hint at something irrational. Johannes, the narrator in Kierkegaard's The Seducer's Diary, first treats the young Cordelia with businesslike politeness, as his reputation would lead her to expect. Yet she very soon overhears him making remarks that hint at a wild, poetic streak in his character; and she is excited and intrigued. These principles have applications far beyond sexual seduction. To hold the attention of a broad public, to seduce them into thinking about you, you need to mix your signals. Display too much of one quality—even if it is a noble one, like knowledge or efficiency—and people will feel that you lack humanity. We are all complex and ambiguous, full of contradictory impulses; if you show only one side, even if it is your good side, you will wear on people's nerves. They will suspect you are a hypocrite. Mahatma Gandhi, a saintly figure, openly confessed to feelings of anger and vengefulness. John F. Kennedy, the most seductive American public figure of modern times, was a walking paradox: an East Coast aristocrat with a love of the common man, an obviously masculine man—a war hero—with a vulnerability you could sense underneath, an intellectual who loved popular culture. People were drawn to Kennedy like the steel filings in Wilde's fable. A bright surface may have a decorative charm, but what draws your eye into a painting is a depth of field, an inexpressible ambiguity, a surreal complexity. 194 • The Art of Seduction Symbol: The Theater Curtain. Onstage, the curtain's heavy deep-red folds attract your eye with their hypnotic surface. But what really fascinates and draws you in is what you think might be happening behind the curtain— the light peeking through, the suggestion of a secret, something about to happen. You feel the thrill of a voyeur about to watch a performance. Reversal The complexity you signal to other people will only affect them properly if they have the capacity to enjoy a mystery. Some people like things simple, and lack the patience to pursue a person who confuses them. They prefer to be dazzled and overwhelmed. The great Belle Epoque courtesan known as La Belle Otero would work a complex magic on artists and political figures who fell for her, but in dealing with the more uncomplicated, sensual male she would astound them with spectacle and beauty.

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

  In late 2014, Sauter and her colleagues inadvertently solved the mystery. They revealed that their experiment included an extra step not reported in their original publication: a step that’s rich in conceptual knowledge. After the Himba participants heard an emotion story but before they listened to any sound pairs, they were asked to describe how the target person in the story was feeling. To help them in this task, Sauter and colleagues “allowed participants to listen several times to a given recorded story (if needed), until they could explain the intended emotion in their own words.” Whenever Himba participants described something other than the English emotion concept, they received negative feedback and were told to try again. Test subjects who were unable to provide the expected description were disqualified from the experiment. In effect, Himba participants were not permitted to listen to any sounds, let alone pick the ones that matched the story, until they had learned the corresponding English emotion concepts. When we attempted to replicate Sauter and colleagues’ experiment, we used only the methods in their published paper, without the extra, unreported step, so our Himba test subjects did not have the opportunity to learn English emotion concepts before listening to the vocalizations.16 There was one other difference between our experimental method and the one used by Sauter and her colleagues. Once a Himba participant had explained the emotion concept satisfactorily—let’s say it was sadness—Sauter’s team played a pair of sounds, such as a cry and a laugh, and the subject chose the better match for sadness. The participant then heard more pairs of sounds, each one containing a cry: perhaps a cry and a sigh, then a cry and a scream, and so on. From each pair, the participant selected one sound as the better match for sadness. If the Himba participants were not confident of the link between cries and sadness at the beginning of these trials, they certainly were by the end. Our experiments avoided this problem. In each trial, Maria would read a story (through the translator), then present a pair of sounds, and then have the participant choose the best match. Trials were in random order (e.g., a sadness trial, followed by an anger trial, followed by a happiness trial, and so on), which is a standard way to avoid learning within this type of experiment. We saw no evidence of universality.17

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Although we’re led to believe we live in times of sexual liberation, contemporary human sexuality throbs with obvious, painful truths that must not be spoken aloud. The conflict between what we’re told we feel and what we really feel may be the richest source of confusion, dissatisfaction, and unnecessary suffering of our time. The answers normally proffered don’t answer the questions at the heart of our erotic lives: why are men and women so different in our desires, fantasies, responses, and sexual behavior? Why are we betraying and divorcing each other at ever increasing rates when not opting out of marriage entirely? Why the pandemic spread of single-parent families? Why does the passion evaporate from so many marriages so quickly? What causes the death of desire? Having evolved together right here on Earth, why do so many men and women resonate with the idea that we may as well be from different planets? Oriented toward medicine and business, American society has responded to this ongoing crisis by developing a marital-industrial complex of couples therapy, pharmaceutical hard-ons, sex-advice columnists, creepy father-daughter purity cults, and an endless stream of in-box come-ons (“Unleash your LoveMonster! She’ll thank you!”). Every month, truckloads of glossy supermarket magazines offer the same old tricks to get the spark back into our moribund sex lives. Yes, a few candles here, some crotchless panties there, toss a handful of rose petals on the bed and it’ll be just like the very first time! What’s that you say? He’s still checking out other women? She’s still got an air of detached disappointment? He’s finished before you’ve begun? Well, then, let the experts figure out what ails you, your partner, your relationship. Perhaps his penis needs enlarging or her vagina needs a retrofit. Maybe he has “commitment issues,” a “fragmentary superego,” or the dreaded “Peter Pan complex.” Are you depressed? You say you love your spouse of a dozen years but don’t feel sexually attracted the way you used to? One or both of you are tempted by another? Maybe you two should try doing it on the kitchen floor. Or force yourself to do it every night for a year.4 Maybe he’s going through a midlife crisis. Take these pills. Get a new hairstyle. Something must be wrong with you. Ever feel like the victim of a well-intentioned Inquisition?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Each spring, thousands of American university students celebrate with wet T-shirt contests, foam parties, and Jell-O wrestling on the beautiful beaches of the I Do Not Understand You Peninsula. But confusion mistaken for knowledge isn’t limited to spring break. We all fall into this trap. (One night, over dinner, a close friend mentioned that her favorite Beatles song is “Hey Dude.”) Despite their years of training, even scientific types slip into thinking they are observing something when in fact they are simply projecting their biases and ignorance. What trips up the scientists is the same cognitive failing we all share: it’s hard to be certain about what we think we know, but don’t really. Having misread the map, we’re sure we know where we are. In the face of evidence to the contrary, most of us tend to go with our gut, but the gut can be an unreliable guide. You Are What You Eat Take food, for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself—as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gérard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer. How does a plate of sheep’s brain sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig’s ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That’s revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig’s shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin’, but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what’s their rationale? And what about all the exceptions? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff ’em in an intestine, and you’ve got yourself respectable sausages or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years ago by an advertising agency hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had happened to replace at the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that winter, author of a bestselling novel, I remember its title, La Rue du Chat qui Pěche , but not the lady’s name. A number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had occurred among the lady’s fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I started to speak. A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Léons’ followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod , the Russian ‘mead,’ and everybody gave him a different answer.” Nabokov makes a Joycean appearance in Gisèle Freund and V. B. Carleton’s James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (New York, 1965). Pictured on pp. 44–45 is a meeting of the editorial board of the Parisian journal Mesures. Nine literati are shown gathered around a garden table, and a caption identifies the group, which includes Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan—and Jacques Audiberti, a tall, thin man standing in the back, looking down, his face in shadows, a trace of a smile suggesting some miraculous foreknowledge of the caption that twenty-eight years later would mistakenly identify him as “Audiberti,” and in thus denying the existence of the already pseudonymous V. Sirin, would summarize the vicissitudes and spectral qualities of Russian émigré life, and cast him as The Mystery Man in the Garden, a role based on the nameless man in the brown macintosh, the mystery man of Ulysses , the “lankylooking galoot” (as Bloom calls him) whose name is misunderstood by a newspaper reporter as “M’Intosh,” under which name he is immortalized. The photo is also included in TriQuarterly 17 (Winter 1970). C’est entendu? : French; that’s agreed? Lenore : although Poe wrote a poem thusly titled, the primary allusion is to the title character in one of the most popular dramatic ballads of Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794), German poet of the Sturm und Drang period. H.H. echoes the best-known line, in which Lenore and her ghostly lover ride off: “ Und hurre, hurre, bop, hop, hop, hop! … ” (line 149). See also Keys , p. 141n. The allusion is ironic, since Lenore grieves over her lover. Nabokov discusses the poem in the Commentary to his Eugene Onegin translation (Vol. III, pp.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Listen, you've got to go and talk to Robert. I've thought it over. There ain't nobody but him, and his buddies, can get me out of this mess." Naively, Gil believed that the local heavies would greet him with open arms and make him a member of their gang. He believed in the existence of such a gang, a dangerous one, another society that was fighting against society itself. That evening Roger left the penitentiary in a very confused state of mind. He was happy that Gil had felt desire for him, for a moment ( even though it had been based on a confusion with his sister) ; he was annoyed with himself for having drawn back from Gil's kiss; he felt proud to know that the greatness of his friend was about to be recognized, and that it was he; Roger, who had been chosen to establish contact with the supreme powers. Now, whenever he had the oppo.rtunity, Querelle would go, round about dusk, for a walk, unobtrusively strolling in the direction of his hidden treasure. On these occasions he let sadness appear on his face. He felt himself already garbed in convict uniform, slowly meandering along, a ball and chain round his ankle, in a landscape of monstrous palm trees, a region of dream and death, from which neither morning nor any acquittal granted by men could ever save him again. The certainty of living in a world that is the silent double of the one in which you are actually moving about invested Querelle with a certain kind of disinterest, which endowed him, in its turn, with a spontaneous understanding of things. As a rule indiffer- 163 I QUERELLE ent to plants or objects-but had he ever confronted them?now he understood them intuitively. The taste of everything is isolated by some singularity, first recognized by the eye, then communicated to the palate : hay is hay primarily because of that characteristic yellowish·gray powder the sense of taste first expects and then experiences. It is the same with any vegetable species. The eye may allow some confusion, but the mouth won't stand for it, and thus Querelle was slowly proceeding through a universe of savors, of recognitions within recognitions. One evening he ran into Roger. It didn't take the sailor long to know who the boy was, and to succeed in penetrating to Gil's hiding place. THE GLORY OF

• From Querelle (1953)

  The voice was still calm, and it was a strange feeling for Robert to discuss such accusations so reasonably. At first, he found it hard to discern the components. The notion of his brother was completely invisible, only the idea of those "filthy 'doings" was present. Yet Robert wasn't thinking : his stare was too rigid, his body too motionless for him to be able to think intelligently. He did not know how to think. But the deliberateness of his speech, its apparent calm ( though there were tremors of some almost imperceptible emotion ) , and the repetition of the word "filth" increased his confusion. He lay spellbound, as if by some litany of misery whose refrain echoes 188 I JEAN GENET through the most secret reaches of our pain. The idea of filthy doings embarrassed him, offended his family feelings. Mournfully he said to himself: "Well, there goes the family, down the drain!'' He did not know how, but he knew he was guilty, and to a considerable degree. Lysiane said nothing. Suddenly she looked stupid and helpless. Uncomprehending, she looked at her lover talking to her from the bottom of the ocean. She was afraid of losing him. Every time he was alone with himself, and especiaiiy when he went on his twilight walks to prowl round the hiding place of his treasure, that docker's exclamation kept roiling round his brain : "Wow, what a piece a ass I Wanna try it?" When he was striding over the grass, under the trees, in the fog, sure-footed and looking impassive, he knew that something inside him kept on worrying those words like a bone. He had been violated. He was a Little Red Riding Hood, and a big bad wolf, much stronger than he, had put his paw into his little basket; he was a sweet flower girl, and a street urchin came and stole his carnations, laughing and kicking the display to pieces, and wanted to make off with his treasure-which he was now coming close to : in his inmost heart, Quereiie was afraid. He felt a spasm of anguish in his stomach. Madame Lysiane watched Robert as he was lugubriously digesting his own verbal symbol of hurt, like some pill that would dissolve him. She was afraid of such a dissolution. "But that's what you said, filthy things." "So I said it, so what, it doesn't mean anything. Oh, darling, I'm so unhappy." He looked at her. She had lost her authority of womanhood, of being the lady of the house. She had been declawed. Her face was soft now. She was merely a middle-aged woman, with no make-up on, no glamor, but brimming with tenderness, a bursting reservoir of tenderness that wished for nothing so much as to overflow into the room, over an entranced Robert's 189 I QUERELLE feet, in long, hot waves, in which little sly fish would then sport about . . . Lysiane shivered. "Why don't you get back in."