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.

Page 38 of 112 · 20 per page

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She gave him her hand, and they set off side by side, going faster and faster, and the more rapidly they moved the more tightly she grasped his hand. “With you I should soon learn; I somehow feel confidence in you,” she said to him. “And I have confidence in myself when you are leaning on me,” he said, but was at once panic-stricken at what he had said, and blushed. And indeed, no sooner had he uttered these words, when all at once, like the sun going behind a cloud, her face lost all its friendliness, and Levin detected the familiar change in her expression that denoted the working of thought; a crease showed on her smooth brow. “Is there anything troubling you?—though I’ve no right to ask such a question,” he added hurriedly. “Oh, why so?... No, I have nothing to trouble me,” she responded coldly; and she added immediately: “You haven’t seen Mlle. Linon, have you?” “Not yet.” “Go and speak to her, she likes you so much.” “What’s wrong? I have offended her. Lord help me!” thought Levin, and he flew towards the old Frenchwoman with the gray ringlets, who was sitting on a bench. Smiling and showing her false teeth, she greeted him as an old friend. “Yes, you see we’re growing up,” she said to him, glancing towards Kitty, “and growing old. _Tiny bear_ has grown big now!” pursued the Frenchwoman, laughing, and she reminded him of his joke about the three young ladies whom he had compared to the three bears in the English nursery tale. “Do you remember that’s what you used to call them?” He remembered absolutely nothing, but she had been laughing at the joke for ten years now, and was fond of it. “Now, go and skate, go and skate. Our Kitty has learned to skate nicely, hasn’t she?” When Levin darted up to Kitty her face was no longer stern; her eyes looked at him with the same sincerity and friendliness, but Levin fancied that in her friendliness there was a certain note of deliberate composure. And he felt depressed. After talking a little of her old governess and her peculiarities, she questioned him about his life. “Surely you must be dull in the country in the winter, aren’t you?” she said. “No, I’m not dull, I am very busy,” he said, feeling that she was holding him in check by her composed tone, which he would not have the force to break through, just as it had been at the beginning of the winter. “Are you going to stay in town long?” Kitty questioned him. “I don’t know,” he answered, not thinking of what he was saying. The thought that if he were held in check by her tone of quiet friendliness he would end by going back again without deciding anything came into his mind, and he resolved to make a struggle against it. “How is it you don’t know?”

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Look, it's this way. Let me explain. Don't get me wrong now, I'm not saying that they'll get you, I'm sure they won't. But you never know. And if they did, it would be better for you, if you weren't carrying a gun." Querelle's private reasoning went as follows : if he starts shooting at the cops, the cops'll shoot right back. They'll either kill him, or they'll take him alive. If they arrest him, theill find out, either from a Gil weakened by his wounds, or by conducting an intensive investigation, that this revolver used to belong to Lieutenant Seblon, and then what else could that poor sod do but put the finger on his steward. In trying to follow the movements in our protagonists' souls, we are also trying to cast some light on our own. Feel free to notice that the attitude we would have liked to adopt-with a view to, or perhaps, with a foreknowledge of the desired end of the story-has led us to the discovery of a given psychological world that supports the idea of freedom of choice; but as soon as the progression of the story tequ.ires one or the other of its main characters to pronounce a judgment, to take thought, we are immediately confronted by the arbitrary: the character escapes from its author, becoming 251 I QUERELLE its own, singular being. Thus we have to admit that the author is able to reveal certain traits of this character only after the fact. Now in the case of Querelle, if an explanation is needed, let us try this one, no better, no more despicable than any other: his lack of imagination being of the same order as his lack of feelings, he misjudged the officer. Seblon's diary bears witness to the fact that rather than denounce Querelle he would have taken the blame on himself. It is true that in one entry the Lieutenant expressed a desire to point out Querelle as the murderer, but we shall see what sublime use he then made of this desire. Gil thought he was losing his mind. He could not for the life of him comprehend his friend's intentions. He heard himself say : "So that's it, I'll have to go out there naked, stark naked.'' Querelle had just collected the sailor clothes. He couldn't afford to leave Gil anything that might incriminate him. "Shut up, you little runt, you won't have to go naked." That particularly wounding remark subjugated Gil, who had, gradually incited to it by Querelle's gentle yet a little remote behavior, reached the point of rebellion. Querelle knew admirablv .

• 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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea Mihalovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sidling sleepily out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, turned round about Levin’s knees, jumping up and longing, but not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest. “You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna. “I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and went into his study. The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ashtray, a manuscript book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: “No, you’re not going to get away from us, and you’re not going to be different, but you’re going to be the same as you’ve always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.” This the things said to him, but another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two heavy dumbbells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumbbells. The bailiff came in, and said everything, thank God, was doing well; but informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated Levin. The new drying machine had been constructed and partly invented by Levin. The bailiff had always been against the drying machine, and now it was with suppressed triumph that he announced that the buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the buckwheat had been scorched, it was only because the precautions had not been taken, for which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had calved.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions was an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in one’s wife. Why one ought to have confidence—that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife would always love him—he did not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife’s loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right, and besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful,” began Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed. Your feelings are an affair of your own conscience; but I am in duty bound to you, to myself, and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.” “I don’t understand a word. And, oh dear! how sleepy I am, unluckily,” she said, rapidly passing her hand through her hair, feeling for the remaining hairpins. “Anna, for God’s sake don’t speak like that!” he said gently. “Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me, what I say, I say as much for myself as for you. I am your husband, and I love you.” For an instant her face fell, and the mocking gleam in her eyes died away; but the word _love_ threw her into revolt again. She thought: “Love? Can he love? If he hadn’t heard there was such a thing as love, he would never have used the word. He doesn’t even know what love is.” “Alexey Alexandrovitch, really I don’t understand,” she said. “Define what it is you find....” “Pardon, let me say all I have to say. I love you. But I am not speaking of myself; the most important persons in this matter are our son and yourself. It may very well be, I repeat, that my words seem to you utterly unnecessary and out of place; it may be that they are called forth by my mistaken impression. In that case, I beg you to forgive me. But if you are conscious yourself of even the smallest foundation for them, then I beg you to think a little, and if your heart prompts you, to speak out to me....” Alexey Alexandrovitch was unconsciously saying something utterly unlike what he had prepared. “I have nothing to say. And besides,” she said hurriedly, with difficulty repressing a smile, “it’s really time to be in bed.” Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed, and, without saying more, went into the bedroom.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at the interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a bargeman than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon Sergey Ivanovitch, as though to ask: What’s one to say to him? But Sergey Ivanovitch, who had been talking with far less heat and one-sidedness than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of mind to answer the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the simple and natural point of view from which the question was put, smiled and said: “That question we have no right to answer as yet.” “We have not the requisite data,” chimed in the professor, and he went back to his argument. “No,” he said; “I would point out the fact that if, as Pripasov directly asserts, perception is based on sensation, then we are bound to distinguish sharply between these two conceptions.” Levin listened no more, and simply waited for the professor to go. Chapter 8 When the professor had gone, Sergey Ivanovitch turned to his brother. “Delighted that you’ve come. For some time, is it? How’s your farming getting on?” Levin knew that his elder brother took little interest in farming, and only put the question in deference to him, and so he only told him about the sale of his wheat and money matters. Levin had meant to tell his brother of his determination to get married, and to ask his advice; he had indeed firmly resolved to do so. But after seeing his brother, listening to his conversation with the professor, hearing afterwards the unconsciously patronizing tone in which his brother questioned him about agricultural matters (their mother’s property had not been divided, and Levin took charge of both their shares), Levin felt that he could not for some reason begin to talk to him of his intention of marrying. He felt that his brother would not look at it as he would have wished him to. “Well, how is your district council doing?” asked Sergey Ivanovitch, who was greatly interested in these local boards and attached great importance to them. “I really don’t know.” “What! Why, surely you’re a member of the board?” “No, I’m not a member now; I’ve resigned,” answered Levin, “and I no longer attend the meetings.” “What a pity!” commented Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. Levin in self-defense began to describe what took place in the meetings in his district. “That’s how it always is!” Sergey Ivanovitch interrupted him. “We Russians are always like that. Perhaps it’s our strong point, really, the faculty of seeing our own shortcomings; but we overdo it, we comfort ourselves with irony which we always have on the tip of our tongues. All I say is, give such rights as our local self-government to any other European people—why, the Germans or the English would have worked their way to freedom from them, while we simply turn them into ridicule.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  The first one, the true one. Now, if they really loved each other, did they, too, make love? Like pederasts. Pederasts were shameful. To mention them in this brothel was comparable to the evocation of Satan in the choir of a basilica. 1;1adame Lysiane despised them. No one of them ever crossed her doorstep. She only admitted certain clients with bizarre tastes who demanded things one did not otherwise expect women to do, and no doubt these _were tainted with a touch of queerness : but it was women they went upstairs with, and so one could assume that it was women they liked. In their own way. But homosexuals-never. "But what am I trying to do there? Robert's no faggot . . . " In her mind's eye she saw her lover's regular, tough, composed features-but with incredible speed these faded into an image of the sailor's face, and this again became Robert's, changing into Querelle's, and Querelle, again, into Robert . . . A composite face with an unchanging expression : hard eyes, mouth severe and calm, the chin solid, and over all that, a peculiar air of innocence in regard to the unceasing confusi�n. Querelle never dared mention Mario's name. Sometimes he wondered if anyone knew about his escapade with the detective. But why would he brag about it. It didn't look as if Madame Lysiane had heard anything about it. Having met her that first day he walked into La Feria, he had ignored her ever since. But little by little, with her habitual authority, she zts I JEAN GENET imposed herself on him and took possession of him, swathing him into gestures and lines of motion whose curves were very wide and beautiful. Those harmonious masses of fl�h, that dignified bearing exuded a heat, almost a kind of steam, beclouding Querelle's senses before he was aware of the witchcraft being worked upon him. Casually he glanced at the golden chain on her breasts, the bracelets ·on her wrists, and, always vaguely, he felt himself swaddled in opulence. Sometimes he mused, looking at her from a distance, that the brothelkeeper had a beautiful wife, his brother a beautiful mistress; but when she came closer to him, Madame Lysiane was merely a source of warm, amazingly fecund, but almost unreal radiation. "You wouldn't have a match, Madame Lysiane?'' "Certainly, my dear, I'll get you a light." She refused the cigarette the sailor offered her, with a smile. "But why don't you have one? I've never seen you smoking. It's a Craven, you know." ''I never smoke in here. I allow the girls to do it, because it would make a bad impression to be so severe, but I never do, myself. It just wouldn't be class, to have the patronne sit there, puffing away." She did not sound offended at all. She spoke directly, explaining what was self-evident and not open to further discussion.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  A little man in spectacles, with a narrow forehead, tore himself from the discussion for an instant to greet Levin, and then went on talking without paying any further attention to him. Levin sat down to wait till the professor should go, but he soon began to get interested in the subject under discussion. Levin had come across the magazine articles about which they were disputing, and had read them, interested in them as a development of the first principles of science, familiar to him as a natural science student at the university. But he had never connected these scientific deductions as to the origin of man as an animal, as to reflex action, biology, and sociology, with those questions as to the meaning of life and death to himself, which had of late been more and more often in his mind. As he listened to his brother’s argument with the professor, he noticed that they connected these scientific questions with those spiritual problems, that at times they almost touched on the latter; but every time they were close upon what seemed to him the chief point, they promptly beat a hasty retreat, and plunged again into a sea of subtle distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions, and appeals to authorities, and it was with difficulty that he understood what they were talking about. “I cannot admit it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, with his habitual clearness, precision of expression, and elegance of phrase. “I cannot in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the external world has been derived from perceptions. The most fundamental idea, the idea of existence, has not been received by me through sensation; indeed, there is no special sense-organ for the transmission of such an idea.” “Yes, but they—Wurt, and Knaust, and Pripasov—would answer that your consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations. Wurt, indeed, says plainly that, assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence.” “I maintain the contrary,” began Sergey Ivanovitch. But here it seemed to Levin that just as they were close upon the real point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he made up his mind to put a question to the professor. “According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is dead, I can have no existence of any sort?” he queried.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “What can I write?” she thought. “What can I decide upon alone? What do I know? What do I want? What is there I care for?” Again she felt that her soul was beginning to be split in two. She was terrified again at this feeling, and clutched at the first pretext for doing something which might divert her thoughts from herself. “I ought to see Alexey” (so she called Vronsky in her thoughts); “no one but he can tell me what I ought to do. I’ll go to Betsy’s, perhaps I shall see him there,” she said to herself, completely forgetting that when she had told him the day before that she was not going to Princess Tverskaya’s, he had said that in that case he should not go either. She went up to the table, wrote to her husband, “I have received your letter.—A.”; and, ringing the bell, gave it to the footman. “We are not going,” she said to Annushka, as she came in. “Not going at all?” “No; don’t unpack till tomorrow, and let the carriage wait. I’m going to the princess’s.” “Which dress am I to get ready?” Chapter 17 The croquet party to which the Princess Tverskaya had invited Anna was to consist of two ladies and their adorers. These two ladies were the chief representatives of a select new Petersburg circle, nicknamed, in imitation of some imitation, _les sept merveilles du monde_. These ladies belonged to a circle which, though of the highest society, was utterly hostile to that in which Anna moved. Moreover, Stremov, one of the most influential people in Petersburg, and the elderly admirer of Liza Merkalova, was Alexey Alexandrovitch’s enemy in the political world. From all these considerations Anna had not meant to go, and the hints in Princess Tverskaya’s note referred to her refusal. But now Anna was eager to go, in the hope of seeing Vronsky. Anna arrived at Princess Tverskaya’s earlier than the other guests. At the same moment as she entered, Vronsky’s footman, with side-whiskers combed out like a _Kammerjunker_, went in too. He stopped at the door, and, taking off his cap, let her pass. Anna recognized him, and only then recalled that Vronsky had told her the day before that he would not come. Most likely he was sending a note to say so. As she took off her outer garment in the hall, she heard the footman, pronouncing his “_r’s_” even like a _Kammerjunker_, say, “From the count for the princess,” and hand the note.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Sure, forget all the backsliding and the many exceptions, and you’ve got a real strong case! Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Malinowski’s position remains deeply embedded in both scientific and popular assumptions about family structure. In fact, the whole architecture of what qualifies as family in Western society is based on Malinowski’s insistence that each child everywhere has always had just one father. But if Malinowski’s position has won the day, why is poor Morgan’s intellectual body still being regularly disinterred for further insult? Anthropologist Laura Betzig opens a paper on conjugal dissolution (failed marriage) by noting that Morgan’s “fantasy [of group marriage]…expired on encountering the evidence, and a century after Morgan…the consensus is that [monogamous] marriage comes as close to being a human universal as anything about human behavior can.”17 Ouch. But in truth, Morgan’s understanding of family structure was no “fantasy.” His conclusions were based upon decades of extensive field research and study. Later, a bit less wind in her sails, Betzig admits that “there is still, however, no consensus as to why” marriage is so widespread. That’s a mystery all right. We’ll see that anthropologists find marriage wherever they look mainly because they haven’t quite decided what it looks like. CHAPTER EIGHTMaking a Mess of Marriage, Mating, and MonogamyMarriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE When Albert Einstein proclaimed that E=mc2, no physicists asked each other, “What’s he mean by E?” In the hard sciences, the important stuff comes packaged in numbers and predefined symbols. Imprecise wording rarely causes confusion. But in more interpretive sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary theory, misinterpretation and misunderstanding are common. Take the words love and lust, for example. Love and lust are as different from each other as red wine and blue cheese, but because they can also complement one another splendidly, they get conflated with amazing, dumbfounding regularity. In the literature of evolutionary psychology, in popular culture, in the tastefully appointed offices of marriage counselors, in religious teachings, in political discourse, and in our own mixed-up lives, lust is often mistaken for love. Perhaps even more insidious and damaging in societies insistent on long-term, sexually exclusive monogamy, the negative form of that statement is also true. The absence of lust is misread as indicating an absence of love (we’ll explore this in Part V).

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had just been drinking and taking some lunch, came up to them in his uniform of a gentleman of the bedchamber, wiping his lips with a perfumed handkerchief of bordered batiste. “We are placing our forces,” he said, pulling out his whiskers, “Sergey Ivanovitch!” And listening to the conversation, he supported Sviazhsky’s contention. “One district’s enough, and Sviazhsky’s obviously of the opposition,” he said, words evidently intelligible to all except Levin. “Why, Kostya, you here too! I suppose you’re converted, eh?” he added, turning to Levin and drawing his arm through his. Levin would have been glad indeed to be converted, but could not make out what the point was, and retreating a few steps from the speakers, he explained to Stepan Arkadyevitch his inability to understand why the marshal of the province should be asked to stand. _“O sancta simplicitas!”_ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and briefly and clearly he explained it to Levin. If, as at previous elections, all the districts asked the marshal of the province to stand, then he would be elected without a ballot. That must not be. Now eight districts had agreed to call upon him: if two refused to do so, Snetkov might decline to stand at all; and then the old party might choose another of their party, which would throw them completely out in their reckoning. But if only one district, Sviazhsky’s, did not call upon him to stand, Snetkov would let himself be balloted for. They were even, some of them, going to vote for him, and purposely to let him get a good many votes, so that the enemy might be thrown off the scent, and when a candidate of the other side was put up, they too might give him some votes. Levin understood to some extent, but not fully, and would have put a few more questions, when suddenly everyone began talking and making a noise and they moved towards the big room. “What is it? eh? whom?” “No guarantee? whose? what?” “They won’t pass him?” “No guarantee?” “They won’t let Flerov in?” “Eh, because of the charge against him?” “Why, at this rate, they won’t admit anyone. It’s a swindle!” “The law!” Levin heard exclamations on all sides, and he moved into the big room together with the others, all hurrying somewhere and afraid of missing something. Squeezed by the crowding noblemen, he drew near the high table where the marshal of the province, Sviazhsky, and the other leaders were hotly disputing about something. Chapter 28

• 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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched from time to time on his forehead, as with one thinking deeply and intensely. Levin involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and clearer that was still as dark as ever for Levin. “Yes, yes, so,” the dying man articulated slowly at intervals. “Wait a little.” He was silent. “Right!” he pronounced all at once reassuringly, as though all were solved for him. “O Lord!” he murmured, and sighed deeply. Marya Nikolaevna felt his feet. “They’re getting cold,” she whispered. For a long while, a very long while it seemed to Levin, the sick man lay motionless. But he was still alive, and from time to time he sighed. Levin by now was exhausted from mental strain. He felt that, with no mental effort, could he understand what it was that was _right_. He could not even think of the problem of death itself, but with no will of his own thoughts kept coming to him of what he had to do next; closing the dead man’s eyes, dressing him, ordering the coffin. And, strange to say, he felt utterly cold, and was not conscious of sorrow nor of loss, less still of pity for his brother. If he had any feeling for his brother at that moment, it was envy for the knowledge the dying man had now that he could not have. A long time more he sat over him so, continually expecting the end. But the end did not come. The door opened and Kitty appeared. Levin got up to stop her. But at the moment he was getting up, he caught the sound of the dying man stirring. “Don’t go away,” said Nikolay and held out his hand. Levin gave him his, and angrily waved to his wife to go away. With the dying man’s hand in his hand, he sat for half an hour, an hour, another hour. He did not think of death at all now. He wondered what Kitty was doing; who lived in the next room; whether the doctor lived in a house of his own. He longed for food and for sleep. He cautiously drew away his hand and felt the feet. The feet were cold, but the sick man was still breathing. Levin tried again to move away on tiptoe, but the sick man stirred again and said: “Don’t go.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “If you care for my profession of faith as regards that, I’ll tell you that I don’t believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is why. To my mind, love ... both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato defines in his Banquet, served as the test of men. Some men only understand one sort, and some only the other. And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy. ‘I’m much obliged for the gratification, my humble respects’—that’s all the tragedy. And in platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love all is clear and pure, because....” At that instant Levin recollected his own sins and the inner conflict he had lived through. And he added unexpectedly: “But perhaps you are right. Very likely ... I don’t know, I don’t know.” “It’s this, don’t you see,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “you’re very much all of a piece. That’s your strong point and your failing. You have a character that’s all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of a piece too—but that’s not how it is. You despise public official work because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all the while with the aim—and that’s not how it is. You want a man’s work, too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided—and that’s not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own affairs, and did not hear Oblonsky. And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than once experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy, coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases. “Bill!” he called, and he went into the next room where he promptly came across an aide-de-camp of his acquaintance and dropped into conversation with him about an actress and her protector. And at once in the conversation with the aide-de-camp Oblonsky had a sense of relaxation and relief after the conversation with Levin, which always put him to too great a mental and spiritual strain. When the Tatar appeared with a bill for twenty-six roubles and odd kopecks, besides a tip for himself, Levin, who would another time have been horrified, like anyone from the country, at his share of fourteen roubles, did not notice it, paid, and set off homewards to dress and go to the Shtcherbatskys’ there to decide his fate. Chapter 12

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Oh, no, I can’t receive him; and what object would there....” She stopped suddenly, and glanced inquiringly at her husband (he did not look at her). “In short, I don’t wish it....” Alexey Alexandrovitch advanced and would have taken her hand. Her first impulse was to jerk back her hand from the damp hand with big swollen veins that sought hers, but with an obvious effort to control herself she pressed his hand. “I am very grateful to you for your confidence, but....” he said, feeling with confusion and annoyance that what he could decide easily and clearly by himself, he could not discuss before Princess Tverskaya, who to him stood for the incarnation of that brute force which would inevitably control him in the life he led in the eyes of the world, and hinder him from giving way to his feeling of love and forgiveness. He stopped short, looking at Princess Tverskaya. “Well, good-bye, my darling,” said Betsy, getting up. She kissed Anna, and went out. Alexey Alexandrovitch escorted her out. “Alexey Alexandrovitch! I know you are a truly magnanimous man,” said Betsy, stopping in the little drawing-room, and with special warmth shaking hands with him once more. “I am an outsider, but I so love her and respect you that I venture to advise. Receive him. Alexey Vronsky is the soul of honor, and he is going away to Tashkend.” “Thank you, princess, for your sympathy and advice. But the question of whether my wife can or cannot see anyone she must decide herself.” He said this from habit, lifting his brows with dignity, and reflected immediately that whatever his words might be, there could be no dignity in his position. And he saw this by the suppressed, malicious, and ironical smile with which Betsy glanced at him after this phrase. Chapter 20 Alexey Alexandrovitch took leave of Betsy in the drawing-room, and went to his wife. She was lying down, but hearing his steps she sat up hastily in her former attitude, and looked in a scared way at him. He saw she had been crying. “I am very grateful for your confidence in me.” He repeated gently in Russian the phrase he had said in Betsy’s presence in French, and sat down beside her. When he spoke to her in Russian, using the Russian “thou” of intimacy and affection, it was insufferably irritating to Anna. “And I am very grateful for your decision. I, too, imagine that since he is going away, there is no sort of necessity for Count Vronsky to come here. However, if....”

• 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 NINEPaternity Certainty: The Crumbling Cornerstone of the Standard NarrativeAccording 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 Querelle (1953)

  21s I QUERELLE around it, after he had stopped laughing. She knew for certain that this was a happy young man, and it gave her an almost imperceptible sh ock-caused a little crack to open, through wh ich the incredible me?ange of her sentiments now flowed freely. Unbeknownst to the women wh o only saw her calm face, her beautiful eyes, who were always impressed by the melan choly majesty of her bearing, supported as it was by her heavy, amp le, in the best sense of the word, hospitable haunches (ini tially destined for motherhood) -in her, whose bosom ap peared so deep and calm, there was a constant swirling, hvisting and untangling, for some mysterious reason, of these long and wide black veils, consisting of a soft and opaque material, mourning silks with shadowy folds: there was nothing else going on inside her but th is at times rapid, at times languorous to-and-fro motion of those sheets of black, and she could neither pull them out through her mouth to expose them to the sunlight, nor could she blow them out her asshole, like a solitary worm. "It's ridiculous to arrive at such a state, at my age, and I can't afford to make any mistakes. Not me. Nobody's going to fool Josephine. Just to think of it, in five years I'll turn fifty. Above all, I mustn't throw myself at the mercy of some notion. And it is a crazy notion, of my own making. When I say that they resemble one another, to the point where they are just one, in reality 'they' are two. There's Robert, on one side, and Jo on the other. " These tranquilizing daydreams which she indulged in in the daytime and during the moments of respite she granted herself wh ile watching over the transactions in the parlor, were con tinuously interrupted by everyday concerns. Thus, slowly, Madame Lysiane began to regard her own life, with its thou sands of incidents, as something completely stupid and trivial compared to the dimensions of the phenomenon whose witness and stage she had become.

• From Querelle (1953)

  187 I QUERELLE lover. And � love you. You just don't understand how I feel , "I've got nothing else to say about that. \Vhat do you want, for crissakes. You're making mountains out of molehills." "But my sweet cabbagehead, I just want you to be the one and only. \Vhat makes me so unhappy is to see there are two of you. I'm afraid for you. I'm afraid you'll never be able to be yourself. Just think about that." She stood naked under the lighted chandelier. At the comer of his mouth Robert still retained the last vestige of a smile. But his eyes were somber, as he stared at Lysiane's knees and through them at some very distant horizon. "\Vhy did you say we did filthy things? That 'you were fed up with our filth'?" Robert's voice sounded as remote as his gaze, and as calm; but Lysiane, who had studied her lov_er's reactions, heard in it a willingness to embark upon the explication of geometrical theorems; within that voice was sounded an instrument-or rather, an organ-whose function it was to see. With that voice went an eye th at was determined to pierce the darkness. Lysiane did not answer. "Well? That's what you said, dammit. What filth were you talking about?" The voice was still calm, and it was a strange feeling for Robert to discuss such accusations so reasonably. At first, he fo und 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 deliber at eness of his speech, its apparent calm (though there were tremors of some almost imperceptible emotion), and the repeti tion of the word "filth" increased his confusion. He lay spell bound, as if by some litany of misery whose refrain echoes

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Certainly, for the student colony one finds no other common denominator this is all, really, that they have in common, and they are dis tinguished from each other by the ways in which they come to terms, or fail to come to terms with their confusion. This prodigious question, at home so little recognized, seems, germ-like, to be vivified in the European air, and to grow disproportionately, displacing previous assurances, and pro ducing tensions and bewilderments entirely unlooked for. It is not, moreover, a question which limits itself to those who arc, so to speak, in traffic with ideas. It confronts everyone, finding everyone unprepared; it is a question with implications not easily escaped, and the attempt to escape can precipitate disaster. Our perfectly adapted student, fc:>r example, should his strongbox of custom break, may find himself hurled into that coterie of gold-bricks who form such a spectacular cle- A QUESTION OF IDENTITY 99 ment of the Paris scene that they are often what the Parisian has in the fo reground of his mind when he wonderingly mut ters, Cht vmiment /es America ins. The great majority of this group, ha,ing attempted, on more or less personal le,·els, to lose or disguise their antecedents, are reduced to a kind of rubble of compulsion. HaYing cast off all pre,·ious disciplines, they haYe also lost the shape which these disciplines made fo r them and have not succeeded in finding any other. Their re jection of the limitations of American society has not set them free to function in any other society, and their illusions, there fo re, remain intact: they have yet to be corrupted by the no tion that society is ne,·er anything less than a perfect labyrinth of limitations. They are charmed by the reflection that Paris is more than two thousand years old, but it escapes them that the Parisian has been in the making just about that long, and that one does not, theretore, become Parisian by virtue of a Paris address. This little band of bohemians, as grimly single minded as any eYangelical sect, illustrate, by the ,·ery fe rocity \\ith which they disa\·ow American attitudes, one of the most American of attributes, the inability to belie,·e that time is real . It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience. Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, de signed by and to r all the other people, and experience is noth ing more than sensation-so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, giYe one the ri ch, full life.