Contentment

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)

  We often recognize Charmers as such; we sense their cleverness. (Surely Harriman must have realized that his meeting with Pamela Churchill in 1971 was no coincidence.) Nevertheless, we fall under their spell. The reason is simple: the feeling that Charmers provide is so rare as to be worth the price we pay. The world is full of self-absorbed people. In their presence, we know that everything in our relationship with them is directed toward themselves— their insecurities, their neediness, their hunger for attention. That reinforces our own egocentric tendencies; we protectively close ourselves up. It is a syndrome that only makes us the more helpless with Charmers. First, they don't talk much about themselves, which heightens their mystery and disguises their limitations. Second, they seem to be interested in us, and their interest is so delightfully focused that we relax and open up to them. Finally, Charmers are pleasant to be around. They have none of most people's ugly qualities—nagging, complaining, self-assertion. They seem to know what pleases. Theirs is a diffused warmth; union without sex. (You may think a geisha is sexual as well as charming; her power, however, lies not in the sexual favors she provides but in her rare self-effacing attentiveness.) Inevitably, we become addicted, and dependent. And dependence is the source of the Charmer's power. People who are physically beautiful, and who play on their beauty to create a sexually charged presence, have little power in the end; the bloom of youth fades, there is always someone younger and more beautiful, and in any case people tire of beauty without social grace. But they never tire of feeling their self-worth validated. Learn the power you can wield by making the other person feel like the star. The key is to diffuse your sexual presence: create a vaguer, more beguiling sense of excitement through a generalized flirtation, a socialized sexuality that is constant, addictive, and never totally satisfied. 88 • The Art of Seduction 3. In December of 1936, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalists, was captured by a group of his own soldiers who were angry with his policies: instead of fighting the Japanese, who had just invaded China, he was continuing his civil war against the Communist armies of Mao Zedong. The soldiers saw no threat in Mao—Chiang had almost annhilated the Communists. In fact, they believed he should join forces with Mao against the common enemy—it was the only patriotic thing to do. The soldiers thought by capturing him they could compel Chiang to change his mind, but he was a stubborn man. Since Chiang was the main impediment to a unified war against the Japanese, the soldiers contemplated having him executed, or turned over to the Communists.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The undefensive lover. As people get older, they protect themselves against Hermes greeted his mother painful experiences by closing themselves off. The price for this is that they and retrieved something grow rigid, physically and mentally. But children are by nature unprotected that he had hidden underneath a sheepskin. • and open to experience, and this receptiveness is extremely attractive. In "What have you there?" the presence of children we become less rigid, infected with their open- asked Apollo. • In answer, ness. That is why we want to be around them. Hermes showed his newly- invented tortoise-shell lyre, Undefensive lovers have somehow circumvented the self-protective and played such a process, retaining the playful, receptive spirit of the child. They often ravishing tune on it with manifest this spirit physically: they are graceful, and seem to age less rapidly the plectrum he had also invented, at the same time than other people. Of all the Natural's character qualities, this one is the singing in praise of most useful. Defensiveness is deadly in seduction; act defensive and you'll Apollo's nobility, bring out defensiveness in other people. The undefensive lover, on the intelligence, and generosity, other hand, lowers the inhibitions of his or her target, a critical part of se- that he was forgiven at once. He led the surprised duction. It is important to learn to not react defensively: bend instead of and delighted Apollo to resist, be open to influence from others, and they will more easily fall under Pylus, playing all the way, your spell. and there gave him the remainder of the cattle, which he had hidden in a cave. • "A bargain!" cried Apollo. "You keep the cows, and I take the lyre. " 58 • The Art of Seduction • "Agreed," said Hermes, Examples of Natural Seducers and they shook hands on it. • . . . Apollo, taking 1. As a child growing up in England, Charlie Chaplin spent years in dire the child back to Olympus, told Zeus all that had poverty, particularly after his mother was committed to an asylum. In his happened. Zeus warned early teens, forced to work to live, he landed a job in vaudeville, eventually Hermes that henceforth he gaining some success as a comedian. But Chaplin was wildly ambitious, and must respect the rights oj so, in 1910, when he was only nineteen, he emigrated to the United States, property and refrain from telling downright lies; but hoping to break into the film business. Making his way to Hollywood, he he could not help being found occasional bit parts, but success seemed elusive: the competition was amused. "You seem to be a fierce, and although Chaplin had a repertoire of gags that he had learned in very ingenious, eloquent, and persuasive godling," he vaudeville, he did not particularly excel at physical humor, a critical part of said. • "Then make me silent comedy. He was not a gymnast like Buster Keaton. your herald, Father,"

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Natasha took his arm, gushing to him that she was ready for outrage from PETA, a protest or two, an Op-Ed in the New York Times that would be publicity gold. Ping Xi nodded blankly. I called in sick the day of the opening. Natasha didn’t seem to care. She had Angelika fill in at the front desk. She was an anorexic Goth, a senior at NYU. The show was a “brutal success,” one critic called it. “Cruelly funny.” Another said Ping Xi “marked the end of the sacred in art. Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?” I don’t know why I didn’t just quit. I didn’t need the money. I was relieved when, at last, in June, Natasha called from Switzerland to fire me. I had messed up a shipment of press materials for Art Basel, apparently. “Out of curiosity, what are you on?” she wanted to know. “I’ve just been really tired.” “Is it a medical issue?” “No,” I said. I could have lied. I could have told her that I had mono, or some sleep disorder. Cancer maybe. Everybody was getting cancer. But defending myself was useless. I had no good reason to fight to keep my job. “Are you letting me go?” “I’d love it if you’d stay on until I get back and use the time to show Angelika the ropes, the filing system, whatever you’ve been doing on the computer, if anything.” I hung up the phone, took a handful of Benadryl, and went down to the supply closet and fell sleep. • • • OH, SLEEP. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep. When I was in the third grade, my mother, due to some unspoken conflict with my father, let me sleep with her in their bed because, as she said, it was easier to wake me up in the mornings if she didn’t have to get up and go across the hall. I accumulated thirty-seven tardies and twenty- four absences that year.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The counters and the table were covered with bowls of pretzels, chips, nuts, a plate of cheeses, crudité, dip, cookies. “We finished all the bagels,” Reva said. Coffee was brewing in a samovar on the counter. Huge pots on the stove steamed. “Chicken, spaghetti, some kind of ratatouille thing,” she said, lifting each of the lids. She was oddly unembarrassed. It seemed like she had dispensed with her usual uppity pretentions. She made no attempt to excuse herself for being homey, folksy, or whatever the word she would have used to describe living in a home like hers—“unglamorous.” Maybe she had just completely shut down. She opened the refrigerator to show me shelves of round Tupperware containers of steamed vegetables that she’d made in advance, she said, so she’d have something to snack on all day. She hadn’t been to the gym since Christmas. “But whatever. Now is not the time. Want some broccoli?” She popped the top off one of the containers. The smell hit me and nearly made me gag. “Is this the sitting thing? You sit for ten days?” I asked, handing her the bouquet of flowers. “Shiva is seven days. But no. My family isn’t religious or anything. They just like to sit around and eat a lot. My aunts and uncles drove in from New Jersey.” Reva put the flowers in the sink, poured herself a cup of coffee, tapped in a speck of Sweet’N Low from a crumpled packet she pulled from her pocket, and stirred mindlessly, staring down at the floor. I chugged the rest of the McDonald’s coffee and refilled it from the samovar. The fluorescent lights glared off the linoleum floor and hurt my eyes. “I really need to lie down, Reva,” I told her. “I don’t feel well.” “Oh, right,” she said. “Follow me.” We walked back through the sitting room. “Dad, don’t let anyone go downstairs. My friend needs some privacy.” One of the bald men waved his hand dismissively and bit into a Danish. The crust flaked apart and fell down the front of his brown sweater-vest. He looked to me like a child molester. All those men did. But anyone would, in the right light, I thought—even I did. Even Reva. As her father tried to contain the flakes of pastry on his chest, the women got up and came at him, flicking the crumbs from his sweater onto their plates while he protested. If it weren’t for the specter of death hanging over everything, I would have felt like I was in a John Hughes movie. I tried to picture Anthony Michael Hall making an appearance, maybe as the neighbor’s kid coming to pay his condolences with a pie or a casserole. Or maybe this was a dark comedy, and Whoopi Goldberg would play the undertaker. I would have loved that. Just the thought of Whoopi soothed me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She rubbed her cheek against my temple. Valeria soon got over that. “Is there anything special you would like for dinner, dear? John and Jean will drop in later.” I answered with a grunt. She kissed me on my underlip, and, brightly saying she would bake a cake (a tradition subsisted from my lodging days that I adored her cakes), left me to my idleness. Carefully putting down the open book where she had sat (it attempted to send forth a rotation of waves, but an inserted pencil stopped the pages), I checked the hiding place of the key: rather self-consciously it lay under the old expensive safety razor I had used before she bought me a much better and cheaper one. Was it the perfect hiding place—there, under that razor, in the groove of its velvet-lined case? The case lay in a small trunk where I kept various business papers. Could I improve upon this? Remarkable how difficult it is to conceal things—especially when one’s wife keeps monkeying with the furniture. 22I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon mail brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen. The lady wrote she had just returned to St. Algebra from her sister’s funeral. “Euphemia had never been the same after breaking that hip.” As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert’s daughter, she wished to report that it was too late to enroll her this year; but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Humbert brought Dolores over in January, her admittance might be arranged.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  (very distinctly and slowly). She shrugged. (Probably Harold used to take a vacation at that time. Open season. Conditional reflex on her part.) “I think I know where that is,” she said, still pointing. “There is a hotel I remember, Enchanted Hunters, quaint, isn’t it? And the food is a dream. And nobody bothers anybody.” She rubbed her cheek against my temple. Valeria soon got over that. “Is there anything special you would like for dinner, dear? John and Jean will drop in later.” I answered with a grunt. She kissed me on my underlip, and, brightly saying she would bake a cake (a tradition subsisted from my lodging days that I adored her cakes), left me to my idleness. Carefully putting down the open book where she had sat (it attempted to send forth a rotation of waves, but an inserted pencil stopped the pages), I checked the hiding place of the key: rather self-consciously it lay under the old expensive safety razor I had used before she bought me a much better and cheaper one. Was it the perfect hiding place—there, under that razor, in the groove of its velvet-lined case? The case lay in a small trunk where I kept various business papers. Could I improve upon this? Remarkable how difficult it is to conceal things—especially when one’s wife keeps monkeying with the furniture. 22 I think it was exactly a week after our last swim that the noon mail brought a reply from the second Miss Phalen. The lady wrote she had just returned to St. Algebra from her sister’s funeral. “Euphemia had never been the same after breaking that hip.” As to the matter of Mrs. Humbert’s daughter, she wished to report that it was too late to enroll her this year; but that she, the surviving Phalen, was practically certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Humbert brought Dolores over in January, her admittance might be arranged. Next day, after lunch, I went to see “our” doctor, a friendly fellow whose perfect bedside manner and complete reliance on a few patented drugs adequately masked his ignorance of, and indifference to, medical science. The fact that Lo would have to come back to Ramsdale was a treasure of anticipation. For this event I wanted to be fully prepared. I had in fact begun my campaign earlier, before Charlotte made that cruel decision of hers. I had to be sure when my lovely child arrived, that very night, and then night after night, until St.

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

  There are many ways to gain new concepts: taking trips (even just a walk in the woods), reading books, watching movies, trying unfamiliar foods. Be a collector of experiences. Try on new perspectives the way you try on new clothing. These kinds of activities will provoke your brain to combine concepts to form new ones, changing your conceptual system proactively so you’ll predict and behave differently later. For example, in our household, my husband, Dan, is in charge of recycling because I am forever placing inappropriate items into the bin, like cellophane or wood, because by God, they should be recyclable. Instead of getting frustrated by the extra work I make for him, Dan applied a concept from his childhood, when he collected superhero comic books. My fruitless attempts at bucking reality became a “Superpower” that he calls wishful recycling. An irritating habit was thus transformed into an amusing foible. Perhaps the easiest way to gain concepts is to learn new words. You’ve probably never thought about learning words as a path to greater emotional health, but it follows directly from the neuroscience of construction. Words seed your concepts, concepts drive your predictions, predictions regulate your body budget, and your body budget determines how you feel. Therefore, the more finely grained your vocabulary, the more precisely your predicting brain can calibrate your budget to your body’s needs. In fact, people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. This is not magic; it’s what happens when you leverage the porous boundary between the social and the physical.13 So, learn as many new words as possible. Read books that are outside of your comfort zone, or listen to thought-provoking audio content like National Public Radio. Don’t be satisfied with “happy”: seek out and use more specific words like “ecstatic,” “blissful,” and “inspired.” Learn the difference between “discouraged” or “dejected” versus generically “sad.” As you build up the associated concepts, you’ll become able to construct your experiences more finely. And don’t limit yourself to words in your native language. Pick another language and seek out its concepts for which your language has no words, like the Dutch emotion of togetherness, gezellig, and the Greek feeling of major guilt, enohi. Each word is another invitation to construct your experiences in new ways.14

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And then she was back on her feet, and another hard blow sent her crying into the dark cellar chamber of the castle. Slaves everywhere were thrown over barrels, their sore bodies being washed quickly with cool water. Beauty felt it flow over her abraded flesh, and then the soft toweling. At once, Leon had her on her feet. "You've pleased the Queen marvelously. Your form was magnificent. You were born for the Bridle Path." "But the Prince..." Beauty whispered. And she felt dizzy, and mistakenly envisioned Prince Alexi. "Not tonight for you, lovely one, he is quite busy with a thousand amusements. And you must be placed where you can serve and rest, as the exertion of the Bridle Path is quite enough in one night for a novice." He unfastened her braids and brushed out her hair in ripples. She was breathing deeply and evenly now and bent her forehead against his chest. "Was I truly graceful?" "Pricelessly beautiful," he whispered, "and Lady Juliana is thoroughly in love with you." But now he ordered her down on her knees and told her to follow him. She was suddenly out in the night again, on the warm grass with the noisy crowd all about her. She saw the table legs, the gathered gowns, hands moving in the shadows. There was a shriek of laughter nearby and then she saw before her a long banquet table covered with sweets, fruit and pastries. Two Princes attended it and decorative pillars stood at both ends to which slave girls were affixed, their hands above their heads, their feet chained slightly apart at the bottom. One of these was removed as Beauty approached and she was quickly fastened in the girl's place, standing firmly, her head and swollen buttocks pressed back against the pillar. She could see the whole feast around her, even with her lids lowered, and she felt herself quite firmly bound in place, unable to move, and it did not matter. The worst was over. Even when a passing Lord stopped to smile at her and pinch her nipples, she did not care. She was amazed to see the little brass bells had been taken away. She was so weary she hadn't noticed. Leon was still nearby, at her ear, and she was about to murmur some question as to how long she would be here, when quite distinctly in front of her she saw Prince Alexi. He was as beautiful as she had remembered, his auburn brown hair curling against the hollows of his handsome face, his soft brown eyes fixed on her. His lips spread easily in a smile though he drew up to the table and gave his pitcher to be filled to one of those in attendance. Beauty stared furtively out of the corner of her eye. She saw his thick hard sex and the lush hair around it.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  duce a person is the effort we expend on their behalf, showing how much we care, how much they are worth. Leaving things to chance is a recipe for disaster, and reveals that we do not take love and romance very seriously. It was the effort Casanova expended, the artfulness he applied to each affair that made him so devilishly seductive. Falling in love is a matter not of magic but of psychology. Once you understand your target's psychology, and strategize to suit it, you will be better able to cast a "magical" spell. A seducer sees love not as sacred but as warfare, where all is fair. Seducers are never self-absorbed. Their gaze is directed outward, not inward. When they meet someone their first move is to get inside that per- Preface • xxiii son's skin, to see the world through their eyes. The reasons for this are sev- The disaffection, neurosis, eral. First, self-absorption is a sign of insecurity; it is anti-seductive. Every- anguish and frustration encountered by one has insecurities, but seducers manage to ignore them, finding therapy psychoanalysis comes no for moments of self-doubt by being absorbed in the world. This gives them doubt from being unable to a buoyant spirit—we want to be around them. Second, getting into some- love or to be loved, from being unable to give or take one's skin, imagining what it is like to be them, helps the seducer gather pleasure, but the radical valuable information, learn what makes that person tick, what will make disenchantment comes from them lose their ability to think straight and fall into a trap. Armed with seduction and its failure. Only those who lie such information, they can provide focused and individualized attention—a completely outside rare commodity in a world in which most people see us only from behind seduction are ill, even if the screen of their own prejudices. Getting into the targets' skin is the first they remain fully capable of important tactical move in the war of penetration. loving and making love. Psychoanalysis believes it Seducers see themselves as providers of pleasure, like bees that gather treats the disorder of sex pollen from some flowers and deliver it to others. As children we mostly and desire, but in reality it devoted our lives to play and pleasure. Adults often have feelings of being is dealing with the disorders of seduction. . . . cut off from this paradise, of being weighed down by responsibilities. The The most serious seducer knows that people are waiting for pleasure—they never get enough deficiencies always concern of it from friends and lovers, and they cannot get it by themselves. A person charm and not pleasure, enchantment and not some who enters their lives offering adventure and romance cannot be resisted. vital or sexual satisfaction. Pleasure is a feeling of being taken past our limits, of being overwhelmed— —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, by another person, by an experience. People are dying to be overwhelmed, SEDUCTION

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn’t notice. I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I’ll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn’t a good lay. I’ll be able to forget him. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “That I’ve been well and truly fucked.” I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true. “You’re a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven’t fucked you properly. I can do much better than that.” I was caught up short by his candor. “OK,” I confessed glumly, “you haven’t fucked me properly. I admit it.” “That’s better. Why are you always trying to be such a goddamned social worker? To salve my ego?” He pronounced it “egg-oh.” I thought for a while. What was I doing? I just assumed that you had to act that way with men. If you didn’t they’d fall apart, or go crazy. I didn’t want to drive another man crazy. “I guess I always just assumed that the male ego was so fragile you had to coddle it—” “Well mine isn’t so fragile. I can take being told I haven’t fucked you properly—especially when it’s bloody true.” “I guess I’ve just never met anyone like you.” He smiled delightedly. “No, you haven’t, ducks, and I daresay you never will again. I told you I’m an antihero. I’m not here to rescue you—and carry you away on a white horse.” What was he here for then, I wondered? It certainly wasn’t fucking. We went swimming at a huge public Schwimmbad on the outskirts of Vienna. I had never in my life seen so much sunburned fat. In Heidelberg, I had deliberately avoided the public swimming pools and saunas; and when we traveled we had always avoided the beach resorts frequented by Germans. We made a point of bypassing Ravenna and the other Teutonic encampments. Instead, I used to gaze enviously at the beautiful concave navels of the French Riviera, the moneyed, exercised midriffs of Capri. But here we were surrounded by mountains of Schlag and Sacher Torte metamorphosed into fat. “It’s like The Last Judgment by Michelangelo,” I told Adrian. “The one at the end of the Sistine Chapel.” He stuck his tongue out at me and made a face. “Here are all these people just enjoying themselves and having a good swim, and you’re turning your satirical gaze upon them, seeing depravity and corruption all around you. Madam Savonarola, I ought to call you.” “You’re right,” I said meekly. Couldn’t I ever stop looking and dissecting and tearing everything down? I couldn’t. “But they do look like The Last Judgment ,” I said. “God’s revenge on the Germans for being such pigs is making them look like pigs.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away… —Louis de Bernières, Correlli’s Mandolin There is a cost…for the society that insists on conformity to a particular range of heterosexual practices. We believe that cultures can be rationally designed. We can teach and reward and coerce. But in so doing we must also consider the price of each culture, measured in the time and energy required for training and enforcement and in the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our innate predispositions. E. O. WILSON1 So now what? Having written this whole book about sex, we’d like to confusingly suggest that most of us take sex way too seriously: when it’s just sex, that’s all it is. In such cases, it’s not love. Or sin. Or pathology. Or a good reason to destroy an otherwise happy family. Like the Victorians, most contemporary Western societies inflate the inherent value of sex by restricting supply (“Good girls don’t”) and inflating demand (Girls Gone Wild). This process leads to a distorted vision of just how important sex actually is. Yes, sex is essential, but it’s not something that must always be taken so seriously. Think of food, water, oxygen, shelter, and all the other elements of life crucial to survival and happiness but that don’t figure in our day-to-day thinking unless they become unavailable. A reasonable relaxation of moralistic social codes making sexual satisfaction more easily available would also make it less problematic. This appears to be the overall trajectory of history. While many are perplexed and disturbed by the “hooking up” culture, the sexting of racy images back and forth, full recognition of all legal rights for gay male and lesbian couples, and so on, there’s not much they can do to stop any of it for long. In terms of sexuality, history appears to be flowing back toward a hunter-gatherer casualness. If so, future generations may suffer fewer pathological manifestations of sexual frustration and unnecessarily fractured families. Concerning the Siriono, with whom he lived, Holmberg writes, “The Siriono rarely, if ever, lack for sexual partners. Whenever the sex drive is up, there is almost always an available partner willing to reduce it…. Sex anxiety seems to be remarkably low in Siriono society. Such manifestations as excessive indulgence, continence, or sex dreams and fantasies are rarely encountered.”2

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Adrian dropped us off at the hotel without a word and roared off in the Triumph to get lost. We went upstairs to wash away the sins of the night before. Since there was no meeting Bennett wanted to attend that afternoon, we decided to take a walk together in the direction of Freud’s house. Before Adrian had appeared on the scene we’d planned that excursion, but somehow it had got lost in the shuffle. Vienna was beautiful that morning. Not hot yet, but sunny and blue-skied and full of official-looking people hurrying to work with their briefcases (in which they probably had nothing more official than newspapers and their lunch). We strolled through the Volksgarten and admired the tidy rose trees, the beds of manicured flowers. We commented on the inevitable desecration of these flowerbeds if they were in New York. We tsk-tsked to each other concerning the vandalism of New York versus the law-abiding virtues of Germanic cities. We had our old familiar conversation about civilization and repression versus impulse and acting out. For a short while there was that comfortable solidarity between us which Adrian had called our “marital boredom.” He was wrong about that. Since he was a lone wolf, he didn’t understand pairing and could only see marriage as boredom. What he missed was that special coupling instinct which causes two people to come together, fill in the chinks in each other’s souls, and feel stronger for it. Coupling doesn’t always have to do with sex; you see it among friends who live together, or old married homosexuals who rarely even screw each other anymore, and you see it in some marriages. Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. Bennett and I linked arms and walked to Freud’s house. It was our unspoken agreement that we would not mention the night before. The night before might as well have been a dream, and now that we were together again in the sunlight, the dream was being burned away like early-morning fog. We walked up the stairs to Freud’s consulting room like two patients going for marital therapy.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I sniffed the air for traces of anything uncouth, but smelled nothing. I found a stray Silenor on the kitchen counter and swallowed it. “Your phone is in a Tupperware container floating in the tub,” Reva yelled from the bathroom. “I know,” I lied. We sat down on the sofa, me with my second coffee and my sample bottle of Infermiterol, Reva with her fat-free strawberry frozen yogurt. We watched the rest of the porn movie in complete silence. After a day spent meditating on death, watching people have sex felt good. “Procreation,” I thought. “The circle of life.” During the blow job scene, I got up and peed. During the pussy-eating scene, Reva got up and puked, I thought. Then she found a corkscrew in the kitchen, opened a bottle of the funeral wine, came back to the sofa and sat down. We passed the bottle back and forth and watched ejaculate dribble over the girl’s face. Gobs of it got stuck in her fake eyelashes. I thought of Trevor and all his drips and splats on my belly and back. When we’d had sex at his place, he’d finish and instantly rush out and back in with a roll of paper towels, hold the little trash can out for me as I wiped myself off. “These sheets . . .” Trevor never once came inside of me, not even when I was on the pill. His favorite thing was to fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep, as if I wouldn’t notice his penis slamming into the back of my throat. The credits rolled. Another porn movie started. Reva found the remote and hit unmute. I opened the sample bottle of Infermiterol and took one, washing it down with the wine. I remember listening to the stiff dialogue of the opening—the girl played a physical therapist, the guy played a football player with a pain in his groin. Reva cried for a while. When the fucking started, she lowered the volume and told me about her New Year’s the year before. “I just wasn’t in the mood to go to a couples party, you know? Everybody kissing at midnight? Ken was being a dick but I met him at like three in the morning at the Howard Johnson in Times Square.” I was glad to hear she was drunk now. It took some of the tension out of the room. On-screen, there was a knock on the door. The fucking didn’t stop. I was weaving in and out of sleep by then. Reva kept talking. “And so then Ken was like . . . That was the first time . . . I told my mom . . . She said to pretend it never happened . . . Am I nuts?” “Whoa,” I said, pointing at the TV screen. A black girl had entered the scene in a cheerleader’s uniform. “Do you think that’s his jealous girlfriend?”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Discover what your target never got and you have the ingredients for a deep-rooted seduction. The key is not just to talk about memories—that is weak. What you want is to get people to act out in their present old issues from their past, without their being aware of what is happening. The regressions you can effect fall into four main types. The Infantile Regression. The first bond—the bond between a mother and her infant—is the most powerful one. Unlike other animals, human ba- bies have a long period of helplessness during which they are dependent on their mother, creating an attachment that influences the rest of their lives. The key to effecting this regression is to reproduce the sense of uncondi- tional love a mother has for her child. Never judge your targets—let them do whatever they want, including behaving badly; at the same time sur- round them with loving attention, smother them with comfort. A part of mothers, and sometimes wives. ...•... A magazine called Young Lady featured an article (January 1982) on "how to make ourselves beautiful." How, in other words, to attract men. An American or European magazine would then go on to tell the reader how to be sexually desirable, no doubt suggesting various puffs, creams, and sprays. Not so with Young Lady. "The most attractive women," it informs us, "are women full of maternal love. Women without maternal love are the types men never want to marry. . . . One has to look at men through the eyes of a mother. " —IAN BURUMA, BEHIND THE MASK: ON SEXUAL DEMONS, SACRED MOTHERS, TRANSVESTITES, GANGSTERS, DRIFTERS AND OTHER JAPANESE CULTURAL HEROES I have stressed the fact that the beloved person is a substitute for the ideal ego. Two people who love each other are interchanging . their ego-ideals. That they love each other means they love the ideal of themselves in the other one. There would be no love on earth if this phantom were not there. We fall in love because we cannot attain the image that is our better self and the best of our self From this concept it is obvious that love itself is only possible on a certain cultural level or after a certain phase in the development of the personality has been reached. The creation of an ego-ideal itself marks human progress. When people are entirely satisfied Effect a Regression • 331 them will regress to those earliest years when their mother took care of everything and rarely left them alone. This works on almost everyone, for unconditional love is the rarest and most treasured form. You do not even have to tailor your behavior to anything specific in their childhood; most of us have experienced this kind of attention. Meanwhile, create atmospheres that reinforce the feeling you are generating—warm environments, playful activities, bright, happy colors. The Oedipal Regression.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Among foragers, where property is shared, poverty tends to be a nonissue. In his classic book Stone Age Economics, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that “the world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”20 Socrates made the same point 2,400 years ago: “He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.” But the wealth of civilization is material. After reading every word of the Old Testament, journalist David Plotz was struck by its mercantile tone. “The overarching theme of the Bible,” he wrote, “particularly of Genesis, is real estate. God is…constantly making land deals (and then remaking them, on different terms)…. It’s not just land that the Bible is obsessed with, but also portable property: gold, silver, livestock.”21 Malthus and Darwin were both struck by the characteristic egalitarianism of foragers, the former writing, “Among most of the American tribes…so great a degree of equality prevailed that all the members of each community would be nearly equal sharers in general hardships of savage life and in the pressure of occasional famines.”22 For his part, Darwin recognized the inherent conflict between the capital-based civilization he knew and what he saw as the natives’ self-defeating generosity, writing, “Nomadic habits, whether over wide plains, or through the dense forests of the tropics, or along the shores of the sea, have in every case been highly detrimental…. The perfect equality of all the inhabitants,” he wrote, “will for many years prevent their civilization.”23 Finding Contentment “at the Bottom of the Scale of Human Beings” Looking for an example of the world’s most downtrodden, pathetic, desperately poor “savages,” Malthus cited “the wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” who had been judged by European travelers to be “at the bottom of the scale of human beings.” Just thirty years later Charles Darwin was in Tierra del Fuego, observing these same people. He agreed with Malthus concerning the Fuegians, writing in his journal, “I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.” As chance would have it, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle—the ship on which Darwin was sailing—had picked up three young Fuegians on an earlier voyage, and brought them back to England to introduce them to the glories of British life and a proper Christian education. Now, after they’d experienced firsthand the superiority of civilized living, FitzRoy was returning them to their own people to serve as missionaries. The plan was for them to show the Fuegians the folly of their “savage” ways and help them join the civilized world.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOConfronting the Sky TogetherLove is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away… —Louis de Bernières, Correlli’s Mandolin There is a cost…for the society that insists on conformity to a particular range of heterosexual practices. We believe that cultures can be rationally designed. We can teach and reward and coerce. But in so doing we must also consider the price of each culture, measured in the time and energy required for training and enforcement and in the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our innate predispositions. E. O. WILSON1 So now what? Having written this whole book about sex, we’d like to confusingly suggest that most of us take sex way too seriously: when it’s just sex, that’s all it is. In such cases, it’s not love. Or sin. Or pathology. Or a good reason to destroy an otherwise happy family. Like the Victorians, most contemporary Western societies inflate the inherent value of sex by restricting supply (“Good girls don’t”) and inflating demand (Girls Gone Wild). This process leads to a distorted vision of just how important sex actually is. Yes, sex is essential, but it’s not something that must always be taken so seriously. Think of food, water, oxygen, shelter, and all the other elements of life crucial to survival and happiness but that don’t figure in our day-to-day thinking unless they become unavailable. A reasonable relaxation of moralistic social codes making sexual satisfaction more easily available would also make it less problematic. This appears to be the overall trajectory of history. While many are perplexed and disturbed by the “hooking up” culture, the sexting of racy images back and forth, full recognition of all legal rights for gay male and lesbian couples, and so on, there’s not much they can do to stop any of it for long. In terms of sexuality, history appears to be flowing back toward a hunter-gatherer casualness. If so, future generations may suffer fewer pathological manifestations of sexual frustration and unnecessarily fractured families. Concerning the Siriono, with whom he lived, Holmberg writes, “The Siriono rarely, if ever, lack for sexual partners. Whenever the sex drive is up, there is almost always an available partner willing to reduce it…. Sex anxiety seems to be remarkably low in Siriono society. Such manifestations as excessive indulgence, continence, or sex dreams and fantasies are rarely encountered.”2

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate. I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Around me the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside. From the aproned pot-scrubber to the flanneled potentate, everybody liked me, everybody petted me. Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa. Ruined Russian princesses who could not pay my father, bought me expensive bonbons. He, mon cher petit papa , took me out boating and biking, taught me to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Misérables , and I adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss his various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who made much of me and cooed and shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness. I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beauté Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult. 3 Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  He felt his old power returning—it was as if he were charming her. A few days later she dropped in on him at one of his weekend homes. Harriman was one of the wealthiest men in the world, but was no lavish spender; he and Marie had lived a Spartan life. Pamela made no comment, but when she invited him to her own home, he could not help but notice the brightness and vibrancy of her life—flowers everywhere, beautiful linens on the bed, wonderful meals (she seemed to know all of his favorite foods). He had heard of her reputation as a courtesan and understood the lure of his wealth, yet being around her was invigorating, and eight weeks after that party, he married her. Pamela did not stop there. She persuaded her husband to donate the art that Marie had collected to the National Gallery. She got him to part with some of his money—a trust fund for her son Winston, new houses, constant redecorations. Her approach was subtle and patient; she made him somehow feel good about giving her what she wanted. Within a few years, hardly any traces of Marie remained in their life. Harriman spent less time with his children and grandchildren. He seemed to be going through a second youth. In Washington, politicians and their wives viewed Pamela with suspicion. They saw through her, and were immune to her charm, or so they thought. Yet they always came to the frequent parties she hosted, justify-ing themselves with the thought that powerful people would be there. Everything at these parties was calibrated to create a relaxed, intimate atmosphere. No one felt ignored: the least important people would find themselves talking to Pamela, opening up to that attentive look of hers. She made them feel powerful and respected. Afterward she would send them a The Charmer • 87 personal note or gift, often referring to something they had mentioned in conversation. The wives who had called her a courtesan and worse slowly changed their minds. The men found her not only beguiling but useful— her worldwide contacts were invaluable. She could put them in touch with exactly the right person without them even having to ask. The Harrimans' parties soon evolved into fundraising events for the Democratic Party. Put at their ease, feeling elevated by the aristocratic atmosphere Pamela created and the sense of importance she gave them, visitors would empty their wal-lets without realizing quite why. This, of course, was exactly what all the men in her life had done. In 1986, Averell Harriman died. By then Pamela was powerful and wealthy enough that she no longer needed a man. In 1993, she was named the U.S. ambassador to France, and easily transferred her personal and social charm into the world of political diplomacy. She was still working when she died, in 1997.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  And yet, after the novelty of Hugo's new life wore off, his affairs resumed. Finally, fearing for his health, and worried that she could no longer compete with yet another twenty-year-old coquette, Juliette made a calm but stern demand: no more women or she was leaving him. Taken completely by surprise, yet certain that she meant every word, Hugo broke down and sobbed. An old man by now, he got down on his knees and swore, on the Bible and then on a copy of his famous novel Les Misérables, that he would stray no more. Until Juliette's death, in 1883, her spell over him was complete. Interpretation. Hugo's love life was determined by his relationship with his mother. He never felt she had loved him enough. Almost all the women he had affairs with bore a physical resemblance to her; somehow he would make up for her lack of love for him by sheer volume. When Juliette met him, she could not have known all this, but she must have sensed two things: he was extremely disappointed in his wife, and he had never really grown up. His emotional outbursts and his need for attention made him more a little boy than a man. She would gain ascendancy over him for the rest of his life by supplying the one thing he had never had: complete, unconditional mother-love. Juliette never judged Hugo, or criticized him for his naughty ways. She lavished him with attention; visiting her was like returning to the womb. In her presence, in fact, he was more a little boy than ever. How could he refuse her a favor or ever leave her? And when she finally threatened to leave him, he was reduced to the state of a wailing infant crying for his mother. In the end she had total power over him. Unconditional love is rare and hard to find, yet it is what we all crave, since we either experienced it once or wish we had. You do not have to go as far as Juliette Drouet; the mere hint of devoted attention, of accepting your lovers for who they are, of meeting their needs, will place them in an infantile position. A sense of dependency may frighten them a little, and they may feel an undercurrent of ambivalence, a need to assert themselves periodically, as Hugo did through his affairs. But their ties to you will be strong and they will keep coming back for more, bound by the illusion that they are recapturing the mother-love they had seemingly lost forever, or never had. 2. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Professor Mut, a schoolmaster at a college for young men in a small German town, began to de- Effect a Regression • 341

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Once the Chinese established full control of the area in 1956, government officials began making annual visits to lecture the people on the dangers of sexual freedom and convince them to switch to “normal” marriage. In a bit of dubious publicity reminiscent of Reefer Madness, Chinese government officials showed up one year with a portable generator and a film showing “actors dressed as Mosuo…who were in the last stages of syphilis, who had gone mad and lost most of their faces.” The audience response was not what the Chinese officials expected: their makeshift cinema was burned to the ground. But the officials didn’t give up. Yang Erche Namu recalls “meetings night after night where they harangued and criticized and interrogated…. [The Chinese officials] ambushed men on their way to their lovers’ houses, they dragged couples out of their beds and exposed people naked to their own relatives’ eyes.” When even these heavy-handed tactics failed to convince the Mosuo to abandon their system, government officials insisted on bringing (if not demonstrating) “decency” to the Mosuo. They cut off essential deliveries of seed grain and children’s clothing. Finally, literally starved into submission, many Mosuo agreed to participate in government-sponsored marriage ceremonies, where each was given “a cup of tea, a cigarette, pieces of candy, and a paper certificate.”11 But the arm-twisting had little lasting effect. Travel writer Cynthia Barnes visited Lugu Lake in 2006 and found the Mosuo system still intact, though under pressure from Chinese tourists who, like Marco Polo 750 years earlier, mistake the sexual autonomy of Mosuo women for licentiousness. “Although their lack of coyness draws the world’s attention to the Mosuo,” Barnes writes, “sex is not the center of their universe.” She continues: I think of my parents’ bitter divorce, of childhood friends uprooted and destroyed because Mommy or Daddy decided to sleep with someone else. Lugu Lake, I think, is not so much a kingdom of women as a kingdom of family—albeit one blessedly free of politicians and preachers extolling “family values.” There’s no such thing as a “broken home,” no sociologists wringing their hands over “single mothers,” no economic devastation or shame and stigma when parents part. Sassy and confident, [a Mosuo girl will] grow up cherished in a circle of male and female relatives…. When she joins the dances and invites a boy into her flower room, it will be for love, or lust, or whatever people call it when they are operating on hormones and heavy breathing. She will not need that boy—or any other—to have a home, to make a “family.” She already knows that she will always have both.12