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

  1 8 Some research seems to show that such stereotypes are more accurate than we might think. Steven Pinker writes in The Blank Slate, for example, that “people who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites . . . are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct” when compared to census figures. He and others argue that many scientists dismiss stereotypes as inaccurate because we are bullied into political correctness, are condescending toward ordinary people, or are biased by our own muddled assumptions about human nature. But as you’ve just seen, there is another possibility: the official welfare statistics are true because we, as a society, made them so. 1 9 By virtue of our values and practices, we restrict options and narrow possibilities for some people while widening them for others, and then we say that stereotypes are accurate. They are accurate only in relation to a shared social reality that our collective concepts created in the first place. People aren’t a bunch of billiard balls knocking one another around. We are a bunch of brains regulating each other’s body budgets, building concepts and social reality together, and thereby helping to construct each other’s minds and determine each other’s outcomes. Some readers might dismiss this sort of constructionist worldview as a stereotypically bleeding-heart liberal ivory tower academic viewpoint from the Land Where Everything Is Relative. In fact, this view cuts across traditional political lines. The idea that you’re molded by your culture is stereotypically liberal. At the same time, as we discussed in chapter 6 , you are responsible in a broad sense for the concepts you have, which ultimately influence your behavior. Individual responsibility is a deeply conservative idea. You are also somewhat responsible to others, not only the less fortunate but also future generations, for how you influence their wiring. It matters how you treat other people. That is a fundamentally religious idea. The American Dream traditionally says, “If you work hard, anything is possi ble.” Construction agrees that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined in part by your culture, influences your later options. I don’t know about you, but I find some comfort in a bit of uncertainty. It’s refreshing to question the concepts that have been given to us, and to be curious about which are physical and which are social. There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing. Uncertainty means that things can be other than they appear.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Italian for Dummies. A book of Mad Libs that I filled in myself using the simplest words I could think of. I passed the days like this for four or five weeks. I did not buy a cell phone. I got rid of the old mattress. Every night at nine I lay down on the smooth hardwood floor with a stretch and a yawn, and I had no trouble sleeping. I had no dreams. I was like a newborn animal. I rose with the sun. I did not walk south of Sixty-eighth Street. By mid-June, it was too hot to wear the tracksuit Ping Xi had left me. I bought a pack of white cotton panties and plastic slip-on shoes from the 99 Cent Store on 108th Street. I liked it up there, almost Harlem. I paced slowly up and down Second Avenue in red or blue gym shorts and oversized athletic tees. I got in the habit of buying a box of Corn Flakes from the Egyptians each morning. I fed the Corn Flakes in gentle handfuls to the squirrels in the park. I drank no coffee. I discovered the Goodwill store on 126th Street. I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed. This was how I refurnished my apartment. One day, I brought the white fox fur coat with me to the Goodwill and handed it to the teenager taking donations through the door around the corner from the store entrance. He took it calmly, asked if I wanted a receipt. I watched his hands smooth the fur, as though he were assessing its value. Maybe he’d steal it and give it to his girlfriend, or his mother. I hoped he would. But then he just threw it in a huge blue bin. In August I bought a battery-operated radio and carried it with me to the park each day. I listened to the jazz stations. I didn’t know any names of the songs. The squirrels flocked to me as soon as I uncrumpled the bag of Corn Flakes. They ate straight from my palm, tiny black hands crunching into the cereal, cheeks ballooning. “You pigs!” I told them. They seemed perturbed by the music coming out of my little radio. I kept the volume low when I fed them. • • • I DIDN’T THINK MUCH of Ping Xi until I saw Reva. I called her on August 19 from the doorman’s cell phone. Despite all the sleep and forgetting, I still knew her number by heart, and recognized the date on the calendar as her birthday.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Still ten yards away, Howard had a chance to switch his position with his wife – quickly and unobserved – so that Erskine would naturally veer towards Howard and French would go the other way. He took this opportunity. Unfortunately French was not given to duologic conversation – he addressed the group, always. No – he addressed the gaps between the group. ‘Belseys en masse ,’ said Jack French very slowly, and each Belsey tried to ascertain which Belsey he might be looking at directly. ‘Missing . . . one , I believe. Belseys minus one.’ ‘That’s Levi, our youngest – we lost him. He lost us. To be honest, he’s trying to lose us,’ said Kiki coarsely and laughed, and Jerome laughed and Zora laughed and so did Howard and Erskine and after all of them, very slowly, with infinite slowness, Jack French began to laugh. ‘My children,’ began Jack. ‘Yes?’ said Howard. ‘Spend most of their time,’ said Jack. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Howard, encouragingly. ‘ Contriving ,’ said Jack. ‘Ha, ha,’ said Howard. ‘ Yes .’ ‘To lose me at public events,’ said Jack finally. ‘Right,’ said Howard, exhausted already. ‘Right. Always the way.’ ‘We are anathema to our own children,’ said Erskine merrily, with his scale-jumping accent, from high to low and back again. ‘We are liked only by other people’s children. Your children for example like me so much more than they like you .’ ‘It’s true, man. I’d move in with you if I could,’ said Jerome in return, for which he got the standard Erskine response to good tidings, even minor ones like the arrival of a new gin and tonic on the table – both of Erskine’s hands placed on his cheeks and a kiss on the forehead. ‘You will come home with me, then. It is settled.’ ‘Please, take the rest too. Don’t dangle carrots,’ said Howard, stepping forward and giving Erskine a jovial slap on the back. He then turned to Jack French and put out his hand, which French, who had turned to gaze upon the musicians, did not notice.  kipps and belsey ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ said Kiki. ‘We’re so glad to bump into you two. Is Maisie here, Jack? Or the kids?’ ‘It is wonderful,’ confirmed Jack, putting his hands on his slim hips. Zora was elbowing her father in his mid-section.

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

  8 Here’s another simple budget-booster: set up regular lunch dates with a friend and take turns treating each other. Research shows that giving and gratitude have mutual benefits for the body budgets involved, so when you take turns, you reap the benefits. (And over the long run, it costs the same as splitting the checks.) 9 There are many more things you can try that I haven’t mentioned yet. Adopt a pet, which gives you touch and unconditional adoration at the same time. Take walks in a public garden or park. Look online for research on your favorite hobbies, to see if they’re beneficial for stress, or just try things out and see what works. Knitting works, apparently; for me, it’s counted cross-stitch. 1 0 Changing your habits to suit your body budget is never easy, and sometimes it’s impossible, but try these techniques wherever you can. They will lift your mood and you’ll feel less stressed more of the time. … After attending to your body budget, the next best thing you can do for emotional health is to beef up your concepts, otherwise known as “becoming more emotionally intelligent.” People with a classical view mindset think about emotional intelligence as “detecting” other people’s emotions “accurately,” or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness “at the right time.” With our new understanding of emotions, however, we can think about emotional intelligence in a new way. “Happiness” and “Sadness” are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation. (And also when not to construct emotions but instances of some other concept.) Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, argues that higher EI leads to greater success in academics, business, and social rela tionships. “For star performance in all jobs, in every field,” he writes, “emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities.” So you might be surprised to hear that science still has no generally accepted definition or measure of EI. Goleman’s books offer a lot of reasonable, practical advice, but they don’t properly explain why his advice works. Their scientific justification is heavily influenced by the outdated “triune brain” model—if you regulate your alleged emotional inner beast effectively, then you’re emotionally intelligent. 1 1 Emotional intelligence is better characterized in terms of concepts. Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, “Feeling Awesome” and “Feeling Crappy.” Whenever you experienced emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorize only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  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. Thirty-seven times, my mother and I woke up together, bleary and exhausted at seven A.M., tried to get up, but fell back into bed and slept on while cartoons flashed from the small television on her bedside table. We’d wake up a few hours later—shades drawn, extra pillows lying shipwrecked on the rough beige rug—dress in a daze and lurch out into the car. I remember her holding one eye open with one hand, steering with the other. I’ve often wondered what she was on that year, and if she’d been slipping me any of it. Twenty-four times we slept through the alarm, got up sometime past noon, and abandoned the thought of school altogether. I’d eat cereal and read or watch television all day. My mother would smoke cigarettes, talk on the phone, hide from the housekeeper, take a bottle of wine with her into the master bathroom, and draw a bubble bath and read Danielle Steel or Better Homes & Gardens.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  LUCIUS APULEIUS dextera gerebam flammis adultam facem, et caput decore corona cinxerat, palmae candidae foliis in modum radiorum prosistentibus: sic ad instar solis exornato me et in vicem simulacri constituto, repente velis reductis, in aspectum populus errabat. Exhine festissimum celebravi natalem sacrorum et suaves epulae et faceta convivia; dies etiam tertius pari caerimoniarum ritu celebratus, et ientaculum re- ligiosum et teletae legitima consummatio. Paucis dehine ibidem commoratus diebus inexplicabili voluptate simulacri divini perfruebar, irremunerabili quippe beneficio pigneratus. Sed tandem deae monitu, licet non plene, tamen pro meo modulo supplicue gratiis persolutis, tardam satis domuitionem comparo, vix equidem abruptis ardentissimi desiderii retinaculis. — Provolutus denique ante conspectum deae et facie mea diu detersis vestigiis eius, lacrimis obortis, singultu crebro sermonem interficiens et verba devorans, aio: ?5 “Tu quidem saneta et humani generis sospitatrix perpetua, semper fovendis mortalibus munifica, dulcem matris affectionem miserorum casibus tribuis. Nec dies nec quies ulla ac ne momentum quidem tenue tuis transcurrit beneficiis otiosum, quin mari terraque protegas homines et depulsis vitae procellis salutarem porrigas dexteram, qua. fatorum etiam 582 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK XI my right hand I carried a lighted torch, and a gar- land of flowers was upon my head, with white palm- leaves sprouting out on every side like rays; thus I was adorned like unto the sun, and made in fashion of an image, when the curtains were drawn aside and all the people compassed about to behold me. Then they began te solemnise the feast, the nativity of my holy order, with sumptuous banquets and pleasant meats: the third day was likewise celebrate with like ceremonies, with a religious dinner, and with all the consummation of the adept order. Now when I had continued there some days, conceiving a marvellous pleasure and consolation in beholding ordinarily the image of the goddess, because of the benefits, beyond all esteem or reward, which she had brought me, at length she admonished me to depart homeward, not without rendering of thanks, which although they were not sufficient, yet they were ac- cording to my power. Howbeit I could hardly be persuaded to break the chains of my most earnest devotion and to depart, before I had fallen prostrate before the face of the goddess and wiped her feet with my face, whereby I began so greatly to weep and sigh that my words were interrupted, and ‘as devouring my prayer I began to say in this sort: “O holy and blessed dame, the perpetual comfort of human kind, who by Thy bounty and grace nourishest all the world,and bearest a great affection to the adversities of the miserable as a loving mother, Thou takest no rest night or day, neither art Thou idle at any time in giving benefits and succouring all men as well on land as sea; Thou art she that puttest away all storms and dangers from men's life by stretching forth Thy right hand, whereby likewise Thou dost unweave even the inextricable and tangled web of 583 26 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Started believing I was a fictional character invented by me.” “Weird,” said Marty, impressed. “The point is that fantasies are fantasies and you can’t live in ecstasy every day of the year. Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom.” Wasn’t I sounding like Bennett? The irony of it! “I wish you’d tell Judy that,” Marty said. “Nobody can tell anyone anything,” I said. — Later, when Adrian and I were in the tent together, I asked him about Judy. “Boring cunt,” he said. “It just lies there and doesn’t even acknowledge your existence.” “How’d she like you?” “How do I know?” “Don’t you care?” “Look—I fucked Judy as one might have coffee after dinner. And not very good coffee at that.” “Then why bother?” “Why not?” “Because if you reduce everything to that level of indifference, everything becomes meaningless. It’s not existentialism, it’s numbness. It just ends by making everything meaningless.” “So?” “So you wind up with the opposite of what you wanted. You wanted intensity, but you get numbness. It’s self-defeating.” “You’re lecturing me,” Adrian said. “You’re right,” I said without apology. — The next morning Judy and Marty were gone. They had packed up and fled in the night like gypsies. “I lied to you last night,” Adrian said. “About what?” “I actually didn’t fuck Judy at all.” “How come?” “Because I didn’t feel like it.” I laughed nastily. “You mean you couldn’t.” “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean I didn’t want to.” “It doesn’t matter at all to me ,” I said, “whether you did or didn’t.” “That’s shit.” “That’s what you think.” “You’re just furious because I’m the first man you’ve met that you can’t control, and you can’t put up for long without anyone or anything you can’t control.” “Crap. I just happen to have somewhat higher standards of what I want than you do. I see through your game. I agree with you about spontaneity and existentialism—but this isn’t spontaneity at all—it’s desperation. You said it about me the first day we screwed and now I’ll say it back to you. It’s all desperation and depression masquerading as freedom. It isn’t even pleasurable. It’s pathetic. Even this trip is pathetic.” “You never give anything a chance,” Adrian said. — Later we swam in the pond and dried ourselves in the sun. Adrian stretched out on the grass and squinted up into the sunlight. I lay with my head on his chest smelling the warm odor of his skin. Suddenly a cloud passed in front of the sun and rain began to fall lightly. We didn’t move. The rain cloud passed, leaving us sprinkled with large drops. I could feel them evaporating when the sun came out and shone on our skin again. A daddy longlegs walked over Adrian’s shoulder and through his hair.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  O predestination, how far withdrawn is thy root from such vision as sees not the first cause entire! And ye mortals, hold yourselves straitly back from judging; for we who see God, know not as yet all the elect; and sweet to us is such defect because our good in this good is refined, that what God willeth we too will.” So by this divine image to clear my curtailed vision was given me sweet medicine. And as on a good singer a good harpist maketh the quivering of the chord attend, wherein the song gaineth more pleasantness, so whilst he spake I mind me that I saw the two blessed lights, just as the beating of the eyes concordeth, making their flames to quiver to the words. 1. It was the general belief that the light of all the stars was reflected from the Sun. 2. A much disputed passage. It is taken in the translation to mean, “As the flute is played on by the breath of the musician, so these spirits were played upon by their own holy thoughts, wherein that same divine love which clad them with the smiling brightness of joy, breathed upon them.”3. Contains by implication Dante’s doctrine of inspiration. The human instrument of the Divine Spirit has a genuine part to play.4. Cf. Purg. 1.5. 2 Kings xx. 1-11.6. The donation of Constantine, called by Bryce “the most stupendous of all mediaeval forgeries,” set forth how Constantine, when cured of his leprosy by Pope Sylvester, resolved to transfer his capital to Constantinople (“made himself a Greek”) in order to leave to the Pope and his successors the sovereignty over Italy. Dante, while accepting the supposed fact, regarded it as one of the most disastrous events of history. (Cf. Inf. xix and Purg. xxxii.) He warmly maintained that the donation was invalid, since the Emperor could not alienate, nor the Pope receive, temporal power. (De Monarchia, iii. 10, etc. Cf. Gardner, iii. 1, under “Book iii.”7. William the Good (1166-1189) was the last king of the house of Tancred who reigned over the “Two Sicilies.” See Cantos iii (note 12) and ix (note 1); and Tables i and iv on pp. 621, 624. The kingdom of Naples, under Charles II, and the kingdom of Sicily, under Frederick, bewail him.8. Ripheus. Virgil calls him “the one man amongst the Trojans most just and observant of the right.” Æneid, ii.9. The imprint of the eternal pleasure probably means justice. By longing for God everything becomes its true self.10. it = “my questioning.” 11. Quidity = the “what-ness” of a thing, as quality is the “what-like-ness” of it. “You know the name of a thing, but know not what the thing is.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Finding myself in Heidelberg, Germany, far from parents, graduate school, my New York friends, I began to write as if my life—literally—depended on it. Writing was my meditation, my sanity, my escape, my homecoming. I wrote poetry, short stories, fragments of novels. I was usually afraid to finish my fictions because finishing implies being judged. And I was not ready to be judged. (Is one ever ready?) Still, it was in Heidelberg that I discovered in myself a writer’s tenacity. I discovered the ability to sit still, to live for years without feedback, to luxuriate in the cave of the secret self where a writer mostly lives. I read and read the writers I loved, letting them become my teachers. I found an English-speaking analyst who helped me untangle the self-destructive patterns that otherwise might have sabotaged my life. Graham Greene, who brilliantly called the writer’s existence “a sort of life,” entitled the second installment of his autobiography Ways of Escape. Escape is the way writers work. We attempt to escape ourselves to find ourselves. This is what I was doing in Heidelberg behind the mask of an Army doctor’s wife. A sort of life indeed. The life at the writing desk is so much more vivid than the life away from it. My three years in Heidelberg found me doing plenty of other things—teaching, writing for a tourist magazine, surrendering to psychoanalysis—yet when I think of those years, I always remember myself at my desk in the darkish second bedroom of the dismal Army housing project where we lived. I read ravenously and wrote constantly. The housewifery and the teaching and the magazine writing with which I leavened my writing all fade to a blur compared to my memory of myself hunched toward the self-imposed discipline of that desk. 1966 to 1969 were vivid years in Heidelberg—and in the world. They found Heidelberg University students marching down the Hauptstrasse chanting, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,” and hurling cobblestones at the polizei like their Paris confreres. Hallucinogenic drugs were ubiquitous. Social and sexual revolution were in the smoky air. Despite these heady—excuse the expression—distractions, I was determined to return to New York with a manuscript worth publishing. I kept my promise to myself. I returned in 1969 with a book of poems, which over the next year or so metamorphosed into Fruits & Vegetables, my first book, published in 1971. But also in my luggage the seeds of Fear of Flying were germinating.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  But, no . . . absolutely, and you know, we really need to thank you for helping Jerome with a place to stay in London – it was so generous of you. His hour of need and everything. I was so sad that everything got polluted by – ’ ‘I love a line from a poem: There is such a shelter in each other . I think it is so fine . Don’t you think it’s a wonderful thing?’ Kiki was left with her mouth open at being interrupted thus. ‘Is it – which poet is it?’ ‘Oh, I would not actually know that for myself . . . Monty is the intellectual in our family. I have no talent for ideas or memory  On Beauty for names. I read it in a newspaper, that’s all. You’re an intellectual too?’ And this was possibly the most important question Wellington had never honestly asked Kiki. ‘No, actually . . . No, I’m not. I’m really not.’ ‘Neither am I. But I do love poetry. Everything I cannot say and I never hear said. The bit I cannot touch?’ Kiki could not tell at first what kind of question this was or whether she was meant to answer it, but a moment’s pause proved it rhetorical. ‘I find that bit in poems,’ said Mrs Kipps. ‘I did not read a poem for years and years – I preferred biographies. And then I read one last year. Now I can’t stop!’ ‘God, that’s great. I just never get a chance to read any more. I used to read a lot of Angelou – do you read her? That’s autobiogra-phy, isn’t it? I always found her very . . .’ Kiki stopped. The same thing that had distracted Mrs Kipps distracted her. Just passing by the gate five white teenage girls, barely dressed, were going by. They had rolled-up towels under their arms and wet hair, stuck together in long sopping ropes, like the Medusa. They were all speaking at once. ‘ There is such a shelter in each other ,’ repeated Mrs Kipps, as the noise grew fainter, ‘Montague says poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. He is always saying wonderful things like that.’ Kiki, who did not think this especially wonderful, stayed quiet. ‘And when I told him this line, from the poem – ’ ‘Yes, the poem line.’ ‘Yes. When I spoke it to him, he said that that was all very well but I should place it on a scale – a scale of judgement – and on the other side of the scale I should place L’enfer, c’est les autres . And then see which had more weight in the world!’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  absolutely, and you know, we really need to thank you for helping Jerome with a place to stay in London – it was so generous of you. His hour of need and everything. I was so sad that everything got polluted by – ’ ‘I love a line from a poem: There is such a shelter in each other . I think it is so fine . Don’t you think it’s a wonderful thing?’ Kiki was left with her mouth open at being interrupted thus. ‘Is it – which poet is it?’ ‘Oh, I would not actually know that for myself . . . Monty is the intellectual in our family. I have no talent for ideas or memory  On Beauty for names. I read it in a newspaper, that’s all. You’re an intellectual too?’ And this was possibly the most important question Wellington had never honestly asked Kiki. ‘No, actually . . . No, I’m not. I’m really not.’ ‘Neither am I. But I do love poetry. Everything I cannot say and I never hear said. The bit I cannot touch?’ Kiki could not tell at first what kind of question this was or whether she was meant to answer it, but a moment’s pause proved it rhetorical. ‘I find that bit in poems,’ said Mrs Kipps. ‘I did not read a poem for years and years – I preferred biographies. And then I read one last year. Now I can’t stop!’ ‘God, that’s great. I just never get a chance to read any more. I used to read a lot of Angelou – do you read her? That’s autobiogra-phy, isn’t it? I always found her very . . .’ Kiki stopped. The same thing that had distracted Mrs Kipps distracted her. Just passing by the gate five white teenage girls, barely dressed, were going by. They had rolled-up towels under their arms and wet hair, stuck together in long sopping ropes, like the Medusa. They were all speaking at once. ‘ There is such a shelter in each other ,’ repeated Mrs Kipps, as the noise grew fainter, ‘Montague says poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. He is always saying wonderful things like that.’ Kiki, who did not think this especially wonderful, stayed quiet. ‘And when I told him this line, from the poem – ’ ‘Yes, the poem line.’ ‘Yes. When I spoke it to him, he said that that was all very well but I should place it on a scale – a scale of judgement – and on the other side of the scale I should place L’enfer, c’est les autres . And then see which had more weight in the world!’ She laughed for some time at this, a sprightly laugh, more youthful than her speaking voice. Kiki smiled helplessly. She did not speak French. ‘I’m so glad we’ve met properly,’ said Mrs Kipps, with real fondness.  kipps and belsey Kiki was touched. ‘Oh, that’s very sweet.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The Kippses aren’t under any obligation to me , but they asked and I accepted – gratefully. I’ve been in their place a week now, and still no mention of any rent, which should tell you something. I know you want me to tell you it’s a nightmare, but I can’t – I love living here. It’s a different universe. The house is just wow – early Victorian, a ‘terrace’ – unassuming-looking outside but  On Beauty massive inside – but there’s still a kind of humility that really appeals to me – almost everything white, and a lot of handmade things, and quilts and dark wood shelves and cornices and this four-storey staircase – and in the whole place there’s only one television, which is in the basement anyway, just so Monty can keep abreast of news stuff, and some of the things he does on the television – but that’s it. I think of it as the negativized image of our house sometimes . . . It’s in this bit of North London called ‘Kilburn’, which sounds bucolic, but boy oh boy is not bucolic in the least, except for this street we live on off the ‘high road’, and it’s suddenly like you can’t hear a thing and you can just sit in the yard in the shadow of this huge tree – eighty feet tall and ivy-ed all up the trunk . . . reading and feeling like you’re in a novel . . . Fall’s different here – much less intense and trees balder earlier – everything more melancholy somehow. The family are another thing again – they deserve more space and time than I have right now (I’m writing this on my lunch hour). But, in brief: one boy, Michael, nice, sporty. A little dull, I guess. You’d think he was, anyway. He’s a business guy – exactly what business I haven’t been able to figure out. And he’s huge! He’s got two inches on you, at least. They’re all big in that athletic, Caribbean way. He must be 6Ј 5Љ. There’s also a very tall and beautiful daughter, Victoria, who I’ve seen only in photos (she’s inter-railing in Europe), but she’s coming back for a while on Friday, I think. Monty’s wife, Carlene – perfect. She’s not from Trinidad, though – it’s a small island, St something or other – I’m not sure.

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

  As it turns out, people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings. 33 When it comes to managing your body budget, your brain does not have to go it alone. Other people regulate your body budget too. When you interact with your friends, parents, children, lovers, teammates, therapist, or other close companions, you and they synchronize breathing, heart beats, and other physical signals, leading to tangible benefits. Holding hands with loved ones, or even keeping their photo on your desk at work, reduces activation in your body-budgeting regions and makes you less bothered by pain. If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill with friends, it will appear less steep and easier to climb than if you are alone. If you grow up in poverty, a situation that leads to chronic body-budget imbalance and an overactive immune system, these body-budgeting problems are reduced if you have a supportive person in your life. In contrast, when you lose a close, loving relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer helping to regulate your budget. You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself because, in a sense, you have. 34 Every person you encounter, every prediction you make, every idea you imagine, and every sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell that you fail to anticipate all have budgetary consequences and corresponding interoceptive predictions. Your brain must contend with this continuous, ever-changing flow of interoceptive sensations from the predictions that keep you alive. Sometimes you’re aware of them, and other times you’re not, but they are always part of your brain’s model of the world. They are, as I’ve said, the scientific basis for simple feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, and calmness that you experience every day. For some, the flow is like the trickle of a tranquil brook. For others, it’s like a raging river. Sometimes the sensations are transformed into emotions, but as you will now learn, even when they’re only in the background, they influence what you do, what you think, and what you perceive. 35 ... When you wake up in the morning, do you feel refreshed or crabby? In the middle of the day, do you feel dragged out or full of energy? Consider how you feel right now. Calm? Interested? Energetic? Bored? Tired? Cranky? These are the simple feelings we discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Scientists call them affect. * Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day.

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

  After attending to your body budget, the next best thing you can do for emotional health is to beef up your concepts, otherwise known as “becoming more emotionally intelligent.” People with a classical view mindset think about emotional intelligence as “detecting” other people’s emotions “accurately,” or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness “at the right time.” With our new understanding of emotions, however, we can think about emotional intelligence in a new way. “Happiness” and “Sadness” are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation. (And also when not to construct emotions but instances of some other concept.) Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, argues that higher EI leads to greater success in academics, business, and social relationships. “For star performance in all jobs, in every field,” he writes, “emotional competence is twice as important as purely cognitive abilities.” So you might be surprised to hear that science still has no generally accepted definition or measure of EI. Goleman’s books offer a lot of reasonable, practical advice, but they don’t properly explain why his advice works. Their scientific justification is heavily influenced by the outdated “triune brain” model—if you regulate your alleged emotional inner beast effectively, then you’re emotionally intelligent.11 Emotional intelligence is better characterized in terms of concepts. Suppose you knew only two emotion concepts, “Feeling Awesome” and “Feeling Crappy.” Whenever you experienced emotion or perceived someone else as emotional, you could categorize only with this broad brush. Such a person cannot be very emotionally intelligent. In contrast, if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful . . .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy . . .), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses. You could predict and categorize your sensations more efficiently, and better tailor your actions to your environment. What I’m describing is emotional granularity, the phenomenon (described in chapter 1) that some people construct finer-grained emotional experiences than others do. People who make highly granular experiences are emotion experts: they issue predictions and construct instances of emotion that are finely tailored to fit each specific situation. At the other end of the spectrum, there are young children who haven’t yet developed adult-like emotion concepts, and who use “sad” and “mad” interchangeably to mean feeling unpleasant (as we discussed in chapter 5). My lab has shown that adults run the whole range from low to high emotional granularity. So, a key to EI is to gain new emotion concepts and hone your existing ones.12

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She tucked her tiny body into a cleft of Warren’s. Photographs elongated her, making her appear long and wiry, but in life this American poet was only five foot one and physically prepubescent, even now, at fifty-four. She was neatly made with the minimum of material. When she moved a finger, you could trace the motion through pulleys of veins that went all the way up her slender arms and shoulders to her neck, itself elegantly creased like the lungs of an accordion. Her elfin head with its inch of closely cropped brown  On Beauty hair fitted neatly into her lover’s hand. To Kiki they looked very happy – but what did that mean? Wellington couples had a talent for looking happy. ‘Incredible day, isn’t it? We got back a week ago and it’s hotter here than it was there. The sun is a lemon today, it is . It’s like a huge lemon-drop. God , it’s incredible,’ said Claire, as Warren softly palpated the back of her skull. She was babbling a little; it always took her a minute or two to settle. Claire had been at graduate school with Howard, and Kiki had known her thirty years, but never had she felt that they knew each other well. They did not quite gel as friends. There was a part of Kiki that felt every meeting with Claire was like the first time all over again. ‘And you look marvellous!’ cried Claire now. ‘It’s so good to see you. What an outfit! It’s like a sunset – the red, the yellow, the orangey-brown – Keeks, you’re setting .’ ‘Honey,’ said Kiki, moving her head from side to side in a manner she understood white people enjoyed, ‘I done set already .’ Claire made the jangle sound of laughter. Not for the first time, Kiki noted the implacable intelligence of her eyes, the way they did not indulge in the natural release of the act. ‘Come on, walk with us,’ said Claire plaintively, putting Warren between herself and Kiki, as if he were their child. It was a strange way to walk – it meant they had to talk to each other over Warren’s body. ‘OK – we got to keep an eye out for Jerome, though – he’s about.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Warren had clearly joined the list of things of which Claire approved – therefore they wanted him. A circle of strange young anthropologists Howard didn’t think he knew remained in the kitchen all night, hovering by the food, fearful of going anywhere where there was not an abundance of props – glasses, bottles, canapeś – with which to fiddle. Howard left them to it and adjourned to the garden. He walked the rim of the pool, happily holding on to his empty glass, as the summer moon passed behind blushing clouds and all about rose the agreeable animal sound of outdoor conversation. ‘Strange date for it, though,’ he heard somebody say. And then the usual response: ‘Oh, I think it’s a wonderful date for a party. You know it’s their actual anniversary, so . . . And if we don’t reclaim the day, you know . . . then it’s like they’ve won. It’s a reclaiming, absolutely.’ This was the most popular conversation of the night. Howard had had it himself at least four times since the clock struck ten and the wine really kicked in. Before that no one liked to mention it. Every twenty seconds or so, Howard admired a pair of feet as they thrust up through the skin of the water; the curved back that  On Beauty followed, and then the slim brown form in the water doing another speedy, almost silent lap. Levi had evidently decided that if he must stay at this party, he might as well get a work-out. Howard could not figure out exactly how long Levi’d been in the pool, but, as his own speech had ended and the applause faded, everyone had noticed at the same time that there was a lone swimmer, and then almost everyone had asked their neighbour whether they recalled Cheever’s story. Academics lack range. ‘I should have brought my swimsuit,’ Howard had overhead Claire Malcolm saying loudly to somebody. ‘And would you have swum if you had?’ came the sensible reply. Without any great urgency, Howard was now looking for Erskine. He wanted Erskine’s opinion on his earlier speech. He sat down on the pretty bench Kiki had installed under their apple tree and looked out on to his party. The wide backs and solid calves of women he didn’t know surrounded him. Friends of Kiki from the hospital, talking among themselves. Nurses, thought Howard definitively, not sexy. And how had his speech gone down with women like this, non-academic, solid, opinionated, Kiki supporters – for that matter, how had it gone down with everyone? It had not been an easy speech to give. It was, in effect, three speeches.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  mentis succuum pulmenta condita vapore mollibat. Unico illi contubernio communem vitam sustinebant meque ad vasa illa compluria gestanda praedes- tinarant, quae domini regiones plusculas pererrantis variis usibus erant necessaria. Adsciscor itaque inter duos illos fratres tertius contubernalis, haud ullo tem- pore tam benivolam fortunam expertus: nam ves- pera, post opiparas cenas earumque splendidissimos apparatus, multas numero partes in cellulam suam mei solebant reportare domini: ille porcorum, pul- lorum, piscium et cuiuscemodi pulmentorum largissi- mas reliquias, hic panes, crustula, lucunculos, hamos, lacertulos et plura scitamenta mellita. Qui cum se refecturi clausa cellula balneas petissent, oblatis ego divinitus dapibus affatim saginabar: nec enim tam stultus eram tamque vere asinus, ut dulcissimis illis relictis cibis cenarem asperrimum faenum. Et diu quidem pulcherrime mibi furatrinae procedebat artificium, quippe adhue timide et satis parce sur- ripienti de tam multis pauciora, nec illis fraudes ullas in asino suspicantibus. At ubi fiducia latendi pleniore capta partes opimas quasque devorabam et iucundiora eligens abligurribam dulcia, suspicio non exilis fratrum pupugit animos et quamquam de me nihil etiam tum tale crederent, tamen cotidiani damni studiose vestigabant reum. Illi vero postremo etiam mutuo sese rapinae turpissimae criminabantur, iam- que curam diligentiorem et acriorem custodelam et dinumerationem adhibebant partium. Tandem deni- que rupta verecundia sic alter alterum compellat : * At istud iam neque aequum ac ne humanum qui- 496 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X

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

  When asked how she was feeling, she did not respond with sufficient enthusiasm or say she was “fabulous” or “wonderful.” I once heard her give a talk on her experiences, and I nodded through the entire thing, clapped vigorously at the end, and then walked up to her, gave her a hug, and said “excellent job!” It took me a moment to realize I had just confirmed every one of her observations. 3 3 Batja’s experience is not unique. Our colleague Yulia Chentsova Dutton from Russia says that her cheeks ached for an entire year after moving to the United States because she had never smiled so much. My neighbor Paul Harris, a transplanted emotion researcher from England, has observed how American academics are always excited by scientific puzzles—a high arousal, pleasant feeling—but never merely curious, perplexed, or confused, which are low arousal and fairly neutral experiences that are more familiar to him. In general, Americans prefer high arousal, pleasant states. We smile a lot. We praise, compliment, and encourage each other. We give each other awards for all levels of accomplishment, even “Certificates of Participation.” It seems like every other week there is an awards show on television. I have lost count of how many books on happiness have been published in the United States in the last ten years. We are a culture of positivity. We like to be happy and to celebrate how great we are. 3 4 The more time that Batja spent in America, the more her emotions became attuned to the American context. Her pleasant emotion concepts expanded and became more variable. She became more granular, experiencing the American style of happiness as distinct from satisfaction and contentment. Her brain bootstrapped new concepts for American norms and customs. This process is called emotion acculturation. From a new culture, you acquire new concepts, which translate into new predictions. Using those predictions, you become able to experience and perceive the emotions of your newly adopted home. The scientist who discovered emotion acculturation is, in fact, Batja herself. She found that people’s emotion concepts not only vary from culture to culture but also transform. For example, situations that bring about anger in Belgium, like having your goals blocked by a coworker, in Turkey will also include feelings of (what Americans experience as) guilt, shame, and respect. But for Turkish immigrants in Belgium, their emotional experiences come to look more “Belgian” the longer they live there. 3 5 A brain that is bathed in the situations of a new culture is probably somewhat like an infant’s brain: driven more by prediction error than prediction. Lacking the emotion concepts of the new culture, the immigrant brain soaks up sensory input and builds new concepts. The new emotional patterns don’t replace the old ones, though they may cause interference, as was the case for my research associate Alexandra from Greece whom you met in chapter 5 .

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

  It combines existing concepts to create your very first instance of a novel concept of emotion. 44 My friend Batja Mesquita is a Dutch cultural psychologist, and the first time I traveled to visit her in Belgium, she told me that we were sharing the emotion gezellig. Curled up in her living room, sharing wine and chocolates, she explained that this emotion means the comfort, coziness, and togetherness of being at home, with friends and loved ones. Gezellig is not an internal feeling that one person has for another but a way of experiencing oneself in the world. No single word in English describes the experience of gezellig, but once Batja explained it to me, I immediately experienced it. Her use of the word invited me to form a concept as infants do, but through conceptual combination—I automatically employed my concepts of “Close Friend,” “Love,” and “Delight,” with a touch of “Comfort” and “Well-Being.” This translation was not perfect, though, because in my American way of experiencing gezellig, I used emotion concepts that focus more on internal feelings than those that describe the situation. 45 Conceptual combination is a potent capability of the brain. Scientists still debate on the mechanisms responsible for it, but they pretty much agree that it’s a basic function of the conceptual system. It allows you to construct a potentially limitless number of novel concepts from your existing ones. This includes goal-based concepts like “Things That Can Protect You from Stinging Insects,” in which the goal is short-lived. 46 Conceptual combination is powerful, but it is far less efficient than having a word. If you asked me what I had for dinner this evening, I could say “baked dough with tomato sauce and cheese,” but this is much less efficient than saying “pizza.” Strictly speaking, you don’t need an emotion word to construct an instance of that emotion, but it’s easier when you have a word. If you want the concept to be efficient, and you want to transmit the concept to others, then a word is pretty handy. Infants can benefit from this “pizza effect” before they can speak. For example, prelinguistic infants generally can hold about three objects in mind at a time. If you hide toys in a box while an infant watches, she can remember up to three hiding places. However, if you label several toys with a nonsense word like “dax” and several more with “blicket” before hiding them—assigning the toys to categories—the infant can hold up to six objects in mind! This happens even if all six toys are physically identical, strongly suggesting that infants gain the same efficiency benefits from conceptual knowledge that adults do.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  z Is finis nobis et sermonis et itineris communis fuit: nam comites utrique ad villulam proximam laevorsum abierunt. Ego vero quod primum in- gressu stabulum conspicatus sum, accessi, et de quadam anu caupona illico percontor “ Estne" inquam * Hypata haec civitas?" Adnuit. * Nostine Milonem quendam e primoribus?" Arrisit et * Vere" inquit * Primus istic perhibetur Milo, qui extra pomerium et urbem totam colit." “ Remoto " inquam “Toco, parens optima, dic oro et cuiatis sit et quibus deversetur aedibus?" * Videsne " inquit * Extremas fenestras, quae foris urbem prospiciunt et altrinsecus fores proximum respicientes angiportum ? Inibi iste Milo deversatur ampliter nummatus et longe opulentus, verum extremae avaritiae et sordis infimae infamis homo, foenus denique copiosum sub arrabone auri et argenti crebriter exercens, exiguo Lare inclusus et aerugini semper intentus, cum uxorem etiam calamitatis suae comitem habeat, Neque praeter unicam pascit ancillam et habitu mendicantis semper incedit." Ad haec ego risum subicio: * Benigne" inquam * Et prospicue Demeas meus in me consuluit, qui peregrinaturum tali viro conciliavit, in cuius hos- 22 pitio nec fumi nec nidoris nebulam vererer," et cum dicto modico secus progressus ostium accedo et ianuam firmiter oppessulatam pulsare vocaliter incipio, 36 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK I pain at all, not so much by his back, as by mine own ears.” Thus ended both our talk and our journey, for they two turned on the left hand to the next village, and I rode up to the first inn that I saw, and I espied an old woman, of whom I enquired whether that city was called Hypata or no, who answered: “ Yes.” Then I demanded whether she knew one Milo, one of the first men of the city, whereat she laughed, and said : “ Verily it is not without cause that Milo is accounted first in the city, for he dwells altogether without the boundary.” To whom I said again: “I pray thee, good mother, do not mock, but tell me what manner of man he is, and where he dwelleth.” * Marry," quoth she, * Do not you see those bay windows, which on the one side look out upon the city, and the doors on the other side to the next lane: there Milo dwells, very rich both in money and substance, but by reason of his great avarice and covetousness he is evil spoken of, and he is a man that liveth all by usury, and lending his money upon pledges of silver and gold. Moreover he dwelleth in a small house and is ever counting his money, and hath a wife that is a companion of his extreme misery, neither keepeth he any more in his house than one only maid, and he goes apparelled like unto a beggar."