Despair

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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  You flaunted everything in front of Bennett. You encouraged me to shake up my life and go off with you and now you’re busy keeping your safe little household intact! What kind of shit do you think I’ll stand for? You were the one who sold me a bill of goods about honesty and openness and not living in a million contradictions. I’m damn well going to Cherbourg with you. I want to meet Esther and the kids and we’ll all just play it by ear.” “Absolutely not. I won’t take you. I’ll physically throw you out of the car if need be.” I looked at him in disbelief. Why was it so hard for me to believe that he would be so callous? It was clear he meant what he said. I knew he would throw me out of the car if need be. And perhaps even drive off laughing. “But don’t you care about being a hypocrite?” The tone of my voice was tinged with pleading as if I already knew I’d lost. “I refuse to upset the kids that way,” he said, “and that’s final.” “Obviously you don’t mind upsetting me.” “You’re grown up. You can take it. They can’t.” What answer could I make to that? I could scream and yell that I was a baby too, that I’d fall apart if he left me, that I’d crack up. Maybe I would. But I wasn’t Adrian’s child, and it wasn’t his business to rescue me. I was nobody’s baby now. Liberated. Utterly free. It was the most terrifying sensation I’d ever known in my life. Like teetering on the edge of the Grand Canyon and hoping you’d learn to fly before you hit bottom. — It was only after he’d left that I was able to gather my terror in my two hands and possess it. We did not part enemies. When I knew I was truly defeated, I stopped hating him. I began concentrating on how to endure being alone. As soon as I ceased expecting rescue from him, I found that I could empathize with him. I was not his child. He had a right to protect his children. Even from me—if he conceived me to be a threat to them. He had betrayed me, but I had sensed all along that this would happen and in some way I had used him as a betrayer just as surely as he had used me as a victim. He was, perversely, an instrument of my freedom. As I watched him drive away, I knew I would fall back in love with him as soon as the distance between us was great enough. He hadn’t left without offering help, either.

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

  Affect primarily comes from prediction. You’ve already learned that you see what your brain believes—that’s affective realism. Now you know the same is true for most feelings you’ve experienced in your life. Even the feeling of the pulse in your wrist is a simulation, constructed in sensory regions of your brain and corrected by sensory input (your actual pulse). Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling. These ideas are not just speculation. Scientists with the right equipment can change people’s affect by directly manipulating body-budgeting regions that issue predictions. Helen S. Mayberg, a pioneering neurologist, has developed a deep brain stimulation therapy for people suffering from treatment-resistant depression. These people don’t just experience the anguish of a major depressive episode—they are in agony, trapped in a pit of self-loathing and unending torment. Some of them can barely move. During surgery, Mayberg works with a team of neurosurgeons who drill small holes in the skull and sink electrodes into a key predictive area in the patient’s interoceptive network. When the neurosurgeons turn on the electrodes, Mayberg’s patients report immediate relief from their agony. As the electrical current is turned off and on, the patients’ crippling wave of dread approaches and recedes in synchrony with the stimulation. Mayberg’s remarkable work might represent the first time in scientific history that direct stimulation of the human brain has consistently changed people’s affective feelings, potentially leading to new treatments for mental illness. 54 While predictive brain circuitry is important for affect, it likely is not necessary. Consider the case of Roger, a fifty-six-year-old patient whose relevant circuitry was destroyed by a rare illness. He has an above-normal IQ and a college education but also plenty of mental difficulties, such as severe amnesia and difficulty with smell and taste. Nevertheless, Roger experiences affect. Most likely, his affect is driven by actual sensory inputs from his body; other brain regions could be supplying the predictions, an example of degeneracy (different sets of neurons producing the same outcome). The opposite situation can also occur. Patients with spinal cord damage or Pure Autonomic Failure, a degenerative disease of the autonomic nervous system, have interoceptive predictions but don’t receive sensory inputs from their organs and tissue. These patients likely experience affect based primarily on uncorrected predictions. 55 Figure 4-6: Deep brain stimulation Your interoceptive network doesn’t just help determine how you feel. Its body-budgeting regions are some of the most powerful and well-connected predictors in your entire brain. These regions are loud and bossy, like a mostly deaf scientist with a big megaphone.

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

  3 Now a vicious cycle can ensue. When you feel fatigued due to inflammation, you don’t move as much, in order to conserve (what your brain mistakenly believes to be) your limited energy resources. You start eating and sleeping poorly and neglect exercise, which throws your budget out of balance even more, and you start to feel seriously like crap. You might gain weight, which enhances your problems because certain fat cells actually produce the proinflammatory cytokines that make inflammation worse. You might also start avoiding other people, who then cannot help balance your body budget, and people with fewer social connections also have more proinflammatory cytokines and might even get sick more often. 4 About ten years ago, scientists discovered—to their astonishment—that proinflammatory cytokines can cross from the body into the brain. We also now know that the brain has its own inflammatory system with cells that secrete these cytokines. These little proteins, with their capacity to induce feelings of such misery, reshape the brain. Inflammation in the brain causes changes in brain structure, particularly within your interoceptive network; it interferes with neural connections, and even kills neurons. Chronic inflammation can also make it harder for you to pay attention and remember things, lowering performance on IQ tests. 5 So consider what happens if you’re in a stressful social situation, like when a clique of coworkers suddenly stops inviting you to join them at lunch, or when friends read your text messages but don’t answer. As per normal, your brain predicts you need fuel that your body doesn’t require, temporarily impacting your budget. But what if the social situation doesn’t resolve quickly? What if this social rejection is your life every day? Your body stays on alert, flush with cortisol and cytokines. Now your brain starts treating your body as if it were sick or damaged, and chronic inflammation sets in. 6 Inflammation in your brain is very bad. It affects your predictions, in particular those that manage your body budget, sending your budget into overdraft. Remember that your body-budgeting circuitry is hard of hearing—it can be mostly deaf to corrections from your body. Inflammation moves the needle toward “completely deaf.” Your body-budgeting regions become insensitive to your situation, making it more likely that your budget will remain overdrawn. You can become consumed with fatigue and unpleasant feelings. The chronic misbudgeting depletes your resources, causes wear and tear on your body, and eventually builds up more proinflammatory cytokines. When that happens, you are really, truly in trouble.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Snapshot. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene. “Forget me, Reva,” I’d say, flapping the photos in her face. “You’ll never see me again.” But did I care? I didn’t think so. If Reva’s body was hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, I might have just gone home. But this moment was ceremonious. I had my magic back. This is mine now, I told myself. I’m going to sleep. The water in the tap was orange and tasted like blood. I didn’t want to wash down my nice pills with Satan’s sweat. I’d get water from the kitchen sink, I thought, so I went to the bathroom door and tried to open it. It did not open. I fiddled with the lock, turning the knob back and forth. “Reva?” Something was jammed or broken. I shoved the handful of pills into the pocket of my coat and twisted the knob again, pulling and wrenching. But it didn’t work. I was locked inside. I pounded on the door. “Reva!” I called again. There was no answer. I sat on the fuzzy pink toilet lid and fiddled with the knob for what felt like twenty minutes. I would have to break the door down, or wait for Reva to come home from work, I thought. Either way, it would result in a confrontation. I already knew everything she’d say. “I’ve stood by the sidelines long enough. You have a problem. I can’t just look the other way while you kill yourself.” And what I’d say back. “I appreciate your concern,” me seething, me wanting to kill her. “I’m under a doctor’s supervision, Reva. There’s nothing to worry about with me. I wouldn’t be allowed to do this if it wasn’t kosher. It’s all safe!” Or maybe she’d go the heartbroken route. “I buried my mother a few weeks ago. I’m not going to bury you, too.” “You didn’t bury your mother.” “Cremated, whatever.” “I want a sea burial,” I’d tell her. “Wrap me in a black cloth and throw me over. Like a pirate.” I pulled back the mildewed shower curtain, hung my coat on the towel rack, lay down in the tub, and waited. In the hours before Reva came home and let me out, I did not sleep. I knew I wouldn’t. I needed a way out of this —the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  So I filled prescriptions for things like Neuroproxin, Maxiphenphen, Valdignore, and Silencior and threw them into the mix now and then, but mostly I took sleeping aids in large doses, and supplemented them with Seconols or Nembutals when I was irritable, Valiums or Libriums when I suspected that I was sad, and Placidyls or Noctecs or Miltowns when I suspected I was lonely. Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of the sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones. “Do not take this if you become pregnant.” “Take with food or milk.” “Store in a dry place.” “May cause drowsiness.” “May cause dizziness.” “Do not take aspirin.” “Do not crush.” “Do not chew.” Any normal person would have worried about what the drugs would do to her health. I wasn’t completely naive about the potential dangers. My father had been eaten alive by cancer. I’d seen my mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead. I’d lost a childhood friend to liver failure after she took acetaminophen on top of DayQuil in high school. Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person. And I figured I was smart enough to know in advance if the pills were going to kill me. I’d start having premonition nightmares before that happened, before my heart failed or my brain exploded or hemorrhaged or pushed me out my seventh-story window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day. • • • I’D MOVED INTO MY apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in 1996, a year after I graduated from Columbia. By summer 2000, I still hadn’t had a single conversation with any of my neighbors—almost four years of complete silence in the elevator, each awkward ride a performance of hypnotized spaceout. My neighbors were mostly fortysomething married people without children. Everyone was well-groomed, professional. A lot of camel-hair coats and black leather briefcases. Burberry scarves and pearl earrings. There were a few loudmouthed single women my age I saw from time to time gabbing on their cell phones and walking their teacup poodles. They reminded me of Reva, but they had more money and less self-loathing, I would guess. This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care. The only other slovenly people around were elderly Jews with rent-controlled apartments. But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The shower stall in her basement bathroom was small, the door clouded, gray glass. There was no soap, only a bottle of Prell. I washed my hair and stayed under the water until it ran cold. When I got out, I could hear the news blaring through the ceiling. The towels Reva had left for me on the sink were pink and seafoam green and smelled faintly of mildew. I rubbed the fog off the mirror and looked at myself again. My hair splatted against my neck. Maybe I should cut it even shorter, I thought. Maybe I would enjoy that. Boy cut. Gamine. I’d look like Edie Sedgwick. “You’d look like Charlize Theron,” Reva would have said. I wrapped the towel around myself and lay back down on the bed. There were other things that might make me sad. I thought of Beaches, Steel Magnolias, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk in front of the Viper Room, Sophie’s Choice, Ghost, E.T., Boyz n the Hood, AIDS, Anne Frank. Bambi was sad. An American Tail and The Land Before Time were sad. I thought of The Color Purple, when Nettie gets kicked out and has to leave Celie in that house, a slave to her abusive husband. “Nothing but death can keep me from her!” That was sad. That should have done it, but I couldn’t cry. None of that penetrated deep enough to press whatever button controlled my “outpouring of sorrow.” But I kept trying. I pictured the day of my father’s funeral—brushing my hair in the mirror in my black dress, picking at my cuticles until they bled, how my vision got blurry with tears walking down the stairs and I almost tripped, the streaks of autumn leaves blearing by as I drove my mother to the university chapel in her Trans Am, the space between us filling with tangled ribbons of pale blue smoke from her Virginia Slim, her saying not to open a window because the wind would mess up her hair. Still, no sorrow. “I’m just so sorry,” Peggy said over and over at my father’s funeral. Peggy was the only friend my mother had left by the end—a Reva type, for sure. She lived around the corner from my parents’ house in a lavender Dutch Colonial with a front yard full of wildflowers in the summer, sloppy snowmen and forts built by her two young sons in the winter, tattered Tibetan prayer flags hanging over the front door, lots of wind chimes, a cherry tree. My father had called it “the hippie house.” I sensed that Peggy wasn’t very intelligent, and that my mother didn’t really like her. But Peggy offered my mother a lot of pity. And my mother loved pity. I stayed home for a week after my father’s funeral. I wanted to do what I thought I was supposed to do—to mourn. I’d seen it happening in movies

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I love you,” she said, grabbing the bottle of rosé on her way out. • • • I DREAMT A LOT at the beginning, especially when the summer started in full force and the air in my apartment got thick with the sickly chill of AC. Dr. Tuttle said my dreams might indicate how well certain medications were working. She suggested I keep a log of my dreams as a way of tracking the “waning intensity of suffering.” “I don’t like the term ‘dream journal,’” she told me at our in-person appointment in June. “I prefer ‘night vision log.’” So I made notes on Post-its. Each time I awoke, I scribbled down whatever I could remember. Later I copied the dreams over in crazier- looking handwriting on a yellow legal pad, adding terrifying details, to hand in to Dr. Tuttle in July. My hope was that she’d think I needed more sedation. In one dream, I went to a party on a cruise ship and watched a lone dolphin circling in the distance. But in the dream journal, I reported that I was actually on the Titanic and the dolphin was a shark that was also Moby Dick and also Dick Tracy and also a hard, inflamed penis, and the penis was giving a speech to a crowd of women and children and waving his gun around. “Then I saluted everyone like a Nazi and jumped overboard and everybody else got executed.” In another dream, I lost my balance standing in a speeding subway car, “and accidentally grabbed and ripped the hair off an old woman’s head. Her scalp was teeming with larvae, and the larvae were all threatening to kill me.” I dreamt I drove a rusted Mercedes up onto the Esplanade by the East River, “skinny joggers and Hispanic housekeepers and toy poodles thudding under the tires, and my heart exploded with happiness when I saw all the blood.” I dreamt I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and found an underwater village abandoned because its inhabitants had heard life was better somewhere else. “A fire-breathing serpent disemboweled me and slurped up my entrails.” I dreamt I stole somebody’s diaphragm and put it in my mouth “before giving my doorman a blow job.” I cut off my ear and e- mailed it to Natasha with a bill for a million dollars. I swallowed a live bee. “I ate a grenade.” I bought a pair of red suede ankle boots and walked down Park Avenue. “The gutters were flooded with aborted fetuses.” “Tsk-tsk,” Dr. Tuttle replied, when I showed her the “log.” “Looks like you’re still in the depths of despair. Let’s up your Solfoton. But if you have nightmares about inanimate objects coming to life, or if you experience such things while you’re awake, discontinue.” And then there were the dreams about my parents, which I never mentioned to Dr. Tuttle. I dreamt my dad had an illegitimate son he kept in the closet of his study.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  At Rite Aid, I browsed the videos: The Bodyguard, The Mighty Ducks, The Karate Kid Part III, Bullets over Broadway, and Emma, then remembered, heartbreakingly, again—the truth was cruel—that my VCR was still broken. The woman working the pharmacy counter was old and birdlike. I’d never seen her before. Her name tag said her name was Tammy. The worst name on Earth. She spoke to me with a clinical professionalism that made me hate her. “Date of birth? Have you been here before?” “Do you guys sell VCRs?” “I don’t think so, ma’am.” I could have made the trek to Best Buy on Eighty-sixth Street. I could have taken a cab there and back. I was just too lazy, I told myself. But really, by this point, I think I had resigned myself to fate. No stupid movie would save me. I could already hear the jet planes thunder overhead, a rumble in the atmosphere of my mind that would rend things open, then obscure the damage with smoke and tears. I didn’t know what it would look like. That was fine. I paid for some Dimetapp, the Ambien, a tiny tin of Altoids, and strutted home through the cold—vibrating but relieved, the pills and mints now rattling like snakes, I thought, with each step I took. Soon I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep. A dog walker passed by with a team of yipping teacups and lapdogs on whiplike leashes. The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazed me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter, but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good. “Some flowers just came for you,” the doorman said as I walked back into my building. He pointed at a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the mantel over the nonworking fireplace in the lobby. “For me?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Charles half suppressed a burp of agreement. ‘There were a few seamen—they had a hostel out at Limehouse. I had some good friends there, brave, reckless fellows, many of them. There were jazz players in London, of course, who had quite a following. But I suppose most people in the country didn’t see a black person in all their lives. It was impossible to imagine the hatred that would be unleashed against them later on.’ ‘You’ve seen a lot of that.’ ‘You could say so.’ Charles nodded, staring fiercely at the carpet as if caught by some bitter and ironic memory. I started to speak but he cut across me: ‘There are times when I can’t think of my country without a kind of despairing shame. Something literally inexpressible, so I won’t bother to try and speechify about it.’ ‘I know what you mean.’ ‘Only last year out at Stepney there were hateful scenes—precisely hateful. Oh—National Front and their like, spraying their slogans all over the Boys’ Club, where, as you know, a lot of … non-whites go. Every day there were leaflets, just full of mindless hatred—I’m sorry to keep saying it. The horrific thing was that several of those boys were boys who used to come to the Club themselves. It’s the only time I’ve seen our excellent friend Bill get truly angry. He threw out a boy by main force, simply picked him up, carried him to the door and hurled him into the street. He’s as strong as an ox, old Bill. I remember the boy—but boy is too beautiful a word—had a Union Jack pinned to the back of his sort of coat, and Bill had torn it off, accidentally I think, as he ejected him, and was left scowling absolute thunder and holding it in his hand. I was very frightened as I’m not the man I was in a fight, but all being cowards in the bone these louts sidled away when they saw they had met their match. And I wondered to myself what on earth that flag could mean now.’ He paused, mouth agape. ‘We had an outstanding young Pakistani boy, a genius at badminton, who was horribly beaten up last winter—much worse even than you, knifed in the arm and also completely deafened in one ear. Those youngsters feel they have to go about in groups now. And then of course the police think they’re out to cause trouble.’ ‘Will it ever get better,’ I said, hardly as a question. Charles puffed helplessly. ‘I’m beginning to feel a kind of relief that I shan’t be around to find out.’ It was graceless of me to put Charles on the spot but I said I found it hard to reconcile his views on race with the film that Staines had made and he himself—according to Aldo—had paid for. But I did it with as much cheek and charm as possible. He was bemused.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow)—and was, indeed, looking forward to surrender myself to many hands, without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me, relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors—for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company—both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Count U.S. presidents. Count the years you have left to live. I might jump out the window, I thought, if I couldn’t sleep. I pulled the blanket up to my chest. I counted state capitals. I counted different kinds of flowers. I counted shades of blue. Cerulean. Cadet. Electric. Teal. Tiffany. Egyptian. Persian. Oxford. I didn’t sleep. I wouldn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I counted as many kinds of birds as I could think of. I counted TV shows from the eighties. I counted movies set in New York City. I counted famous people who committed suicide: Diane Arbus, the Hemingways, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf. Poor Kurt Cobain. I counted the times I’d cried since my parents died. I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen. I pulled the blanket off me. On TV, a young couple spelunking in a cave in New Zealand lowered themselves down into a huge black crevasse, shimmied through a narrow crack in the stone, passed under a field of what looked like huge boogers dripping from the ceiling, and then entered a room illuminated by glowing blue worms. I tried to imagine something stupid Reva would have said to try to soothe me, but nothing came to mind. I was so tired. I truly believed I might never sleep again. So my throat clenched. I cried. I did it. My breath sputtered like from a scraped knee on the playground. It was so stupid. I counted down from a thousand and flicked the tears off my cheeks with my fingers. My muscles ticked like a car that’s been driven a long distance and is left parked in the shade. I changed the channel. It was a British nature show. A small white fox burrowed down into the snow on a blinding sunny day. “While many mammals hibernate during the winter, the arctic fox does not. With special fur and fat covering her stocky body, low temperatures are not going to slow down this little fox! Its tremendous tolerance for cold climes is thanks to an extraordinary metabolism. It only starts to increase at negative fifty degrees Centigrade. That means she doesn’t even shiver before temps drop to negative seventy degrees and below. Wow.” I counted furs: mink, chinchilla, sable, rabbit, muskrat, raccoon, ermine, skunk, possum. Reva had taken her mother’s beaver fur coat. It had a boxy cut and made me think of a gunslinging outlaw hiding out in a snow-filled forest, then taking off west along the train tracks by moonlight, his beaver fur keeping him warm against the biting wind. The image impressed me. It was unusual. I was being creative. Maybe I was dreaming, I thought. I pictured the man in the beaver fur rolling up the ankles of his worn-out trousers to cross an ice-cold brook, his feet so white, like fish in the water.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It’s like I’m in hell.” “Hell? I can give you something for that,” she said, reaching for her prescription pad. “Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.” “I’ll keep it in mind.” Dr. Tuttle handed me the prescriptions. “Here, have some samples,” she said, pushing a basket of Promaxatine toward me. “Oh no, wait, these are for impotent obsessive compulsives. They’d keep you up at night.” She pulled the basket back. “See you in a month.” I took a cab home, filled the new prescriptions and refilled the old ones at Rite Aid, bought a pack of Skittles, and went home and ate the Skittles and a few leftover primidone and went back to sleep. • • • THE NEXT DAY, Reva came over to whine about her dying mother and prattle on about Ken. Her drinking seemed to be getting worse that summer. She pulled out a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a can of Diet Mountain Dew from her new huge lime green alligator-skin knockoff Gucci tote. “Want some tequila?” I shook my head no. Reva had an interesting method of mixing her drinks. After each sip of Diet Mountain Dew, she’d pour a little Jose Cuervo into the can to take up the space her sip had displaced, so that by the time she finished, she was drinking straight tequila. It was fascinating to me. I caught myself imagining the ratio of Diet Mountain Dew to Jose Cuervo in that can, what the formula would be to measure it sip by sip. I’d studied Zeno’s Paradox in high school algebra but never fully understood it. Infinite divisibility, the theory of halving, whatever it was. That philosophical quandary was exactly the kind of thing Trevor would have loved to explain to me. He’d sit across from me at dinner, slurping his ice water, muttering fluently about fractions of cents and the fluctuating price of oil, for example, all while his eyes scanned the room behind me as though to affirm to me that I was stupid, I was boring. Someone far better might be getting up from a table to go powder her nose. The thought stung. I still couldn’t accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it. I was still stuck on that bit of vanity.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  If some things could change, so could other things. What right had I to predict the future and predict it so nihilistically? As I got older I would probably change in hundreds of ways I couldn’t foresee. All I had to do was wait it out. It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait. I slept. I think I actually fell asleep with my face pressed to my spiral notebook. I remember waking up in the blue hours of early morning and feeling a spiral welt on the side of my cheek. Then I pushed away the notebook and went back to sleep. And my dreams were extravagant. Full of elevators, platforms in space, enormously steep and slippery staircases, ziggurat temples I had to climb, mountains, towers, ruins.... I had some vague sense that I was assigning myself dreams as a sort of cure. I remember once or twice waking and then falling back to sleep thinking: “Now I will have the dream which makes my decision for me.” But what was the decision I sought? Every choice seemed so unsatisfactory in one way or another. Every choice excluded some other choice. It was as if I were asking my dreams to tell me who I was and what I ought to do. I would wake with my heart pounding and then sink back to sleep again. Maybe I was hoping I’d wake up somebody else. Fragments of those dreams are still with me. In one of them, I had to walk a narrow plank between two skyscrapers in order to save someone’s life. Whose? Mine? Bennett’s? Chloe’s? The dream did not say. But it was clear that if I failed, my own life would be over. In another, I reached inside myself to take out my diaphragm, and there, floating over my cervix, was a large contact lens. Womb with a view. The cervix was really an eye. And a nearsighted eye at that. Then I remember the dream in which I was back in college preparing to receive my degree from Millicent McIntosh. I walked up a long flight of steps which looked more like the steps of a Mexican temple than the steps of Low Library. I teetered on very high heels and worried about tripping over my gown. As I approached the lectern and Mrs. McIntosh held out a scroll to me, I realized that I was not merely graduating but was to receive some special honor. “I must tell you that the faculty does not approve of this,” Mrs. McIntosh said. And I knew then that the fellowship conferred on me the right to have three husbands simultaneously. They sat in the audience wearing black caps and gowns. Bennett, Adrian, and some other man whose face was not clear.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenětres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take off—whereupon the lighted image would move and Eve would revert to a rib, and there would be nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper. Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. “Savez-vous qu’à dix ans ma petite était folle de vous?” said a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated seductively but also to be nobly held—all this, chance denied me—chance and a change to smaller characters on the pale beloved writer’s part. My fancy was both Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning, late in September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and bilious janitor with whom I was on execrable terms started to complain that a man who had seen Rita home recently had been “sick like a dog” on the front steps. In the process of listening to him and tipping him, and then listening to a revised and politer version of the incident, I had the impression that one of the two letters which that blessed mail brought was from Rita’s mother, a crazy little woman, whom we had once visited on Cape Cod and who kept writing me to my various addresses, saying how wonderfully well matched her daughter and I were, and how wonderful it would be if we married; the other letter which I opened and scanned rapidly in the elevator was from John Farlow.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I refused to. I would feel nothing, be a blank slate. Trevor had told me once he thought I was frigid, and that was fine with me. Fine. Let me be a cold bitch. Let me be the ice queen. Someone once said that when you die of hypothermia, you get cold and sleepy, things slow down, and then you just drift away. You don’t feel a thing. That sounded nice. That was the best way to die—awake and dreaming, feeling nothing. I could take the train to Coney Island, I thought, walk along the beach in the freezing wind, and swim out into the ocean. Then I’d just float on my back looking up at the stars, go numb, get sleepy, drift, drift. Isn’t it only fair that I should get to choose how I’ll die? I wouldn’t die like my father did, passive and quiet while the cancer ate him alive. At least my mother did things her own way. I’d never thought to admire her before for that. At least she had guts. At least she took matters into her own hands. I opened my eyes. There was a spiderweb in the corner of the ceiling, fluttering like a scrap of moth-eaten silk in the draft. I tuned in to Reva for a moment. Her words cleansed the palette of my mind. Thank God for her, I thought, my whiny, moronic analgesic. “So then I was like, ‘I’m tired of you jerking me around.’ And he starts talking about how he’s my boss. All macho, right? And actually evading the real issue which is the thing I told you about, which I can’t even think about right now.” I had no memory of her telling me anything. The sound of more gin. “I mean, I’m not keeping it. Obviously. Especially not now! But no. Ken can’t be bothered about that. Being evasive is totally his thing.” I turned around and peeked at her. “If he thinks he can get rid of me so easily . . . ,” she said, wagging her finger. “If he thinks he’s gonna get away with this . . .” “What, Reva? What are you going to do to him? Are you going to kill him? You’re going to burn his house down?” “If he thinks I’m just going to eat his shit and slink away . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence. She had no threats to make. She was too afraid of her own rage to ever imagine it through to any violent end. She would never exact revenge. So I suggested, “Tell his wife he’s been fucking you. Or sue him for sexual harassment.” Reva wrinkled her nose and sucked her teeth, her rage suddenly transformed into calculated pragmatism. “I don’t want people to know, though.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Journals and magazines and newspapers and manila folders, gummy pink erasers that struck me suddenly as somehow genital. Squat glass bottles of Canada Dry a quarter full. A chipped crystal dish of oxidizing paper clips, loose change, a crumpled lozenge wrapper, a button he had meant to sew back onto a shirt but never did. My father. How many of my parents’ hairs and eyelashes and skin cells and fingernail clippings had survived between the floorboards since the professor moved in? If I sold the house, the new owners might cover the hardwood with linoleum, or tear it out. They might paint the walls bright colors, build a deck in the back and seed the lawn with wildflowers. The place could look like “the hippie house” next door by spring, I thought. My parents would have hated that. I put the letter from the lawyer aside and lay down on the sofa. I should have felt something—a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that—if I were in a movie—would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life’s most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video footage of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn’t hit. These weren’t my memories. I felt just a tingling feeling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don’t. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose. So I called the estate lawyer. “What would make more money?” I asked him. “Selling the house, or burning it down?” There was a breathless pause on the phone. “Hello?” “Selling it, definitely,” the lawyer said. “There are some things in the attic and the basement,” I began to say. “Do I have to—” “You can pick that up when we pass the papers. In due time. The professor moves out mid-February, and then we’ll see. I’ll let you know what transpires.” I hung up and put my coat on and went down to Rite Aid. It was cold and windy out, snow brushing up off parked cars like rainbow glitter in the noon light. I could smell the coffee burning as I passed the bodega and was tempted to get some for the walk to the pharmacy, but I knew better. Caffeine wouldn’t help me now. I was already shaky and nervous. I had high hopes for the Ambien. Four Ambien with a Dimetapp chaser could put me out for at least four hours, I thought. “Think positive,” Reva liked to tell me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I lay back down on the sofa. Then I was hungry, so I ate the banana bread and watched Frantic three times in a row, taking a few Ativan every thirty minutes or so. But I still couldn’t sleep. I watched Schindler’s List, which I hoped would depress me, but it only irritated me, and then the sun came up, so I took some Lamictal and watched The Last of the Mohicans and Patriot Games, but that had no effect either, so I took a few Placidyl and put The Player back in. When it was over, I checked the digital clock on the VCR. It was noon. I ordered Pad See Ew from the Thai place, ate half of it, watched the 1995 remake of Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, took another shower, downed the last of my Ambien, and found the porn channel again. I turned the volume down low, shifted my body away from the screen so that the grunts and moans could lull me. Still, I didn’t sleep. Life could go on forever like this, I thought. Life would, if I didn’t take action. I fingered myself on the sofa under the blanket, came twice, then turned the TV off. I got up and raised the blinds and sat in a daze for a while and watched the sun go down—was it possible?—then I rewound Sabrina and watched it again and ate the rest of the Pad See Ew. I watched Driving Miss Daisy and Sling Blade. I took a Nembutal and drank half a bottle of Robitussin. I watched The World According to Garp and Stargate and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Moonstruck and Flashdance, then Dirty Dancing and Ghost, then Pretty Woman. Not even a yawn. I wasn’t remotely sleepy. I could tell my sense of balance was off—I nearly fell over when I tried to stand up, but I pushed through it and tidied up for a while, sliding the videocassettes into their cases and putting them back on the shelf. I thought some activity might tire me out. I took a Zyprexa and some more Ativan. I ate a handful of melatonin, chewing like a cow on cud. Nothing was working. So I called Trevor. “It’s five in the morning,” he said. He sounded irritated and foggy, but he’d answered. My number must have shown up on his caller ID, and he’d answered. “I’ve been sexually assaulted,” I lied. I hadn’t said anything aloud in days by then. My voice had a sexy rasp. I felt like I might vomit again. “Can you come over? I need you to come look to see if there are any tears in my vagina. You’re the only one I trust,” I said. “Please?” “Who is it?” I heard a woman’s voice murmuring in the distance. “Nobody,” Trevor said to her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  They would see me being humiliated by this stable boy, me the proud Prince who had rebelled against the Queen. And yet all I could do was to weep, and suffer, and feel the paddle swatting me. "I did not even think of the Queen learning of this. I was too devoid of hope. I thought only of the moment. Now, this, Beauty, is one aspect of yielding and acceptance, surely. I thought only of the stable boy and pleasing him and escaping, for a little while longer, at this terrible price, the kitchen. In other words, I thought of doing precisely what was expected of me. "Now, my stable boy grew tired of it. He ordered my back down to the grass on my hands and knees and took me deeper into the woods. I was completely unbound, yet I was under his will utterly. Now he found a tree and told me to stand up and grasp the limb over my head. I hung by the limb, my feet off the ground, as he raped me. He thrust in deep and hard and repeatedly. I thought it would never end, and my poor penis was hard as the tree itself with suffering. "And when he was finished, the most extraordinary thing happened. I found myself kneeling at his feet, kissing his feet and more than that, I was twisting my hips, and thrusting and doing all in my power to beg him to relieve the passion between my legs, to allow me some release, for I had known absolutely none in the kitchen. "He laughed at all this. He pulled me up, impaled me easily on his whip handle and drove me back towards the kitchen. I was weeping as uncontrollably as ever in my life. "The vast room was almost empty. All were out tending the vegetable gardens, or in the anterooms above as the meals were being served, and only a young serving girl remained, who climbed to her feet at once when she saw us. In a moment, the stable boy was whispering to her, and as she nodded her head, and wiped her hands on her apron, he ordered me up onto one of the square tables. I was to squat again with my hands behind my head. I obeyed without even thinking. More paddling, I thought, and for the benefit of this little girl with her warm face and brown braids. She meantime drew near and looked at me with what seemed wonder. Then for her the stable boy began to torment me.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Mother, be gentle with her, please, I beg you," said the Prince. "Allow me to keep her in my chambers, and to train her myself. Don't send her back to the Hall of Slaves tonight." Beauty tried to smother her own crying. It seemed the Page's hand over her mouth only made it more difficult for her. "My son, when she has proven her humility, we shall see," said the Queen. "Tomorrow night, the Bridle Path." "O, but Mother, it is so soon." "Such rigor will be good for her; it will make her malleable," said the Queen. And turning with a broad gesture that loosened the train of her gown and made it fall behind her, the Queen left the parlor. The Page released Beauty. And the Prince at once took her wrists in his hand and urged her out into the corridor, Lady Juliana coming beside him. The Queen was gone, and the Prince moved Beauty angrily along ahead of him, Beauty's sobs echoing under the dark vaulted ceilings. "O, dear, poor exquisite dear," said the Lady Juliana. At last they reached the Prince's apartments, and to Beauty's misery, the Lady Juliana came in as if this were nothing to enter the Prince's chamber. "Have they no propriety and restraint among themselves," Beauty thought, "or are they degraded with each other as we are degraded?" But she soon realized it was only the Prince's study, and Pages were about. And the door remained open. The Lady Juliana took Beauty now from the Prince, he soft cool hands urging Beauty down on her knees before her chair. Then from somewhere in the folds of her gown, the Lady produced a long narrow silver-handled brush and she commenced to brush Beauty's hair lovingly. "This will soothe you, my poor precious one," she said. "Don't be so frightened." Beauty broke into fresh sobs. She hated this lovely Lady. She wanted to destroy her. She felt such savage thoughts, ad yet she wanted at the same moment to cling to her, to sob against her breast. She thought of friends she'd had at her father's Court, her Ladies in waiting, and how many times they had been easily affectionate with one another, and she wanted to abandon herself to the same affection. The brushing of her hair produced a tingling all through her scalp and through the flesh of her arms as well. And when the Lady's left hand covered her breasts and gently patted them, she felt herself defenseless. Her mouth went slack and she turned towards the Lady Juliana and laid her forehead against her knee, defeated. "Poor, darling one," said the Lady. "But the Bridle Path is not so dreadful. You will be grateful afterwards that you were used rigorously in the beginning, for it will all the sooner soften you." "Familiar sentiments," Beauty thought. "Perhaps," the Lady Juliana went on with the rhythmic stroking of the brush, "I shall ride beside you." What could this mean?

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

  Modern culture, unfortunately, is engineered to screw up your body budget. Many of the products sold in supermarkets and chain restaurants are pseudo-food loaded with budget-warping refined sugar and bad fats. Schools and jobs require you to wake early and go to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four regularly sleep-deprived, a condition that can lead to chronic misbudgeting and possibly depression and other mental illnesses. Advertisers play on your insecurities, suggesting you’ll be judged badly by your friends unless you buy the right clothing or car, and social rejection is toxic for your body budget. Social media offers new opportunities for social rejection and adds ambiguity, which is even worse for your body budget. Friends and employers expect you to be surgically attached to your cell phone at all hours, which means you never truly relax, and late-night screen time disrupts your sleeping patterns. Your culture’s expectations for work, rest, and socializing determine how easily you can manage that internal budget. Social reality transmutes into physical reality. 2 Your body budget, you may remember, is regulated by predictive circuitry in your interoceptive network. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with your body’s actual needs, it’s hard to bring them back into balance. Your body-budgeting circuitry, the loudmouth of your brain, doesn’t respond quickly to counterevidence (prediction error) from your body. Once the predictions have been off-base for long enough, you will feel chronically miserable. When people feel crappy on a regular basis, quite a few of them self-medicate. Thirty percent of all medications consumed in the United States are taken to manage some form of distress. For these sufferers, their predictions are regularly not calibrated to their bodies’ actual expenditures, likely because their brain is misestimating the cost. So they feel miserable and take medication, or they turn to alcohol or certain street drugs like opiates. 3 That’s the bad news. What can you do, practically speaking, to keep your predictions calibrated and body budget balanced? I apologize if I suddenly sound like your mother, but the road begins with eating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep. I know, I know, it sounds mundane or even trite, but sadly there is no substitute, biologically speaking. A body budget, like a financial budget, is easier to maintain when you have a solid foundation. When you were a baby, your caretakers entirely managed your body budget. As you grew, they gradually transferred more and more responsibility for maintaining your budget to you. Today your friends and family might pitch in a little, but its nourishment is pretty much up to you.