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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  To take just one example, we argue that women’s seemingly consistent preference for men with access to wealth is not a result of innate evolutionary programming, as the standard model asserts, but simply a behavioral adaptation to a world in which men control a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. As we’ll explore in detail, before the advent of agriculture a hundred centuries ago, women typically had as much access to food, protection, and social support as did men. We’ll see that upheavals in human societies resulting from the shift to settled living in agricultural communities brought radical changes to women’s ability to survive. Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive capacity for access to the resources and protection they needed to survive. But these conditions are very different from those in which our species had been evolving previously. It’s important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species’ existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers. So in order to trace the deepest roots of human sexuality, it’s vital to look beneath the thin crust of recent human history. Until agriculture, human beings evolved in societies organized around an insistence on sharing just about everything. But all this sharing doesn’t make anyone a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies were no nobler than you are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums. Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly social species to minimize risk. Sharing and self-interest, as we shall see, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many anthropologists call fierce egalitarianism was the predominant pattern of social organization around the world for many millennia before the advent of agriculture. But human societies changed in radical ways once they started farming and raising domesticated animals. They organized themselves around hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”6

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

  Hope can be a cruel mistress. [back] 39. also with chronic fatigue syndrome: To be clear, I am not saying that depression and chronic pain are the same phenomenon. I am saying that they have a set of common causes. There is a longstanding debate whether certain chronic pain syndromes are independent of depression, as opposed to being expressions of depression. In the past, this debate has been framed as a version of “it’s all in your head,” where spontaneously experienced pain in the absence of tissue damage is assumed to be a sign of mental illness. This line of argument assumes that depression is merely a mental illness, but this historical distinction is not meaningful in the light of modern neuroscience. Both depression and chronic pain can be considered neurodegenerative brain diseases that have metabolic and inflammatory roots. The fact that some prescription drugs are successful at reducing some instances of depression but not of chronic pain (or vice versa) does not mean the two are distinct biological categories, because depression has degenerate causes. Not everyone suffering from depression (i.e., the variable members of that category) is treated successfully with the same medication (i.e., variation is the norm). The same logic probably works for any category of chronic pain. [back] 40. are highly variable and malleable: Barrett 2013. [back] 41. symptoms sounds just like autism: The diagnostic symptoms of autism are consistent with my description; see heam.info/autism-1. [back] 42. have multiple, complex causes: Jeste and Geschwind 2014. See also heam.info/autism-2. [back] 43. “An Inside View of Autism”: Grandin 1991. “why she was not a cat”: Grandin 2009. “and all is well”: Higashida 2013. [back] 44. is a failure of prediction: Van de Cruys et al. 2014; Quattrocki and Friston 2014; Sinha et al. 2014. the trajectory of brain development: For a discussion, see heam.info/autism-3. [back] 45. sound of a laugh track: There is now ample evidence that children and adolescents learn both physical and relational aggression from the media (Anderson et al. 2003). Situation comedies, both those designed for children and those for general audiences, contain some aggression in over 90% of programs sampled, compared with 71% of reality programs (Martins and Wilson 2011). In the fifty television shows that are most popular with children ages two to eleven years old, episodes contained, on average, fourteen different incidents of relational aggression per hour, or one every four or five minutes (Martins and Wilson 2012a). Young teenagers find relational and physical aggression funny (as opposed to upsetting) when it’s performed by a likeable character in teenage (“tween”) sitcoms; in addition, teens report that they are more likely to imitate the aggression themselves (Martins et al., in press).

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Unable to sleep, she would wait all night for him to show up. She had never experienced such desperation. Somehow she had to seduce him, possess him, have him all to herself. She tried everything—letters, coquetry, all kinds of promises— until he finally wrote that he was no longer in love with her and that was that. Interpretation. Baudelaire was an intellectual seducer. He wanted to over- whelm Madame Sabatier with words, dominate her thoughts, make her fall in love with him. Physically, he knew, he could not compete with her many other admirers—he was shy, awkward, not particularly handsome. So he resorted to his one strength, poetry. Haunting her with anonymous let- ters gave him a perverse thrill. He had to know she would realize, eventu- ally, that he was her correspondent—no one else wrote like him—but he wanted her to figure this out on her own. He stopped writing to her be- cause he had become interested in someone else, but he knew she would be thinking of him, wondering, perhaps waiting for him. And when he pub- lished his book, he decided to write to her again, this time directly, stirring up the old venom he had injected in her. When they were alone, he could see she was waiting for him to do something, to take hold of her, but he was not that kind of seducer. Besides, it gave him pleasure to hold himself back, to sense his power over a woman whom so many desired. By the time she turned physical and aggressive, the seduction was over for him. He had made her fall in love; that was enough. The devastating effect of Baudelaire's push-and-pull on Madame Sabatier teaches us a great lesson in seduction. First, it is always best to keep at some distance from your targets. You do not have to go as far as remain- ing anonymous, but you do not want to be seen too often, or to be seen as and the seas will dry up first! Oh, misery! How it would have brought me comfort and healing if I had held him in my arms once before he died. How? Yes, quite naked next to him, in order to enjoy him fully. ..."•.. . When they came within six or seven leagues of the castle where King Bademagu was staying, news that was pleasing came to him about Lancelot—news that he was glad to hear; Lancelot was alive and was returning, hale and hearty. He behaved most properly in going to inform the queen. "Good sir," she told him, "I believe it, since you have told me. But were he dead, I assure you that I could never again be happy." •...

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Although the survival odds of any children resulting from his casual encounters would presumably be lower than those of the children he helps raise, this investment would still be wise for him, given the low costs he incurs (a few drinks and a room at the Shady Grove Motor Lodge—at the hourly rate). The woman’s mixed strategy would be to extract a long-term commitment from the man who offers her the best access to resources, status, and protection, while still seeking the occasional fling with rugged dudes in leather jackets who offer genetic advantages her loving, but domesticated, mate lacks. It’s hard to decide who comes out looking worse. Various studies have demonstrated that women are more likely to cheat on their husbands (to have extra-pair copulations, or EPCs) when they are ovulating and less likely to use birth control than they are when not fertile. Furthermore, women are likely to wear more perfume and jewelry when ovulating than at other points in their menstrual cycle and to be attracted to more macho-looking men (those with physical markers of more vigorous genes). These conflicting agendas and the eternal struggle they appear to fuel—this “war between the sexes”—is central to the dismal vision of human sexual life featured in today’s scientific and therapeutic narratives. As Wright summarizes, “Even with high MPI [male parental investment], and in some ways because of it, a basic underlying dynamic between men and women is mutual exploitation. They seem, at times, designed to make each other miserable [emphasis added].”16 Symons voices the same resignation in the first lines of The Evolution of Human Sexuality: A central theme of this book is that, with respect to sexuality, there is a female human nature and a male human nature, and that these natures are extraordinarily different, though the differences are to some extent masked by the compromises heterosexual relations entail and by moral injunctions. Men and women differ in their sexual natures because throughout the immensely long hunting and gathering phase of human evolutionary history the sexual desires and dispositions that were adaptive for either sex were for the other tickets to reproductive oblivion.17 Bleak, no? Conventional evolutionary theory assures us that all you scheming, gold-digging women reading this are evolved to trick a trusting yet boring guy into marrying you, only to then spray on a bunch of perfume and run down to the local singles club to try to get pregnant by some unshaven Neanderthal as soon as hubby falls asleep on the couch. How could you? But before male readers start feeling superior, remember that according to the same narrative, you evolved to woo and marry some innocent young beauty with empty promises of undying love, fake Rolex prominent on your wrist, get her pregnant ASAP, then start “working late” with as many secretaries as you can manage. Nothing to be proud of, mister. Extended Sexual Receptivity and Concealed Ovulation

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyes—of Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumed, very square and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore, was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas—que sais-je!—or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangular shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike block there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 A.M., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I almost said—trying to find some casual remark—“I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?”—but stopped in time lest she rejoin: “I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl …” Finally, I reverted to money matters. That sum, I said, represented more or less the net rent from her mother’s house; she said: “Had it not been sold years ago?” No (I admit I had told her this in order to sever all connections with R.); a lawyer would send a full account of the financial situation later; it was rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned had gone up and up. Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to go, and find him, and destroy him. Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kept retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and her belly made toward me. She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was it was getting sort of purplish about the gills. I said it was hers, I could go by bus. She said don’t be silly, they would fly to Jupiter and buy a car there. I said I would buy this one from her for five hundred dollars. “At this rate we’ll be millionnaires next,” she said to the ecstatic dog. Carmencita, lui demandais-je … “One last word,” I said in my horrible careful English, “are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope” (to that effect). “No,” she said smiling, “no.” “It would have made all the difference,” said Humbert Humbert. Then I pulled out my automatic—I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it. “Good by-aye!” she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy offers a different explanation for the unusual sexual capacity of the human female. She suggests that concealed ovulation and extended receptivity in early hominids may have evolved not to reassure males, but to confuse them. Having noted the tendency of newly enthroned alpha male baboons to kill all the babies of the previous patriarch, Hrdy hypothesized that this aspect of female sexuality may have developed as a way of confusing paternity among various males. The female would have sex with several males so that none of them could be certain of paternity, thus reducing the likelihood that the next alpha male would kill offspring who could be his. So we’ve got Fisher’s “classic theory” proposing that women evolved their special sexiness as a way of keeping one man’s interest, and Hrdy saying it’s all about keeping several guys guessing. Fisher’s theory fits better with the standard model, in which females trade sex for food, protection, and so forth. But this explanation works only if we believe that males—including our “primitive” ancestors—were interested in sex all the time with just one female. This contradicts the premise that males are hell-bent on spreading their seed far and wide, while simultaneously protecting their investment in their primary mate/family. Hrdy’s “seeds of confusion” theory posits that concealed ovulation and constant receptivity would benefit a female who had multiple male partners—by preventing them from killing her offspring and inducing them to defend or otherwise aid her children. Hrdy’s vision of human sexual evolution puts females directly at odds with males, who would presumably view fertile females as “individually recognizable and potentially defensible resource packets” too valuable to share. Either way, as depicted in the standard narrative, human sexual prehistory was characterized by deceit, disappointment, and despair. According to this view, both males and females are, by nature, liars, whores, and cheats. At our most basic levels, we’re told, heterosexual men and women have evolved to trick one another while selfishly pursuing zero-sum, mutually antagonistic genetic agendas—even though this demands the betrayal of the people we claim to love most sincerely. Original sin indeed. CHAPTER FOUR The Ape in the Mirror Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well? STEPHEN JAY GOULD ’Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry’d one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv’d, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both. DAVID HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740)

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The Enchanted Hunters: note the plural (H.H., Quilty, and, in another sense, the author). For “enchantment,” see Little Carmen. Quilty names his play after the hotel (here) and adapts an anagram of it for one of his many pseudonyms (Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.); the married Lolita ends up living on “Hunter Road.” CHAPTER 26Heart, head—everything: “Is ‘mask’ the keyword?” H.H. asked (see “real people”). As his narrative approaches the first conjugal night with Lolita, H.H. is overcome by anguish, and in the bare six lines of Chapter Twenty-six—the shortest “chapter” in the book—he loses control, and for a moment the mask drops. Not until the very end of the passage does the voice again sound like our Hum the Hummer, when the desperation of “Heart, head—everything” suddenly gives way to the resiliently comic command to the printer. In that one instant H.H.’s masking takes place before the reader, who gets a fleeting look into those “two hypnotic eyes” (to quote John Ray) and sees the pain in them. Lolita is so deeply moving a novel because of our sharp awareness of the great tension sustained between H.H.’s mute despair and his compensatory jollity. “Crime and Pun” is one of the titles the murderous narrator of Despair considers for his manuscript, and it would serve H.H. just as well, for language is as much a defense to him as chess is to Grandmaster Luzhin. But even when H.H. lets the mask slip, one glimpses only his desperation, not the “real” H.H. or the manipulative author. As Nabokov says in Chapter Five of Gogol, analogously discussing Akaky Akakyevich and the “holes” and “gaps” in the narrative texture of The Overcoat: “We did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be” [italics mine—A.A.]. If the printer had obeyed H.H.’s request to fill the page with Lo’s name, we’d have a twentieth-century equivalent of a totally self-reflexive blank or patterned page in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767). CHAPTER 27redheaded … lad: Charlie Holmes turns out to be Lolita’s first lover. moth or butterfly: a reminder that H.H. is no entomologist. See John Ray, Jr.. Nabokov stressed “Humbert’s complete incapacity to differentiate between Rhopalocera and Heterocera.” lentigo: a freckly skin pigmentation. aux yeux battus: French; with circles round one’s eyes. plumbaceous umbrae: Latin; leaden shadows. mägdlein: German; little girl. Lepingville … nineteenth century: as to the “identity” of this poet, Nabokov responded, “That poet was evidently Leping who used to go lepping (i.e., lepidoptera hunting) but that’s about all anybody knows about him.” See gay … Lepingville. backfisch: German; an immature, adolescent girl; a teenager. simulacrum: a sham; an unreal semblance. psychotherapist … rapist: H.H. calls our attention to the rapist in the therapist. Nabokov similarly employs semantic constituents in Despair, when he poses a sensible question: “What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion?” (p. 46).

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Lottelita, Lolitchen. So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naïvely lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests. I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was. At breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook (simulating that Coffee Shoppe where in their college days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo together), she would sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness as I consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator. My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where pink mountains loom. Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years. The poor woman busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if (to prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy. With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the home.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Men and women, women and men. It will never work, I thought. Back in the days when men were hunters and chest-beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid…. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild—and what happened? The men wilted. It was hopeless. I had desired Adrian as I had never desired anyone before in my life, and the very intensity of my need canceled out his. The more I showed my passion, the cooler he became. The more I risked to be with him, the less he was willing to risk to be with me. Was it really that simple? Did it all come down to what my mother had told me years ago about “playing hard to get"? It did seem to be true that the men who had loved me hardest were the ones I was most casual about. But what was the fun of that? What was the point? Couldn’t you ever bring philos and eros together, at least for a little while? What was the point of this constant round of alternating losses, this constant cycle of desire and indifference, indifference and desire? I had to find a hotel. It was late and dark and my suitcase was not only a great encumbrance, but it increased my air of availability. I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone—the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Smurov is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife. Fiction/Literature DESPAIR Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965—thirty years after its original publication— Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder. Fiction/Literature THE GIFT The last of the Nabokov’s novels in Russian, The Gift is his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write—a book very much like The Gift itself. Fiction/Literature GLORY Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil project”—to illegally re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he had fled in 1919. He succeeds—but at a terrible cost. Fiction/Literature KING, QUEEN, KNAVE This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium store. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz. Fiction/Literature PALE FIRE In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue. Fiction/Literature LAUGHTER IN THE DARK Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s. Fiction/Literature LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899) whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Nabokov himself. Focusing on the central figures of his life—his four wives, his books, and his muse, Dementia—the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself, as the worlds of reality and literary invention grow increasingly indistinguishable. Fiction/Literature MARY Nabokov’s first novel, Mary takes place in a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He could not be the villain. It was absolutely preposterous. I was losing my time and my wits. He and she were in California and not here at all. Presently, I noticed a vague commotion behind some white statues; a door—not the one I had been staring at—opened briskly, and amid a bevy of women students a baldish head and two bright brown eyes bobbed, advanced. He was a total stranger to me but insisted we had met at a lawn party at Beardsley School. How was my delightful tennis-playing daughter? He had another class. He would be seeing me. Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved: through an advertisement in one of Lo’s magazines I dared to get in touch with a private detective, an ex-pugilist, and merely to give him some idea of the method adopted by the fiend, I acquainted him with the kind of names and addresses I had collected. He demanded a goodish deposit and for two years—two years, reader!—that imbecile busied himself with checking those nonsense data. I had long severed all monetary relations with him when he turned up one day with the triumphant information that an eighty-year-old Indian by the name of Bill Brown lived near Dolores, Colo. 25 This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called “ Dolorès Disparue ,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster. Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her—as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed. One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines. You know the sort.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Nobody’s family, in short, was as transcendentally evil as the modern autobiographical novelist (or poet) imagined his family to be. To excoriate one’s family was ultimately the same thing as to idealize. It showed how fettered one still was to the past. Through fame, too, the artist sought to compensate himself for the sense of early deprivation. But it never quite worked. Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small, and besides the world is a lousy lover. So fame too was a disappointment. Many artists turned in despair to opium, alcohol, homosexual lechery, heterosexual lechery, religious fervor, political moralizing, suicide, and other palliatives. But these never quite worked either. Except suicide—which always worked, in a way. At that point I remembered an epigram by Antonio Porchia which the analyst had not wit enough to quote: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings for the soul that cures its sufferings dies. So too with artists. Only more so. Throughout the whole description of the artist’s weakness, dependency, naiveté, etc., Bennett squeezed my hand and shot me knowing glances. Come back home to Daddy. All is understood. How I longed to come back home to Daddy! But how I also longed to be free! “Freedom is an illusion,” Bennett would have said (agreeing for once with B. F. Skinner) and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability…I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my “hunger-thump.” It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men and poems shaped like men and men shaped like poems—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that’s what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart. What was this pounding thing inside of me? A drum? Or a whole percussion section? Was it all air in a stretched skin? Was it an auditory hallucination? Was it maybe a frog? Wasn’t he thumping about a prince? Wasn’t he thinking he was a prince?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But making sense of human nature is anything but simple. Human nature has been landscaped, replanted, weeded, fertilized, fenced off, seeded, and irrigated as intensively as any garden or seaside golf course. Human beings have been under cultivation longer than we’ve been cultivating anything else. Our cultures domesticate us for obscure purposes, nurturing and encouraging certain aspects of our behavior and tendencies while seeking to eliminate those that might be disruptive. Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal.2 Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled—though as we’ll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past. Pull them if you want, but they’ll just keep coming back again and again. What gets cultivated—in soil and minds—is not necessarily beneficial to the individuals in a given society. Something may benefit a culture overall, while being disastrous to the majority of the individual members of that society. Individuals suffer and die in wars from which a society may benefit greatly. Industrial poisons in the air and water, globalized trade accords, genetically modified crops…all are accepted by individuals likely to end up losing in the deal. This disconnect between individual and group interests helps explain why the shift to agriculture is normally spun as a great leap forward, despite the fact that it was actually a disaster for most of the individuals who endured it. Skeletal remains taken from various regions of the world dating to the transition from foraging to farming all tell the same story: increased famine, vitamin deficiency, stunted growth, radical reduction in life span, increased violence…little cause for celebration. For most people, we’ll see that the shift from foraging to farming was less a giant leap forward than a dizzying fall from grace. On Getting Funky and Rockin’ Round the Clock If you ever doubt that human beings are, beyond everything, social animals, consider that short of outright execution or physical torture, the worst punishment in any society’s arsenal has always been exile. Having run short of empty places to exile our worst prisoners, we’ve turned to internal exile as our harshest punishment: solitary confinement. Sartre got it backwards when he proclaimed, “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is other people). It’s the absence of other people that is hellish for our species. Human beings are so desperate for social contact that prisoners almost universally choose the company of murderous lunatics over extended isolation. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” said journalist Terry Anderson, recalling his seven-year ordeal as a hostage in Lebanon.3

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Yet even after centuries of such barbaric punishment, adultery persists everywhere, without exception. As Alfred Kinsey noted back in the 1950s, “Even in cultures which most rigorously attempt to control the female’s extramarital coitus, it is perfectly clear that such activity does occur, and in many instances it occurs with considerable regularity.”20 Think about that. No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature. The Promise of Promiscuity Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture. EDWARD ABBEY As we consider alternate views of prehistoric human sexuality, keep in mind that the core logic of the standard narrative pivots on two interlocking assumptions: A prehistoric mother and child needed the meat and protection a man would provide. A woman would have had to offer her own sexual autonomy in exchange, thus assuring him that it was his child he was supporting. The standard narrative is founded upon the belief that the exchange of protein and protection for assured paternity was the best way to increase the odds of a child’s survival to reproductive age. Survival of offspring is, after all, the primary engine of natural selection as described by Darwin and subsequent theorists. But what if risk to offspring were mitigated more effectively by behavior that encouraged the opposite arrangement? What if, rather than one man agreeing to share his meat, protection, and status with a particular woman and her child, sharing were generalized? What if group-wide sharing offered a more effective approach to the risks our ancestors encountered in the prehistoric world? And in light of these risks, what if paternity uncertainty were more beneficial to the child’s chances of survival, as more men would take an interest in him or her? Again, we’re not suggesting a nobler social system, just one that might have been better suited to meeting the challenges of prehistoric conditions and more effective in helping people survive long enough to reproduce.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Countless studies confirm that testosterone and associated male sex hormones are at high tide from puberty to a man’s mid-twenties. Here we have another massive conflict between what society dictates and biology demands. With every voice in a young man’s body screaming for SEX NOW, many societies insist he ignore these incessant urgings and channel that energy into other pursuits, ranging from sports to homework to military adventure.3 As with other attempts to block the unignorable importations of biology, this one has been a centuries-long disaster. Testosterone levels correlate to the likelihood of a young man (or woman) getting into trouble.4 In the United States, adolescent males are five times more likely to kill themselves than females are. Among Americans between fifteen and twenty-five, suicide is the third leading cause of death, and teenage boys kill themselves at a rate double that of any other demographic group. Adding to the sense that sexual repression underlies this widespread despair, a government study found that homosexual youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.5 Well-intentioned websites and presentations rarely, if ever, mention gut-wrenching, identity-clouding sexual frustration as a possible cause of some of this destructive adolescent behavior. Despite the omnipresence of billboards and bus stops featuring semi-naked barely pubescent fashion models, significant parts of American society remain adamantly opposed to any suggestion that sexual activity may commence before the law allows.6 In 2003, seventeen-year-old honor student and homecoming king Genarlow Wilson was caught having consensual oral sex with his girlfriend, who had not yet turned sixteen. He was convicted of aggravated child molestation, sentenced to a minimum of ten years in a Georgia prison, and forced to register as a sex offender for life. If Wilson and his girlfriend had just enjoyed good old-fashioned intercourse, as opposed to oral sex, their “crime” would have been a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum of a year in prison and no sex-offender status.7 The previous year, Todd Senters videotaped consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was over the age of consent. No problem, right? Wrong. According to Nebraska state law, although the sex itself was perfectly legal, taping it constituted “manufacturing child pornography.” The seventeen-year-old was legally permitted to have sex, but images of her doing so are illegal. Go figure. Adolescents all over the country are getting into serious trouble for sexting one another: snapping a risqué photo of themselves with their cell phone and sending it to a friend. Turns out, in many states, these kids can be sent to prison (where sexual abuse is rampant) for photographing their own bodies (manufacturing child pornography) and sharing the photos (distributing child pornography). They’re being forced to register as sex offenders despite the fact that they themselves are the “victims” of their own “crimes.”8 Just Say What?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov’s “private tragedy” is our concern, for in varying degrees it involves us all. Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is H.H.’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all of our attempts to communicate. “ ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once.” It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s palm. H.H. has failed once—“She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I use[d] for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own teeth on edge”—but it is a necessary act of love to try, and perhaps Nabokov succeeds with the reader where H.H. failed with Lolita. frac-tails: Nabokov wittily demonstrates that the “native illusionist” is now an internationalist: frac is French for “dress coat.” It is just that Nabokov (and this edition) should conclude with a joke, however small, for, from behind “the bars of the poor creature’s cage,” desperate Humbert also exults. In Gogol, Nabokov notes how “one likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant” (p. 142), a juxtaposition implicit in the early title, Laughter in the Dark. The title goes two ways: it records the laughter of the cosmic joker who has made a pawn of Albinus, blinding and tormenting him, but it also summarizes Nabokov’s response to life, his course for survival. Toward the end of Lolita, the sick and despairing Humbert has finally tracked down Lolita, who is now the pregnant Mrs. Richard Schiller. He recalls how he rang the doorbell, ready to kill Dick. The bell seems to vibrate through his whole exhausted system, but suddenly Humbert takes his automatic French response to the sound and playfully twists it into verbal nonsense: “Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense?” he wonders. It sounds from the depths of Vladimir Nabokov’s profoundly humane comic vision, and the gusto of Humbert’s narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies, and games all attest to a comic vision that overrides the sadness or terror of everyday life.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  the pleasure of knowing you, leaving the world behind. In any case, some people are too fragile to be cut off from their base of support. The great modern courtesan Pamela Harriman had a solution to this problem: she isolated her victims from their families, their former or present wives, and in place of those old connections she quickly set up new comforts for her lovers. She overwhelmed them with attention, attending to their every need. In the case of Averill Harriman, the billionaire who eventually married her, she literally established a new home for him, one that had no associations with the past and was full of the pleasures of the present. It is unwise to keep the seduced dangling in midair for too long, with nothing familiar or comforting in sight. Instead, replace the familiar things you have cut them off from with a new home, a new series of comforts. Phase Three The Precipice— Deepening the Effect Through Extreme Measures The goal in this phase is to make everything deeper—the effect you have on their mind, feelings of love and attachment, tension within your victims. With your hooks deep into them, you can then push them back and forth, between hope and despair, until they weaken and snap. Showing how far you are willing to go for your victims, doing some noble or chivalrous deed (16: Prove yourself) will create a powerful jolt, spark an intensely positive reaction. Everyone has scars, repressed desires, and unfinished business from childhood. Bring these desires and wounds to the surface, make your victims feel they are getting what they never got as a child and you will penetrate deep into their psyche, stir uncontrollable emotions (17: Effect a regression). Now you can take your victims past their limits, getting them to act out their dark sides, adding a sense of danger to your seduction (18: Stir up the transgressive and taboo). You need to deepen the spell, and nothing will more confuse and enchant your victims than giving your seduction a spiritual veneer. It is not lust that motivates you, but destiny, divine thoughts and everything elevated (19: Use spiritual lures). The erotic lurks beneath the spiritual. Now your victims have been properly set up. By deliberately hurting them, instilling fears and anxieties, you will lead them to the edge of the precipice from which it will be easy to push and make them fall (20: Mix pleasure with pain). They feel great tension and are yearning for relief. Prove Yourself Most people want to be seduced. If they resist your efforts, it is proba- bly because you have not gone far enough to allay their doubts— about your motives, the depth of your feel- ings, and so on. One well-timed ac- tion that shows how far you are willing to go to win them over will dispel their doubts. Do not worry about looking foolish or making a mistake— any kind of deed that is self-sacrificing and for your targets'

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Prior to the population increases associated with agriculture, most of the world was a vast, empty place in terms of human population. But the desperate overcrowding imagined by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin is still deeply embedded in evolutionary theory and repeated like a mantra, facts be damned. For example, in his recent essay entitled “Why War?,” philosopher David Livingstone Smith projects the Malthusian panorama in all its mistaken despair: “Competition for limited resources is the engine of evolutionary change,” he writes. “Any population that reproduces without inhibition will eventually outstrip the resources upon which it depends and, as numbers swell, individuals will have no alternative but to compete more and more desperately for dwindling resources. Those who can secure them will flourish, and those who cannot will die.”9 True, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far, because Smith forgets that our ancestors were the original ramblin’ men (and women)—nomads who rarely stopped walking for more than a few days at a stretch. Walking away is what they did best. Why assume they would have stuck around to struggle “desperately” in an overpopulated area with depleted resources when they could simply walk up the beach, as they’d been doing for uncounted generations? And prehistoric human beings never reproduced “without inhibition,” like rabbits. Far from it. In fact, prehistoric world population growth is estimated to have been well below .001 percent per year throughout prehistory10—hardly the population bomb Malthus assumed. Basic human reproductive biology in a foraging context made rapid population growth unlikely, if not impossible. Women rarely conceive while breastfeeding, and without milk from domesticated animals, hunter-gatherer women typically breastfeed each child for five or six years. Furthermore, the demands of a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle make carrying more than one small child at a time unreasonable for a mother—even assuming lots of help from others. Finally, low body-fat levels result in much later menarche for hunter-gatherer females than for their post-agricultural sisters. Most foragers don’t start ovulating until their late teens, resulting in a shorter reproductive life.11 Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin were themselves surrounded by the desperate effects of population saturation (rampant infectious disease, ceaseless war, Machiavellian struggles for power). The prehistoric world, however, was sparsely populated—where it was populated at all. Other than isolated pockets surrounded by desert, or islands like Papua New Guinea, the prehistoric world was almost all open frontier. Most scholars believe that our ancestors were just setting out from Africa about fifty thousand years ago, entering Europe five or ten thousand years later.12 The first human footprints probably weren’t left on North American soil until about twelve thousand years ago.13 During the many millennia before agriculture, the entire number of Homo sapiens on the planet probably never surpassed a million people and certainly never approached the current population of Chicago. Furthermore, recently obtained DNA analyses suggest several population bottlenecks caused by environmental catastrophes reduced our species to just a few thousand individuals as recently as 70,000 years ago.14

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  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. When the solution to my problems came to me, it landed in my mind like a hawk on a cliff. It was as though it had been circling up there the whole time, studying every little thing in my life, putting all the pieces together. “This is the way.”