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.

Page 56 of 267 · 20 per page

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She packed everything into the shopping bags with the urgent efficiency of someone building a sand castle at sundown, as the tide comes in. Like a dream you know will end. If I move fast enough, I won’t wake the gods. Most of the clothes still had the tags on them. “This is good motivation to stick to my diet,” Reva said, lugging the bags into the living room. “Atkins, I think. Bacon and eggs for the next six months. I think I can do it if I really set my mind to it. The doctor said the abortion won’t cause any dramatic weight loss, but I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever I can get. Especially now. Size twos are a challenge for my hips, you know. You’re sure you won’t want any of this back?” She was gleeful and flushed. “Take the jewelry, too,” I said, and returned to the bedroom, which now felt hollowed and cool. Thank God for Reva. Her greed would unburden me of my own vanity. I started picking through my jewelry, then decided just to give her the whole box. She didn’t ask why. Maybe she thought I was in a blackout, and if she questioned me, I’d wake up. Don’t disturb the sleeping beast. The white fox in the meat freezer. I went down in the elevator with her, the bags in our fists heavy yet cloudlike, the air in the elevator shifting pressure as though we were flying through a storm. But I felt almost nothing. The doorman held the door for us as we walked out. “Oh, thank you so much, that’s so kind of you,” Reva said, suddenly a lady, gracious and verbose. “That is just so sweet of you, Manuel. Thank you.” His name. I’d never bothered to learn it. I gave her forty dollars cash for the ride crosstown. The doorman whistled for a taxi. “I’m going on a trip, Reva,” I said. “Rehab?” “Something like that.” “For how long?” Just the slightest twitch in her eye, barely balking at the lie that was obvious in its vagueness. But what could she say? I’d paid her off in high fashion to leave me alone. “I’ll be back on June first,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll stay longer. They won’t let me make phone calls. They told me it’s best not to have contact with people from my past.” “Not even me?” She was being polite. I could tell she was already hatching plans, all the hunting for love and admiration she’d do with this new wardrobe, flashy armor, the brightest camouflage. She blew on her hands to warm them and craned her neck at the approaching cab. “Good luck with the abortion.” Reva nodded sincerely. In that moment, I think our friendship ended.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There was one strain running through all that pseudonymity which caused me especially painful palpitations when I came across it. Such things as “G. Trapp, Geneva, NY.” was the sign of treachery on Lolita’s part. “Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island” suggested more lucidly than the garbled telephone message had that the starting point of the affair should be looked for in the East. “Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa.” insinuated that my Carmen had betrayed my pathetic endearments to the impostor. Horribly cruel, forsooth, was “Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.” The gruesome “Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona” (which at another time would have appealed to my sense of humor) implied a familiarity with the girl’s past that in night-mare fashion suggested for a moment that my quarry was an old friend of the family, maybe an old flame of Charlotte’s, maybe a redresser of wrongs (“Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev.”). But the most penetrating bodkin was the anagramtailed entry in the register of Chestnut Lodge “Ted Hunter, Cane, NH.”. The garbled license numbers left by all these Persons and Orgons and Morells and Trapps only told me that motel keepers omit to check if guests’ cars are accurately listed. References—incompletely or incorrectly indicated—to the cars the fiend had hired for short laps between Wace and Elphinstone were of course useless; the license of the initial Aztec was a shimmer of shifting numerals, some transposed, others altered or omitted, but somehow forming interrelated combinations (such as “WS 1564” and “SH 1616,” and “Q32888” or “CU 88322”) which however were so cunningly contrived as to never reveal a common denominator. It occurred to me that after he had turned that convertible over to accomplices at Wace and switched to the stage-motor car system, his successors might have been less careful and might have inscribed at some hotel office the archtype of those interrelated figures. But if looking for the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a complicated vague and unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown motorists traveling along unknown routes? 24By the time I reached Beardsley, in the course of the harrowing recapitulation I have now discussed at sufficient length, a complete image had formed in my mind; and through the—always risky—process of elimination I had reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration and torpid memory could give it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise. The able psychiatrist who studies my case—and whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascination—is no doubt anxious to have me take my Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee. Well, comrade, let me tell you that I did look for a beach, though I also have to confess that by the time we reached its mirage of gray water, so many delights had already been granted me by my traveling companion that the search for a Kingdom by the Sea, a Sublimated Riviera, or whatnot, far from being the impulse of the subconscious, had become the rational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill. The angels knew it, and arranged things accordingly. A visit to a plausible cove on the Atlantic side was completely messed up by foul weather. A thick damp sky, muddy waves, a sense of boundless but somehow matter-of-fact mist—what could be further removed from the crisp charm, the sapphire occasion and rosy contingency of my Riviera romance? A couple of semitropical beaches on the Gulf, though bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beasties and swept by hurricane winds. Finally, on a Californian beach, facing the phantom of the Pacific, I hit upon some rather perverse privacy in a kind of cave whence you could hear the shrieks of a lot of girl scouts taking their first surf bath on a separate part of the beach, behind rotting trees; but the fog was like a wet blanket, and the sand was gritty and clammy, and Lo was all gooseflesh and grit, and for the first time in my life I had as little desire for her as for a manatee. Perhaps, my learned readers may perk up if I tell them that even had we discovered a piece of sympathetic seaside somewhere, it would have come too late, since my real liberation had occurred much earlier: at the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared to me, golden and brown, kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious, dishonest, but eminently satisfactory seaside arrangement (although there was nothing but a second-rate lake in the neighborhood). So much for those special sensations, influenced, if not actually brought about, by the tenets of modern psychiatry. Consequently, I turned away—I headed my Lolita away—from beaches which were either too bleak when lone, or too populous when ablaze.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I took three Nembutals and the last of the Ativan, then flopped down on the sofa. The weird feeling in my head seemed to descend into my torso. Instead of guts, I just had air inside of me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d moved my bowels. What if the only way to sleep is death? I thought. Should I consult a priest? Oh, the absurdity. I started to wallow. I wished I’d never taken that damned Infermiterol. I wanted the old half life back, when my VCR still worked and Reva would come over with her petty gripes and I could lose myself in her shallow universe for a few hours and then disappear into slumber. I wondered if those days were over now that Reva had been promoted and Ken was out of the picture. Would she suddenly grow into maturity and discard me as a relic from a failed past, the way I’d hoped to do to her when my year of sleep was over? Was Reva actually waking up? Did she now realize I was a terrible friend? Could she really dispose of me so easily? No. No. She was a drone. She was too far gone. If the VCR had been working, I would have watched Working Girl on high volume, munching melatonin and animal crackers, if I’d had any left. Why did I stop buying animal crackers? Had I forgotten that I was once a human child? Was that a good thing? I turned on the TV. I watched Law & Order. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched Friends, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The West Wing, Will & Grace. Hours clicked by in half-hour segments. For days, I watched, it seemed, and I didn’t sleep. Occasionally I mistook vertigo and nausea for sleepiness, but when I closed my eyes, my heart raced. I watched The King of Queens. I watched Oprah. Donahue. The Ricki Lake Show. Sally Jessy Raphael. I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness. At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He went on snoring. We were sleeping by a roadside somewhere in France that night and it might as well have been the moon. That was how lonely I felt, how utterly bereft. “No one, no one, no one, no one…” I moaned, hugging myself like the big baby I was. I was trying to rock myself to sleep. From now on, I thought, I will have to be my own mother, my own comforter, my own rocker-to-sleep. Perhaps this is what Adrian meant about going down into the bottom of yourself and pulling yourself back up. Learning how to survive your own life. Learning how to endure your own existence. Learning how to mother yourself. Not always turning to an analyst, a lover, a husband, a parent. I rocked myself. I said my own name to try to remember who I was: “Isadora, Isadora, Isadora, Isadora…Isadora White Stollerman Wing…Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing…B.A., M.A., Phi Beta Kappa. Isadora Wing, promising younger poet. Isadora Wing, promising younger sufferer. Isadora Wing, feminist and would-be liberated woman. Isadora Wing, clown, crybaby, fool. Isadora Wing, wit, scholar, ex-wife of Jesus Christ. Isadora Wing, with her fear of flying. Isadora Wing, slightly overweight sexpot, with a bad case of astigmatism of the mind’s eye. Isadora Wing, with her unfillable cunt and holes in her head and her heart. Isadora Wing of the hunger-thump. Isadora Wing whose mother wanted her to fly. Isadora Wing whose mother grounded her. Isadora Wing, professional patient, seeker of saviors, sensuality, certainty. Isadora Wing, fighter of windmills, professional mourner, failed adventuress….” I must have slept. I woke up to see the sunlight streaming in through the brilliant blue of the pup tent. Adrian was still snoring. His hairy blond arm had fallen heavily across my chest and was pressing down on it, making me uncomfortably conscious of my breathing. The birds were chirping. We were in France. By some roadside. Some crossroads in my life. What was I doing there? Why was I lying in a tent in France with a man I hardly knew? Why wasn’t I home in bed with my husband? I thought of my husband with a sudden wave of tenderness. What was he doing? Did he miss me? Had he forgotten me? Had he found someone else? Some ordinary girl who didn’t have to take off on adventures to prove her stamina. Some ordinary girl who was content with making breakfast and raising kiddies. Some ordinary girl of car pools and swimming pools and cesspools. Some ordinary American girl out of Seventeen Magazine? I suddenly had a passion to be that ordinary girl. To be that good little housewife, that glorified American mother, that mascot from Mademoiselle , that matron from McCall’s , that cutie from Cosmo , that girl with the Good Housekeeping Seal tattooed on her ass and advertising jingles programmed in her brain. That was the solution!

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Tell him the truth. He expected nothing from this course of action. He was talking to the wallpaper as much as to this man. ‘No, it’s not all right.’ ‘No? What’s the matter? Oh, God, no one’s dead, are they, son? I couldn’t stand it if anyone’s dead!’ ‘ No one’s dead,’ said Howard. ‘Bloody out with it, then – you’ll give me a heart attack.’ ‘Kiki and me . . .’ said Howard using a grammar older than his marriage, ‘we’re . . . not good. Actually, Harry, I think we’re finished.’ Howard put his hands over his eyes.  on beauty and being wrong ‘Now that can’t be right,’ said Harold cautiously. ‘You’ve been married – what is it now? Twenty-eight years – summink like that?’ ‘Thirty, actually.’ ‘There you are, then. It don’t just fall apart, just like that, does it?’ ‘It does when you . . .’ Howard released an involuntary moan as he took his hands from his eyes. ‘It’s got too hard. You can’t carry on when it gets this hard. When you can’t even talk to someone . . . You’ve just lost what there was. That’s how I feel now. I can’t believe it’s happening.’ Harold now closed his eyes. His face contorted like a quiz-show contestant’s. Losing women was his specialist subject. He did not speak for a while. ‘ ’Cos she wants to finish it or you do?’ he said finally. ‘Because she wants to,’ confirmed Howard, and found that he was comforted by the simplicity of his father’s questions. ‘And . . . because I can’t find enough reasons to stop her wanting to.’ And now Howard succumbed to his heritage – easy, quick-flowing tears. ‘There, son. It’s better out than in, isn’t it,’ said Harold quietly. Howard laughed softly at this phrase: so old, so familiar, so utterly useless. Harold reached forward and touched his son’s knee. Then he leaned back in his chair and picked up his remote control. ‘She found a black fella, I spose. It was always going to happen, though. It’s in their nature.’ He turned the channel to the news. Howard stood up. ‘ Fuck ,’ he said frankly, wiping his tears with his shirtsleeve and laughing grimly. ‘I never fucking learn.’ He picked up his coat and put it on. ‘See you, Harry. Let’s leave it a bit longer next time, eh?’ ‘Oh, no!’ whimpered Harold, his face stricken by the calamity of it. ‘What are you saying? We’re having a nice time, ain’t we?’ Howard stared at him, disbelievingly. ‘ No . Son, please . Oh, come on and stay a bit longer. I’ve said the wrong thing, have I? I’ve said the wrong thing. Then let’s sort it! You’re always in a rush. Rush ’ere, rush there.

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

  2014). [back] 31. sensory information from your body: Your muscles contain energy sensors, for example, that send feedback about energy usage back to your brain (Craig 2015). or other symptoms of depression: Barrett and Simmons 2015. heart disease, and cancer: Your metabolism controls your immune system to some extent; fat cells emit proinflammatory cytokines (Mathis and Shoelson 2011), which means that obesity makes chronic inflammation worse. See, e.g., Spyridaki et al. 2014. [back] 32. scale that shuts you down: Kaiser et al. 2015. When we look at the brains of people suffering from depression, we see activity and connectivity changes that are consistent with this hypothesis; see heam.info/depression-2 . [back] 33. the parts of a machine: In depression, dysregulation is widespread; see heam.info/depression-3 . built from toxic past experiences: Ganzel et al. 2010; Dannlowski et al. 2012. Once a glucocorticoid gene becomes overexpressed at a young age (in rats), the brain pathways become set, creating a lifelong vulnerability to mood disorders and more lability, even if the gene turns off in adulthood (Wei et al. 2012). Toxic past experiences also lead to prolonged inflammation in childhood that increases the risk of depression and other illnesses later in life (Khandaker et al. 2014). environment and every little problem: Sometimes called “neuroticism” or “affective reactivity”; also see heam.info/depression-1 . post-traumatic stress disorder: Risk is greatest with high levels of the ovarian hormone progesterone. This might help explain why the proportion of women suffering from mood disorders is so much higher than the proportion of men (Lokuge et al. 2011; Soni et al. 2013); e.g., Bryant et al. 2011. See also heam.info/women-1 . [back] 34. your interoceptive network is restored: Namely, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex decreases in activity, and its connectivity with the rest of the interoceptive network increases, as does connectivity to the thalamus, which brings prediction error signals (Riva-Posse et al. 2014; Seminowicz et al. 2004; Mayberg 2009; Goldapple et al. 2004; Nobler et al. 2001). For a meta-analytic review, see Fu et al. 2013. for whom no treatments work: McGrath et al. 2014. [back] 35. critical to anxiety as well: On the connectivity of the interoceptive and control networks during anxiety, see McMenamin et al. 2014. On the similarity between anxiety and chronic pain, see Zhuo 2016, and Hunter and McEwen 2013. And for evidence consistent with the idea that anxiety enhances pain via prediction, see Ploghaus et al. 2001. error across these two networks: Paulus and Stein 2010. stress, and depression: E.g., Menon 2011; Crossley et al. 2014. Even fear and anxiety were once thought to be caused by separate circuits (Tovote et al. 2015). Also see heam.info/anxiety-1 . [back] 36. is failing to regulate it: Compare Suvak and Barrett 2011, and Etkin and Wager 2007. See also heam.info/anxiety-2 . [back] 37.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Leslie, old Miss Opposite’s gardener and chauffeur, a very amiable and athletic Negro, grinned at me from afar and shouted, re-shouted, commented by gesture, that I was mighty energetic to-day. The fool dog of the prosperous junk dealer next door ran after a blue car—not Charlotte’s. The prettier of the two little girls (Mabel, I think), shorts, halter with little to halt, bright hair—a nymphet, by Pan!—ran back down the street crumpling her paper bag and was hidden from this Green Goat by the frontage of Mr. and Mrs. Humbert’s residence. A station wagon popped out of the leafy shade of the avenue, dragging some of it on its roof before the shadows snapped, and swung by at an idiotic pace, the sweatshirted driver roof-holding with his left hand and the junkman’s dog tearing alongside. There was a smiling pause—and then, with a flutter in my breast, I witnessed the return of the Blue Sedan. I saw it glide downhill and disappear behind the corner of the house. I had a glimpse of her calm pale profile. It occurred to me that until she went upstairs she would not know whether I had gone or not. A minute later, with an expression of great anguish on her face, she looked down at me from the window of Lo’s room. By sprinting upstairs, I managed to reach that room before she left it. 18 When the bride is a widow and the groom is a widower; when the former has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two years, and the latter for hardly a month; when Monsieur wants to get the whole damned thing over with as quickly as possible, and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my reader, the wedding is generally a “quiet” affair. The bride may dispense with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor does she carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride’s little daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore agreed it was not worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q. My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The early 1970s were a seismic moment for women; as Katy Waldman observed in Slate, Fear of Flying is “also about understanding womanhood circa 1973.” We don’t know what makes a book or movie or any piece of art a cultural flash point. We don’t know why some books capture a moment and other books disappear. I’ve written enough books that have disappeared to know how rare it is to write something that endures. A few pieces of art encapsulate the collective zeitgeist; most do not. There is incredible power in being able to capture the collective imagination, even for a moment, and Mom did that. But she was never able to do it again. Her seeking, her quest to get that moment back, was terribly painful and ultimately devoured her. My mom was thirty-three in 1973 when the book was published. She was an academic and a poet. She was a good student who, according to her, married the first person she ever slept with. I take this fact with a grain of salt as she was never a very reliable narrator. When Fear of Flying came out, she was married, teaching, and living on the middle-class Upper West Side, one of thousands of women just like her. All of a sudden, she was on the cover of magazines, the celebrated creator of a cultural phenomenon. Fear of Flying was a similar triumph around the globe, selling twenty million copies. It created Erica Jong. I used to think that being famous was seismic and important, because when my mother and my grandfather, the author Howard Fast, became less famous, when their fame slipped away as it almost always does, they were profoundly devastated by the experience. I watched them deeply mourn the loss of their immense cultural importance, yet I’m not sure being Erica Jong was much fun. I remember even as a child thinking, “This looks like it should be fun, but she seems miserable…” Erica Jong went to fancy parties with tons of celebrities. She danced on tables. She always smelled good, like French perfume or white wine or very occasionally a cigarette. She followed the maxim of Gore Vidal: “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.” Erica Jong had many marriages and many engagements. Before she married her fourth husband (the one after my father), she was always dating multiple men at the same time. These men had to worship her or she found them boring. She was in some ways very Marilyn Monroe-like, perhaps because Fear of Flying transformed her into a sex symbol. It turned her into a woman a lot of men thought they would like to “ziplessly fuck"—an extremely weird outcome for a feminist novel, but it was, in fact, true. Mom was always looking for a good time but she rarely found it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Losing Roe felt weirdly abstract and distant…except to the women whose bodies it colonized like a malevolent, alien parasite. The three liberal Justices wrote, “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.” Read this book and then go and write your own Fear of Flying , because we need a million more. —Molly Jong-Fast Alas! the love of women! it is known To be a lovely and a fearful thing; For all of theirs upon that die is thrown, And if ‘tis lost, life hath no more to bring To them but mockeries of the past alone, And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring, Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel. They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust, Is always so to women; one sole bond Awaits them—treachery is all their trust; Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond Over their idol, till some wealthier lust Buys them in marriage—and what rests beyond? A thankless husband—next, a faithless lover— Then dressing, nursing, praying—and all’s over. Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers, Some mind their household, others dissipation, Some run away, and but exchange their cares, Losing the advantage of a virtuous station; Few changes e’er can better their affairs, Theirs being an unnatural situation, From the dull palace to the dirty hovel: Some play the devil, and then write a novel. —Lord Byron (from Don Juan ) NINETEEN A 19th-Century Ending …Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny. —D. H. Lawrence T he hotel was a creaky old Victorian building near St. James’. It had an ancient cage of an elevator which whirred like a cricket gone mad, desolate hallways, and huge pier glasses on every landing. I inquired at the desk for Doctor Wing. “No one here by that name, Madam,” said a long, thin concierge who looked like Bob Cratchit. My heart sank. “Are you sure?” “Here, you can have a look at the register—if you like….” And he passed the book over to me. There were only about ten guests in that haunted house. You could see why. Swinging London had swung right by without stopping. I looked down the register. Strawbridge, Henkel, Harbellow, Bottom, Cohen, Kinney, Watts, Wong…. That was it. It had to be Wong. Of course they’d misspell it that way. All Chinese look alike and all Chinese names are Wong. I felt a great closeness to Bennett, having to put up with that kind of crap his whole life and not become bitter. “How about this one in Room 60?” I asked, pointing to the dumb misspelling. “Oh, the Japanese gentleman?”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  On the day fixed for the execution, I walked through the sleet across the campus to the information desk in Maker Hall, Beardsley College. There I learned that the fellow’s name was Riggs (rather like that of the minister), that he was a bachelor, and that in ten minutes he would issue from the “Museum” where he was having a class. In the passage leading to the auditorium I sat on a marble bench of sorts donated by Cecilia Dalrymple Ramble. As I waited there, in prostatic discomfort, drunk, sleep-starved, with my gun in my fist in my raincoat pocket, it suddenly occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid. There was not one chance in a million that Albert Riggs, Ass. Prof., was hiding my Lolita at his Beardsley home, 24 Pritchard Road. 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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Erica Jong went to fancy parties with tons of celebrities. She danced on tables. She always smelled good, like French perfume or white wine or very occasionally a cigarette. She followed the maxim of Gore Vidal: “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.” Erica Jong had many marriages and many engagements. Before she married her fourth husband (the one after my father), she was always dating multiple men at the same time. These men had to worship her or she found them boring. She was in some ways very Marilyn Monroe-like, perhaps because Fear of Flying transformed her into a sex symbol. It turned her into a woman a lot of men thought they would like to “ziplessly fuck"—an extremely weird outcome for a feminist novel, but it was, in fact, true. Mom was always looking for a good time but she rarely found it. She just wanted to check out, and often did. She went to Europe for months on end. She fell in love at least once a week. She went from broken engagement to broken engagement. When she finally married my stepfather it was painful trying to balance his need for her with her responsibilities to write (and drink). She was paralyzed by the pressure to deliver more world-changing books, and she struggled to maintain her equilibrium in the face of an unending series of vile, misogynist attacks and actual stalkers, including the man who parked his car at the head of our driveway in Connecticut and listened to messages from God coming from a radio with no batteries. Back then, neither my mother nor the police in Weston, Connecticut, knew how to handle stalkers. Erica Jong was very much trapped in a world of her own creation. Mom is in her early eighties now and has dementia. She is both on this planet and very much not. What little jewelry she had sits in my safe. Her legacy sits on my desk and on the hard drive of my computer. I thought I would be a great literary executor because I know how publishing works, but the truth is that being my mother’s literary executor is just excruciating. I thought writing this foreword would be fun, easy work, but it’s like performing root canal surgery on myself. Writing about our lives together brings me back to those years when I needed her and didn’t yet know that we would never connect in the way I needed. Now my mother sits in a room waiting for me to visit her, but she’s not in there anymore—or not the mother I once knew. Now she’s like some beautiful little doll.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Victoria reached behind her for a huge furry cushion. She threw this violently at Howard, getting him on the shoulder and spilling a little of his wine across his hand. ‘Hello? I’m in mourning ?’ she said with that nasty transatlantic twang Howard had noted before. ‘The very least you can do is sit down and give me a bit of pastoral care , Dr. Look, if it makes you happier,’ she said springing from the bed and tiptoeing across the room to the door, ‘I’ll put the lock on so no one can disturb us.’ She tiptoed back to the bed. ‘Is that better?’ No, it was not better. Howard turned to leave. ‘Please. I need to talk to someone,’ came the breaking voice behind him. ‘You’re here. Nobody else is here. They’re all praising the Lord downstairs. You’re here .’ Howard put his fingers to the lock. Victoria thumped her bedcovers. ‘ God! I won’t hurt you! I’m asking you to help me. Isn’t that part of your job ? Oh, forget it, OK? Just forget it. Fuck off.’ She started to cry. Howard turned around.  on beauty and being wrong ‘Shit, shit, shit. I’m so bored with crying!’ said Victoria through tears, and then began to laugh at herself a little. Howard moved to the chaise opposite the bed and slowly sat down. It was actually a relief to sit down. He was still experiencing an unhelpful head rush from his cigarette. Victoria wiped her tears with the sleeves of her black shirt. ‘Blimey. That’s far away.’ Howard nodded. ‘Bit unfriendly.’ ‘I’m not a friendly man.’ Victoria took a deep gulp from her tumbler. She touched the silver edges of her green shorts. ‘I must look like a total freak. But I just have to be comfy once I’m in the house – I’ve always been like that. Couldn’t take that skirt any longer. Have to be comfy.’ She bounced her knees up and down against the mattress. ‘Is your family here?’ she asked. ‘I was looking for them. That’s what I was doing.’ ‘I thought you said you were looking for the loo,’ said Victoria accusingly, closing one eye, stretching out her arm and pointing one unsteady finger at him. ‘That too.’ ‘Hmm.’ She swivelled round again and now bellyflopped towards him, so her feet were against the bedstead and her head not far from Howard’s knees. She balanced her glass hazardously on top of the duvet and rested her chin on her hands. She examined his face and, after a time, softly smiled, as if something she found there had amused her. Howard followed her eyes with his own as they roved, trying to focus them on the matter at hand. ‘My mother died,’ he attempted, quite unable to hit the note he meant to. ‘So I know what you’re going through. I was younger than you when she died.

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

  (Incredibly, infants prior to the 1980s were routinely not anesthetized during major surgery, on the belief that they couldn’t feel pain!) There’s also a medical condition called complex regional pain syndrome, in which pain from an injury spreads inexplicably to other areas of the body, which appears to be linked to bad nociceptive predictions. 24 So “Pain,” like “Stress,” is another concept with which you make meaning of physical sensations. You could characterize pain and stress as emotions, or even emotion and stress as types of pain. I’m not saying that instances of emotion and pain are indistinguishable in the brain, but neither has a fingerprint. If I scan your brain while you’re having a toothache and when you’re angry, the scans will look somewhat different. But then, if I scan your brain during different instances of anger, they look somewhat different too. Different instances of dental pain likely vary as well. This is degeneracy; variation is the norm. 25 Emotion, acute pain, chronic pain, and stress are constructed in the same networks, the same neural pathways to and from the body, and most likely the same primary sensory region of cortex, so it is completely plausible that we distinguish emotion and pain by concept—that is, via the concepts the brain applies to make sense of bodily sensations. Chronic pain is likely a misapplication of the concept “Pain” by your brain, as it constructs the experience of pain without injury or threat to your tissue. Chronic pain seems to be a tragic case of predicting poorly and receiving misleading data from your body. 26 ... Keeping in mind what you’ve just learned about chronic stress and chronic pain, let’s turn our attention to depression, which is another debilitating condition that can overwhelm a life. Also known as major depressive disorder, depression is far beyond the everyday distress that people feel when they groan, “I’m like sooo depressed.” Marvin the Paranoid Android, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was truly depressed. Sometimes he was so despondent about life that he shut himself down. A major depressive episode is similarly incapacitating. “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it,” recalled the novelist William Styron in his memoir, “and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.” 27 To many scientists and physicians, depression remains a disease of the mind. It’s classified as a disorder of affect and often blamed on negative thinking: You’re too hard on yourself, or have too many self-defeating, catastrophic thoughts. Or perhaps traumatic events trigger depression, particularly if your genes make you vulnerable.

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

  In effect, you’re locked into a cycle of uncorrected predictions, trapped in an adverse past when your metabolic needs were high. A depressed brain is effectively locked into misery. It’s like a brain in chronic pain, ignoring prediction error, but on a much larger scale that shuts you down. It puts your budget chronically in debt, so your brain tries to cut spending. What’s the most efficient way to do that? Stop moving and don’t pay attention to the world (prediction error). That is the unrelenting fatigue of depression. 32 If depression is a disorder caused by chronic misbudgeting, then it’s not, strictly speaking, exclusively a psychiatric disease. It’s also a neurological, metabolic, and immunologic disease. Depression is an imbalance of many entwined parts of the nervous system that we can understand only by treating the whole person, not by treating one system in isolation like the parts of a machine. The tipping point into a major depressive episode can come from many different sources. You could suffer prolonged stress or abuse, particularly in childhood, leaving you carrying around a model of the world built from toxic past experiences. You could have physical conditions like chronic heart disease or insomnia that lead to bad interoceptive predictions. Your genes could leave you sensitive to your environment and every little problem. Also, if you’re a woman of reproductive age, the connectivity within your interoceptive network changes throughout the month, leaving you more vulnerable, at certain points in your cycle, to unpleasant affect, rumination, and perhaps even increased risk of mood disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. “Thinking positive thoughts” or taking antidepressants might not be enough to bring your body budget back into balance: other lifestyle changes or system adjustments might be necessary. 33 The theory of constructed emotion suggests that we can treat depression by breaking the cycle of misbudgeting, that is, by changing interoceptive predictions to be more in line with what’s going on around you. Scientists have found evidence that this is the case. As treatments like antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy start to work and you feel less depressed, your activity in a key body-budgeting region returns to normal levels, and connectivity in your interoceptive network is restored. These changes are consistent with the idea of reducing the excessive predictions. We might also treat depression by letting in more prediction error, say, by asking people to keep a diary of their positive experiences, which can ease the drain on the body budget.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night. Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman. I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood. Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves. “Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.” TENFreud’s House It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet, gentle girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home. —Sigmund Freud

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  LUCIUS APULEIUS satis inutilem me ad alium quempiam, utique levi- orem laborem legatum iri, vel otiosum certe ciba- tum iri. Sed frustra sollertiam damnosam exercui : complures enim protinus baculis armati me circum- steterunt atque, ut eram luminibus obtectis securus etiamnunc, repente signo dato et clamore conferto plagas ingerentes acervatim, adeo me strepitu turbu- lentant, ut cunctis consiliis abiectis illico scitissime taeniae sparteae totus innixus discursus alacres obi- rem: at subita sectae commutatione risum tota eoetu commoveram. Iamque maxima diei parte transacta defectum alio- quin me, helcio sparteo dimoto, nexu machinae libera- tum applicant praesepio. At ego quamquam eximie fatigatus et refectione virium vehementer indiguus et prorsus fame perditus, tamen familiari curiositate attonitus et satis anxius, postposito cibo qui copio- sus aderat, inoptabilis officinae disciplinam cum de- lectatione quadam arbitrabar. Dii boni! Quales illic homunculi vibicibus lividis totam cutem depicti dor- sumque plagosum scissili centunculo magis inumbrati quam obtecti, nonnulli exiguo tegili tantum modo pubem iniecti, cuncti tamen sic tunicati ut essent per pannulos manifesti, frontes litterati et capillum semirasi et pedes annulati, tum lurore deformes et fumosis tenebris vaporosae caliginis palpebras adesi atque adeo male luminati; et in modum pugilum, 418 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX from the mill as an ass unapt, and put to some other lighter labour, or else to be driven into the fields to pasture: but my subtlety did me small profit, for by and by when the mill stood still, the many servants came about me armed with sticks, whereas I suspected nothing, mine eyes being covered, and suddenly when a sign was given they cried out and plentifully beat me forward, in such sort that I could not stay to advise myself, because of the sudden attack and noise, but leaned sturdily against my rope and went briskly on my appointed path ; whereby all the company laughed to see so sudden a change.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Whip out your gun and follow that car. Now tumble out, and take cover. Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Her dream-gray gaze never flinches. Ninety pounds is all she weighs With a height of sixty inches. My car is limping, Dolores Haze, And the last long lap is the hardest, And I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust. By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers. I wrote many more poems. I immersed myself in the poetry of others. But not for a second did I forget the load of revenge. I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My accursed nature could not change, no matter how my love for her did. On playgrounds and beaches, my sullen and stealthy eye, against my will, still sought out the flash of a nymphet’s limbs, the sly tokens of Lolita’s handmaids and rosegirls. But one essential vision in me had withered: never did I dwell now on possibilities of bliss with a little maiden, specific or synthetic, in some out-of-the-way place; never did my fancy sink its fangs into Lolita’s sisters, far far away, in the coves of evoked islands. That was all over, for the time being at least. On the other hand, alas, two years of monstrous indulgence had left me with certain habits of lust: I feared lest the void I lived in might drive me to plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity when confronted with a chance temptation in some lane between school and supper. Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ. This is how Rita enters the picture. 26She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, an angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back—I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did—and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Such, then, was the mess. I remember reaching the parking area and pumping a handful of rust-tasting water, and drinking it as avidly as if it could give me magic wisdom, youth, freedom, a tiny concubine. For a while, purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the wooshing pines. In the middle distance, two little maidens in shorts and halters came out of a sun-dappled privy marked “Women.” Gum-chewing Mabel (or Mabel’s understudy) laboriously, absent-mindedly, straddled a bicycle, and Marion, shaking her hair because of the flies, settled behind, legs wide apart; and, wobbling, they slowly, absently, merged with the light and shade. Lolita! Father and daughter melting into these woods! The natural solution was to destroy Mrs. Humbert. But how? No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it. There was the famous dispatch of a Mme Lacour in Arles, southern France, at the close of last century. An unidentified bearded six-footer, who, it was later conjectured, had been the lady’s secret lover, walked up to her in a crowded street, soon after her marriage to Colonel Lacour, and mortally stabbed her in the back, three times, while the Colonel, a small bulldog of a man, hung onto the murderer’s arm. By a miraculous and beautiful coincidence, right at the moment when the operator was in the act of loosening the angry little husband’s jaws (while several onlookers were closing in upon the group), a cranky Italian in the house nearest to the scene set off by sheer accident some kind of explosive he was tinkering with, and immediately the street was turned into a pandemonium of smoke, falling bricks and running people. The explosion hurt no one (except that it knocked out game Colonel Lacour); but the lady’s vengeful lover ran when the others ran—and lived happily ever after. Now look what happens when the operator himself plans a perfect removal. I walked down to Hourglass Lake. The spot from which we and a few other “nice” couples (the Farlows, the Chatfields) bathed was a kind of small cove; my Charlotte liked it because it was almost “a private beach.” The main bathing facilities (or “drowning facilities” as the Ramsdale Journal had had occasion to say) were in the left (eastern) part of the hourglass, and could not be seen from our covelet. To our right, the pines soon gave way to a curve of marshland which turned again into forest on the opposite side. I sat down beside my wife so noiselessly that she started. “Shall we go in?” she asked. “We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought.” I thought. More than a minute passed. “All right. Come on.” “Was I on that train?” “You certainly were.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  * Perrexit Psyche volenter, non obsequium. qui- dem illa functura, sed requiem malorum praecipitio fluvialis rupis habitura. Sed inde de fluvio musicae suavis nutrieula leni crepitu dulcis aurae divinitus inspirata sic vaticinatur arundo viridis: * Psyche, tantis aerumnis exercita, neque tua miserrima morte meas sanctas aquas polluas nec vero istud horae? contra formidabiles oves feras aditum, quoad de solis flagrantia mutuatae calorem truci rabie solent efferri cornuque acuto et fronte saxea et nonnunquam venenatis morsibus in exitium saevire mortalium Sed dum meridies solis sedaverit vaporem et pecua Spiritus fuvialis serenitate conquieverint, poteris sub illa procerissima platano, quae mecum simul unum fluentum bibit, latenter abscondere. Et cum primum mitigata furia laxaverint oves animum, percussis frondibus attigui nemoris lanosum aurum repperies, quod passim stirpibus convexis obhaerescit.’ Sic arundo simplex et humana Psycher. aegerrimam salutem suam docebat : nec auscultatu impaenitendo 4 ! Cuius must necessarily refer to the grove, and not to the river, so that the MSS’ gurgites cannot stand. Van der Vliet’s frutices is a possible suggestion. 2 This is the correction of the older editors for the un- intelligible awrive cole of the MSS, 266 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VI in length with the river-banks, the bushes whereof look close down upon the stream hard by? There be great sheep shining like gold, and kept by no manner of person ; I command thee that thou go thither and bring me home some of the wool of their fleeces.’ * Psyche arose willingly, not to do her command- ment, but to throw herself headlong into the water to end her sorrow. But then a green reed, nurse of sweet music, inspired by divine inspiration with a gracious tune and melody, began to say : ‘O Psyche, harried by these great labours, I pray thee not to trouble or pollute my holy water by thy wretched death, and yet beware that thou go not towards the terrible wild sheep of this coast until such time as the heat of the sun be past; for when the sun is in his force, then seem they most dreadful and furious with their sharp horns, their stony foreheads, and their poisonous bites wherewith they arm themselves to the destruction of mankind : but until the midday is past and the heat assuaged, and until the flock doth begin to rest in the gentle breeze of the river, thou mayest hide thyself here by me under this great plane-tree, which drinks of the river as I do also, and as soon as their great fury is past and their passion is stilled, thou mayest go among the thickets and bushes under the wood-side and gather the locks of their golden fleeces which thou shalt find hanging upon the briars. Thus spake the gentle and benign reed, shewing a mean to most wretched Psyche to save her life, which she bare well in eae Duet icti b FADUM MA 3 So Salmasius for the MSS’ Zstéus orae.