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 The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Everywhere then the function of the effort is the same: to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip away. It may be cold and flat when the spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great and arduous when the spontaneous drift is towards repose. In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive, in the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted sailor on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole frame which the act of farther pumping involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him "Rather the aching toil!" he says; and it becomes reality then, in spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious sensations which he gets from lying still. But exactly similar in form would be his consent to lie and sleep. Often it is the thought of sleep and what leads to it which is the hard one to keep before the mind. If a patient afflicted with insomnia can only control the whirling chase of his thoughts so far as to think of nothing at all (which can be done), or so far as to imagine one letter after another of a verse of scripture or poetry spelt slowly and monotonously out, it is almost certain that here, too, specific bodily effects will follow, and that sleep will come. The trouble is to keep the mind upon a train of objects naturally so insipid. To sustain a representation, to think, is, in short, the only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and lunatics alike. Most maniacs know their thoughts to be crazy, but find them too pressing to be withstood. Compared with them the sane truths are so deadly sober, so cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear to look them in the face and say, "Let these alone be my reality!" But with sufficient effort, as Dr. Wigan says,

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality than another, and to be more believed, reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men. In this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real; whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we believe it. Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us and disbelieved Hume's account of the matter was then essentially correct, when he said that belief in anything was simply the having the idea of it in a lively and active manner: "I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination alone is ever able to attain. ... It consists not in the peculiar nature or order of the ideas, but in the manner of their conception and in their feeling to the mind. I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception. ... Its true and proper name ... is belief, which is a term that everyone sufficiently understands in common life. And in philosophy we can go no farther than assert that belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.[313] It gives them more weight and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; enforces them in the mind; gives them a superior influence on the passions, and renders them the governing principle in our actions."[314] Or as Prof. Bain puts it: "In its essential character, belief is a phase of our active nature—otherwise called the Will."[315] "The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, in something quite different from all the other predicates which a subject may possess. Those are properties intellectually or sensibly intuited. When we add any one of them to the subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we enrich its picture in our mind. But adding reality does not enrich the picture in any such inward way; it leaves it inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to us.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Contemptible in my own eyes, I fell into such a state of melancholy as would, if long continued, inevitably have led to insanity or death. I continued to wear my disgraceful fetters till towards the end of January, 1775, when my rage, which had hitherto so often been restrained within bounds, broke forth with the greatest violence. On returning one evening from the opera (the most insipid and tiresome amusement in Italy), where I had passed several hours in the box of the woman who was by turns the object of my antipathy and my love, I took the firm determination of emancipating myself forever from her yoke. Experience had taught me that flight, so far from enabling me to persevere in my resolutions, tended on the contrary to weaken and destroy them; I was inclined therefore to subject myself to a still more severe trial, imagining from the obstinacy and peculiarity of my character that I should succeed most certainly by the adoption of such measures as would compel me to make the greatest efforts. I determined never to leave the house, which, as I have already said, was exactly opposite that of the lady; to gaze at her windows, to see her go in and out every day, to listen to the sound of her voice, though firmly resolved that no advances on her part, either direct or indirect, no tender remembrances, nor in short any other means which might be employed, should ever again tempt me to a revival of our friendship. I was determined to die or liberate myself from my disgraceful thraldom. In order to give stability to my purpose, and to render it impossible for me to waver without the imputation of dishonor, I communicated my determination to one of my friends, who was greatly attached to me, and whom I highly esteemed. He had lamented the state of mind into which I had fallen, but not wishing to give countenance to my conduct, and seeing the impossibility of inducing me to abandon it, he had for some time ceased to visit at my house. In the few lines which I addressed to him, I briefly stated the resolution I had adopted, and as a pledge of my constancy I sent him a long tress of my ugly red hair. I had purposely caused it to be cut off in order to prevent my going out, as no one but clowns and sailors then appeared in public with short hair. I concluded my billet by conjuring him to strengthen and aid my fortitude by his presence and example. Isolated in this manner in my own house, I prohibited all species of intercourse, and passed the first fifteen days in uttering the most frightful lamentations and groans. Some of my friends came to visit me, and appeared to commiserate my situation, perhaps because I did not myself complain; but my figure and whole appearance bespoke my sufferings. Wishing to read something I had recourse to the gazettes, whole pages of which I frequently ran over without understanding a single word. . . I passed more than two months till the end of March 1775, in a state bordering on frenzy; but about this time a new idea darted into my mind, which tended to assuage my melancholy."

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met 'cut us dead,' and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all. Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him.[257] But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command. The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and dejection—unreasonable enough as measured by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of the individual. To his own consciousness he is not, so long as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds. A man's fame , good or bad, and his honor or dishonor, are names for one of his social selves. The particular social self of a man called his honor is usually the result of one of those splittings of which we have spoken. It is his image in the eyes of his own 'set,' which exalts or condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thus a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera; but a priest or

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  perhaps, on record is that of Fèlida X., reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux.[307] At the age of fourteen this woman began to pass into a 'secondary' state characterized by a change in her general disposition and character, as if certain 'inhibitions,' previously existing, were suddenly removed. During the secondary state she remembered the first state, but on emerging from it into the first state she remembered nothing of the second. At the age of forty-four the duration of the secondary state (which was on the whole superior in quality to the original state) had gained upon the latter so much as to occupy most of her time. During it she remembers the events belonging to the original state, but her complete oblivion of the secondary state when the original state recurs is often very distressing to her, as, for example, when the transition takes place in a carriage on her way to a funeral, and she hasn't the least idea which one of her friends may be dead. She actually became pregnant during one of her early secondary states, and during her first state had no knowledge of how it had come to pass. Her distress at these blanks of memory is sometimes intense and once drove her to attempt suicide. To take another example, Dr. Rieger gives an account[308] of an epileptic man who for seventeen years had passed his life alternately free, in prisons, or in asylums, his character being orderly enough in the normal state, but alternating with periods, during which he would leave his home for several weeks, leading the life of a thief and vagabond, being sent to jail, having epileptic fits and excitement, being accused of malingering, etc., etc., and with never a memory of the abnormal conditions which were to blame for all his wretchedness. "I have never got from anyone," says Dr. Rieger, "so singular an impression as from this man, of whom it could not be said that he had any properly conscious past at all. . . . It is really impossible to think one's self into such a state of mind. His last larceny had been performed in Nürnberg, he knew nothing of it, and saw himself before the court and then in the hospital, but without in the least understanding the reason why. That he had epileptic attacks, he knew. But it was impossible to convince him that for hours together he raved and acted in an abnormal way." Another remarkable case is that of Mary Reynolds, lately republished again by Dr. Weir Mitchell.[309] This dull and melancholy young woman, inhabiting the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1811, "was found one morning, long after her habitual time for rising, in a profound sleep from which it was impossible to arouse her. After eighteen or twenty hours of sleeping she awakened, but in a state of unnatural consciousness. Memory had fled. To all intents and purposes she was as a being for the first time ushered into the world. 'All

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  to my old self. This desire kept me from killing myself. . . . I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form and assumed my functions."[304] In cases similar to this, it is as certain that the I is unaltered as that the me is changed. That is to say, the present Thought of the patient is cognitive of both the old me and the new, so long as its memory holds good. Only, within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself so simply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic appropriation, strange perplexities have arisen. The present and the past both seen therein will not unite. Where is my old me? What is this new one? Are they the same? Or have I two? Such questions, answered by whatever theory the patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the beginning of his insane life.[305] A case with which I am acquainted through Dr. C. J. Fisher of Tewksbury has possibly its origin in this way. The woman, Bridget F., "has been many years insane, and always speaks of her supposed self as 'the rat,' asking me to 'bury the little rat,' etc. Her real self she speaks of in the third person as 'the good woman,' saying, 'The good woman knew Dr. F. and used to work for him,' etc. Sometimes she sadly asks: 'Do you think the good woman will ever come back?' She works at needlework, knitting, laundry, etc., and shows her work, saying, 'Isn't that good for only a rat?' She has, during periods of depression, hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and under boxes. 'She was only a rat, and wants to die,' she would say when we found her." 2. The phenomenon of alternating personality in its simplest phases seems based on lapses of memory. Any man becomes, as we say, inconsistent with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges, knowledges, and habits; and it is merely a question of degree at what point we shall say that his personality is changed. In the pathological cases known as those of double or alternate personality the lapse of memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a period of unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of time. In the hypnotic trance we can easily produce an alteration of the personality, either by telling the subject to forget all that has happened to him since such or such a date, in which case he becomes (it may be) a child again, or by telling him he is another altogether imaginary personage, in which case all facts about himself seem for the time being to lapse from out his mind, and he throws himself into the new character with a vivacity proportionate to the amount of histrionic imagination which he possesses.[306] But in the pathological cases the transformation is spontaneous. The most famous case,

• From Story of O (1954)

  The first time she did not cry out. He went at it again, harder now, and she screamed. She screamed as much out of revolt as of pain, and he was fully aware of it. She also knew - which meant that in any event she was vanquished - that he was pleased to make her cry out. When he had finished with her, and after he had helped her to her feet, he was on the point of dismissing her when he remarked to her that what he had spilled in her was going to seep slowly out, tinted with the blood of the wound he had inflicted on her, that this wound would burn her as long as her buttocks were not used to him and he was obliged to keep forcing his way. René had reserved this particular use of her to him, and he certainly intended to make full use of it, she had best have no illusions on that score. He reminded her that she had agreed to be René's slave, and his too, but that it appeared unlikely that she was aware - consciously aware - of what she had consented to. By the time she had learned, it would be too late for her to escape.

• From Story of O (1954)

  René, who had come over to the two women, said to O: "Watch." And to Jeanne: "Lift your dress." With both hands she raised the crackling silk and the crinoline which lined it, revealing as she did a golden belly, gleaming thighs and knees, and a tight black triangle. René put his hand on it and slowly explored, and with the other excited the nipple of one breast. "Merely so you can see," he said to O. O saw. She saw his ironic but attentive face, his eyes carefully watching Jeanne's half-open mouth and her neck, which was thrown back, tightly circled by the leather collar. What pleasure was she giving him, yes she, that this girl or any other could not? "That hadn't occurred to you?" he added. No, that had not occurred to her. She had collapsed against the wall, between the two doors, her arms hanging limp. There was no longer any need to tell her to keep quiet. How could she have spoken? Perhaps he was touched by her despair. He left Jeanne and took her in his arms, calling her his love and his life, saying over and over again that he loved her. The hand he was caressing her neck with was moist with the odor of Jeanne. And so? The despair that had overwhelmed her slowly ebbed: he loved her, ah he loved her. He was free to enjoy himself with Jeanne, or with others, he loved her. "I love you," he had whispered to her ear, "I love you," so softly it was scarcely audible. "I love you." He did not leave until he saw that her eyes were clear and her expression calm, contented. Jeanne took O by the hand and let her out into the hallway. Their mules again made a resounding noise on the tile floor, and again they found a valet seated on a bench between the doors. He was dressed like Pierre, but it was not Pierre. This one was tall, dry, and had dark hair. He preceded them and showed them into an antechamber where, before a wrought-iron door that stood between two tall green drapes, two other valets were waiting, some white dogs with russet spots lying at their feet.

• From Story of O (1954)

  "As a matter of fact," the other voice went on, "if you do tie her up from time to time, or whip her just a little, and she begins to like it, that's no good either. You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears." Then they made O get up and were on the verge of untying her, probably in order to attach her to some pole or wall, when someone protested that he wanted to take her first, right there on the spot. So they made her kneel down again, this time with her bust on an ottoman, her hands still tied behind her, with her hips higher than her torso. Then one of the men, holding her with both his hands on her hips, plunged into her belly. He yielded to a second. The third wanted to force his way into the narrower passage and, driving hard, made her scream. When he let her go, sobbing and befouled by tears beneath her blindfold, she slipped to the floor, only to feel someone's knees against her face, and she realized that her mouth was not to be spared. Finally they let her go, a captive clothed in tawdry finery, lying on her back in front of the fire. She could hear glasses being filled and the sound of the men drinking, and the scraping of chair. They put some more wood on the fire. All of a sudden they removed her blindfold. The large room, the walls of which were lined with bookcases, was dimly lit by a single wall lamp and by the light of the fire, which was beginning to burn more brightly. Two of the men were standing and smoking. Another was seated, a riding crop on his knees, and the one leaning over her fondling her breast was her lover. All four of them had taken her, and she had not been able to distinguish him from the others. They explained to her that this was how it would always be, as long as she was in the chateau, that she would see the faces of those who violated or tormented her, but never at night, and she would never know which ones had been responsible for the worst. The same would be true when she was whipped, except that they wanted her to see herself being whipped, and so this once she would not be blindfolded. They, on the other hand, would don their masks, and she would no longer be able to tell them apart.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  your life . Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says: "The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress." The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: "Ach! you need only blow on your hands!" And the remark illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually successful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote,[151] says that the collapse of barbarian nations when Europeans come among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed. The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning such habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there be a real possibility of carrying it out . We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it , a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed. "One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest 'swell,' but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day. The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can , and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right. In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible . Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in

• From Story of O (1954)

  the little light which lighted the room, was a wooden tray on which were some water, fruit, and bread. The heat from the radiators, which had been installed along the base of the walls and set into the walls themselves to form around the entire room a sort of burning plinth, was none the less insufficient to overcome the odor of earth and mud which is the odor of ancient prisons and in old chateaux, of uninhabited dungeons. In that hot semi-darkness, into which no sound intruded, O soon lost all track of time. There was no longer any day or night, the light never went out. Pierre, or some other valet - it hardly mattered which - replaced the water, fruit, and bread on the tray whenever it was gone, and took her to bathe in a nearby dungeon. She never saw the men who came in, for each time a valet preceded them to blindfold her eyes, and removed it only after they had left. She also lost track of them, of who they were and how many there were, and neither her soft hands nor her lips blindly caressing were ever able to identify who they were touching. At times there were several, more often only one, but each time, before they came near her, she was made to kneel down facing the wall, the ring of her collar fastened to the same eye- bolt to which the chain was attached, and whipped. She placed her palms against the wall and pressed her face against the back of her hands, to keep from scratching it against the stones; but scraped her knees and her breasts on them. Thus she lost track of the tortures and screams which were smothered by the vault. She waited. Suddenly time no longer stood still. In her velvet night her chain was no unfastened. She had been waiting for three months, three days, or ten days, or ten years. She felt herself being wrapped in a heavy cloth, and someone taking her by the shoulders and knees, lifting and carrying her. She found herself in her cell, lying under the black fur cover, it was early afternoon, her eyes were open, her hands free, and René was sitting beside her, stroking her hair. "You must get dressed now," he said, "we're leaving."

• From Story of O (1954)

  The scene had taken place in the little oval room with the inlaid floor, in which the only piece of furniture was a table encrusted with mother-of-pearl, the room adjoining the yellow and gray living room. René remained only long enough to betray O and hear Sir Stephen's reply. Then he shook hands with him, smiled at O, and left. Through the window, O saw him crossing the courtyard; he did not turn around; she heard the car door slam shut, the roar of the motor, and in a little mirror imbedded in the wall she caught a glimpse of her own image: she was white with fear and despair. Then, mechanically, when she walked past Sir Stephen, who opened the living- room door for her and stood back for her to pass, she looked at him: he was as pale as she. In a flash, she was absolutely certain that he loved her, but it was a fleeting certainty that vanished as fast as it had come. Although she did not believe it and chided herself for having thought of it, she was comforted by it and undressed meekly, on a mere signal from him. Then, and for the first time since he had been making her come two or three times a week, and using her slowly, sometimes making her wait for an hour naked without coming near her, listening to her entreaties without ever replying, for there were times when she did beg and beseech, enjoining her to do the same things always at the same moments, as in a ritual, so that she knew when her mouth was supposed to caress him and when, on her knees, her head buried in the silken sofa, she should offer him only her back, which he now possessed without hurting her, for the first time, for in spite of the fear which convulsed her - or perhaps because of that fear - she opened to him, in spite of the chagrin she felt at René's betrayal, but perhaps too because of it, she surrendered herself completely. And for the first time, so gentle were her yielding eyes when they fastened on Sir Stephen's pale, burning gaze, that he suddenly spoke to her in French, employing the familiar tu form: "I'm going to put a gag in your mouth, O, because I'd like to whip you till I draw blood. Do I have your permission?" "I'm yours," O said. She was standing in the middle of the drawing room, and her arms raised and held together by the Roissy bracelets, which were attached by a chain to a ring in the ceiling from which a chandelier had formerly hung, thrust her breasts forward. Sir Stephen caressed them, then kissed them, then kissed her mouth once, ten times. (He had never kissed her.) And when he had put on the gag, which filled her mouth with the taste of wet canvas and pushed her tongue to the back of

• From Story of O (1954)

  This was true to such a degree that when René relaxed his grip upon her - or when she imagined he had - when he seemed distracted, when he left her in a mood which she took to be indifference of let some time go by without seeing her or replying to her letters and she assumed that he no longer cared to see her and was on the verge of ceasing to love her, then everything was choked and smothered within her. The grass turned black, day was no longer day nor night any longer night, but both merely infernal machines which alternately provided, as part of her torture, periods of light and darkness. Cool water made her nauseous. She felt as though she were a statue of ashes - bitter, useless, damned - like the salt statues of Gomorrah. For she was guilty. Those who love God, and by Him are abandoned in the dark of night, are guilty because they are abandoned. They cast back into their memories, searching for their sins. She looked back, hunting for hers. All she found were insignificant acts of kindness or self-indulgence, which were not so much acts as an innate part of her personality, such as arousing the desires of men other than René, men she noticed only to the extent that the love René gave her, the certainty of belonging to René, made her happy and filled her cup of happiness to overflowing, and insofar as her total submission to René rendered her vulnerable, irresponsible, and all her trifling acts - but what acts? For all she had to reproach herself with were thoughts and fleeting temptations. Yet, he was certain that she was guilty and, without really wanting to, René was punishing her for a sin he knew nothing about (since it remained completely internal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detected it: her wantonness.

• From Story of O (1954)

  There was another girl, very young, a girl with bare shoulders and a choker of pearls around her neck, wearing one of those white dresses young girls wear to their first ball, two tea-scented roses at her waist and a pair of golden slippers on her feet, and a boy made her sit down next to O, on her right. Then he took her hand and made her caress O's breasts, which quivered to the touch of the cool, light fingers, and touch her belly, and the chain, and the hole through which it passed, the young girl silently, did as she was bid, and when the boy said he planned to do the same thing to her, she did not seem shocked. But even though they thus made use of O, and even though they used her in this way as a model, or the subject of a demonstration, not once did anyone ever speak to her directly. Was she then of stone or wax, or rather some creature from another world, and did they think it pointless to speak to her? Or didn't they dare? It was only after daybreak, after all the dancers had left, that Sir Stephen and the Commander, awakening Natalie who was asleep at O's feet, helped O to her feet, led her to the middle of the courtyard, unfastened her chain and removed her mask and, laying her back upon a table, possessed her one after the other. Ina final chapter, which has been suppressed, O returned to Roissy, where she was abandoned by Sir Stephen. There exists a second ending to the story of O, according to which O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave her his consent.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  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 Evolutionary theorists love to seek explanations for species’ most outstanding features: the elk’s antlers, the giraffe’s neck, the cheetah’s breakaway speed. These features reflect the environment in which the species evolved and the particular niche it occupies in this environment. What’s our species’s outstanding feature? Other than our supersized male genitalia (see Part IV ), we’re not very impressive from a physical perspective. With less than half our body weight, the average chimp has the strength of any four or five mustachioed firefighters. Plenty of animals can run faster, dive deeper, fight better, see farther, detect fainter smells, and hear tonal subtleties in what sounds like silence to us. So what do we bring to the party? What’s so special about human beings? Our endlessly complex interactions with each other. We know what you’re thinking: big brains. True, but our unique brains result from our chatty sociability.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Greed constitutes the most grievous wrong. L AURENTI M AGESA, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life Economics, “the dismal science,” was dismal right from the start. On a late autumn afternoon in 1838, what may have been the brightest bolt of illumination ever to flash out of an overcast English sky struck Charles Darwin right upside the head, leaving him stunned by what Richard Dawkins has called “the most powerful idea that has ever occurred to a man.” At the very moment the great insight underlying natural selection came to him, Darwin was reading An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus. 1 If the measure of an idea is its endurance through time, Thomas Malthus deserves his spot as Wikipedia’s eightieth Most Influential Person in History. More than two centuries later, one would be hard pressed to find a single student of economics unfamiliar with the simple argument put forth by the world’s first professor of economics. You’ll recall that Malthus argued that each generation doubles geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32 …), but farmers can only increase food supply arithmetically, as new fields are cleared and productive capacity is added in a linear fashion (2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …). From this crystalline reasoning follows Malthus’s brutal conclusion: chronic overpopulation, desperation, and widespread starvation are intrinsic to human existence. Not a thing to be done about it. Helping the poor is like feeding London’s pigeons; they’ll just reproduce back to the brink of starvation anyway, so what’s the point? “The poverty and misery which prevail among the lower classes of society,” Malthus asserts, “are absolutely irremediable.” Malthus based his estimates of human reproductive rates on the recorded increase of (European) population in North America in the previous 150 years (1650–1800). He concluded that the colonial population had doubled every twenty-five years or so, which he took to be a reasonable estimate of the rates of human population growth in general. In his autobiography, Darwin recalled that when he applied these dire Malthusian computations to the natural world, “it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work …” 2 Science writer Matt Ridley believes Malthus taught Darwin the “bleak lesson” that “overbreeding must end in pestilence, famine or violence,” convincing him that the secret of natural selection was embedded in the struggle for existence. Thus was Darwin’s brilliance sparked by the darkest Malthusian gloom.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Pervert’s Lament Paraphilias are not universally present in human societies, their incidence could be greatly reduced if tolerance and education in sexual matters were more widespread. This is a most important but socially sensitive area of sex research. A LAN D IXSON 1 While many women are freed by their erotic flexibility, men can find themselves trapped by the rigidity of their sexual response, like the male sheep and goats mentioned earlier. Once determined, male eroticism tends to retain its contours throughout life, like concrete that has set. Consequently, the theory of erotic plasticity predicts that paraphilias (abnormal sexual desires and behaviors) should be far more prevalent in men than in women who would presumably be more responsive to social pressures and find it easier to abandon previous turn-ons or ignore unseemly urges. Nearly every source of evidence supports this prediction. Most researchers and therapists agree that these unusual sexual hungers are almost exclusively seen in males, appear to be related to early imprinting, and are difficult, if not impossible, to alter once boyhood impressions have hardened into adult yearnings. Purely psychological treatment for paraphilias and pedophilia have shown little success. The most effective treatments for the latter tend to be based upon biological approaches (hormone therapy, chemical castration). Once beyond the age of malleability, males seem to be stuck with whatever imprint they’ve received, latex or leather, S or M, goat or lamb. If the influences during this “developmental window” are distorting and destructive, a boy may grow into a man with an unalterable, nearly irresistible desire to reenact the same patterns with others. The ritualized, widespread pedophilia in the Catholic Church appears to be a prime example of this process (as does the Church’s centuries-long attempt to cover up the issue). Recall Schopenhauer’s famous quote, “Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.) Desire, particularly male desire, is notoriously unresponsive to religious dictate, legal retribution, family pressure, self-preservation, or common sense. It does respond to one thing, however: testosterone. A man who suffered a hormonal disorder that left him with almost no testosterone for four months discussed his experience (anonymously) in a radio interview. Without testosterone, he said, “Everything I identified as being me [was lost]. My ambition, my interest in things, my sense of humor, the inflection of my voice…. The introduction of testosterone returned everything.” Asked whether there had been an upside to being testosterone-free, he said, “There were things that I find offensive about my own personality that were disconnected then.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  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 Unlike her closest primate cousins, the standard human female doesn’t come equipped with private parts that swell up to double their normal size and turn bright red when she is about to ovulate. In fact, a foundational premise of the standard narrative is that men have no way of knowing when a woman is fertile. As we’re supposed to be the smartest creatures around, it’s interesting that humans are thought to be almost unique in this ignorance. The vast majority of other female mammals advertise when they are fertile, and are decidedly not interested in sex at other times. Concealed ovulation is said to be a significant human exception. Among primates, the female capacity and willingness to have sex any time, any place is characteristic only of bonobos and humans. “Extended receptivity” is just a scientific way of saying that women can be sexually active throughout their menstrual cycle, whereas most mammals have sex only when it “matters”—that is, when pregnancy can occur.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Most modern couples aren’t as flexible about tolerating a variety of sexual partners as the Melanesians and many of the societies we surveyed in earlier chapters. After reviewing the broad literature on Western marriage, sociologist Jessie Bernard argued in the early 1970s that increasing men’s opportunities for sexually novel partners was one of the most important social changes required in Western societies to promote marital happiness. 29 But this hasn’t happened yet and seems even less likely now, almost four decades later. Maybe this is why some twenty million American marriages can be categorized as no-sex or low-sex due to the man’s loss of sexual interest. According to the authors of He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore, 15 to 20 percent of American couples have sex fewer than ten times per year. They note that the absence of sexual desire is the most common sexual problem in the country. 30 Combine these dismal numbers with the 50 percent of all marriages that end in divorce, and it’s clear that modern marriage is suffering a soft-core meltdown. In The Evolution of Human Sexuality, the ever-quotable Donald Symons pointed out that Western societies have tried every trick in the book to change this aspect of male sexuality, but all have failed miserably: “Human males seem to be so constituted that they resist learning not to desire variety,” he wrote, “despite impediments such as Christianity and the doctrine of sin; Judaism and the doctrine of mensch; social science and the doctrines of repressed homosexuality and psychosexual immaturity; evolutionary theories of monogamous pair-bonding; cultural and legal traditions that support and glorify monogamy.” 31 Need we supplement Symons’s thoughts with a list of specific examples of men (presidents, governors, senators, athletes, musicians) who have squandered family and fortune, power and prestige—all for an encounter with a woman whose principal attraction was her novelty? Need we remind female readers of the men in their past who seemed so smitten at first, but mysteriously stopped calling once the thrill of novelty had faded? A Few More Reasons I Need Somebody New (Just Like You) Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). M ILAN K UNDERA, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Remember how Phil said he felt “high” when he was with his new lover? “Colors were richer, food tasted better.” There’s a reason for this intensification of sensation, but it’s not love. As their testosterone levels decline with age, many men experience a diminishment of energy and libido, an intangible distance from the basic pleasures of life. Most attribute this blurred distance to stress, lack of sleep, or too much responsibility, or they just chalk it up to the passage of time.