Disappointment

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 Art of Seduction (2001)

  having had to depend on them. Don't worry about stirring up these am- FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, bivalences, which don't keep us from being tied to our parents. Remember QUOTED IN FRIEDRICH SIEBURG, CHATEAUBRIAND, TRANSLATED to include an erotic component in your parental behavior. Now your tar- BY VIOLET M. MACDONALD gets are not only getting their mother or father all to themselves, they are getting something more, something previously forbidden but now allowed. The Ego Ideal Regression. As children, we often form an ideal figure out of our dreams and ambitions. First, that ideal figure is the person we want to be. We imagine ourselves as brave adventurers, romantic figures. Then, in our adolescence, we turn our attention to others, often projecting our ideals onto them. The first boy or girl we fall in love with may seem to have the ideal qualities we wanted for ourselves, or else may make us feel that we can play that ideal role in relation to them. Most of us carry these 338 • The Art of Seduction ideals around with us, buried just below the surface. We are secretly disappointed in how much we have had to compromise, how far below the ideal we have fallen as we have gotten older. Make your targets feel they are living out this youthful ideal, and coming closer to being the person they wanted to be, and you will effect a different kind of regression, creating a feeling reminiscent of adolescence. The relationship between you and the seduced is in this instance more equal than in the previous kinds of regressions—more like the affection between siblings. In fact the ideal is often modeled on a brother or sister. To create this effect, strive to reproduce the intense, innocent mood of a youthful infatuation. The Reverse Parental Regression. Here you are the one to regress: you deliberately play the role of the cute, adorable, yet also sexually charged child. Older people always find younger people incredibly seductive. In the presence of youth, they feel a little of their own youth return; but they are in fact older, and mixed into the invigoration they feel in young people's company is the pleasure of playing the mother or father to them. If a child has erotic feelings toward a parent, feelings that are quickly repressed, the parent must deal with the same problem in reverse. Assume the role of the child in relation to your targets, however, and they get to act out some of those repressed erotic sentiments. The strategy may seem to call for a difference in age, but this is actually not critical. Marilyn Monroe's exaggerated little-girl qualities worked just fine on men her age. Emphasizing a weakness or vulnerability on your part will give the target a chance to play the protector. Some Examples

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare. She showed her gums when she smiled. “I almost put both of you into my lake,” she said. “I even noticed something you overlooked. You [addressing Humbert] had your wrist watch on in, yes, sir, you had.” “Waterproof,” said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth. Jean took my wrist upon her knee and examined Charlotte’s gift, then put back Humbert’s hand on the sand, palm up. “You could see anything that way,” remarked Charlotte coquettishly. Jean sighed. “I once saw,” she said, “two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love. Their shadows were giants. And I told you about Mr. Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears—” “Hullo there,” said John’s voice. 21 My habit of being silent when displeased, or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying “Ce qui me rend folle, c’est que je ne sais à quoi tu penses quand tu es connne ça.” I tried being silent with Charlotte—and she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under the chin. An astonishing woman! I would retire to my former room, now a regular “studio,” mumbling I had after all a learned opus to write, and cheerfully Charlotte went on beautifying the home, warbling on the telephone and writing letters. From my window, through the lacquered shiver of poplar leaves, I could see her crossing the street and contentedly mailing her letter to Miss Phalen’s sister. The week of scattered showers and shadows which elapsed after our last visit to the motionless sands of Hourglass Lake was one of the gloomiest I can recall. Then came two or three dim rays of hope—before the ultimate sunburst. It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it. If I dared not meddle with my wife’s plans for her daughter (getting warmer and browner every day in the fair weather of hopeless distance), I could surely devise some general means to assert myself in a general way that might be later directed toward a particular occasion. One evening, Charlotte herself provided me with an opening. “I have a surprise for you,” she said looking at me with fond eyes over a spoonful of soup. “In the fall we two are going to England.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Most of us don’t. So it’s not without a good deal of trepidation that I sit down fifty years later to write the foreword to a book that has become larger than me and larger than her. I never knew my mother before her outsized success. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, Fear of Flying was very much a part of my mom’s life and legacy. I was born inside the house of her fame and have never gotten outside of it. The year 1973 was a big year for women and sexual freedoms. The United States Supreme Court decided that “A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right to choose, the right to end a pregnancy, and the advent of oral contraception in the 1960s changed the game for women. Sex and pregnancy were no longer inextricably linked. Fear of Flying was a piece of this new zipless freedom. But progress hasn’t been a straight line for American women. In the decades since Fear of Flying was published, a lot of the things my mother and her peers thought would happen have not. Women are still not close to equality with men. Women of color make about sixty cents to every dollar a white man makes. There is no Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Women are not protected. The world of free love and equality that my mom and her peers dreamed of shimmered briefly on the horizon but never came fully into being. There were backlashes and whiplashes and Ronald and Nancy Reagan pulling the solar panels off the White House. We never got the equality we were promised. But that wasn’t where the nightmare ended. In June 2022, the three Trump justices overturned Roe. These justices took away a Constitutional right that women had had for almost half a century, and they did it with the stroke of a pen. The earth didn’t slide off its axis; the world continued on. The next day all of us got up and ate our breakfast as if we hadn’t lost a Constitutional right.

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

  And remember that the “six basic facial expressions” were not a scientific discovery; the Western architects of the basic emotion method stipulated them, actors posed them, and a science was built around them. There is no known validity to these particular facial poses, and studies that use more objective methods like facial EMG and facial coding do not find evidence that people routinely make these movements in real life during episodes of emotion. Yet scientists continue to use the basic emotion method regardless. After all, it produces very consistent results. 2 4 Each time a scientific “fact” is overturned it leads to new avenues for discovery. The physicist Albert Michelson won a Nobel Prize in 1907 for disproving a conjecture made by Aristotle, that light travels through empty space via a hypothetical substance called luminiferous ether. His detective work set the stage for Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In our case, we’ve cast substantial doubt on the evidence for universal emotions. They only appear to be universal under certain conditions —when you give people a tiny bit of information about Western emotion concepts, intentionally or not. These observations, and others like them, set the stage for the new theory of emotion that you are about to learn. So Tomkins, Ekman, and their colleagues did contribute to a remarkable discovery. It just wasn’t the discovery that they expected. 2 5 The many cross-cultural studies employing the basic emotion method suggest something else exciting: it may be easy to teach emotion concepts across cultural boundaries, even unintentionally. Such a worldwide understanding would be hugely beneficial. If Saddam Hussein’s half-brother had only understood the American emotion concept of anger, he might have perceived anger in Secretary of State James Baker, which might have averted the first Gulf War with the United States, saving thousands of lives. Given how easy it is to teach emotion concepts by accident, there is also a danger in using Western stereotypes of emotion in cultural research. For instance, an ongoing series of studies called the Universal Expressions Project is attempting to document what is universal about emotional expressions in the face, body, and voice. So far, they’ve identified “about 30 facial expressions and 20 vocal expressions that are very similar around the world.” The catch is that the project uses only the basic emotion method, so it’s investigating universality with a tool that cannot provide such evidence. (Also, they’re asking people to pose what they believe are their cultural expressions, which is not the same thing as observing actual body movements during emotion.) More importantly, if the project reaches its goal, everyone in the world might learn the Western stereotypes for emotions.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  At the private all girls’ high school I went to, I’d had a flock of Reva-like adorers. I was emulated and gossiped about. I was blond and thin and pretty—that’s what people noticed. That’s what those girls cared about. I learned to float on cheap affections gleaned from other people’s insecurities. I didn’t stay out late. I just did my homework, kept my room clean, bided my time until I could move out and grow up and feel normal, I hoped. I didn’t go out with boys until college, until Trevor. When I was applying to schools, I overheard my mother talking to my father about me one more time. “You should read her college essay,” said my mother. “She’ll never let me look at it. I’m worried she might try to do something creative. She’ll end up at some awful state school.” “I’ve had some very bright graduate students who went to state schools,” my father replied calmly. “And if she just wants to major in English or something like that, it doesn’t really matter where she goes.” In the end I did show my college essay to my mother. I didn’t tell her that Anton Kirschler, the artist I wrote about, was a character of my own invention. I wrote that his work was instructive for how to maintain “a humanistic approach to art facing the rise of technology.” I described various made-up pieces: Dog Urinating on Computer, Stock Market Hamburger Lunch. I wrote that his work spoke to me personally because I was interested in how “art created the future.” It was a mediocre essay. My mother seemed unperturbed by it, which shocked me, and handed it back with the suggestion that I look up a few words in the thesaurus because I’d repeated them too often. I didn’t take her advice. I applied to Columbia early decision and got in. On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk. “Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?” I shook my head. “It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.” “For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I found my first husband during my freshman year and married him after graduation four years later with occasional sidetrips and experiments in between. By the time I was twenty-two, I was a veteran of one marriage which had fallen apart under the most painful circumstances. Pia found a succession of bastards who fucked her and disappointed her. From college, she wrote long epistolary epics in her tiny baroque handwriting and described each bastard in detail, but somehow I could never tell them apart. They all seemed to have hollow cheekbones and lank blond hair. She was hung up on the midwestern shagetz the way certain Jewish guys are hung up on shikses. It was as if they were all the same guy. Huck Finn without a raft. Blond hair, blue denim, and cowboy boots. And they always wound up walking all over her. Progressively the two of us got more and more disillusioned. This was inevitable, of course, given the absurd fantasies we’d started out with, but I don’t think we were that different from other adolescent girls (though we were more literary and certainly more pretentious). All we wanted were men we could share everything with. Why was that so much to ask? Was it that men and women were basically incompatible? Or just that we hadn’t yet found the right ones? By the summer of ‘65 when we were both twenty-three and toured Europe together, our disillusionment was such that we slept with men principally to boast to each other about the number of scalps on our belts. In Florence, Pia paraphrased Robert Browning: Open my cunt and you shall see Engraved upon it: Italy. We slept with guys who sold wallets outside the Uffizi, with two black musicians who lived in a pensione across the Piazza, with Alitalia ticket clerks, with mail clerks from American Express. I had a weeklong affair with that married Italian named Alessandro who liked me to whisper “shit fuck cunt” in his ear while we screwed. This usually made me so hysterical with laughter that I lost interest in screwing. Then another weeklong affair with a middle-aged American professor of art history whose name was Michael Karlinsky and who signed his love letters “Michelangelo.” He had an alcoholic American wife in Fiesole, a gleaming bald head, a goatee, and a passion for Granità di Coffee. He wanted to eat orange segments out of my cunt because he’d read about it in The Perfumed Garden. And then there was the Italian voice student (tenor) who, on our second date, told me his favorite book was Sade’s Justine, and did I want to enact scenes from it? Experience for experience’s sake, Pia and I believed—but I never saw him again.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, Fear of Flying was very much a part of my mom’s life and legacy. I was born inside the house of her fame and have never gotten outside of it. The year 1973 was a big year for women and sexual freedoms. The United States Supreme Court decided that “A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right to choose, the right to end a pregnancy, and the advent of oral contraception in the 1960s changed the game for women. Sex and pregnancy were no longer inextricably linked. Fear of Flying was a piece of this new zipless freedom. But progress hasn’t been a straight line for American women. In the decades since Fear of Flying was published, a lot of the things my mother and her peers thought would happen have not. Women are still not close to equality with men. Women of color make about sixty cents to every dollar a white man makes. There is no Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Women are not protected. The world of free love and equality that my mom and her peers dreamed of shimmered briefly on the horizon but never came fully into being. There were backlashes and whiplashes and Ronald and Nancy Reagan pulling the solar panels off the White House. We never got the equality we were promised. But that wasn’t where the nightmare ended. In June 2022, the three Trump justices overturned Roe. These justices took away a Constitutional right that women had had for almost half a century, and they did it with the stroke of a pen. The earth didn’t slide off its axis; the world continued on. The next day all of us got up and ate our breakfast as if we hadn’t lost a Constitutional right. 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 F INTRODUCTION ear of Flying was not an immediate hit when it arrived on bookshelves in 1973.

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

  Many other cultures, however, characterize emotions as interpersonal events that require two or more people. This includes the Ifaluk of Micronesia, the Balinese, the Fula, the Ilongot of the Philippines, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the Minangkabau of Indonesia, the Pintupi Aborigines of Australia, and the Samoans. More intriguingly, some cultures don’t even have a unified concept of “Emotion” for the experiences that Westerners lump together as emotional. The Tahitians, the Gidjingali Aborigines of Australia, the Fante and Dagbani of Ghana, the Chewong of Malaysia, and our friends the Himba from chapter 3 are a few well-studied examples. 31 Most scientific research on emotion is conducted in English, using American concepts and American emotion words (and their translations). According to noted linguist Anna Wierzbicka, English has been a conceptual prison for the science of emotion. “English terms of emotion constitute a folk taxonomy, not an objective, culture-free analytic framework, so obviously we cannot assume that English words such as disgust, fear, or shame are clues to universal human concepts, or to basic psychological realities.” To make matters even more imperialistic, these emotion words are from twentieth-century English, and there’s evidence that some are fairly modern. The concept of “Emotion” itself is an invention of the seventeenth century. Before that, scholars wrote about passions, sentiments, and other concepts that had somewhat different meanings. 32 Different languages describe diverse human experience in different ways—emotions and other mental events, colors, body parts, direction, time, spatial relations, and causality. The diversity from language to language is astonishing. The experiences of my friend Batja Mesquita, the cultural psychologist whom you met in chapter 5, provide an example. She was born and raised in the Netherlands and immigrated to America for her postdoctoral training. Over the next fifteen years, she married, raised a family, and was a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. When living in the Netherlands, Batja felt that her emotions were, for lack of a better word, natural. After moving to the United States, however, she soon noticed her emotions were not a good fit for American culture. Americans struck her as unnaturally happy. We constantly spoke in an upbeat tone of voice. We smiled a tremendous amount. When Batja asked how people were doing, we would always answer positively (“I’m doing great!”). Batja’s own emotional responses seemed inadequate in the U.S. cultural context. When asked how she was feeling, she did not respond with sufficient enthusiasm or say she was “fabulous” or “wonderful.” I once heard her give a talk on her experiences, and I nodded through the entire thing, clapped vigorously at the end, and then walked up to her, gave her a hug, and said “excellent job!” It took me a moment to realize I had just confirmed every one of her observations.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Still, a romantic urge surfaced now and then with Trevor, a recurring ex-boyfriend, my first and only. I was only eighteen, a freshman, when I met him at a Halloween party in a loft near Battery Park. I went with a dozen girls from the sorority I was rushing. Like most Halloween costumes, mine was an excuse to go around town dressed like a whore. I went as Detective Rizzoli, Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Fatal Beauty. In the first scene of the movie, she’s undercover and disguised as a hooker, so to copy her, I’d teased out my hair, wore a tight dress, high heels, gold lamé jacket, and white cat-eye sunglasses. Trevor had on an Andy Warhol costume: blond bobbed wig, thick black glasses, tight striped shirt. My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. We left the party together and walked around for hours, lied to each other about our happy lives, ate pizza at midnight, took the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and watched the sun rise. I gave him my phone number at the dorm. By the time he finally called me, two weeks later, I’d become obsessed with him. He kept me on a long, tight leash for months—expensive meals, the occasional opera or ballet. He took my virginity at a ski lodge in Vermont on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, but I trusted he knew more about sex than I did, so when he rolled off and said, “That was amazing,” I believed him. He was thirty-three, worked for Fuji Bank at the World Trade Center, wore tailored suits, sent cars to pick me up at my dorm, then the sorority house sophomore year, wined and dined me, and asked for head with no shame in the back of cabs he charged to the company account. I took this as proof of his masculine value. My “sisters” all agreed; he was “suave.” And I was impressed by how much he liked talking about his emotions, something I’d never seen a man do. “My mom’s a pothead now, and that’s why I have this deep sadness.” He took frequent trips to Tokyo for work and to San Francisco to visit his twin sister. I suspected she discouraged him from dating me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I had never counted, of course? She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible—and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary—fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood. I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketchy tap—one of her acquired gestures. She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I had been a good father, she guessed—granting me that. Proceed, Dolly Schiller. Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he was practically an old friend? That he had visited with his uncle in Ramsdale? —oh, years ago—and spoken at Mother’s club, and had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by her bare arm onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten and furious with him? Did I know he had seen me and her at the inn where he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two years later? Did I know—It had been horrid of her to sidetrack me into believing that Clare was an old female, maybe a relative of his or a sometime lifemate—and oh, what a close shave it had been when the Wace Journal carried his picture. The Briceland Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing. Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it. At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor. “Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young fellow, veteran of a remote war, was hard of hearing. Arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin. We shook hands. Discreet Bill, who evidently took pride in working wonders with one hand, brought in the beer cans he had opened. Wanted to withdraw. The exquisite courtesy of simple folks. Was made to stay. A beer ad. In point of fact, I preferred it that way, and so did the Schillers.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn’t expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched up her face, sneezed violently, turned to wipe her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more. “And how did she die?” she asked. “Not pineal failure, I suppose.” “She mixed alcohol with sedatives,” I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle had forgotten that I’d told her my mother had slit her wrists, telling her the truth wouldn’t matter in the long run. “People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.” • • • SEPTEMBER CAME AND WENT. The sunlight tilted through the blinds once in a while, and I’d peek out to see if the leaves on the trees were dying yet. Life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum. I shuffled down to the Egyptians. I filled my prescriptions. Reva continued to appear from time to time, usually drunk and always on the brink of hysteria or outrage or complete meltdown one way or another. In October, she barged in while I was watching Working Girl. “This again?” she huffed and threw herself down in the armchair. “I’m fasting for Yom Kippur,” she sighed boastfully. This was not unusual. She’d been on some truly insane diets in the past. A gallon of salt water a day. Only prune juice and baking soda. “I can have as much sugar-free Jell-O as I want before eleven A.M.” Or “I’m fasting,” she’d say. “I’m fasting on weekends.” “I’m fasting every other weekday.” “Melanie Griffith looks bulimic in this movie,” Reva said now, pointing lazily at the screen. “See her swollen jowls? Her face looks fat, but her legs are super skinny. Or maybe she’s just fat with skinny legs. Her arms look soft, don’t they? I could be wrong. I don’t know. I’m kind of out of it. I’m fasting,” she said again. “That’s not puking, it’s boozing, Reva,” I told her, slurping drool from the corner of my mouth. “Not every skinny person has an eating disorder.” It was the most I’d said in weeks to anyone. “Sorry,” Reva said. “You’re right. I’m just in a mood. I’m fasting, you know?” She dug around in her purse and pulled out her dwindling fifth of tequila. “Want some?” she asked. “No.” She cracked open a Diet Mountain Dew. We watched the movie in silence. In the middle, I fell back asleep. • • • OCTOBER WAS PLACID. The radiator hissed and sputtered, releasing a sharp vinegary smell that reminded me of my dead parents’ basement, so I rarely turned on the heat. I didn’t mind the cold. My visit to Dr. Tuttle that month was relatively unremarkable. “How is everything at home?” she asked. “Good?

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  But she was worried about his future; it was difficult to make a living as a poet, and she encouraged him to learn her native language, Russian, and become a translator. He followed her ad- vice so avidly that within months he could speak Russian. They visited Russia together, and Rilke was overwhelmed by what he saw—the peas- ants, the folk customs, the art, the architecture. Back in Berlin, he turned his rooms into a kind of shrine to Russia, and started wearing Russian peas- ant blouses and peppering his conversation with Russian phrases. Now the charm of his mirroring soon wore off. At first Salomé had been flattered that he shared her interests so intensely, but now she saw this as something else: he seemed to have no real identity. He had become dependent on her for his own self-esteem. It was all so slavish. In 1899, much to his horror, she broke off the relationship. The lesson is simple: your entry into a person's spirit must be a tactic, a way to bring him or her under your spell. You cannot be simply a sponge, soaking up the other person's moods. Mirror them for too long and they will see through you and be repelled by you. Beneath the similarity to them that you make them see, you must have a strong underlying sense of your own identity. When the time comes, you will want to lead them into your spirit; you cannot live on their turf. Never take mirroring too far, then. It is only useful in the first phase of a seduction; at some point the dynamic must be reversed. This desire for a double of the other sex that resembles us absolutely while still being other, for a magical creature who is ourself while possessing the advantage, over all our imaginings, of an autonomous existence. . . . We find traces of it in even the most banal circumstances of love: in the attraction linked to any change, any disguise, as in the importance of unison and the repetition of self in the other. . . . The great, the implacable amorous passions are all linked to the fact that a being imagines he sees his most secret self spying upon him behind the curtain of another's eyes. —ROBERT MUSIL, QUOTED IN DENIS DE ROUGEMONT, LOVE DECLARED, TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD Create Temptation Lure the target deep into your seduction by creating the proper temptation: a glimpse of the pleasures to come. As the serpent tempted Eve with the promise of forbidden knowledge, you must awaken a desire in your tar- gets that they cannot control.

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

  Given how easy it is to teach emotion concepts by accident, there is also a danger in using Western stereotypes of emotion in cultural research. For instance, an ongoing series of studies called the Universal Expressions Project is attempting to document what is universal about emotional expressions in the face, body, and voice. So far, they’ve identified “about 30 facial expressions and 20 vocal expressions that are very similar around the world.” The catch is that the project uses only the basic emotion method, so it’s investigating universality with a tool that cannot provide such evidence. (Also, they’re asking people to pose what they believe are their cultural expressions, which is not the same thing as observing actual body movements during emotion.) More importantly, if the project reaches its goal, everyone in the world might learn the Western stereotypes for emotions.26 In the long run, scientists who still subscribe to the basic emotion method are very likely helping to create the universality that they believe they are discovering. Closer to home, if people believe that a face alone displays emotion, it can lead to serious mistakes with damaging repercussions. In one case, this belief changed the course of a U.S. presidential election. In 2003–2004, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont was seeking the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, an honor that ultimately went to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Voters saw a lot of negative campaigning that season, and one of the most misleading examples was a video of Dean taken during a speech. In a snippet of video that went viral, Dean’s face was shown alone, without context, and he looked furious. But if you watched the entire video in context, it becomes obvious that Dean was not enraged but excited, firing up the crowd with his enthusiasm. The snippet circulated on the news, spread widely, and, ultimately, Dean dropped out of the race. We can only wonder what might have happened if viewers had understood how emotions are made when they saw those misleading images. … Guided by a constructionist approach, scientists continue to replicate my lab’s findings in other cultures (data from China, East Africa, Melanesia, and other regions are looking promising at press time). As they do, we are speeding the paradigm shift to a new understanding of emotion that goes beyond Western stereotypes. We can cast aside questions like “How accurately can you recognize fear?” and instead study the variety of facial movements that people actually make in fear. We can also try to understand why people hold stereotypes about facial configurations in the first place, and what their value might be.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We make our mistakes, we like to think, but we are getting better all the time. Well, to state it mildly, this is a point of view which any sane or honest Negro will have some difficulty holding. Very tew Americans, and this includes very few Jews, wish to believe that the American Negro situation is as desperate and dan gerous as it is. Very few Americans, and very few Jews, have the courage to recognize that the America of which they dream and boast is not the America in which the Negro lives. It is a country which the Negro has never seen. And this is not merely a matter of bad faith on the part of Americans. NEGROES ARE ANTI-SEMITIC BECAUSE ... 743 Bad faith, God knows, abounds, but there is something in the American dream sadder and more wistful than that. No one, I suppose, would dream of accusing the late Moss Hart of bad faith. Near the end of his autobiography, "Act One," just after he has become a successful playwright, and is riding home to Brooklyn for the first time in a cab, he reflects: "I stared through the taxi window at a pinch-faced IO-year old hurrying down the steps on some morning errand before school, and I thought of myself hurrying down the streets on so many gray mornings out of a doorway and a house much the same as this one. My mind jumped backward in time and then whirled forward, like a many-faceted prism-flashing our old neighborhood in front of me, the house, the steps, the candy store-and then shifted to the skyline I had just passed by, the opening last night, and the notices I still hugged tightly under my arm. It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy-for any of its millions-to ha\'e a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank, or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream." But this is not true for the Negro, and not even the most successful or fatuous Negro can really feel this way. His jour ney will have cost him too much, and the price will be revealed in his estrangement-unless he is very rare and lucky-from other colored people, and in his continuing isolation from whites. Furthermore, for e\·ery Negro boy who achieves such a taxi ride, hundreds, at least, will have perished around him, and not because they lacked the boldness to dream, but be cause the Republic despises their dreams. Perhaps one must be in such a situation in order really to understand what it is. But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can't but look on the American state and the American people as one's oppressors. For that, after all, is exactly what they are.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  “Your mom told me you play baseball. She said you liked to pitch.” (This was an understatement. Racer is passionate about baseball but his parents have trouble getting him to practices and games with one home in Berkeley and one in San Jose.) “Yeah, I like to play a lot,” Racer told me. “Our team has the best record. We’re going to be in the championships. And the coach told me that I could pitch in the play-offs. But only if I’m there for the rest of the season.” Racer looked worried. “Have you talked to your parents about this? It’s so important to you.” “They said they’d try to work it out to get me to all the rest of the games, but I don’t know.” Racer scowled. “They say that a lot, but things don’t work out.” “If you could change something, what would it be?” “Going back and forth bugs me. Like me and my friends are playing and then it’s time to leave right when we’re into a game. And I have things I really want to do on weekends, like baseball, and I miss important stuff.” “Could you be on a baseball team in San Jose, where your dad lives?” Racer looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “That wouldn’t solve anything.” His tone was a mixture of condescension and irritation. “It’d just make everything worse. Then I’d have two teams that I couldn’t make it to the games for and two coaches who’d be mad at me.” “Of course; I see exactly what you mean.” I hastened to regain lost ground. “It’s a problem.” “A big problem,” Racer emphasized. “Their houses are too far apart. I wish they would get together.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Theo Altidore stood in the middle, hand on hip, turbaned and robed in red, a scimitar in his belt. I couldn't tell if his rajah's moustaches were real or part of the costume. He was stout and high-coloured, with the irritable glare of the determined pleasure-seeker, handsome, young still, but already the man he would become. The brilliant picture, untouched by smoke or rain, could only show, like the Pavillion itself, how far he had wandered from Guillaume's austere refinement. He reminded me of bankers at Glyndebourne pretending to be aesthetes (betrayed by drink) or Toiler spreads on charity balls—the Duke of Somewhere, a frightful old monster, got up as a sheik or an Indian prince, never anything less than his own status. And it was notable how Theo had chosen the glamour of another empire than the one that was to ruin him. I could see why he'd frightened little Luc with his sword and his stare and his party of idlers. But then the whole place spoke of adult pleasures and delusions—it was mad to think that Luc would ever have wanted to come here. His mother and I revealed some romantic failing of our own, poetic suppositions that had nothing to do with the boy's troubles and discoveries, the hidden upheavals of love. I was such a bad teacher. I stood for a while at the open front door, feeling tired and dirty. It wasn't just that I hadn't found Luc there in person. He wasn't there in other ways I'd hoped for: I'd dreamt of the house as a means of possessing him, of entering his past at a deep and early level, but the jumpy ten minutes inside gave me nothing but a lonely shell. I started to snivel pathetically and turned away in case Marcel should see me. Then I heard the dull report of a car on the cattle-grid. The mauve Mini was coming over the field, bouncing and struggling on the rutted track. That terrifying little car. I waited for it shiftily, trying to make out if it contained one, two, or even three people—perhaps they'd all come to tell me the game was over, they would get out and lean on the open car door and marvel at my folly. It buzzed on to the mossy flagstones and stopped dead in front of the statue. There was only Sibylle inside—she sat for a while glaring out. It was clear to me she'd been sent by Luc to deliver some ultimatum and was working herself up to it and concentrating her anger at me and my blind interventions. Then she spotted Marcel, who was standing away to my right, frowning, head on one side in one of his gawky "grown-up" attitudes.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We do not know, fr om the film, that when she refuses to sleep with the horny and vocal Big Blue, he has her thrown in jail: we know nothing, in fact, of the kind of terror with which this girl lived almost fr om the time that she was born. The incident with Big Blue is reduced to low comedy, much as is the scene with Billie's mother when she tries on the extrava gant hat. Billie's testimony concerning the meaning of this hat is not in the film: "all the big-time whores wore big red velvet hats then-she looked so pretty in it"-nor is the fact CHAPTER THREE 559 that it is the mother who has bought the hat, because "we were going to live like ladies." In the film, Billie auditions as a dancer, and is terrible, and she says so in the book. It is also during this audition that the piano player saves her by snarl ing, "Girl, can you sing?" and so she sings for the first time in public, and this turns out to be the beginning of her career. But the scene, as recounted by Billie, and the scene as trans lated in the film have nothing whatever in common. In the film, for no immediately discernible reason, except, perhaps, ambition, Billie drops into a nearby club, and asks for an au dition. She is dressed as Hollywood-though it should cer tainly know better by now, God knows-persistently imagines cheap whores to dress. She joins the chorus line, disastrously, ending with her black bottom stuck out-after which, etc., she sings, etc. Billie's testimony is that she and her mother were about to be evicted in the morning and that it was as "cold as all hell that night, and I walked out without any kind of coat." She hits a joint, she is indeed allowed to dance, but solo, "and it was pitiful." Before they throw her out, the piano player does indeed say, "'Girl, can you sing?'-So I asked him to play 'Trav'lin' All Alone'. That came closer than anything to the way I felt." And: "when I left the joint that night, I split with the piano player and still took home fifty-seven dollars-! went out and bought a whole chicken and some baked beans." The scene, in the film, is far fr om being an improvement on Billie's testimony, and it has two curious results, neither of which are vouched for anywhere in Billie's book. One is the invention of Piano Man, who, according to the film, re mains with Billie until his death.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I tell him that I had concluded, fr om the fact that I was not met, that the F.A.M.U. people had not wanted me to come and had taken this way to let me know. Haley is a tall man in his early forties, who, shortly after I left Tallahassee, was dismissed fr om his position in the Music Department because he backed the stu dent protest movement. He looked grave as I spoke, said he appreciated my bluntness and agreed that I might find hos tility on the part of many of the people I was likely to meet. The events of the last few months had created great divisions in the Negro world. The F.A.M.U. president, for example, would not be glad to see me, for he and his supporters were hoping that the entire problem would somehow go away. These men are in an impossible position because their entire usefulness to the State of Florida depends on their ability to influence and control their students. But the students do not trust them, and this means the death of their influence and their usefulness alike. These men are as unable as is the State of Florida to find anything that will divert the students fr om their present course. 626 OTHER ESSAYS Until now the Negro college president's usefulness to the students, to the Negro community and to the state was de termined by the number of alternatives to equality that he could produce out of the Southern hat. The docility of the students was the tacit price agreed upon fi>r more funds, new buildings, more land. And these were tangible alternatives, fi>r these things were hideously needed. As for curricular expan sion, it usually came about in order to contain the discontent of Negro students. For example, at one time the state made no provision for the study of law at its Negro university. Stu dents then applied, with every intention of testing the legality of the state's position, for instruction in white colleges. To prevent such testing, law was added to the Negro university curriculum. And what has happened is that precisely those dormitories, chemistry labs, and classrooms for which Negro presidents formerly bargained are now being built by the South in a doomed attempt to blunt the force of the Supreme Court decision against segregation.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  13By the time spring had touched up Thayer Street with yellow and green and pink, Lolita was irrevocably stage-struck. Pratt, whom I chanced to notice one Sunday lunching with some people at Walton Inn, caught my eye from afar and went through the motion of sympathetically and discreetly clapping her hands while Lo was not looking. I detest the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those individual injections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry which a closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff. Being much occupied at the time with my own literary labors, I did not bother to read the complete text of The Enchanted Hunters, the playlet in which Dolores Haze was assigned the part of a farmer’s daughter who imagines herself to be a woodland witch, or Diana, or something, and who, having got hold of a book on hypnotism, plunges a number of lost hunters into various entertaining trances before falling in her turn under the spell of a vagabond poet (Mona Dahl). That much I gleaned from bits of crumpled and poorly typed script that Lo sowed all over the house. The coincidence of the title with the name of an unforgettable inn was pleasant in a sad little way: I wearily thought I had better not bring it to my own enchantress’s notice, lest a brazen accusation of mawkishness hurt me even more than her failure to notice it for herself had done. I assumed the playlet was just another, practically anonymous, version of some banal legend. Nothing prevented one, of course, from supposing that in quest of an attractive name the founder of the hotel had been immediately and solely influenced by the chance fantasy of the second-rate muralist he had hired, and that subsequently the hotel’s name had suggested the play’s title. But in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind I happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole matter much thought really, supposed that mural, name and title had all been derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know. In consequence I was under the impression (all this quite casually, you understand, quite outside any orbit of importance) that the accursed playlet belonged to the type of whimsey for juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times, such as Hansel and Gretel by Richard Roe, or The Sleeping Beauty by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor’s New Clothes by Maurice Vermont and Marion Rumpelmeyer—all this to be found in any Plays for School Actors or Let’s Have a Play! In other words, I did not know—and would not have cared, if I did—that actually The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and technically original composition which had been produced for the first time only three or four months ago by a highbrow group in New York. To me—inasmuch as I could judge from my charmer’s part—it seemed to be a pretty dismal kind of fancy work, with echoes from Lenormand and Maeterlinck and various quiet British dreamers. The red-capped, uniformly attired hunters, of which one was a banker, another a plumber, a third a policeman, a fourth an undertaker, a fifth an underwriter, a sixth an escaped convict (you see the possibilities!), went through a complete change of mind in Dolly’s Dell, and remembered their real lives only as dreams or nightmares from which little Diana had aroused them; but a seventh Hunter (in a green cap, the fool) was a Young Poet, and he insisted, much to Diana’s annoyance, that she and the entertainment provided (dancing nymphs, and elves, and monsters) were his, the Poet’s, invention. I understand that finally, in utter disgust at this cocksureness, barefooted Dolores was to lead check-trousered Mona to the paternal farm behind the Perilous Forest to prove to the braggard she was not a poet’s fancy, but a rustic, down-to-brown-earth lass—and a last minute kiss was to enforce the play’s profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love. I considered it wiser not to criticize the thing in front of Lo: she was so healthily engrossed in “problems of expression,” and so charmingly did she put her narrow Florentine hands together, batting her eyelashes and pleading with me not to come to rehearsals as some ridiculous parents did because she wanted to dazzle me with a perfect First Night—and because I was, anyway, always butting in and saying the wrong thing, and cramping her style in the presence of other people.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  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).