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 On Beauty (2005)

  She was ten minutes late now. A wind was blowing the snow up off the ground in horizontal sweeps. The quad behind him looked like an arctic tundra. Another five minutes. Howard wandered across to Emerson Hall itself, and stationed himself just inside the doors, where he would not miss her. With everybody already seated, he was left with the waiting staff, so black in their white shirts, holding high those trays of Wellington shrimp that always looked much better than they tasted. They were informal back here, laughing and whistling, speaking their boisterous Creole, touching each other. Nothing like the silent docile servers they became in hall. Now a queue of them lined up just near Howard with their platters, jiggling impatiently like footballers in a tunnel, ready to run on to the pitch. A loud clatter of a side door made everyone turn to look at the same time, Howard included. Fifteen white young men in matching black suits and gold waistcoats walked into the hallway. They quickly arranged themselves in a staggered formation on the main stairs. The fattest of them now sang a clear, steady note with which the rest harmonized, until there was an almost unbearably pleasant chord in the air. It vibrated so brutally that Howard felt it in his body, like standing beside a loud sound system. The front door opened. ‘Shit! Sorry I’m late – sorry. Clothes crisis.’ Victoria, dressed in a very long overcoat, brushed the snow from her shoulders. The young men, apparently satisfied with their sound check, stopped singing and trooped back into the room from which  on beauty and being wrong they had come. A spatter of applause – which sounded distinctly ironic – came from the waiters. ‘You’re very late,’ said Howard, frowning after the retreating singers, but Victoria did not answer. She was busy taking off her coat. Howard turned back round. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, although there could be no question of the answer. She wore a shimmering white trouser suit, cut low. Apparently there was nothing underneath it. The waist was as neat as neat could be; her backside was impertinent. Her hair had changed again. This time it was parted on the side and slicked down with pomade like in those old photos of Josephine Baker. Her lashes appeared longer than usual. Every man and woman in the line of waiters fixed their eyes upon her. ‘You look – ’ attempted Howard. ‘Yeah, well . . . I thought one of us should wear a nice suit.’

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  surrounded by the whiteness of the smoky air, an Arctic landscape. There was a row of old Häagen-Dazs down there, from before they changed the packaging. There were boxes of Klondike bars down there. Maybe that’s where I should go, I thought—Klondike. Yukon. I could move to Canada. I leaned down into the freezer and scraped at the frost and managed to pick out a Klondike for Reva. If she brought me a Christmas gift and I had nothing for her, it would fuel her judgment and “concern” for weeks. I thought I’d also give her some of the fuchsia underwear from Victoria’s Secret I never wore. And a pair of jeans. The looser styles might fit her, I thought. I was feeling generous. The Egyptian slid the cigarettes and M&M’s across the counter with a scrap he’d ripped from a brown paper bag. “You still owe me six fifty from last week,” he said, and wrote down the sum I now owed on top of that, along with my name, which I was stunned he knew. I could only assume I’d come down for a snack during a blackout. The Egyptian taped the scrap of paper on the wall next to his rolls of scratch tickets. I put the cigarettes and the Klondike bar and the M&M’s in my coat pocket, took my coffees, and went back upstairs to my apartment. I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I’d cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they’d grow wide and glisten with awe. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate—an odd prediction, maybe, of when I’m ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The meter was bumpy, but the message was plain. We would have gladly groveled if only we could have found men worth groveling to. — The boys we met in college were, in a way, worse. At least John and Ron were good-natured creeps who adored us. They didn’t have minds like G.B.S. and bodies like Michelangelo’s David, but they were devoted to us, and regarded us as creatures of glittering wit and sophistication. But in college the war between the sexes began in earnest and our minds and bodies drifted farther and farther apart. 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.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  surrounded by the whiteness of the smoky air, an Arctic landscape. There was a row of old Häagen-Dazs down there, from before they changed the packaging. There were boxes of Klondike bars down there. Maybe that’s where I should go, I thought—Klondike. Yukon. I could move to Canada. I leaned down into the freezer and scraped at the frost and managed to pick out a Klondike for Reva. If she brought me a Christmas gift and I had nothing for her, it would fuel her judgment and “concern” for weeks. I thought I’d also give her some of the fuchsia underwear from Victoria’s Secret I never wore. And a pair of jeans. The looser styles might fit her, I thought. I was feeling generous. The Egyptian slid the cigarettes and M&M’s across the counter with a scrap he’d ripped from a brown paper bag. “You still owe me six fifty from last week,” he said, and wrote down the sum I now owed on top of that, along with my name, which I was stunned he knew. I could only assume I’d come down for a snack during a blackout. The Egyptian taped the scrap of paper on the wall next to his rolls of scratch tickets. I put the cigarettes and the Klondike bar and the M&M’s in my coat pocket, took my coffees, and went back upstairs to my apartment. I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I’d cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they’d grow wide and glisten with awe. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate—an odd prediction, maybe, of when I’m ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Virgil, Pope, the Romantics. Why idealize?’ ‘Idealize?’ repeated Claire uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure I really . . . You know, what I’ve always felt is, well, for instance, in The Georgics – ’ ‘The what?’ ‘Virgil . . . in The Georgics , nature and the pleasures of the pastoral are essential to any . . .’ began Claire, but Zora had already stopped listening. Claire’s kind of learning was tiresome to her. Claire didn’t  the anatomy lesson know anything about theorists, or ideas, or the latest thinking. Sometimes Zora suspected her of being barely intellectual. With her, it was always ‘in Plato’ or ‘in Baudelaire’ or ‘in Rimbaud’, as if we all had time to sit around reading whatever we fancied. Zora blinked impatiently, visibly tracking Claire’s sentence, waiting for a period or, failing that, a semicolon in which to insert herself again. ‘But after Foucault,’ she said, seeing her chance, ‘where is there to go with that stuff ?’ They were having an intellectual argument. The table was excited. Lena bounced on her heels to keep the blood circulating. Claire felt very tired. She was a poet. How had she ever ended up here, in one of these institutions, these universities, where one must make an argument for everything, even an argument for wanting to write about a chestnut tree? ‘Boo.’ Claire and the rest of the table looked up. A tall, handsome brown boy, with five or six guys hanging right behind him, stood by their table. Levi, unfazed by this kind of focused attention, acknowledged it with a nod. ‘Eleven thirty, out front, a’right?’ Zora agreed quickly, willing him away. ‘ Levi? Is that you? ’ ‘Oh, hi, Mizz Malcolm.’ ‘My God . Look at you! So that’s what all that swimming is for. You’re huge !’ ‘Getting that way,’ said Levi, rounding out his shoulders. He didn’t smile. He knew about Claire Malcolm, Jerome had told him, and, with his usual judicious ability to see both sides of a thing, he had felt quite reasonable about it. He felt bad for his mom, obviously, but he also understood his father’s position. Levi too had loved girls dearly in the past and then played away with other girls for less than honourable reasons and saw nothing heinously wrong with the separation of sex and love into two different categories. But, looking at Claire Malcolm now, he found himself confused. It was yet another example of his father’s bizarre tastes. Where was the booty on that? Where was the rack? He felt the unfairness  On Beauty and illogic of this substitution. He made a decision to cut the conversation short as a sign of solidarity with his mother’s more generous proportions. ‘Well, you look great,’ chimed Claire. ‘Are you performing tonight?’ ‘Not definitely.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She meant to continue, but, once again, everything fell away. She just knew she could no longer crouch. She took her feet out from under her and sat down on the wood. ‘Yes, you sit down and we can talk properly. Whatever problems our husbands may have, it’s no quarrel of ours.’ Nothing followed. Kiki felt and saw herself in this unlikely position, sitting on the floor beneath a woman she did not know. She looked out over the garden and sighed stupidly, as if the charm of the scene had only this moment struck her. ‘Now, what do you think,’ Mrs Kipps said slowly, ‘of my house?’ This question, implicit in Kiki’s social dealings with the women of Wellington, was another she had never been asked outright before. ‘Well, I think it’s absolutely lovely.’ This answer seemed to surprise the occupant. She moved forward, lifting her chin from where it rested on her chest. ‘ Really . I cannot say that I like it so much. It’s so new . There’s nothing in this house except money, jangling. My house in London, Mrs Belsey – ’ ‘Kiki, please.’ ‘ Carlene ,’ she replied, pressing a long hand to her own, exposed  On Beauty throat. ‘It’s so full of humanity – I could hear petticoats in the hallway. I miss it so much, already. American houses . . .’ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has ever lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?’ Kiki instinctively bristled – after a lifetime of bad-mouthing her own country, these past few years she had grown into a new sensitivity. She had to leave the room when Howard’s English friends settled into their armchairs after dinner and began the assault. ‘American houses? How do you mean? You mean, you’d rather a house with, like, a history?’ ‘Oh . . . well, it can be put this way, yes.’ Kiki was further wounded by the sense she had said something to disappoint, or, worse, something so dull it was not worth replying to. ‘But you know, actually this house does have a kind of history, Mrs – Carlene – it’s not a very pretty one, though.’ ‘Mmm.’ Now this was simply impolite. Mrs Kipps had closed her eyes. The woman was rude. Wasn’t she? Maybe it was a cultural difference.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He looked sideways across his chest for it and grabbed it by one leg. He dangled it, watching it tread the air like a swimmer treading water. “Don’t kill it!” I pleaded. “I thought you were scared of it.” “I am, but I don’t want to see you kill it.” I shrank back. “How about this?” he said, pulling off one of its legs. “Oh God—don’t! I hate it when people do that.” Adrian went on plucking off the legs like daisy petals. “She loves me, she loves me not...” he said. “I hate that,” I said. “Please don’t.” “I thought you hated bugs.” “I don’t like them crawling on me—but I can’t stand to see them killed either. And it makes me sick to see you mutilate it like that. I can’t watch,” and I got up and ran back to the swimming hole. “I don’t understand you!” Adrian shouted after me. “Why are you so bloody sensitive?” I ducked under the water. — We didn’t speak again until after lunch. “You’ve ruined it,” Adrian said, “with your fretting and worrying and hypersensitivity.” “OK, then drop me off in Paris and I’ll fly home from there.” “With pleasure.” “I could have told you that you’d get sick of me if I ever displayed any human feelings. What kind of plastic woman do you want, anyway?” “Don’t be daft. I just want you to grow up.” “As defined by you.” “As defined by both of us.” “Aren’t you democratic,” I said sarcastically. We began packing the car, banging tent poles and gear. It took about twenty minutes, during which we didn’t exchange a word. Finally we got in the car. “I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you that I cared enough about you to shake up my whole life for you.” “You didn’t do it for me,” he said. “I was just the excuse.” “I never would have been able to do it without feeling as strongly about you as I did.” And then with a shudder that went through my whole body, I remembered my longing for him in Vienna. The weakness in the knees. The churning guts. The racing heart. The shortness of breath. All the things he stirred in me which had made me follow him. I longed for him as he was when I first met him. The man he had become was disappointing. “The man under the bed can never be the man over the bed,” I said. “They’re mutually exclusive. Once the man comes up from under he’s no longer the man you desired.” “What the hell are you talking about?” “My theory of the zipless fuck,” I said.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The bitch finally married the pediatrician who took care of her kid—an American bloke.” “So why didn’t you go after her if you cared so much?” He looked at me as if I were crazy, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. “Go after her? Why?” (He burned rubber around a corner, taking another wrong turn.) “Because you loved her.” “I never used that word.” “But if you felt that way, why didn’t you go?” “My work is like keeping chickens,” he said. “Someone’s got to be there to shovel the shit and spread the corn.” “Bullshit,” I said. “Doctors always use their work as an excuse for not being human. I know that routine.” “Not bullshit, ducks, chickenshit.” “Not very funny,” I said, laughing. After May Pei there was a whole UN Assembly of girls from Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal. There was an African girl from Botswana and a couple of French psychoanalysts, and a French actress who’d “spent time in a bin.” “A what?” “A bin—you know, a madhouse. In a mental hospital, I mean.” Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics. “I knew you wanted something from me,” I said. “Right. It’s your index finger I want to use and your ever so opposable thumb.” “Up yours.” We cursed at each other constantly like ten year olds. Our only way of expressing affection. Adrian’s past history of women practically qualified him for membership in my family. Never fuck a kinswoman seemed to be his motto. His present girlfriend (now watching his kids, I learned) was the closest thing to a native bird he’d had: a Jewish girl from Dublin. “Molly Bloom?” I asked. “Who?” “You don’t know who Molly Bloom is???” I was incredulous. All those educated English syllables and he hasn’t even read Joyce. (I’ve skipped long sections of Ulysses too, but I go around telling people it’s my favorite book. Likewise Tristram Shandy.) “I’m illit-trate,” he said, pronouncing the last two syllables as if they rhymed. He was very pleased with himself. Another dumb doctor, I thought. Like most Americans, I naively assumed that an English accent meant education. Oh well, literary men often do turn out to be such bastards. Or else creeps. But I was disappointed. Like when my analyst had never heard of Sylvia Plath. There I was talking for days about her suicide and how I wanted to write great poetry and put my head in the oven. All the while he was probably thinking of frozen coffee cake. Believe it or not, Adrian’s girlfriend was Esther Bloom—not Molly Bloom. She was dark and buxom, and suffered, he said, “from all the Jewish worries. Very sensual and neurotic.”

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

  If we cannot measure emotions in the body and brain, they said, we’ll measure only what happens before and after: the events that bring on an emotion and the physical reactions that result. Never mind what’s happening inside that skull thing in the middle. Thus began the most notorious historical period in psychology, called behaviorism. Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating, collectively known as the “four F’s.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness” was crying, and “fear” was the act of freezing in place. And so, the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence. 3 5 Psychologists often recount stories of behaviorism in the same chilling tones as a ghost story around a campfire. It declared that thoughts, feelings, and the rest of the mind were unimportant to behavior or might not even exist. During this “dark ages” of emotion research, which lasted for several decades, nothing worthwhile was discovered on human emotion (supposedly). Ultimately, most scientists rejected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of us has a mind, and in every waking moment of life, we have thoughts and feelings and perceptions. These experiences, and their relation to behavior, must be explained in scientific terms. Psychology emerged from the darkness in the 1960s, according to the official history, as a cognitive revolution reinstated the mind as a topic of scientific inquiry, likening emotion essences to modules or organs in a mind that was thought to function like a computer. With this transformation, the final pieces of the modern classical view fell into place, and the two main flavors of the classical view—basic emotion theory and classical appraisal theories—were officially anointed. 3 6 That’s what the history books say . . . but history books are written by the victors. The official history of emotion research, from Darwin to James to behaviorism to salvation, is a byproduct of the classical view. In reality, the alleged dark ages included an outpouring of research demonstrating that emotion essences don’t exist. Yes, the same kind of counterevidence that we saw in chapter 1 was discovered seventy years earlier . . . and then forgotten. As a result, massive amounts of time and money are being wasted today in a redundant search for fingerprints of emotion. I discovered this quite by chance in 2006 while cleaning my office, when I stumbled across a couple of old papers from the 1930s when emotion research was allegedly dead. These papers did not embrace behaviorism.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Whereat Milo laughed again, and enquired of me of what stature this man of Assyria was, and what he wasnamed. “ In faith," quoth I, “ He is a tall man and somewhat black, and he is called Diophanes." Then said Milo: *'The same is he and no other, who likewise hath declared many things unto many of us, whereby he got and obtained no small profit, indeed much substance and treasure, but fell at length, poor wretch, into the hands of unpropitious fate, or I might say fate unfaithful. For being on a day amongst a great assembly of people, to tell the by- standers their fortune, a certain merchant called Cerdo came unto him, and desired him to tell when it should be best for him to take his voyage, the which when he had done, Cerdo had already opened his purse and already poured forth his money and counted out a hundred pence to pay him for the pains of his soothsaying ; whereupon came a certain young nobleman from behind and took Diophanes by the garment, and turned him about and embraced and kissed him close, and Diophanes kissed him again and desired him to sit down by him. And being astonished with this sudden chance, he forgot the present business that he was doing, and said: 69 LUCIUS APULEIUS infit ad eum ‘Quam olim equidem exoptatus nobis advenis?' Respondit ad haec ille alius, “Commodum vespera oriente: sed vicissim tu quoque, frater, mihi memora quemadmodum exinde ut de Euboea insula festinus enavigasti, et maris et viae confeceris iter.’ 14 Ad haec Diophanes ille Chaldaeus egregius, mente viduus necdum suus, ‘ Hostes' inquit ‘Et omnes inimici nostri tam diram immo vero Ulixeam pere- grinationem incidant. Nam et navis ipsa qua vehebamur, variis turbinibus procellarum quassata, utroque regimine amisso, aegre ad ulterioris ripae marginem detrusa praeceps demersa est, et nos omnibus amissis vix. enatavimus. Quodcunque vel ignotorum miseratione vel amicorum benivolentia. contraximus, id omne latrocinalis invasit manus, quorum audaciae repugnans. etiam Arignotus unicus frater meus sub istis oculis miser iugulatus est.’ Haec eo adhue narrante maesto Cerdo ille negotiator correptis nummulis suis, quos divinationis mercedi destinaverat, protinus aufugit. Ac dehinc tune demunt Diophanes expergitus seasit imprudentiae suae labem, cum etiam nos omnes circumsecus astantes in clarum cachinnum videret effusos. Sed tibi plane, Luci domine, soli omnium Chaldaeus ille vera dixerit, sisque felix et iter dexterum porrigas." 15. Haec Milone diutine sermocinante tacitus in- gemescebam, mihique non mediocriter suscensebam 70 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “The superego is soluble in alcohol,” says Adrian, becoming again the self-confident flirt he was in Vienna. “My superego is soluble in Europe,” I say. And we both laugh rather too loudly. “Let’s never go home,” I propose. “Let’s stay here forever and be delirious every day.” “The grape is the only true existentialist,” Adrian answers, holding me close. “Or the hops. Is it hops or hop? I’m never sure.” “Hops,” he says authoritatively, taking another belt of beer. “Hops,” I say, doing the same. We skip through Paris in a beery blur. We eat couscous for lunch and oysters for supper, and in between we drink innumerable beers and make innumerable stops to pee; we skip through the Jardin des Plantes and around the Pantheon and through the narrow streets near the Sorbonne. We skip through the Jardin du Luxembourg. Finally we rest on a bench near the Fontaine de l’Observatoire. We are happily stewed. We watch the great bronze horses rearing out of the fountain. I have that strange sense of invulnerability which alcohol gives and I feel that I am living in the midst of a romantic movie. I feel so relaxed and loose and giddy. New York is farther away than the moon. “Let’s find a hotel room and go to bed,” I say. Not a strong wave of lust, but just a friendly wish to consummate this romantic giddiness. We might try once more. Just one perfect fuck to remember him by. All our attempts have been somehow disappointing. It seems such a shame that we’ve been together all this time and have risked so much for so little. Or maybe that’s the whole point? “No,” says Adrian, “we haven’t time.” “What do you mean we haven’t time?” “I’ll have to set out tonight if I expect to get to Cherbourg tomorrow morning.” “Why do you have to get to Cherbourg tomorrow morning?” Something horrible is beginning to dawn through the alcoholic euphoria. “To meet Esther and the children.” “Are you kidding?” “No, I’m not kidding.” He looks at his watch. “They’ll be leaving London about now, I expect. We’re supposed to have a little holiday in Brittany.” I stare at him, calmly consulting his watch. The enormity of his betrayal leaves me speechless. Here I am—drunk, unwashed, not even knowing what day it is—and he’s keeping track of an appointment he made over a month ago. “You mean you’ve known this all along?” He nods. “And you let me think we were just being existentialists while you knew all along you had to meet Esther on a certain day?” “Well—have it your way. It wasn’t as evilly planned as you seem to think.” “Then what was it? How could you let me think we were both just wandering where the whim took us—when all along you had an appointment with Esther?” “It was your reshuffle, ducks, not mine. I never said I was going to reshuffle my life to keep you company.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘No, that’s the point – you should have assumed,’ insisted Kiki, lifting a little out of her seat. ‘It was just damn rude of me not to answer your lovely note . . . things have been a little complicated and . . .’ ‘I can understand that possibly your son feels – ’ ‘No, but that’s the stupid thing – he’s gone back to college anyway. Jerome – he decided to go back. There’s no reason at all why we can’t be friends now. I’d like to be. If you’d still like to,’ said Kiki, and felt ridiculous, like a schoolgirl. She was new to this. The friendship of other women hadn’t mattered to her in a long  the anatomy lesson time. She’d never needed to think about it, having married her best friend. Her hostess smiled impassively at her. ‘I’m sure I would.’ ‘Good! Life’s just too short for – ’ began Kiki. Carlene was already nodding. ‘I very much agree. Much too short. Clotilde!’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Not you, dear. Clotilde! ’ The girl who had answered the door to Kiki came into the room. ‘Clotilde, may we have some tea brought in please, and Mrs Belsey has a pie you can cut up. None for me, please – ’ Kiki protested, but Carlene shook her head. ‘No, I can’t digest a thing before three in the afternoon these days. I’ll try a piece later, but you go on ahead. Now. It’s so good to see you again. How are you?’ ‘Me? Fine . I’m fine. And you?’ ‘As it happens I’ve been in bed for quite a few days. I watched the television. A long documentary – a series of programmes – about Lincoln. Conspiracy theories regarding his death and so on.’ ‘Oh, I’m so sorry you’re feeling bad,’ said Kiki, looking away with shame at the thought of her own conspiracy theories. ‘Don’t be. It was a very good documentary. I find it’s not true what they say about American television – not all of it, anyway.’ ‘Why, what do they say about it?’ asked Kiki, smiling rigidly. She knew what was coming and she was annoyed by it, but also annoyed at herself for being annoyed. Carlene shrugged in a fragile way, not quite in control of the movement. ‘Well, in England we tend to think of it as awful nonsense, I suppose.’ ‘Right. We hear that a lot. I guess our TV’s not so great.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The lashes were extravagant. Howard wondered whether she was drunk. ‘I’ll report back,’ he said, and turned to go. He almost tripped over a lifted ridge in the rug, but his second step righted him. ‘Whoa, there.’ ‘Whoa . . . there,’ repeated Howard. ‘Tell them to calm themselves. It’s only hip-hop. It won’t kill them.’ ‘Right,’ said Howard. ‘Yet,’ he heard her say as he left the room. the anatomy lesson To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed . Elaine Scarry  Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different. Still living at home, still a virgin. And yet heading for her first day as a sophomore. Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in their loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn’t, she did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead. How successful this had been she couldn’t say. Now she stopped to examine herself in the window of Lorelie’s , a campy fifties hairdressers on the corner of Houghton and Maine. She tried to put herself in her peers’ shoes. She asked herself the extremely difficult question: What would I think of me? She had been gunning for something like ‘bohemian intellectual; fearless; graceful; brave and bold’. She was wearing a long boho skirt in a deep green, a white cotton blouse with an eccentric ruff at the neck, a thick brown suede belt of Kiki’s from the days when her mother could still wear belts, a pair of clumpy shoes and a kind of hat. What kind of hat? A man’s hat , of green felt, that looked like a fedora, a little, but was not one. This was not what she had meant when she left the house. This was not it at all.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fear of Flying is one of those inescapable books that defines a very particular time in history. It’s a kind of time capsule transporting us back to the era before Roe, a time that is particularly relevant right now. The early 1970s were a seismic moment for women; as Katy Waldman observed in Slate, Fear of Flying is “also about understanding womanhood circa 1973.” We don’t know what makes a book or movie or any piece of art a cultural flash point. We don’t know why some books capture a moment and other books disappear. I’ve written enough books that have disappeared to know how rare it is to write something that endures. A few pieces of art encapsulate the collective zeitgeist; most do not. There is incredible power in being able to capture the collective imagination, even for a moment, and Mom did that. But she was never able to do it again. Her seeking, her quest to get that moment back, was terribly painful and ultimately devoured her. My mom was thirty-three in 1973 when the book was published. She was an academic and a poet. She was a good student who, according to her, married the first person she ever slept with. I take this fact with a grain of salt as she was never a very reliable narrator. When Fear of Flying came out, she was married, teaching, and living on the middle-class Upper West Side, one of thousands of women just like her. All of a sudden, she was on the cover of magazines, the celebrated creator of a cultural phenomenon. Fear of Flying was a similar triumph around the globe, selling twenty million copies. It created Erica Jong. I used to think that being famous was seismic and important, because when my mother and my grandfather, the author Howard Fast, became less famous, when their fame slipped away as it almost always does, they were profoundly devastated by the experience. I watched them deeply mourn the loss of their immense cultural importance, yet I’m not sure being Erica Jong was much fun. I remember even as a child thinking, “This looks like it should be fun, but she seems miserable…”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Or maybe it was really Charlie: I was outraged by his betrayal, but I couldn’t wait to see him again. Charlie and I broke up soon after our reunion. It seems I could never forgive his ambivalence, though, in fact, I now see it was very like my own, and perhaps I should have been more understanding. Alessandro kept writing from Florence with talk of “divorzio,” but I had seen too many Italian movies to believe him. “Michelangelo” turned up once and looked so much worse in the polluted sunlight of New York that I hadn’t the heart to continue. The brown and amber shades of Florence had done wonders for him—as any E. M. Forster fan can readily understand. September and October were grim and dreary. I went out with a depressing assortment of divorcés, mama’s boys, neurotics, psychotics, and shrinks. I was only able to keep my spirits up by describing them all in bitchy detail in my letters to Pia. Then, in November, Bennett Wing waltzed into my life looking like the solution to all my problems. Silent as the Sphinx and very gentle. Savior and psychiatrist all in one. I fell into marriage the way (in Europe) I had fallen into bed. It looked like a soft bed; the nails were underneath. I FIFTEEN Travels with My Antihero I want! I want! —William Blake told Adrian everything. My whole hysterical history of searching for the impossible man and finding myself always right back where I started: inside my own head. I impersonated my sisters for him, my mother, my father, my grandparents, my husband, my friends.... We drove and talked and drove and talked. “What’s your prognosis?” I asked, ever the patient in search of the perfect doctor. “You’re due for a bit of a reshuffle, ducks,” Adrian kept saying. “You have to go down into yourself and salvage your own life.” Wasn’t I already doing that? What was this crazy itinerary if not a trip back into my past? “You haven’t gone deep enough yet,” he said. “You have to hit rock bottom and then climb back up.” “Jesus! I feel like I already have!” Adrian smirked his beautiful smirk with the pipe tucked between his curling pink lips. “You haven’t hit rock bottom yet,” he said, as if he knew some of the surprises in store. “Are you going to take me there?” I asked. “If you insist, love.” It was his magnificent indifference which infuriated me, turned me on, made me wild with frustration. Despite his cuddling and ass-grabbing, Adrian was so cool.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Jerome caught a shrimp from the side of it with his tongue. ‘Anyway . . . enough about the wedding already. In fa-aa-act,’  kipps and belsey said Warren, taking his phone from the pocket of his khaki shorts, ‘yep – it’s one fifteen – we’ve actually got to head off.’ ‘Keeks – it’s been so nice – but let’s do it indoors at a table soon, OK?’ She was clearly eager to get away; Kiki wished herself more compelling, more artistic or funny or smart, more able to retain the attention of a woman like Claire. ‘Claire,’ she said, but then could think of nothing interesting. ‘Is there anything Howard needs to know? He hasn’t been checking his mail – he’s trying to work on the Rembrandt; I don’t think he’s even spoken to Jack French yet.’ Claire looked baffled by this tediously practical turn to the conversation. ‘Oh – right, right . . . well, we have a cross-faculty meeting on Tuesday – we’ve got six new lecturers across the Humanities Faculty, including that celebrity asshole, you know the guy, I think, Monty Kipps – ’ ‘Monty Kipps?’ repeated Kiki, each word encased in the double ripple of a dead laugh. She felt shock shudder through Jerome, radiating out. Claire continued: ‘I know, really – he’s apparently going to have an office in the Black Studies Department – poor Erskine! It’s the only space they could find for him. I know . . . I don’t understand how many more crypto-fascist appointments this place is going to make, it’s actually pretty extraordinary at this point . . . it’s just . . . well, what can you say? The whole country’s going to hell.’ ‘Oh, god damn ,’ said Jerome beseechingly, turning around in a small circle, inviting sympathy from the people of Wellington. ‘Jerome, can we talk about this later – ’ ‘What the fuck . . .’ said Jerome more quietly, shaking his head in wonderment. ‘Monty Kipps and Howard . . .’ said Kiki evasively, and made an iffy motion with her hand. Claire, at last aware of a subtext of which she was not the sub, began to effect her exit. ‘Oh, Keeks, I really wouldn’t worry about it. I heard Howard did have a beef with him a while back, but  On Beauty Howard’s always having some fight or another.’ She smiled awkwardly at this understatement. ‘So . . . OK – well, come on – kisses – we gotta go. So lovely to see you guys.’

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

  Each construction is real, so questions of accuracy are unanswerable in a strictly objective sense. This is not a limitation of science: it is just the wrong question to be asking in the first place. There are no observer-independent measurements that can reliably and specifically adjudicate the matter. When you can’t find an objective criterion to compute accuracy and are left with consensus, this is a clue that you are dealing with social, not physical, reality. 1 7 This point is easily and frequently misunderstood, so let me be clear. I am not saying emotions are illusions. They are real, but socially real in the manner of flowers and weeds. I’m not saying that everything is relative. If that were true, civilization would fall apart. I am also not saying that emotions are “just in your head.” That phrase trivializes the power of social reality. Money, reputation, laws, government, friendship, and all of our most fervent beliefs are also “just” in human minds, but people live and die for them. They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers. … Imagine the feeling of reaching into a bag of potato chips and discovering that the previous chip you ate was the last one. You feel disappointed that the bag is empty, relieved that you won’t be ingesting any more calories, slightly guilty that you ate the entire bag, and yet hungry for another chip. I have just invented an emotion concept, and there is surely no word for it in the English language. And yet, as you read my prolonged description of this complex feeling, you most likely simulated the whole thing, right down to the crinkle of the bag and the cheerless little crumbs at the bottom. You experienced this emotion without a word for it. Your brain accomplished this feat by combining instances of concepts you already know, such as “Bag,” “Chips,” “Disappointment,” “Relief,” “Guilt,” and “Hunger.” This powerful ability of your brain’s conceptual system, which we called conceptual combination in chapter 5 , creates your very first instance of this new chip-related category of emotion, ready for simulation. Now if I name my new creation “Chiplessness” and teach it to our fellow citizens, it becomes every bit as real an emotion concept as “Happiness” and “Sadness.” People can predict with it, categorize with it, regulate their body budgets with it, and construct diverse instances of “Chiplessness” in different situations. This brings us to one of the most challenging ideas in this book: you need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  21My 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.” I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh, the cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel!) and said: “I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going to England.” “Why, what’s the matter?” she said, looking—with more surprise than I had counted upon—at my hands (I was involuntarily folding and tearing and crushing and tearing again the innocent pink napkin). My smiling face set her somewhat at ease, however.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Her account of her travails among these befuddled beauties, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations. The second of four daughters of a would-be paintress and a father who designed “ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets,” Isadora grew up in a fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. She heavy pets (let’s call it) at thirteen, remorsefully tries to starve herself at fourteen, embarks upon a series of psychiatrists (the first one is Dr. Schrift; he’s short, of course, and tells her, “Ackzept being a vohman”), enters Barnard at seventeen, meets the brilliant Brian Stollerman when she is a freshman, seduces him and terminates her virginity, marries him after graduation, endures his growing madness while she attends graduate school, commits and divorces him at twenty-two, takes up with an unwashed musical loser called Charlie Fielding, is betrayed by him, embarks upon a swinging tour of Europe with a girlfriend at the age of twenty-three, returns to New York, meets a silent thirty-one-year-old Chinese psychiatrist named Bennett Wing, marries him, and now, five years later, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1971, attends with her husband an international congress of psychologists in Vienna, where she meets, loves at first sight, and runs away with an English Laingian psychiatrist called (yes) Adrian Goodlove. This life history is scattered carefreely backward and forward throughout three hundred and forty pages that should be read, one sometimes suspects, in fifty-minute doses. A pattern and a person emerge, amid the wisecracks, postcards (“Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed.”), and reflections upon the hard and curious lot of Woman. Intellectual condescension, physical intimidation, deodorant-selling insinuation—women suffer them all. The case for marriage is nailed in a sentence: “Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better.” Motherhood is another distrusted institution: her own mother, a frustrated artist, is full of “misplaced artistic aggression,” and Isadora thinks sadly of young wives “making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why.” The smaller discomforts of femininity are vividly, comically detailed. The one female complaint not registered, surprisingly, is the one most conspicuous in seriously sexy male fiction, such as Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time.” However adverse her circumstances, Isadora Wing seems to have no trouble achieving sexual satisfaction. And maybe this is what makes her saga so uncranky, for all its intelligent pain, and lends its prose a spun-sugar halo of wonder and fun, and gives its conclusion the smug snap of a shopping expedition satisfactorily completed: “A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Gently he pressed Monty with Howard’s request. Once more, Monty refused to share the text of his lectures. ‘Well,’ conceded Jack, ‘given that clear determination on Professor Kipps’s part . . . but we do still have the right to vote on whether these lectures should take place at all. I know that wasn’t your original intention, Howard, but given the circumstances . . . We do have that power.’ ‘I have no objection to a democratic vote where there is right and power, which there is here,’ said Monty in stately mode. ‘It is clearly the members of this faculty who ultimately decide who shall or shall not be free to speak at their college.’ Howard, in response to this, could offer only a sulky nod. ‘All in favour – I mean, in favour of the lectures going ahead, without prior consultation.’ Jack put his glasses on to count the vote. There was no need. With the exception of Howard’s small pockets of support, all hands went up.  On Beauty Howard, dazed, made his way back to his chair. On the way, he was passed by his daughter, who had just entered the room. Zora squeezed his arm and grinned at him, presuming he had just acquitted himself as well as she was about to. She took a chair next to Liddy Cantalino. She held a pristine pile of paper in her lap. She looked powerful, lit from within by her own fearsome youth. ‘Now,’ said Jack, ‘one of our students, as you see, is with us – she is going to be talking to us about an issue she feels passionate about, as I understand it, and which Professor Kipps touched on earlier – our ‘‘discretionary’’ students, if we can put it that way . . . but before we get on to that, there’s some standard college business to be attended to . . .’ Jack reached out for a piece of paper that Liddy had already drawn from the pile and extended to him. ‘Thank you, Liddy. Publications! Always happy news. And publications next year will include Dr J. M. Wilson’s ‘‘ Windmills of My Mind ’’: Pursuing the Dream of Natural Energy , Branvain Press, which is due for publication in May; Dr Stefan Guilleme’s ‘‘ Paint It Black’’: Adventures in Minimalist America , Yale University Press, in October; Borders and Intersections, or Dancing with Anansi: A Study in Caribbean Mythemes by Professor Erskine Jegede, published by our own Wellington Press this August . . .’ Through this list of triumphant forthcoming publications Howard doodled his way through two sides of paper, waiting for the inevitable, now almost traditional reference to himself. ‘And we await . . . we await,’ said Jack wistfully, ‘Dr Howard Belsey’s Against Rembrandt: Interrogating a Master , which . . . which . . .’ ‘No date as yet,’ confirmed Howard.  At one thirty the doors were opened.