Disgust

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 Divine Comedy (1950)

  From this time forth the serpents were my friends; for one of them then coiled itself about his neck, as if saying: “Thou shalt speak no further!” and another about his arms; and it tied him again, riveting itself in front so firmly, that he could not give a jog with them. Ah, Pistoia! Pistoia! why dost thou not decree to turn thyself to ashes, that thou mayest endure no longer since thou outgoest thy seed2 in evil-doing? Through all the dark circles of Hell, I saw no spirit against God so proud, not even him who fell at Thebes down from the walls.3 He fled, speaking not another word; and I saw a Centaur, full of rage, come crying: “Where is, where is the surly one?” Maremma, I do believe, has not so many snakes as he had on his haunch, to where our human form begins. Over his shoulders, behind the head, a dragon lay with outstretched wings; and it sets on fire every one he meets. My Master said: “That is Cacus,4 who, beneath the rock of Mount Aventine, full often made a lake of blood. He goes not with his brethren on one same road, because of the cunning theft he made of the great herd that lay near him: whence his crooked actions ceased beneath the club of Hercules, who gave him perhaps a hundred blows with it; and he felt not the first ten.” Whilst he thus spake, the Centaur ran past, and also under us there came three spirits, whom neither I nor my Guide perceived, until they cried: “Who are ye?” Our story therefore paused and we then gave heed to them alone.5 I knew them not; but it happened, as usually it happens by some chance, that one had to name another, saying: “Where has Cianfa stopt?” Whereat I, in order that my Guide might stand attentive, placed my finger upwards from the chin to the nose. If thou art now, O Reader, slow to credit what I have to tell, it will be no wonder: for I who saw it, scarce allow it to myself. Whilst I kept gazing on them, lo! a serpent with six feet darts up in front of one, and fastens itself all upon him. With its middle feet it clasped his belly, with the anterior it seized his arms; then fixed its teeth in both his cheeks. The hinder feet it stretched along his thighs; and put its tail between the two, and bent it upwards on his loins behind. Ivy was never so rooted to a tree, as round the other’s limbs the hideous monster entwined its own; then they stuck together, as if they had been of heated wax, and mingled their colours; neither the one, nor the other, now seemed what it was at first: as up before the flame on paper, goes a brown colour which is not yet black, and the white dies away.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “You never know if she’s telling the truth or lying,” Natalie said with a nod toward Lulu. “You can’t believe anything she says. If she croaks I just hope she does it when I’m not around.” “I’ll remember that, Golden One.” “See this banana,” Natalie said to Miri, as she began to peel back the skin. “Don’t eat that in front of me or I’ll vomit,” Lulu said. “She can’t even look at food.” “I can if it’s a picture in a magazine. Just not the real stuff. Not the smelly stuff.” “I have to go outside to eat a banana,” Natalie said. “Banana!” she shouted, wagging it in front of Lulu. Lulu gagged and reached for her call button. A nurse came into the room. “What now, Lulu?” “She made me gag.” “I didn’t make her gag,” Natalie said. “I showed her the banana, that’s all.” Miri snuck a look at her watch. She wanted to get out of there in the worst way. “I think your mother is waiting for me,” she told Natalie. She picked up the gift-wrapped copy of Seventeenth Summer from the chair where she’d set it down earlier and handed it to Natalie. “I brought this for you.” “I hope it’s not chocolates.” “It’s a book.” “Let’s see,” Lulu said as Natalie tore the paper off Miri’s gift. “Seventeenth Summer...how sweet. Are you in love with her?” Lulu asked Miri. “Don’t answer that!” Natalie said. Then, quietly, she told Miri, “I already read it.” “I know,” Miri said. “We read it together. I just thought...I thought...” Lulu started singing, “Be my love...” “Shut up, Lulu!” Natalie said. “I’ve got to go,” Miri said. “Sure,” Natalie said. “I don’t blame you.” — “HOW DID SHE SEEM?” Corinne asked on the way home. “She was good.” “Argumentative? Angry?” Miri nodded. “A little.” “That’s better than depressed. She’s eating again. Not a lot. And only a few things. But that’s progress. Green grapes, iceberg lettuce and bananas. Like a chimpanzee.” Corinne gave a sharp laugh. “Oh, god—I don’t know why I said that. Please don’t mention that I said that, about the chimpanzee.” Miri wanted to say she liked chimpanzees, but she didn’t. Editorial REASON HAS ITS LIMITATIONS APRIL 14 — The inflamed mob action which has been taking place in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and elsewhere should point a major lesson to democratic western policy makers—the futility of placing too much faith in logic and reason when dealing with angry, impassioned peoples. Something similar can be seen even here in a few of the more violent and irrational proposals made to combat Newark Airport Expansion. 30

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It dawned on me (or rather sunset on me, for this recognition felt old, familiar, auburn) that Rachel loved me or would have had she met me at some more favorable moment in her life or mine, or had I been even a few years older. All these objections, and her proud fear of exposing her love to someone who might not welcome it, made her break off, sigh, fidget with her hair, strum the Duino Elegies and squint into already feeble sunlight further filtered by drawn curtains. That distant, scarcely audible whistle must belong to a coach on the playing fields half a mile away. Her chair creaked. Tim materialized, rubbing sleep and fever out of his eyes. He’d been kept home today with the flu. Without hesitation he climbed up onto my lap and butted his head dully, stubbornly against my chest, frustrated because he was sick. I sipped the hot coffee and smiled inwardly at the thought of this wife and this son I’d acquired, these phantom dependents. Sometimes I caught DeQuincey sneaking an unpleasant glance at me, but I knew he would never exile me or even antagonize me, for he needed me to placate his implacable wife. Once, only once, on a Saturday night we three drank two bottles of wine and we let the talk drift to sex. “Yeah,” DeQuincey said, “Rachel’s got her fantasies. She’d like—” “Shut up,” Rachel said without any particular emphasis. An incongruous smile flickered over her features. “Just shut up.” The smile suggested she was anticipating his next move, as a sitter lights up the moment before he is finally shown his portrait. “Yeah, Rachel wants two pricks, one in each hand.” I drew back inwardly at the terrible words and the smile that was leaking out of DeQuincey’s face like candlelight from a carved pumpkin. He had just given a haywire emphasis to the words two pricks that made me no longer think of him as a lovable, befuddled, overgrown preppy but rather as a man who had really had real mental breakdowns, whose imagination had festered. I looked for a reflection of my disgust in Rachel’s face, but she was grinning and staring at her accomplice, perhaps her impresario. There was an air about them of driven but thoroughly professional gamblers. He had just placed a roll of chips on a number. She more than matched him and pushed forward with both her small hands, slowly but firmly, all her remaining wealth. “Okay,” she said softly. Her terrible silent chuckle had begun. She spread her legs under the full skirt, planted her elbows on her knees and looked up at us. Her gaze was steady and provocative, although from time to time she had to steal a glance at the cue card to break the tension. “Oho!” DeQuincey shouted. Then he said in a stage whisper to me, “She thinks we’ll be the first to chicken out.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  not long bear to behold this horrible fact, I could not but attempt to utter my mind and say, “O masters," but I could pronounce no more but the first letter “ O,” which I roared out very clearly and valiantly and like an ass; but at a time inopportune, for some young men of the town, seeking for a stray ass that they had lost the same night, and searching diligently all the inns, heard my voice within the house; whereby they judged that I had been theirs, but concealed in a hidden place, and resolving to manage their own business, they entered altogether unawares, and found these persons committing their vile abomination. This when they saw they called all the neighbour- ing inhabitants and declared to them their unnatural villainy, mocking and laughing at this the pure and clean chastity of these priests. Then they, ashamed at the report which was dispersed throughout all the 'egion there of their beastly wickedness, so that they were justly hated and despised of all, about midnight brought together all their trumpery and departed away from the town. When we had passed a good part of our journey before the rising of the sun, and were now come into a wide desert in the broad day, they conspired much together to slay me. For after they had taken the goddess from my back and set her gingerly upon the ground, they likewise took off all my harness and bound me surely to an oak, and then beat me with that whip which was knotted with sheep’s bones, in such sort that they had well nigh killed me. Amongst them there was one that threatened to cut my hamstrings with his hatchet, because by my noise I had so famously hurt his pure chastity ; but the others, regarding more the image that lay upon the ground than my safety, thought best to spare my life ; and so they laded me again, 395 LUCIUS APULEIUS refertum sarcinis planis gladiis minantes perveniunt ad quandam nobilem civitatem. Inibi vir principalis et alias religiosus et eximie deam reverens, tinnitu cymbalorum et sonu tympanorum cantusque Phrygii mulcentibus modulis excitus, procurrit obviam, deam- que votivo suscipiens hospitio nos omnes intra' con- saeptum domus amplissimae constituit, numenque summa veneratione atque hostiis opimis placare con- tendit.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  8Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because she had divined something about me; it was just her style—and I fell for it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as naïve as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable. After a brief ceremony at the mairie, I took her to the new apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear, before I touched her, a girl’s plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the linen closet of an orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love, disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  No one talked much. There was little laughter, except when my stepmother was on the phone with one of her social friends. Although my father hated most people, he had wanted my stepmother to take her place in society, and she had. She’d become at once proper and frivolous, innocent and amusing, high-spirited and reserved—the combination of wacky girl and prim matron her world so admired. I learned my part less well. I feared the sons of her friends and made shadows among the debs. I played the piano without ever improving; to practice would have meant an acceptance of more delay, whereas I wanted instant success, the throb of plumed fans in the dark audience, the glare off diamonded necks and ears in the curve of loges. What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy. Before dressing I’d stand naked before the closet mirror and wonder if my body was worthy. I can still picture that pale skin stretched over ribs, the thin, hairless arms and sturdier legs, the puzzled, searching face—and the slow lapping of disgust and longing, disgust and longing. The disgust was hot, penetrating—nobody would want me because I was a sissy and had a mole between my shoulder blades. The longing was cooler, less substantial, more the spray off a wave than the wave itself. Perhaps the eyes were engaging, there was something about the smile. If not lovable as a boy, then maybe as a girl; I wrapped the towel into a turban on my head. Or perhaps need itself was charming, or could be. Maybe my need could make me as appealing as Alice, the woman who worked the Addressograph machine with me. I was always reading and often writing but both were passionately abstract activities. Early on, I had recognized that books pictured another life, one quite foreign to mine, in which people circled one another warily and with exquisite courtesy until an individual or a couple erupted and flew out of the salon, spangling the night with fire. I had somehow stumbled on Ibsen and that’s how he struck me: oblique social chatter followed by a heroic death in a snowslide or on the steeple of a church (I wondered how these scenes could be staged). Oddly enough, the “realism” of the last century seemed to me tinglingly farfetched: vows, betrayals, flights, fights, sacrifices, suicides.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Her camp five years ago. Curious coincidence—… took her to a dude ranch about a day’s drive from Elephant (Elphinstone). Named? Oh, some silly name—Duk Duk Ranch—you know just plain silly—but it did not matter now, anyway, because the place had vanished and disintegrated. Really, she meant, I could not imagine how utterly lush that ranch was, she meant it had everything but everything, even an indoor waterfall. Did I remember the redhaired guy we (“we” was good) had once had some tennis with? Well, the place really belonged to Red’s brother, but he had turned it over to Cue for the summer. When Cue and she came, the others had them actually go through a coronation ceremony and then—a terrific ducking, as when you cross the Equator. You know. Her eyes rolled in synthetic resignation. “Go on, please.” Well. The idea was he would take her in September to Hollywood and arrange a tryout for her, a bit part in the tennis-match scene of a movie picture based on a play of his—Golden Guts—and perhaps even have her double one of its sensational starlets on the Klieg-struck tennis court. Alas, it never came to that. “Where is the hog now?” He was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects. But it was all drink and drugs. And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch. She refused to take part because she loved him, and he threw her out. “What things?” “Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.” (Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start.) “What things exactly?” “Oh, things … Oh, I—really I”—she uttered the “I” as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down-moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her. That made sense. “It is of no importance now,” she said pounding a gray cushion with her fist and then lying back, belly up, on the divan. “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to [she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler] your beastly boys, because I want only you. Well, he kicked me out.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I nursed my beer. As soon as I looked up, a man at a nearby table caught my eye. He had that swaggering look which says, I know what you want, baby…. It was the same flirtatiousness that I had fallen for in Adrian, but now it sickened me. All I saw in it at this point was bullying and sadism. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps 90 percent of the men who displayed it were really concealing impotence. I didn’t care to test that hypothesis either. I furrowed my brows and looked down. Couldn’t he see I didn’t want anyone? Couldn’t he see I was tired and dirty and beat? Couldn’t he see I was clinging to my beer glass as if it were the Holy Grail? Why was it that whenever you refused a man, refused him sincerely and wholeheartedly, he persisted in believing you were being coquettish? I thought back to my days of having fantasies of men on trains. It’s true that I never did anything about these fantasies and wouldn’t have dared to. I wasn’t even brave enough to write about them until much later. But suppose I had approached one of these men, and suppose he had rejected me, looked away, shown disgust or revulsion. What then? I would have immediately taken the rejection to heart, believed myself in the wrong, blamed myself for being an evil woman, a whore, a slut, a disturber of the peace…. More to the point, I would have immediately blamed my own unattractiveness, not the man’s reluctance, and I would have been destroyed for days by his rejection of me. Yet a man assumes that a woman’s refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it’s no. When a woman says no, it’s yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves. Finally, after centuries of living under the shadow of such assumptions, they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds about anything. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology, hormones, premenstrual tension. Suddenly—with the leering eyes of that strange man on me—I knew what I had done wrong with Adrian and why he had left me. I had broken the basic rule. I had pursued him. Years of having fantasies about men and never acting on them—and then for the first time in my life, I live out a fantasy. I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a waterlogged noodle and refuses me.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways. The Armed Forces Radio Network blaring out the football scores and the (inflated) number of Viet Cong killed on the other side of the world. Children screaming. Twenty-five-year-old freckle-faced matrons from Kansas wandering about in housecoats and hair rollers, always awaiting that Cinderella evening for which it will be worthwhile to comb out their curls. It never comes. Instead come the salesmen who stalk the hallways, ringing doorbells, selling everything from mutual funds to picture encyclopedias (in simplified vocabulary) to Oriental rugs. Besides the American strays and British dropouts and Pakistani students selling “on the side,” there is a veritable Bundeswehr of gnomelike Germans, peddling everything from “handpainted” oils of sugared Alps under honeyed sunsets to beer steins which play “God Bless America” to Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks which chime perpetually. And the army people buy and buy and buy. The wives buy to fill up their empty lives, to create an illusion of home in their drab quarters, to spread the grease of American money around. The kids buy helmets and war toys and child-sized fatigues so that they can play their favorite games of VC’s versus Green Berets and prepare for their future. The husbands buy power tools to counteract their own sense of impotence. They all buy clocks as if to symbolize the way the army is ticking away their lives. Someone had started a rumor in Mark Twain Village that German clocks brought fortunes in “the land of the big PX,” so every captain or sergeant or first lieutenant made it his business to bring home at least thirty. They collected on his walls for two years, chiming and cuckooing at odd intervals, driving his wife and children as crazy as the army was driving him. And since the walls in those buildings were paper thin, even noncuckooing tenants (like us) heard a steady barrage of cuckoos all day long. When it wasn’t cuckoos next door, it was someone’s unmusical kid playing the unplayable “Star Spangled Banner” on the Hammond organ (paid for in easy monthly installments—it was the listening to it that was hard) or some chief warrant officer howling across the quadrangle for his kids (twin boys named Wayne and Dwayne—otherwise referred to as his “varmints”). When the cuckooing itself wasn’t infuriating me, the symbolism of the clocks amused me. Everyone in the army was always counting the days and minutes: eight more months before you rotate, three more months before your husband goes to Vietnam, two more years before you’re eligible for promotion, three more months before you can send for your wife and child…. The cuckoos recorded every minute of every hour in that long march toward oblivion.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘This stuff makes me want to die ,’ said Zora loudly and put both hands on the top of her head. ‘It’s so cheesy .’ ‘My vagina / In Carolina / Is much finer / Than yours,’ said Ron, walking close (Claire felt) to the racial line, with his exaggerated impression of the girl’s feisty head movements and sing-song intonation. But the class fell into hysterics, Zora leading the laughter and so, in a vital way, sanctioning it. Of course, thought Claire, they’re less sensitive about all that than we were. If it were  this room would be as silent as a church. Through the laughter and conversation, the ordering of drinks, the opening and closing of toilet doors, the girl kept going. After ten minutes the fact that the girl was not good stopped being amusing and began, as Claire heard her students put it, ‘getting old’. Even the most supportive members in the audience stopped nodding. Conversation grew louder. The MC, who sat on a stool by the side of the stage, switched his mike on to intervene; he begged them for quiet and attention and respect, this last word having some currency in the Bus Stop. But the girl was not good, and soon enough the chatter started up again. Finally, with the ominous promise ‘ And I WILL rise ’, the girl stopped. A spattering of applause came. ‘ Thank you, Queen Lara,’ said the MC, holding his mike very close to his lips like an ice-cream. ‘Now, I’m Doc Brown, your MC this eve’nin’, and I want to hear you make some noise for Queen Lara . . . Sister was brave to get up on this stage, takes some guts to do that, man . . . to stand up in front of everybody, talk about yo’womb and shit . . .’ Doc Brown allowed himself a chuckle here but then played the straight man once more: ‘Nah, on the real, tho, that takes some guts, sho’ nuf . . . right? Am I right? Oh, come on, man, put yo hands together, now. Don’t be like that. Let’s hear it for Queen Lara and her conscious lyrics – now that’s better .’ Claire’s class joined in the reluctant clapping. ‘Bring on the poetry!’ said Ron, meaning it as a joke, just for his friends, but he had pitched it too loud.  On Beauty ‘Bring on the poetry?’ repeated Doc Brown, wide-eyed, looking into the darkness for the mystery voice. ‘Shit, now how often you get to hear that? See, that’s why I love the Bus Stop. Bring on the poetry . I know that be a Wellington kid . . .’ Laughter detonated through the basement, loudest among Claire’s class itself. ‘ Bring on the poetry . We got some educated brothers in here tonight. Bring on the poetry. Bring on the trigonometry. Bring ON the algebra – bring that

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (Be Good to Your Stomach), and I hated the Germans for always thinking about their damned stomachs, their Gesundheit—as if they had invented health, hygiene, and hypochondria. I hated their fanatical obsession with the illusion of cleanliness. Illusion, mind you, because Germans are really not clean. The lacy white curtains, the quilts hanging out the windows to air, the housewives who scrub the sidewalks in front of their houses, and the storekeepers who scrub their front windows are all part of a carefully contrived facade to intimidate foreigners with Germany’s aggressive wholesomeness. But just go into any German toilet and you’ll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere. (I say this as a seasoned world traveler.) Then there’s the filthy rag of a public towel, hanging over a tiny wash basin which has only a cold water tap (for you to dribble cold water over your right hand—or whichever hand you happen to use). I did quite a lot of thinking about toilets when I lived in Europe. (That was how crazy Germany made me.) I once even attempted a classification of people on the basis of toilets. “The History of the World Through Toilets” (I optimistically wrote at the top of a clean page in my notebook) “an epic poem???” British: British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip). Often property of government. In the ultimate welfare state even the t.p. is printed with propaganda. The British toilet as the last refuge of colonialism. Water rushing overhead like Victoria Falls, & you an explorer. The spray in your face. For one brief moment (as you flush) Britannia rules the waves again. The pull chain is elegant. A bell cord in a stately home (open to the public, for pennies, on Sundays). German: German toilets observe class distinctions. In third-class carriages: rough brown paper. In first class: white paper. Called Spezial Krepp. (Requires no translation.) But the German toilet is unique for its little stage (all the world’s a) on which shit falls. This enables you to take a long look, choose among political candidates, and think of things to tell your analyst. Also good for diamond miners trying to smuggle out gems by bowel. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything. Italian:

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He’s referring to the kind of deathless trite prose long produced by women for women (e.g., the Harlequin romances, whose male authors adopt female pseudonyms to be “credible”). the writer’s ancient lust: H.H. sees himself in a line descending from the great Roman love poets, and he frequently imitates their locutions. The intonational stresses of “this Lolita, my Lolita” are borrowed from a donnish English translation of a Latin poem (see [PART ONE] c11.1, c15.1, [PART TWO] c01.1, c29.1, c29.2, c35.1). H.H.’s “ancient” models include Propertius (c. 50–16 B.C.) on Cynthia, Tibullus (c. 55–19 B.C.) on Delia, and Horace (65–8 B.C.) on any of the sixteen women to whom he wrote poems. See my Lolita. Our Glass Lake: a “mistake”; see Hourglass Lake ... spelled. “Little Carmen”: a pun: little [train]men, or “Dwarf Conductors” (see also Keys, p. 144n). The allusions to Carmen have nothing to do with Bizet’s opera. They refer only to the novella (1845) by Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870). For a pun on his name, see Merrymay, Pa.... my Carmen. Like H.H., José Lizzarrabengoa, Carmen’s abandoned and ill-fated lover (see José Lizzarrabengoa), tells his story from prison (but not until the third chapter, when the narrative frame is withdrawn). The story of love, loss, and revenge is appropriate. The Carmen allusions also serve as a trap for the sophisticated reader who is misled into believing that H.H., like José, will murder his treacherous Carmen; see here, where H.H. springs the trap. H.H. quotes Mérimée (Est-ce que ... Carmen, Changeons ... séparés, Carmen ... moi) and frequently calls Lolita “Carmen,” the traditional name of a bewitching woman ([PART ONE] c13.1, c13.2, c13.3, [PART TWO] c22.1, c22.2, c24.1, c29.1, c29.2). Carl R. Proffer discusses the Carmen allusions in Keys, pp. 43–51. In Latin, carmen means song, poetry, and charm. “My charmin’, my Carmen,” says H.H., thus demonstrating that he knows its etymology and original English meaning: the chanting of a verse having magic power; “to bewitch, enchant, subdue by magic power.” See not human, but nymphic. H.H. calls himself “an enchanted hunter,” takes Lolita to the hotel of that name, speaks of an “enchanted island of time”, and so forth. Nabokov told his lecture classes at Cornell that a great writer was at once a storyteller, a teacher, and, most supremely, an enchanter. See The Enchanted Hunters. I shot ... said: Ah.’: a prevision of Quilty’s death; see shooting her lover ... making him say “akh!” and a feminine. Pisky: “Pixie”; see Percy Elphinstone. The town is invented. Also means “moth” in rural England.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  18 trunca calvaria. Tune, decantatis spirantibus fibris, litat vario latice, nune rore fontano, nunc lacte vaccino, nune melle montano, libat et mulsa. | Sic illos capillos in mutuos nexus obditos atque nodatos cum multis odoribus dat vivis carbonibus adolendos : tune protinus inexpugnabili magicae disciplinae potestate et caeca numinum coactorum violentia illa corpora, quorum fumabant stridentes capilli, spiritum mutuantur humanum et sentiunt et audiunt et am- bulant, e& qua nidor suarum ducebat exuviarum veniunt et pro illo iuvene Boeotio aditum géestientes fores insiliunt ; cum ecce crapula madens et impro- vidae noctis deceptus caligine, audacter mucrone destricto in insani modum Aiacis armatus, non ut ille vivis pecoribus infestus tota laniavit armenta, sed longe fortius, quitres inflatos caprinos utres exanimasti, 126 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK III the hair of the Boeotian: and I took a good deal thereof, and dissembling the truth I brought it te my mistress. * And so when night came, before your return from supper, Pamphile my mistress, being now out of her wits, went up toa high gallery of her house, blown upon by all the winds of heaven, opening to the east and all other parts of the world; well prepared for these her practices, she gathered together all her aecustomed substance for fumigations, she brought forth plates of metal carved with strange characters, she prepared the bones of birds of ill-omen, she made ready the members of dead men brought from their tombs. Here she set out their nostrils and fingers, there the nails with lumps of flesh of such as were hanged, the blood which she had reserved of such as were slain, and skulls snatched away from the jaws and teeth of wild beasts. Then she said certain charms over entrails still warm and breathing, and dipped them in divers waters, as in well water, cow milk, mountain honey and mead; which when she had done she tied and lapped up the hair together, and with many perfumes and smells threw it into a hot fire to burn. Then by the strong force of this sorcery, and the invisible violence of the gods so compelled, those bodies, whose hair was burning in the fire, received human breath, and felt, heard, and walked, and, smelling the scent of their own hair, came and rapped at our doors instead of the Boeotian. Then came you being well tippled, and deceived by the obscurity of the night, and drew out your sword courageously, like furious Ajax, and killed, not as he- did whole herds of living beasts, but three blown skins, a deed more brave than his, to the intent that L, after the slaughter of so many enemies without 121 LUCIUS APULEIUS ut ego te prostratis hostibus sine macula sanguinis non homicidam nunc sed utricidam amplecterer.” 19 Et sic lepido sermone Fotis, at invicem cavillatus 20

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It dawned on me (or rather sunset on me, for this recognition felt old, familiar, auburn) that Rachel loved me or would have had she met me at some more favorable moment in her life or mine, or had I been even a few years older. All these objections, and her proud fear of exposing her love to someone who might not welcome it, made her break off, sigh, fidget with her hair, strum the Duino Elegies and squint into already feeble sunlight further filtered by drawn curtains. That distant, scarcely audible whistle must belong to a coach on the playing fields half a mile away. Her chair creaked. Tim materialized, rubbing sleep and fever out of his eyes. He’d been kept home today with the flu. Without hesitation he climbed up onto my lap and butted his head dully, stubbornly against my chest, frustrated because he was sick. I sipped the hot coffee and smiled inwardly at the thought of this wife and this son I’d acquired, these phantom dependents. Sometimes I caught DeQuincey sneaking an unpleasant glance at me, but I knew he would never exile me or even antagonize me, for he needed me to placate his implacable wife. Once, only once, on a Saturday night we three drank two bottles of wine and we let the talk drift to sex. “Yeah,” DeQuincey said, “Rachel’s got her fantasies. She’d like—” “Shut up,” Rachel said without any particular emphasis. An incongruous smile flickered over her features. “Just shut up.” The smile suggested she was anticipating his next move, as a sitter lights up the moment before he is finally shown his portrait. “Yeah, Rachel wants two pricks, one in each hand.” I drew back inwardly at the terrible words and the smile that was leaking out of DeQuincey’s face like candlelight from a carved pumpkin. He had just given a haywire emphasis to the words two pricks that made me no longer think of him as a lovable, befuddled, overgrown preppy but rather as a man who had really had real mental breakdowns, whose imagination had festered. I looked for a reflection of my disgust in Rachel’s face, but she was grinning and staring at her accomplice, perhaps her impresario. There was an air about them of driven but thoroughly professional gamblers. He had just placed a roll of chips on a number. She more than matched him and pushed forward with both her small hands, slowly but firmly, all her remaining wealth. “Okay,” she said softly. Her terrible silent chuckle had begun. She spread her legs under the full skirt, planted her elbows on her knees and looked up at us. Her gaze was steady and provocative, although from time to time she had to steal a glance at the cue card to break the tension. “Oho!” DeQuincey shouted. Then he said in a stage whisper to me, “She thinks we’ll be the first to chicken out.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Wherefore I to my Guide: “See that thou find someone who may by deed or name be known; and move thy eyes around as we go on.” And one, who understood the Tuscan speech, cried after us: “Stay your feet, ye who run so fast through the brown air; perhaps thou shalt obtain from me that which thou askest.” Whereat my Guide turned round and said: “Wait, and then at his pace proceed.” I stood still, and saw two, showing by their look great haste of mind to be with me; but the load and the narrow way retarded them. When they came up, long with eye askance they viewed me, without uttering a word; then they turned to one another, and said between them: “This one seems alive by the action of his throat; and if they are dead, by what privilege go they divested of the heavy stole?” Then they said to me: “O Tuscan, that are come to the college of the sad hypocrites! to tell us who thou art disdain not.” And I to them: “On Arno’s beauteous river, in the great city I was born and grew and I am with the body that I have always had. But you, who are ye from whom distils such sorrow as I see, down your cheeks? and what punishment is on ye that glitters so?” And one of them replied to me: “Our orange mantles are of lead so thick, that the weights thus cause their scales to creak. We were Jovial Friars, and Bolognese: I named Catalano, and Loderingo he; and by thy city chosen together,3 as usually one solitary man is chosen, to maintain its peace; and we were such, that it yet appears round the Gardingo.” I began: “O Friars, your evil”—but said no more, for to my eyes came one, cross-fixed in the ground with three stakes. When he saw me, he writhed all over, blowing into his beard with sighs; and Friar Catalano, who perceived this, said to me: “That confixed one, on whom thou gazest, counselled the Pharisees that it was expedient to put one man to tortures for the people.4 Traverse and naked he is upon the road, as thou seest; and his to feel the weight of every one that passes; And after the like fashion his father-in-law is racked in this ditch, and the others of that Council, which was a seed of evil for the Jews.” Then I saw Virgil wonder over him that was distended on the cross so ignominiously in the external exile. Afterwards he to the Friar addressed these words: “Let it not displease you, so it be lawful for you, to tell us if on the right hand lies any gap by which we both may go out hence, without constraining any of the Black Angels to come and extricate us from this bottom.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Thereupon my Guide said to me: “Stretch thy face a little forwards, that thy eyes may fully reach the visage of that unclean and dishevelled strumpet, who yonder with her filthy nails scratches herself, now cowering low, now standing on her feet. It is Thais, the harlot, who answered her paramour, when he said: ‘Dost thou thank me much?’ ‘Nay, wondrously.’7 And herewith let our view rest sated.” 1. Literally, Evil Pouches.2. See Canto xxxii.3. The first Jubilee of the Roman Church was instituted by Boniface VIII in the year 1300. The bridge is that of Castello Sant’ Angelo, so called from the castle that stood at one end of it, while the mount is either Mount Janiculum, or, more probably, the Monte Giordano.4. Venedico de’ Caccianemici, whose father, Alberto, was head or the Guelfs of Bologna. In politics he adhered to the family tradition and was a follower of the Marquis of Este, being finally exiled from his native city (1289). His sister’s seducer was either Obizzo II or Azzo VIII of Este (see Canto xii, note 12); probably the former, as Ghisola eventually married a certain Niccolò da Fontana in 1270, and Azzo did not succeed to the Marquisate till 1293. Dante alludes to the fact that several versions of the story had got abroad, according to one of which Venedico was innocent. There are two local touches in this passage. The word pickle is evidently selected with reference to the Salse, a ravine near Bologna into which the bodies of criminals were thrown; and sipa = sia is the Bolognese equivalent for the affirmative particle sì. The Savena flows two miles to the west, and the Reno two miles to the east of Bologna.

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

  This cultural difference is due to concepts. 7 Every moment that you are alive, your brain uses concepts to simulate the outside world. Without concepts, you are experientially blind, as you were with the blobby bee. With concepts, your brain simulates so invisibly and automatically that vision, hearing, and your other senses seem like reflexes rather than constructions. Now consider this: what if your brain uses this same process to make meaning of the sensations from inside your body —the commotion arising from your heartbeat, breathing, and other internal movements? From your brain’s perspective, your body is just another source of sensory input. Sensations from your heart and lungs, your metabolism, your changing temperature, and so on, are like the ambiguous blobs of figure 2-1 . These purely physical sensations inside your body have no objective psychological meaning. Once your concepts enter the picture, however, those sensations may take on additional meaning. If you feel an ache in your stomach while sitting at the dinner table, you might experience it as hunger. If flu season is just around the corner, you might experience that same ache as nausea. If you are a judge in a courtroom, you might experience the ache as a gut feeling that the defendant cannot be trusted. In a given moment, in a given context, your brain uses concepts to give meaning to internal sensations as well as to external sensations from the world, all simultaneously. From an aching stomach, your brain constructs an instance of hunger, nausea, or mistrust. 8 Now consider that same stomachache if you’re sniffing a diaper heavy with pureed lamb, as my daughter’s friends did at her gross foods birthday party. You might experience the ache as disgust. Or if your lover has just walked into the room, you might experience the ache as a pang of longing. If you’re in a doctor’s office waiting for the results of a medical test, you might experience that same ache as an anxious feeling. In these cases of disgust, longing, and anxiety, the concept active in your brain is an emotion concept. As before, your brain makes meaning from your aching stomach, together with the sensations from the world around you, by constructing an instance of that concept. An instance of emotion. And that just might be how emotions are made. … Back when I was in graduate school, a guy in my psychology program asked me out on a date. I didn’t know him very well and was reluctant to go because, honestly, I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, but I had been cooped up too long in the lab that day, so I agreed. As we sat together in a coffee shop, to my surprise, I felt my face flush several times as we spoke.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And presently I got the whole story. Barbara Burke, a sturdy blond, two years older than Lo and by far the camp’s best swimmer, had a very special canoe which she shared with Lo “because I was the only other girl who could make Willow Island” (some swimming test, I imagine). Through July, every morning— mark, reader, every blessed morning—Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the boat to Onyx or Eryx (two small lakes in the wood) by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress’ son, aged thirteen—and the only human male for a couple of miles around (excepting an old meek stone-deaf handyman, and a farmer in an old Ford who sometimes sold the campers eggs as farmers will); every morning, oh my reader, the three children would take a short cut through the beautiful innocent forest brimming with all the emblems of youth, dew, birdsongs, and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel, while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush. At first, Lo had refused “to try what it was like,” but curiosity and camaraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing it by turns with the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie, who had as much sex appeal as a raw carrot but sported a fascinating collection of contraceptives which he used to fish out of a third nearby lake, a considerably larger and more populous one, called Lake Climax, after the booming young factory town of that name. Although conceding it was “sort of fun” and “fine for the complexion,” Lolita, I am glad to say, held Charlie’s mind and manners in the greatest contempt. Nor had her temperament been roused by that filthy fiend. In fact, I think he had rather stunned it, despite the “fun.” By that time it was close to ten. With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples. Brown, naked, frail Lo, her narrow white buttocks to me, her sulky face to a door mirror, stood, arms akimbo, feet (in new slippers with pussy-fur tops) wide apart, and through a forehanging lock tritely mugged at herself in the glass. From the corridor came the cooing voices of colored maids at work, and presently there was a mild attempt to open the door of our room. I had Lo go to the bathroom and take a much-needed soap shower.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Stacks and stacks of Cosmo and Marie Claire and Us Weekly. The only movement in the living room was the swirling screensaver on Reva’s enormous Dell, which sat on a little side table in the corner and was mostly obscured by a drying rack weighed down with Ann Taylor sweater sets and Banana Republic dress shirts, matching bras and panties. A half dozen discolored white sports bras. Pairs and pairs of flesh-colored nylons. “Reva!” I called out, kicking through a pile of brightly colored sneakers in the living room. In the kitchen, a dried-out sheet cake with finger gouges in it sat on the counter next to a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and sugar-free maple syrup. There were stacks of dirty dishes in the sink. A small trash can overflowed with junk-food packaging and apple cores. Half a toaster waffle smeared with peanut butter, a murky bag of baby carrots. Crushed cans of Diet 7UP filled a cardboard box next to the trash can. Diet 7UP cans everywhere. A glass of orange juice with fruit flies floating on the surface. Her cabinets contained exactly what I’d expected. Herbal laxative teas, Metamucil, Sweet’N Low, stacks of canned Healthy Choice soups, stacks of canned tuna. Tostitos. Goldfish crackers. Reduced fat Skippy. Sugar-free jelly. Sugar-free Hershey’s Syrup. Rice crackers. Low-fat microwave popcorn. Box after box of yellow cake mix. When I opened the freezer, smoke billowed out. The thick frosted inside was crowded with fat-free frozen yogurt. Sugar-free Popsicles. A cloudy bottle of Belvedere. Déjà vu. Reva’s new favorite cocktail, she’d told me—had I been on Infermiterol?— was low-calorie Gatorade and vodka. “You could drink this all day and never get dehydrated.” “Reva, if you’re hiding from me, I will find you,” I called out. Her bedroom was hardly any bigger than her king-size mattress, which she’d told me she’d inherited from her parents when her mother got sick “and so they got two doubles because my dad couldn’t sleep at night with all her fidgeting.” Green numbers on a digital alarm clock glowed between cans of Diet 7UP on the bedside table. It was 4:37. I smelled peanut butter and again, the bitter tang of vomit. The comforter was Laura Ashley, folded back from the bed. Food stains on the sheets. I looked under the bed, found only shoes, more magazines, empty little yogurt containers, paper bags from Burger King punched flat like deflated footballs. In the drawer of her bedside table, a purple vibrator, a diary with a waxy green cover, a purple eye mask, a pack of cherry Lifesavers, a Polaroid of her mother wearing a Tigger costume, smiling shyly, her eyes caught midblink, sitting on that plastic-covered sofa in Farmingdale, a five-year-old Reva dressed as a tiny Winnie-the-Pooh on her knee, Reva’s mother’s hand cradling her fuzzy yellow potbelly. I picked up the diary and looked inside. It was just a daily log of numbers, mathematical sums and subtractions, the final results

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

  2 For my daughter’s twelfth birthday, we exploited the power of simulation (and had some fun) by throwing a “gross foods” party. When her guests arrived, we served them pizza doctored with green food coloring so the cheese looked like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomit. For drinks, we served white grape juice in medical urine sample cups. Everybody was exuberantly disgusted (it was perfect twelve-year- old humor), and several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells. The pièce de résistance, however, was the party game we played after lunch: a simple contest to identify foods by their smell. We used mashed baby food—peaches, spinach, beef, and so on—and artfully smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poo. Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged from the simulated smell. 3 Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest. The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Forward-looking thinkers speculate that simulation is a common mechanism not only for perception but also for understanding language, feeling empathy, remembering, imagining, dreaming, and many other psychological phenomena. Our common sense might declare that thinking, perceiving, and dreaming are different mental events (at least to those of us in Western cultures), yet one general process describes them all. Simulation is the default mode for all mental activity. It also holds a key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain creates emotions. 4 Outside your brain, simulation can cause tangible changes in your body. Let’s try a little creative simulation with our bee. In your mind’s eye, see the bee bouncing lightly on the petal of a fragrant white flower, buzzing around as it searches for pollen.