Excitement

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 Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Liz usually won the Lying Game, too, but as with Chew-and-Spew, it didn't matter who won. What was fun was playing the game. That night I was excited because I had what I thought was an unbelievable stumper: A frog's eyeballs go into its mouth when it's swallowing; or a frog's blood is green. "That's easy," Liz said. "Green blood is the lie." "I can't believe you guessed it right away!" "We dissected frogs in biology." I was still talking about how hilarious and bizarre it was that a frog used its eyeballs to swallow when Mom walked through the door carrying a white box tied with red string. "Key lime pie for my girls!" she announced, holding up the box. Her face was glowing and she had a giddy smile. "It's a special occasion, because our lives are about to change." As Mom cut the pie and passed the slices around, she told us that while she'd been at that recording studio, she'd met a man. He was a record producer named Mark Parker, and he'd told her that the reason she wasn't landing gigs as a backup singer was that her voice was too distinctive and she was upstaging the lead singers. "Mark said I wasn't cut out to play second fiddle to anyone," Mom explained. He told her she had star quality, and that night he took her out to dinner and they talked about how to jump-start her career. "He's so smart and funny," Mom said. "You girls will adore him." "Is he serious, or is he just a tire-kicker?" I asked. "Watch it, Bean," Mom said • • • Bean's not my real name, of course, but that's what everyone calls me. Bean. It wasn't my idea. When I was born, Mom named me Jean, but the first time Liz laid eyes on me, she called me Jean the Bean because I was teeny like a bean and because it rhymed—Liz was always rhyming—and then simply Bean because it was shorter. But sometimes she would go and make it longer, calling me the Beaner or Bean Head, maybe Clean Bean when I'd taken a bath, Lean Bean because I was so skinny, Queen Bean just to make me feel good, or Mean Bean if I was in a bad mood. Once, when I got food poisoning after eating a bowl of bad chili, she called me Green Bean, and then later, when I was hugging the toilet and feeling even worse, she called me Greener Beaner. Liz couldn't resist playing with words. That was why she loved the name of our new town, Lost Lake. "Let's go look for it," she'd say, or "I wonder who lost it," or "Maybe the lake should ask for directions."

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In 320, a heated debate about these issues erupted in Alexandria. It seems to have started with an argument about the meaning of Wisdom’s words in the book of Proverbs, which Christians had always applied to Christ—”Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works”6—and went on to say that Wisdom had been God’s “master craftsman,” his agent of creation. Arius, a handsome and charismatic young presbyter of Alexandria, argued that this text made it clear that the Word and Wisdom of the Father was the first and most privileged of God’s creatures. It followed that the Word must also have been created ex nihilo. Arius did not deny that Jesus was God, but suggested that he had merely been promoted to divine status. God had foreseen that when the Logos became a man, he would behave with perfect obedience, and as a reward had raised him to divine status in advance of his mission. The Logos thus became the prototype of the perfected human being; if Christians imitated his wholehearted kenosis, they too could become “sons of God;” they too could become divine.7 Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that Arius had put his finger on an ambiguity in the Alexandrian view of Christ that needed to be cleared up.8 The debate was not confined to a coterie of learned experts. Arius set his ideas to music, and it was not long before sailors and travelers were singing popular songs proclaiming that the Father was God by nature and had given life and being to the Son, who was neither coeternal with him nor uncreated. Soon the controversy had spread to the churches of Asia Minor and Syria. We hear of a bath attendant who engaged the bathers in heated discussion about whether the Son had come from nothingness; a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, held forth on the distinction between the Creator and his creation; and a baker who argued with his customers that the Father was greater than the Son.9 People were discussing the question with the same enthusiasm and passion as they discuss football today, because it touched the heart of their Christian experience. In the past, the creeds and explanations of the faith had often been changed to meet pastoral needs.10 The Arian crisis showed that they would probably have to be changed yet again.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  That’s the way it always is. Seeley gets pinned. Schmooz beats Terry Muzzy, who beat him for the district championship last year. Williamson is doing okay in the first round as I walk behind the bench to get warm. I glance over and see Gary get up, too. It seems like the crowd cheers every step I take, every whack of my rope against the warm-up mat. Evergreen cheers Gary just as crazily. I reverse the rope a time or two and our fans yell and stomp as though I were scoring points. Some Evergreen fans jeer and call me a hot dog. I do a few pushups and stretch my groin. Bridging from my back to my neck, I see a Channel 4 camera guy shooting videotape of me. He shoots me while I look upside down. He’s balding and he reminds me of Lemon Pie. And Lemon Pie reminds me that in about seven minutes my life will be back to normal. I’ll study during the day and work at night. I’ll develop a new routine and maybe make some new friends and enlarge my world a little. Williamson lets his man escape just at the buzzer and loses by a point. “Shit to the thirteenth, man!” shouts Balldozer as I walk out to the mats. “Banzai, man! Banzai!” yells the Big Konig. “May you live a thousand years!” I hear everything, as I always do. Kuch yelps and yips and screams, “Munch ’im up, Swain! Munch ’im up!” “It’s dinnertime!” yells Otto. “Eat ’im, eat ’im, eat ’im, eat ’im!” All the guys chime in. From the bleachers Leeland and Joretta and Sharon and Rosalie wave clenched fists. Tanneran screams unintelligibly. Dad claps and Cindy chants, “WIN . . . WIN . . .” along with the cheerleaders. Mom looks worried. Arney claps along with the chant. Carla smiles and shines and doesn’t make a sound. I’m calm as I enter the circle. Behind me trails a brief tradition. It’s made up, but it’s mine. Win or lose, the river flows again. Shute and I cross and shake hands. The whistle blows. Through me flows the power to blast Grand Coulee Dam to smithereens. TERRY DAVIS is an American novelist who lives near Spokane, Washington, and is a professor emeritus of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he taught creative writing (fiction and screenwriting), as well as adolescent literature.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  A Personal PilgrimageWhen I first encountered the ideas of Yakovlev, I registered the truth of his hypothesis viscerally. My gut rumbled in recognition; my emotions soared in excitement. And intellectually, I yearned to digest and savor the exquisite essence of this man’s genius.† I wanted to devour him alive—that is, if he was still alive. It took several days of persistent phone calls to locate him. He was indeed alive and well. This coming-of-age odyssey mutated to locating and meeting with some of my other key intellectual heroes. After finally receiving my doctorate from University of California–Berkeley in 1977, I sent copies of my thesis on stress to several scientists who were my intellectual mentors. This list included Nikolaas Tinbergen, Raymond Dart, Carl Richter, Hans Selye, Ernst Gellhorn, Paul MacLean and Yakovlev himself. I was on my way … Yakovlev’s lab was in the basement of a dark cavernous building belonging (I believe) to the National Institutes of Health. I proceeded toward the door described to me by the receptionist. It was ever so slightly ajar. As I poked my head in, I was startled by the panoramic vision of shelf after shelf filled with bottles of pickled brains. An impish figure called out, motioning me to his desk. This octogenarian of small stature had a quiet and gentle presence belying his truly expansive character. With twinkling blue eyes and genuine enthusiasm, Yakovlev warmly invited me to sit down. He proceeded to ask me about my interests and was curious why I might have chosen to come so far to visit him. When I told him about my interest in instincts and about my ideas concerning mind-body healing, stress and self-regulation, he jumped up, grabbed my arm excitedly and took me from jar to jar sharing with me his vast variety of specimens, demonstrating the basic anatomical building blocks of the brain. From there he led me back to his desk and microscope; together we looked at slides of minutely thin slices of brain tissue. He narrated this viewing, waxing lyrical in his elaborate reasoning, as I imagined Darwin might have done in his laboratory a mere hundred or so years earlier. For me, the thrill was so intense that I felt as though I could not contain my pressing urge to jump up and shout, “Yes!” I knew that I was on the right track, that we truly are, to the last of our neurons, just a bunch of animals—and that’s really not so bad. At one o’clock, after sharing an egg salad sandwich, Yakovlev drew me an intricate map to guide me to my next appointment, which was about forty miles into the Maryland countryside. He did this task in anatomical detail, meticulously employing a set of brightly colored pencils and dissecting, with exacting precision, the best route and its distinguishing landmarks. He offered that if I had time at the end of the day, I was welcome to return by the same route.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Truth be told, a happy accident pressed me to see love in a whole new light. I was minding my own business as an emotions scientist about eight years back, testing hypotheses drawn from my broaden-and-build theory. My main goal at the time was to find a way to probe the long-range effects of accumulated positive emotions. Would they build people’s resources and transform their lives for the better as the theory predicted? To support definitive claims about cause and effect, I needed an experiment, complete with randomization and rigorous measures. I needed to compare one group of people who increased their daily diets of positive emotions to another group that didn’t. The vexing question was how? How can people reliably and sustainably increase their daily intake of positive emotions? The methods that I and other scientists had used in the lab to test the short-range effects of positive emotions—the music, the film clips, the cartoons, the unexpected gifts of candy—wouldn’t do. They fall flat and lose their charge with repetition. That’s because we humans adapt: Even the most potent emotion-eliciting stimulus fades into the background like wallpaper with repeated exposure. After a few failed attempts to develop a viable intervention, I found myself in a yearlong interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine. Here is where I was first introduced to the ancient mind-training practice called metta in Pali, maître in Sanskrit, often translated as loving-kindness, or simply kindness. In Buddhist teachings, loving-kindness is considered one of the four noblest modes of consciousness—the crown jewel, in some traditions. A lightbulb went off for me: This ancient practice, honed over millennia, could help me test my theory. Perhaps training in loving-kindness was the intervention I’d been seeking. Over the next year, my students and I designed a rigorous and randomized experiment to test the effects of learning to self-generate positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation. My test pilots were reasonably healthy working adults with no particular spiritual orientation. The results were abundantly clear. When people, completely new to meditation, learned to quiet their minds and expand their capacity for love and kindness, they transformed themselves from the inside out. They experienced more love, more engagement, more serenity, more joy, more amusement—more of every positive emotion we measured. And though they typically meditated alone, their biggest boosts in positive emotions came when interacting with others, off the cushion, as it were. Their lives spiraled upward. The kindheartedness they learned to stoke during their meditation practice warmed their connections with others. Later experiments would confirm that it was these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier. We also came to discover that other interventions to foster connection—ones that didn’t require learning to meditate—could increase people’s experiences of love and likewise improve their health. I share all of these change strategies with you in part II.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “It’s not late, it’s early. Come on—up you go. We’re going out. I’ll take a rain check on the sex.” “I was having such a nice dream,” I whine. “Dream about what?” he asks patiently. “You.” I blush. “What was I doing this time?” “Trying to feed me strawberries.” His lips twitch with a trace of a smile. “Dr. Flynn could have a field day with that. Up—get dressed. Don’t bother to shower; we can do that later.” We! I sit up, and the sheet pools at my waist, revealing my body. He stands to give me room, his eyes dark. “What time is it?” “Five thirty in the morning.” “Feels like three a.m.” “We don’t have much time. I let you sleep as long as possible. Come.” “Can’t I have a shower?” He sighs. “If you have a shower, I’ll want one with you, and you and I know what will happen then—the day will just go. Come.” He’s excited. Like a small boy, he’s iridescent with anticipation and excitement. It makes me smile. “What are we doing?” “It’s a surprise. I told you.” I can’t help but grin up at him. “Okay.” I clamber off the bed and search for my clothes. Of course they are neatly folded on the chair beside my bed. He’s laid out a pair of his jersey boxer briefs, too—Ralph Lauren, no less. I slip them on, and he grins at me. Hmm, another piece of Christian Grey’s underwear, a trophy to add to my collection—along with the car, the BlackBerry, the Mac, his black jacket, and a set of valuable old first editions. I shake my head at his largesse, and I frown as a scene from Tess crosses my mind: the strawberry scene. It evokes my dream. To hell with Dr. Flynn—Freud would have a field day, and then he’d probably die trying to deal with Fifty Shades. “I’ll give you some room now that you’re up.” Christian exits toward the living area, and I wander into the bathroom. I have needs to attend to, and I want a quick wash. Seven minutes later, I am in the living area, scrubbed, brushed, and dressed in jeans, my camisole, and Christian Grey’s underwear. Christian glances up from the small dining table where he’s eating breakfast. Breakfast! At this time! “Eat,” he says. Holy crap…my dream. I gape at him, thinking about his tongue touching his palate. Hmm, his expert tongue. “Anastasia,” he says sternly, pulling me out of my reverie. It really is too early for me. How to handle this? “I’ll have some tea. Can I take a croissant for later?” He eyes me suspiciously, and I smile very sweetly. “Don’t rain on my parade, Anastasia,” he warns softly. “I will eat later when my stomach’s woken up. About seven thirty a.m…okay?” “Okay.” Honestly. I have to concentrate hard on not making a face at him. “I want to roll my eyes at you.”

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  Christian blinks, startled, then visibly relaxes. Okay. Christian doesn’t want children. Now or ever? I am reeling from his sudden, unprecedented attack of candor. Perhaps it’s the early morning? Something in the Georgia water? The Georgia air? What else do I want to know? Carpe diem. “So the other four, what happened?” I ask. “One met someone else. The other three wanted…more. I wasn’t in the market for more then.” “And the others?” I press. He glances at me and shakes his head. “Just didn’t work out.” Whoa, a bucketload of information to process. I glance in the side mirror of the car, and I notice the soft swell of pink and aquamarine in the sky behind the car. Dawn is following us. “Where are we headed?” I ask, perplexed, gazing out at Interstate 95. We’re heading south is all I know. “An airfield.” “We’re not going back to Seattle, are we?” I gasp, alarmed. I haven’t said goodbye to my mom. She’s expecting us for dinner. He laughs. “No, Anastasia, we’re going to indulge in my second favorite pastime.” “Second?” I frown at him. “Yep. I told you my favorite this morning.” I glance at his glorious profile, frowning, racking my brain. “Indulging in you, Miss Steele. That’s got to be top of my list. Any way I can get you.” Oh. “Well, that’s quite high up on my list of diverting, kinky priorities, too,” I mutter. “I’m pleased to hear it,” he mutters dryly. “So, airfield?” He grins at me. “Soaring.” The term rings a vague bell. He’s mentioned it before. “We’re going to chase the dawn, Anastasia.” He turns and grins at me as the GPS urges him to turn right into what looks like an industrial complex. He pulls up outside a large white building with a sign reading BRUNSWICK SOARING ASSOCIATION. Gliding! We’re going gliding? He switches off the engine. “You up for this?” he asks. “You’re flying?” “Yes.” “Yes please!” I don’t hesitate. He grins, leans forward, and kisses me. “Another first, Miss Steele,” he says as he climbs out of the car. First? What sort of first? First time flying a glider…shit! No, he said he’s done it before. I relax. He walks around and opens my door. The sky has turned to a subtle opal, shimmering and glowing softly behind the sporadic childlike clouds. Dawn is upon us. Taking my hand, Christian leads me around the building to a large stretch of tarmac where several planes are parked. Waiting beside them is a man with a shaved head and a wild look in his eye, accompanied by Taylor. Taylor! Does Christian go anywhere without that man? I beam at him, and he smiles kindly back at me. “Mr. Grey, this is your tow pilot, Mr. Mark Benson,” says Taylor. Christian and Benson shake hands and strike up a conversation that sounds very technical about wind speed, directions, and the like. “Hello, Taylor,” I murmur shyly.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Miss Steele.” He nods a greeting at me, and I frown. “Ana,” he corrects himself. “He’s been hell on wheels the last few days. Glad we’re here,” he says conspiratorially. Oh, this is news. Why? Surely not because of me! Revelation Thursday! Must be something in the Savannah water that makes these men loosen up a bit. “Anastasia,” Christian summons me. “Come.” He holds out his hand. “See you later.” I smile at Taylor, and giving me a quick salute, he heads back to the parking lot. “Mr. Benson, this is my girlfriend, Anastasia Steele.” “Pleased to meet you,” I say as we shake hands. Benson gives me a dazzling smile. “Likewise.” I can tell from his accent that he’s British. As I take Christian’s hand, there’s a mounting excitement in my belly. Wow…gliding! We follow Mark Benson out across the tarmac toward the runway. He and Christian keep up a running conversation. I catch the gist. We will be in a Blaník L23, which is apparently better than the L13, although this is open to debate. Benson will be flying a Piper Pawnee. He’s been flying tail draggers for about five years now. It all means nothing to me, but glancing up at Christian, he is so animated, so in his element, it’s a pleasure to watch him. The plane itself is long, sleek, and white with orange stripes. It has a small cockpit with two seats, one in front of the other. It’s attached by a long white cable to a small, conventional single-propeller plane. Benson opens the large, clear Perspex dome that frames the cockpit, allowing us to climb in. “First, we need to strap on your parachute.” Parachute! “I’ll do that,” Christian interrupts him and takes the harness from Benson, who smiles amenably at him. “I’ll fetch some ballast.” Benson heads toward the plane. “You like strapping me into things,” I observe dryly. “Miss Steele, you have no idea. Here, step into the straps.” I do as I’m told, placing my arm on his shoulder. Christian stiffens slightly but doesn’t move away. Once my feet are in the loops, he pulls the parachute up, and I place my arms through the shoulder straps. Deftly he fastens the harness and tightens all the straps. “There, you’ll do,” he says mildly, but his eyes are gleaming. “Do you have your hair tie from yesterday?” I nod. “You want me to put my hair up?” “Yes.” I quickly do as I’m asked. “In you go,” Christian commands. He’s still so bossy. I go to climb into the back. “No, front. The pilot sits in the back.” “But you won’t be able to see.” “I’ll see plenty.” He grins.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  I don’t think I have ever seen him so happy—bossy, but happy. I clamber in, settling down into the leather seat. It is surprisingly comfortable. Christian leans over, pulls the harness over my shoulders, reaches between my legs for the lower belt, and slots it into the fastener that rests against my belly. He tightens all the restraining straps. “Hmm, twice in one morning, I am a lucky man.” He kisses me quickly. “This won’t take long—twenty, thirty minutes at most. Thermals aren’t great this time of the morning, but it’s so breathtaking up there at this hour. I hope you’re not nervous.” “Excited.” I beam. Where did this ridiculous grin come from? Actually, part of me is terrified. My inner goddess—she’s under a blanket behind the sofa. “Good.” He grins back, stroking my face, then disappears from view. I hear and feel his movements as he climbs in behind me. Of course he’s strapped me in so tightly I can’t move around to see him…typical! We are very low on the ground. In front of me is a panel of dials and levers and a big stick thing. I leave everything alone. Mark Benson appears with a cheerful grin as he checks my straps and leans in and checks the cockpit floor. I think it’s the ballast. “Yep, that’s secure. First time?” he asks me. “Yes.” “You’ll love it.” “Thanks, Mr. Benson.” “Call me Mark.” He turns to Christian. “Okay?” “Yep. Let’s go.” I am so glad I haven’t eaten anything. I am beyond excited, and I don’t think my stomach would be game for food, excitement, and leaving the ground. Once again, I am putting myself into this beautiful man’s skilled hands. Mark shuts the cockpit lid, strolls over to the plane in front, and climbs in. The Piper’s single propeller starts, and my nervous stomach relocates itself to my throat. Jeez, I’m really doing this. Mark taxis slowly down the runway, and as the cable takes the strain, we suddenly jolt forward. We’re off. I hear chatter over the radio set behind me. I think it’s Mark talking to the tower—but I can’t make out what he’s saying. As the Piper picks up speed, so do we. It’s very bumpy, and in front of us the single prop plane is still on the ground. Will we ever get up? And suddenly, my stomach disappears from my throat and free-falls through my body to the ground—we’re airborne. “Here we go, baby!” Christian shouts from behind me. And we are in our own bubble, just us two. All I hear is the sound of the wind ripping past and the distant hum of the Piper’s engine. I’m gripping the edge of my seat with both hands, so tightly my knuckles are white. We head west, inland, away from the rising sun, gaining height, crossing over fields and woods and homes and Interstate 95.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  My mom has decided on gazpacho soup and a barbecue with steaks marinated in olive oil, garlic, and lemon. Christian likes meat, and it’s simple to do. Bob has volunteered to man the barbecue grill. What is it about men and fire? I ponder as I trail after my mother through the supermarket with the shopping cart. As we browse the raw meat cabinet, my phone rings. I scramble for it, thinking it may be Christian. I don’t recognize the number. “Hello?” I answer breathlessly. “Anastasia Steele?” “Yes.” “It’s Elizabeth Morgan from SIP.” “Oh—hi.” “I’m calling to offer you the job of assistant to Mr. Jack Hyde. We’d like you to start on Monday.” “Wow. That’s great. Thank you!” “You know the salary details?” “Yes. Yes… That’s—I mean, I accept your offer. I’d love to come work for you.” “Excellent. We’ll see you Monday at 8:30 a.m.?” “See you then. Goodbye. And thank you.” I beam at my mom. “You have a job?” I nod gleefully, and she squeals and hugs me in the middle of the Publix supermarket. “Congratulations, darling! We have to buy some champagne!” She’s clapping her hands and jumping up and down. Is she forty-two or twelve? I glance down at my phone and frown; there’s a missed call from Christian. He never phones me. I call him straight back. “Anastasia,” he answers immediately. “Hi.” “I have to return to Seattle. Something’s come up. I am on my way to Hilton Head now. Please apologize to your mother—I can’t make dinner.” He sounds very businesslike. “Nothing serious, I hope?” “I have a situation I have to deal with. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll send Taylor to meet you at Sea-Tac if I can’t come myself.” He sounds cold. Angry even. But for the first time, I don’t immediately think it’s me. “Okay. I hope you sort out your situation. Have a safe flight.” “You, too, baby,” he says, and with those words, my Christian is back. Then he hangs up. Oh no. The last “situation” he had was my virginity. I hope it’s nothing like that. I gaze at my mom. Her earlier jubilation has metamorphosed into concern. “It’s Christian. He’s had to go back to Seattle. He apologizes.” “Oh! That’s a shame, darling. We can still have our barbecue, and now we have something to celebrate—your new job! You have to tell me all about it.” It’s late afternoon, and Mom and I are lying beside the pool. My mother has relaxed to the point where she is literally horizontal now that Mr. Megabucks is not coming to dinner. As I lie in the sun, endeavoring to lose the pale, I think about yesterday evening and breakfast today. I think about Christian, and my ridiculous grin refuses to subside. It keeps creeping across my face, unbidden and disconcerting, as I recall our various conversations and what we did…what he did.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  As she arranged her body in her usual yoga poses, she attempted “a cognitive reframe. I said to myself over and over, like a mantra, that I was a highly sexual woman, a highly responsive woman. Not that I wasn’t a sexual person, but now I was very consciously telling myself these things, taking on this persona. And there was the mindfulness. That’s a part of yoga anyway; you’re deeply aware of what your body is doing. You’re aware of your breathing, your heartbeat. But that day there was a deliberate intent not only to listen to my body even more than I would normally in yoga but also to interpret the signs from my body as signs of my sexual identity. So my breathing was not just breathing through the pose; it was breathing because I was highly sexual.” Sensation and self-image became linked. She was in a tricky position, bent over and balanced on one foot and one inverted hand, when she had a profound moment. It wasn’t that anything she was trying mentally was in itself so stunningly new. The power of positive thought was a cliché. And the acute concentration on the sensory harkened back to a style of sex therapy practiced by Masters and Johnson decades earlier. Yet by melding the two, something revelatory happened. Suddenly her straining muscles and racing heart were affirmations “of my sexual vigor, my arousability.” She finished class and walked out onto the street and bicycled home with an exhilarating sense of her own body, her potency. Brotto took what she learned treating borderline personality—the raisins came from that training—and what she discovered in yoga class, and tested it first with her gynecological cancer patients, then with a range of women who rued their weak desire. These days she sent her groups home to repeat over and over and over, “My body is alive and sexual,” no matter if they believed it. And she guided them in the conference room, “Lift the raisin to your lips. . . . Notice that your mouth has begun to salivate. . . . Place the raisin in your mouth, without chewing it. Close your eyes and just notice how it feels. . . . Notice where the tongue is, notice saliva building up in your mouth. . . . Feel your teeth biting through the surface. Notice the trajectory of the flavor as it bursts forth, the flood of saliva, how the flavor changes from your body’s chemistry. Notice the clenching of your jaw when chewing, the sensation of the raisin passing down the throat as it is swallowed. Notice the aftertaste and even the echo of the aftertaste.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Good Lord! Ernest thought. What a woman; what an evening! Lucky man! Then, glancing again at the clock, he hurried Halston along. “You said it was one of the great evenings of your life—but only up to some momentous point?” “Yes; the sex was sheer ecstasy. Extraordinary. Unlike any I’ve ever even imagined.” “How so extraordinary?” “It’s all still a bit of a haze, but I remember her licking me like a kitten, every square centimeter, head to toe, until every pore on my body was gaping open, begging for more, tingling with delight, receptive to her touch, her tongue, drinking in her scent and warmth.” He stopped. “I’m a bit embarrassed expressing all this, Doctor.” “Halston, you’re doing exactly what you should be doing here. Try to continue.” “Well, the pleasure just kept spiraling up. It was unworldly, I tell you. The head of my—my—what do you say?—organ—lit up, hotter and hotter, until I had an absolutely incandescent orgasm. And then I think I passed out.” Ernest was amazed. Was this the same boring, constricted man with whom he had spent those tedious hours? “Then what happened, Halston?” “Ah, that was the turning point; that’s when everything changed. The next thing I knew I was somewhere else. Now I realize it must have been a dream, but at the time it was so real I could touch and feel and smell everything in it. It’s faded away, but I can recall being chased through a forest by a menacing giant cat—a house cat the size of a lynx but all black, with a white mask around its red, gleaming eyes, a thick, powerful tail, huge fangs, and razor claws. It was chasing the bloody hell out of me! Far away I saw a naked woman standing in a pond. Looked like Artemis, so I jumped in and waded toward her for help. Closer up I saw that it wasn’t Artemis at all but a robot with enormous breasts out of which streamed jets of milk. Then, even closer, I saw that it wasn’t milk but some kind of glowing radioactive liquid. And then I realized, with horror, that I was standing thigh-deep in the corrosive stuff, which was starting to eat away at my feet and legs. I waded frantically toward land again, but there—still hissing and waiting for me—was that damned cat, now bigger—big as a lion. That’s when I bolted out of bed and ran for my life. I put on my clothes running down the stairs and was still shoeless when I started the car. I couldn’t breathe, and I called my physician on the car phone. He instructed me to go to the emergency room—and that’s when I was referred to you.” “And Artemis?”

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  One morning at her metal desk, with a flat November light making its way through her window, she bent over her laptop, poring through plethysmographic readings she’d collected in her latest study. Her eyes tracked a jagged red line that ran across the screen, a line that traced one subject’s blood flow, second by second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to take the data and arrange them in a meaningful form, she needed to eliminate errant points, moments when a subject had probably shifted in her chair, generating a slight pelvic contraction and jarring the plethysmograph, which could, in turn, cause a jolt in the readings and skew the overall results. Slowly, she scanned the line with all its cramped zigs and zags, searching for spots where the unusual height of a peak relative to the ridges beside it told her that arousal wasn’t at play, that an interval was irrelevant to her study. She highlighted and deleted one tiny aberrant section, then continued squinting. She would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a single subject. “I’m going blind,” she said, as she stared at another suspicious crest. She was thrilled, though, with what her experiments were uncovering—and thrilled to belong within the “gathering critical mass,” an unprecedented female effort. The discipline of sexology, which was founded in the late nineteenth century, had always been a male domain. Even now, women made up less than a third of the membership in the field’s most eminent organization, the International Academy of Sex Research, and less than a third of the editorial board—on which Chivers served—of the Academy’s journal. So female eros hadn’t been examined with nearly as much energy as it might have been. And one of Chivers’s heroes, one of the older women in the field, Julia Heiman, the director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, told me that, in addition, sexology had for many decades devoted itself more to documenting behavior than to looking into the feelings, like lust, that lie underneath. Alfred Kinsey’s work at midcentury, she said, didn’t reveal all that much about desire. He had started his career as an entomologist, cataloguing species of wasps; he was wary of delving into emotion. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, filming hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions that concentrated on function rather than craving. It wasn’t until the seventies that sexologists began zeroing in on what women want rather than what women do. And then AIDS engulfed the attention of the discipline. Prevention became everything. Only in the late nineties did full-scale exploration of desire start again.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Let us have more oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more holocausts. Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts, I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toe-nails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us , but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! “I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and whatnot; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed un-fecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit towards death and dissolution.

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

  We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection. Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions. How are emotions made, if they aren’t simply triggered reactions? Why do they vary so much, and why have we believed for so long that they have distinctive fingerprints? These questions in and of themselves can be delightfully interesting to ponder. But taking pleasure in the unknown is more than just a scientific indulgence. It’s part of the spirit of adventure that makes us human. In the pages that follow, I invite you to share that adventure with me. Chapters 1–3 introduce the new science of emotion: how psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines are moving away from the search for emotion fingerprints and instead asking how emotions are constructed. Chapters 4–7 explain how, exactly, emotions are made. And chapters 8–12 explore the practical, real-world implications of this new theory of emotions on our approaches to health, emotional intelligence, child-rearing, personal relationships, systems of law, and even human nature itself. To close the book, chapter 13 reveals how the science of emotion illuminates the age-old mystery of how a human brain creates a human mind. 1The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints”Once upon a time, in the 1980s, I thought I would be a clinical psychologist. I headed into a Ph.D. program at the University of Waterloo, expecting to learn the tools of the trade as a psychotherapist and one day treat patients in a stylish yet tasteful office. I was going to be a consumer of science, not a producer. I certainly had no intention of joining a revolution to unseat basic beliefs about the mind that have existed since the days of Plato. But life sometimes tosses little surprises in your direction.

• From The Trembling of the Veil (1922)

  committed—But I am now going to reform. Colonel Martin of the Horse guards has paid his Addresses to me, and we are to be married in a few days. As there is something singular in our Courtship, I will give you an account of it. Colonel Martin is the second son of the late Sir John Martin who died immensely rich, but bequeathing only one hundred thousand pound apeice to his three younger Children, left the bulk of his fortune, about eight Million to the present Sir Thomas. Upon his small pittance the Colonel lived tolerably contented for nearly four months when he took it into his head to determine on getting the whole of his eldest Brother’s Estate. A new will was forged and the Colonel produced it in Court—but nobody would swear to it’s being the right will except himself, and he had sworn so much that Nobody beleived him. At that moment I happened to be passing by the door of the Court, and was beckoned in by the Judge who told the Colonel that I was a Lady ready to witness anything for the cause of Justice, and advised him to apply to me. In short the Affair was soon adjusted. The Colonel and I swore to its’ being the right will, and Sir Thomas has been obliged to resign all his illgotten wealth. The Colonel in gratitude waited on me the next day with an offer of his hand—. I am now going to murder my Sister. Yours Ever, Anna Parker. A TOUR THROUGH WALES— in a LETTER from a YOUNG LADY— MY DEAR CLARA

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  At stake between various leaders of the Christian initiative in the synagogues was how far to remould the long-established pairing of Jewish and ‘God-fearer’ relationships in such communities, in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul, as he testifies himself, was a former persecutor of Christian believers in Jewish settings, who had never met Jesus in his earthly life. Instead, on a journey from Jerusalem to Damascus, he found himself exhilarated and traumatized in a shattering personal encounter with Jesus’s power and forgiveness: he suffered a complete turnaround, or, as later Christianity would term it, a conversion. After that, Paul felt compelled to convey the same healing experience to a world in which the distinction between Jew and Gentile was now meaningless. Paul brought to this task dynamic contradictions: a deep and proud knowledge of his Jewish heritage, alongside his pride in being a man who could claim Roman citizenship and whose natural first language was non-literary Greek. It is significant that when writing to Diaspora communities, he habitually uses the names of Roman imperial provinces. This cultural combination contrasted with the background and assumptions of Christian leaders in Judaea. They were still close to the Aramaic inheritance of Jesus’s teaching, and they lived their new faith in close quarters to the ancient religious observance in the Temple of Jerusalem, proceeding as it had done uninterruptedly for six centuries, with all that meant for Jewish identity. When Christian activists (whom we now see almost exclusively through Paul’s eyes) erupted out of Jerusalem into the synagogues of towns on the fringes of the Mediterranean, conflict among them was particularly marked in two spheres: first, dietary restrictions founded on scriptural commands and elaborated in a variety of ways by later custom; then, more fundamentally, on the ancient mark of what it was to be a Jew – male circumcision. On dietary matters, Paul could be conciliatory, partly because his opponent Peter had apparently already reconsidered traditional dietary laws for himself (Acts 10). The toxic clash came around circumcision, and the bitterness is evident in Paul’s letter to the Christian assemblies (ekklēsiais) in Galatia. This text is, among much else, an impassioned plea to these assemblies not to be bound by a rule of circumcision, but to identify with Christ Jesus through the new observance of baptism.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Finally she bought a poor man’s Geiger counter, a black light that was supposed to make uranium trace glow, and we started for Salt Lake City. She figured there must be ore somewhere around there. The fact that nobody else had found any meant that we would have the place pretty much to ourselves. To tide us over she planned to take a job with the Kennecott Mining Company, whose personnel officer had responded to a letter of inquiry she’d sent from Florida some time back. He had warned her against coming, said there was no work in Salt Lake and that his own company was about to go out on strike. But his letter was so friendly! My mother just knew she’d get a job out of him. It was as good as guaranteed. So we drove on through the desert. As we drove, we sang—Irish ballads, folk songs, big-band blues. I was hooked on “Mood Indigo.” Again and again I worldwearily crooned “You ain’t been blue, no, no, no” while my mother eyed the temperature gauge and babied the engine. Then my throat dried up on me and left me croaking. I was too excited anyway. Our trail was ending. Burma Shave ads and bullet-riddled mileage signs ticked past. As the numbers on those signs grew smaller we began calling them out at the top of our lungs. I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before. I had my own dreams of transformation, Western dreams, dreams of freedom and dominion and taciturn self-sufficiency. The first thing I wanted to do was change my name. A girl named Toby had joined my class before I left Florida, and this had caused both of us scalding humiliation. I wanted to call myself Jack, after Jack London. I believed that having his name would charge me with some of the strength and competence inherent in my idea of him. The odds were good that I’d never have to share a classroom with a girl named Jack. And I liked the sound. Jack. Jack Wolff. My mother didn’t like it at all, neither the idea of changing my name nor the name itself. I did not drop the subject. She finally agreed, but only on condition that I attend catechism classes. Once I was ready to be received into the Church she would allow me to take Jonathan as my baptismal name and shorten it to Jack. In the meantime I could introduce myself as Jack when I started school that fall. My father got wind of this and called from Connecticut to demand that I stick to the name he had given me. It was, he said, an old family name. This turned out to be untrue.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Myrna hadn’t shared these poems with Dr. Lash. She had plenty to talk about in her therapy sessions, and the poetry seemed irrelevant. Besides, her poems might have invited questions about the theme of secrecy, and they might have led directly to the secret of the dictation tape. Sometimes she worried that her withholding would create a wedge between them. But she assured herself that she could overcome that. Nor did she need Dr. Lash’s approval of her poetry. She found plenty of affirmation elsewhere. The singlepoet.com Internet chat room was crowded with single male poets. Life had become exciting. No more overtime at her Silicon Valley office. Nightly, Myrna rushed home to open her e-mail box, which bulged with praise for her poetry and her refreshing directness. Perhaps she had been too hasty to dismiss e-mail relationships as impersonal. Perhaps the opposite was true. Perhaps electronic friendships—because they did not depend on skin-deep physical attributes—were more genuine and complex. The electronic suitors who praised her poetry never failed to include their personal profiles and phone numbers. Her self-esteem surged. She read and reread her fan mail. She collected: praise, profiles, phone numbers, information. Dimly, she remembered Dr. Lash’s admonition about making withdrawals from data banks. But she liked collecting. She developed a meticulous suitor-rating scale, which weighed earning potential, stock options, corporate influence, and quality of verse as well as personal characteristics such as openness, generosity, and expressivity. Several of the singlepoet chat room suitors asked for a face-to-face meeting—for an afternoon espresso at a Silicon Valley café, for a walk, lunch, dinner. Not yet—she wanted more data. But soon. 6 [image file=image_154.jpg] The Hungarian Cat Curse But tell me, Halston, why do you want to stop therapy? It seems to me we’re only just beginning. We’ve met only, what—three times?” Ernest Lash skimmed though the pages of his appointment book. “Yes, that’s right. This is our fourth meeting.” Waiting patiently for a response, Ernest gazed at his patient’s gray paramecium-patterned tie and his six-button gray vest and tried to remember when he had last seen a patient who wore a formal three-piece business suit or a paisley tie.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Increasingly, Muslims who lived near the empire’s frontiers began to see “the border” as a symbol of Islamic integrity that had to be defended against a hostile world. Some of the ulema (“learned scholars”) had objected to the Umayyads’ monopoly of the jihad because it clashed with Quranic verses and hadith traditions that made jihad a duty for everybody.74 Hence, when the Umayyads had besieged Constantinople (717–18), ulema, hadith-collectors, ascetics, and Quran-reciters had assembled on the frontier to support the army with their prayers. Their motivation was pious, but perhaps they were also attracted by the intensity and excitement of the battlefield. Now following Harun’s lead, they gathered again in even greater numbers, not only on the Syrian-Byzantine border but also on the frontiers of Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. Some of these scholars and ascetics took part in the fighting and in garrison duties, but most supplied spiritual support in the form of prayer, fasting, and study. “Volunteering” (tatawwa) would put down deep roots in Islam and resurface powerfully in our own day. During the eighth century, some of these “fighting scholars” started to develop a distinctively jihadi spirituality. Abu Ishaq al-Fazari (d. c. 802) believed he was imitating the Prophet in his life of study and warfare; Ibraham ibn Adham (d. 778), who engaged in extreme fasts and heroic night vigils on the frontier, maintained that there could be no more perfect form of Islam; and Abdullah ibn Mubarak (d. 797) agreed, arguing that the dedication of the early Muslim warriors had been the glue that bonded the early ummah. Jihadis did not need the state’s permission but could volunteer whether the authorities and professional soldiers liked it or not. However, these pious volunteers could not solve the empire’s manpower problem, so eventually Caliph al-Mutasim (r. 833–42) would create a personal army of Turkish slaves from the steppes, who placed the formidable fighting skills of the herdsmen at the service of Islam. Each mamluk (“slave”) was converted to Islam, but because the Quran forbade the enslaving of Muslims, their sons were born free. This policy was fraught with contradictions, but the Mamluks became a privileged caste, and in the not-too-distant future, these Turks would rule the empire.