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 While You Were Out (2023)

  Instead of heading straight back to the car, my mother took a left and ducked into the diner next door. Time for lunch, she said. My heart was pounding. Lunch? Here? In a restaurant? My parents went out for dinner nearly every Friday night when Holmer returned from his weekly business trips, but we kids rarely got to go. There were too many of us. We usually stayed home with a babysitter, eating Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and french fries that my mother would cook in her deep fryer, the chunks of ice popping as they hit the boiling grease. Inside the diner, I felt like Dorothy wandering the land of Oz. So many new sights and sounds and smells. A fan whirred overhead, blowing the aroma of cherry pie. My mother and I settled into a booth next to the counter, where the waitress gave us each a glass of water and a laminated menu with a thick red leather jacket. I ordered a roast beef sandwich and a Green River, a bright lime-green soda popular in Chicago in those days. I can’t remember what my mother had, likely a BLT, her favorite. All those kids back at school are probably doing arithmetic right now, I thought. Or maybe they are on to reading. In class, we each took turns reading out loud, trying not to laugh as the boy with the stutter pounded his thigh to steady himself so he could spit out the words. If I were there, I’d be sitting in the back of the classroom, where all the fidgety kids went, boys mostly, who jabbed me with protractors and dared me to eat Elmer’s glue. Like this? I’d say as I peeled the dried layers of milky white goo off my palm like a sheath of skin after a day of too much sun. With all the ear infections I’d had as a baby, I usually couldn’t hear the teacher anyway. So while the rest of the class studied Nebuchadnezzar and long division, I passed the time by staring at the clock, holding my breath to see how long I could go before passing out. I wished I could sit still like the other kids. I seemed to be wired differently. When I was especially antsy, Sister Mary David would make me squat next to her at the front of the classroom with my feet in the middle of her enormous army-green metal wastepaper basket and my butt teetering on the sharp rim. It was all I could do to not tip over and spill onto the floor with the rest of the trash in that can. Her metaphor was not lost on me. Is your bottom good and blistered yet, Margaret? the old nun croaked. I flushed with horror that she was discussing my bottom in front of the whole class, especially the boys. But I’m not at school now, I told myself giddily.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  This was no vacation jaunt for Ignatius. Convicted of crimes against the state, he was traveling under armed guard to face his death by execution, having been condemned to the wild beasts of the Roman arena because of his Christian faith. Far from shuddering in the face of his com- ing martyrdom, however, Ignatius embraced it ecstatically; he looked forward to the opportunity to be tom apart and devoured for the sake of Christ. Ignatius was an intriguing personality, to put it mildly. He is seen by some modem readers as the ideal Christian martyr and by others as a case study in pathology. In any event, his status in early proto-orthodox circles is clear, for some Christians of later centuries counted his letters among the sacred Scriptures. The Historical Background We know almost nothing about the man Ignatius apart from what can be inferred from his letters. From these we learn that he was the bishop of the church of Antioch, Syria, one of th oldest and largest of the empire. He was obviously educated and gives some evidence of knowing secular Greek literature (e.g., in Ign. Rom. 4:1). It could be that as a highly literate convert from the upper classes Ignatius had made inroads into the Christian com- munity in Antioch and eventually rose to the position of bishop. Ignatius appears to have left the church in a state of turmoil. He intimates that there had been an internal squabble, possibly a struggle for con- trol, and that the matter had been resolved just recently. The side that Ignatius himself backed in the dispute (whatever it was about) had apparent- ly won. Some scholars have supposed that Ignatius himself was the issue. It may be that his authority as bishop had been challenged by other members of the church before he left. We do not know exactly what happened during the persecution that sent Ignatius to Rome. He does indicate that several other members of the Syrian church had gone before him, apparently also to face execution (Ign. Rora. 10:2). It is rea- sonable to assume that a local outcry had led to the arrest of Christian leaders in Antioch; the sit- uation in that case would be somewhat similar to that which arose about the same time under Pliny in Bithynia-Pontus, just north of where Ignatius passed through Asia Minor. Moreover, since Ignatius was sent to the empire's capital for pun- ishment (possibly to stand trial first), it may be that he and his predecessors were Roman citizens and so had to receive special treatment, unlike native citizens of Antioch, who could have been put on trial and executed on the spot. Ignatius was accompanied across the land route from Syria to Rome by a group of soldiers whom he likens to ten wild leopards who behave more cru- elly when treated kindly (Ign.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “Why do I gotta put my dick away?” The young man came down another step. “Everybody in the movie’s got his dick out his pants, beatin’ off. Or somebody suckin’ on him. Or something—” “Look—” the guy got off his stool now and gestured—“people can see you, man. From outside. Come on, now!” The kid on the stairs broke out laughing and, finally, pushed his privates back in his slacks. Zipping up, he came on into the lobby. “You’re crazy,” his older cousin repeated. “You do that again and I won’t let you come in here no more—” “I’m not crazy,” the younger guy said. “I’m havin’ fun. That’s what everybody does here. You said so—what, you don’t go in there and do it too sometimes? You told me you did—” “Not where everybody can see—” “Why not? That’s what everybody else does.” The other two were grinning, of course. But, past its emotional peak, the conversation slid along its developmental slope into Spanish, now that the phallic display was again veiled. The kid came over to stand in the door with them while they talked of something else. A week or two later, when I was again in the Variety’s balcony, again I looked over the rail to see the guy was back—in about the same seat. That day I’d brought in three cans of ginger ale. After drinking one, I decided I was going to leave early. “Hey,” I called down over the rail, where he was sitting, pants open, but for the moment only holding himself in his fist, “you want a soda? I’m going to leave soon, and I don’t want to carry these around with me.” He looked up. “Huh? Oh, yeah—thanks, man.” He took the can I held down to him. Still leaning on the rail, I asked, “Your cousin downstairs decided to let you back in?” He frowned, then realized what I must have been talking about. “Oh, yeah, he lets me in for nothin’. He’s a good guy.” “You like it?”

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

  “Bill,” Roy said. “Bill. Bill.” He turned silent again, staring down at the fly in the vise, his hands on the table. I finished off my Pepsi and went outside. While my mother and I ate breakfast the next morning Roy carried fishing gear and camping equipment out to the Jeep. He was lashing down something in back when I left for school. I yelled “Good luck!” and he waved at me, and I never saw him again either. My mother was in the apartment when I got home that day, folding clothes into a suitcase that lay open on her bed. Two other suitcases were already packed full. She was singing to herself. Her color was high, her movements quick and sure, everything about her flushed with gaiety. I knew we were on our way the moment I heard her voice, even before I saw the suitcases. She asked me why I wasn’t at archery. There was no suspicion behind the question. “They canceled it,” I told her. “Great,” she said. “Now I won’t have to go looking for you. Why don’t you check your room and make sure I’ve got everything.” “We going somewhere?” “Yes.” She smoothed out a dress. “We sure are.” “Where?” She laughed. “I don’t know. Any suggestions?” “Phoenix,” I said immediately. She didn’t ask why. She hung the dress in a garment bag and said, “That’s a real coincidence, because I was thinking about Phoenix myself. I even got the Phoenix paper. They have lots of opportunities there. Seattle too. What do you think about Seattle?” I sat down on the bed. It was starting to take hold of me too, the giddiness of flight. My knees shook and I felt myself grin. Everything was racing. I said, “What about Roy?” She kept on packing. “What about him?” “I don’t know. Is he coming too?” “Not if I can help it, he isn’t.” She said she hoped that was okay with me. I didn’t answer. I was afraid of saying something she would remember if they got back together. But I was glad to be once more on the run and glad that I would have her to myself again. “I know you two are close,” she said. “Not that close.” She said there wasn’t time to explain everything now, but later on she would. She tried to sound serious, but she was close to laughing and so was I. “Better check your room,” my mother said again. “When are we leaving?” “Right away. As soon as we can.” I ate a bowl of soup while my mother finished packing. She carried the suitcases into the front hall and then walked down to the corner to call a cab. That was when I remembered the rifle. I went to the closet and saw it there with Roy’s things, his boots and jackets and ammo boxes. I carried the rifle to the living room and waited for my mother to come back.

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  For Todd, a thirty-five-year-old deliveryman, the inexpensive nature of Internet porn is what opened the floodgates on his use of porn. Prior to the Internet, cost issues with porn had kept his use in check. “I’ve never had a lot of disposable income. I could justify spending $16 on porn magazines on one visit or $20 in a strip club now and again, but I didn’t have the money to be able to do that every day. Well, I could have got the money, but my wife would have cut me off pretty quickly. That kind of compulsive behavior was not sustainable. But it is sustainable with the Internet. I used to do those activities maybe ten times a year at the most. Now, I can be looking at pornography over the Internet for two to three hours a day. So that barrier of ‘I better not or I’m gonna have to explain where this money went,’ has disappeared.” For Brad, the ease of accessing pay-per-view porn movies on the road is what recharged his sexual involvement with porn. “Before my wife and I were married, fantasies of having sex with her took the place of porn,” he says. “But about six months into the marriage I took a job in sales that involved a lot of travel. I was out of town, driving around the state. Every hotel I stayed in had pay-per-view movies. And of course, pornography is the number-one-selling cable movie channel on pay-per-view. I started accessing porn as often as possible when I was out of town. My porn habit cropped up again, even worse than it had been before.” Pastor Jim Thomas, who directs a program to help men with porn problems at the Faith Center in Eugene, Oregon, believes accessibility to both the Internet and cable porn stations has been one of the biggest contributors to relationship problems for members of his congregation. “It’s one thing to drive to an adult bookstore or porn shop and risk somebody seeing your car parked there. But if you can click on and off of an adult Web site, it’s easy to get involved. Some guys are on the edge, and if they had not been faced with the temptation of porn, may not have succumbed. In private where nobody knows and it’s secret, that is the hook. That is where these guys are vulnerable.” Ben, a twenty-two-year-old college student, developed a serious problem with porn during one weekend of marathon surfing on the Internet when his dorm roommate was out of town. “I didn’t even set out to look for pornography. But I got on the Net and it was everywhere. Something tweaked my curiosity and wham—I just clicked it open. I never had to think what I was doing because it all happened so fast. Internet porn just sucked me in.”

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  Energy is what keeps us alive. That’s why we often feel good after we have allowed a strong feeling to flow through us, when we’ve just had a good rant, or chopped a lot of wood, or had a great orgasm. We feel more alive. We feel energized. All energy is basically life-force energy. When this life-force energy is heightened, speeded up, intensified, life becomes brighter. We are always looking for that which brightens and enriches; that search is part of being alive. We find it in sex and in the expression of feelings, but we also find it in politics, in music, in sports, in art, in raising a family, in a casual exchange with a friendly person on the street, in watching a good movie, in planting a garden and watching it grow, in the deeply rewarding intimacy with someone we have known and loved a long time, in a delighted child’s laughter, in a glorious sunset, in ocean waves smashing on rocks. Whenever we are deeply moved by something, whenever we really believe in something, whenever we feel passionate about something, we experience a sense of rightness, which is very exciting. The energy of the excitement that we are tapping into in any of these situations is the same energy as sexual excitement. Like sex, we can experience this excitement alone: looking at a beautiful view, climbing a mountain, hang gliding. Or we can experience it with others: when a group of people feel it together the energy is amplified; there is a group euphoria that results in a special kind of bonding. The sense of unity that we experience when we participate in a political rally, sing in a choir, or play team sports is the same unity that we experience when we are in love and having great sex. The problem is that it usually happens so unconsciously that we fixate on whatever happens to bring up the feeling. One person might experience it having sex, and another might experience it at a political rally. There is a sexual high from singing in choir, for instance; erotic is not quite the right word but it’s something like that. I used to feel it much more in rehearsals. Having the audience there was a distraction. Singing in rehearsals was breathtaking. —JOANI BLANK

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Most Sunday mornings my parents would take it in turns to take us to the matinee performance at the local cinema; whatever they were showing, and barely understood love stories glimpsed in fleeting sequences in romances and in the trailers, fired my imagination. I fantasised that I was allowed to go to the cinema alone. There were lots of people queuing. Suddenly someone would squeeze my arse. And again, everyone else around me in the queue followed the example, and when I reached the ticket desk, the salesgirl could see that my skirt had been lifted up, and I would talk to her while someone rubbed themselves against my buttocks; I didn’t have any knickers on. The excitement rose. My top would be off by the time I had crossed the foyer (because I had formulated an image of myself as an adult blessed with resplendent breasts, an image I still resort to to this day in my fantasies, whereas my breasts are actually average size). Sometimes the manager of the cinema would ask us, calmly but with some authority, to wait until we were in the auditorium to get on with our dishevelled embraces. At first, I would wriggle about with one boy, squeezed up to him in the same seat. He was the rather taciturn head of the gang who, having heated me to fever pitch, would then turn away abruptly and kiss another girl, abandoning me to his men, and we would drop in a heap to the carpeted floor between the rows of seats. The narrative continues: perfectly respectable men could leave their seats and their suspicious wives to cross the auditorium in the dark and prostrate themselves on top of me. Sometimes I would have the lights going back on while this cavorting was going on; or I would go to the toilets and there would be a succession of comings and goings between there and the auditorium. I think sometimes I would have the police intervening. Another take: the manager of the cinema would ask me to come to his office, and would then call for all the boys too. Another version: I followed the group who had adopted me in the queue all the way to a stretch of wasteland. And there, behind a picket fence, they would strip me naked and paw me. It was a compact group, forming a circle around me, like a second strip of fencing screening me from view. One by one, the boys broke away from the circle to press themselves against me. In another version, I was nestled deep in a seat in a nightclub with a man on either side of me. While I busied myself with one of them and we kissed each other hungrily, the other stroked my body. Then I would turn around and kiss the second one, but the first would not let me go, or he would give up his place to a third man, and so on; I kept swinging from left to right. I’m not sure that when I first started succumbing to these fabulations I had ever done any petting or even kissed a single boy on the mouth. I was a late starter. When I came out of school I would quite often meet up with a group of friends in the bedroom that I shared with my brother, but it was usually to have fights with them. At that sort of age, girls’ bodies are more mature than boys’; I was quite well built and I would sometimes win.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Narration cuts bodies into pieces, satisfies the need to reify them, to instrumentalise them. That famous scene in Godard’s Le Mépris, when Piccoli runs, word by word, over Bardot’s body, is a beautiful transposition of the two-way traffic between sight and speech, each word bringing a part of the body into focus. How many times don’t people say ‘Look!’ when they’re fucking? Of course you are at your leisure to see things close at hand, but in order to see well we sometimes also need to stand back, the way we move back from an exhibit in a museum. Undressing, I love to gaze on a promising-looking cock. Abiding by the law of the Gestalt Theory, it looks enormous in relation to the body which becomes almost fragile in its – sometimes laughable – semi-nudity and its unexpected isolation in the middle of the room; in any event the cock certainly looks bigger than it would if I were looking at it on its own. In the same way, I can, without any warning, break out of the game and go and stand a couple of metres away, with my back turned, my hands forced onto my buttocks to spread them as far apart as possible, bringing into the same sight line both the brownish crater of the arsehole and the crimson valley of the vulva. Like when an invitation takes on the wording of a necessity, as in: ‘you must taste these fruits’, so ‘you must look at my arse’. And because things are more picturesque if they are animated, I make it quiver.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  “Well, that and superstition,” she added, nodding soberly. “Gotta roll ’em to make sure they’re not unlucky.” “Naturally.” But inside his head, he was saying, Oh, apparently you’re not only unbearably hot, you’re also my dream girl. Possibly you don’t really exist and this is all an elaborate hallucination brought on by an excess of screen time or some bad sashimi. And for another thing, Ed enjoyed himself. A definite first, for a date. He was usually too nervous to converse when he took a woman out for the first time, but in this case the woman had already gone down on him in a parking lot. He felt fairly assured that she liked him and also reasonably confident about the prospect of sex at some point. It took the pressure off. “So what will your name be? Elves and fairy folk are usually, like, Arondiel Leafblower or something. Woodsy stuff or Tolkien-sounding stuff.” Beth pursed her lips, considering. “Flaxseed Featherwort? Gladringel Saplingraiser?” “You sure you’ve never done this before?” “How about Arianna Elfington? Or, let’s see...something less goofy is better, so I don’t forget it. Lark? Larken...Summerjoy. That should work.” “Lady Larken?” Ed asked, not really expecting her to get the reference. “From Once Upon a Mattress! I love that show. Maybe I should name my pixie Fred, after the princess.” Ed was astonished. “How do you feel about My Fair Lady and Camelot?” She lifted an eyebrow. “I feel like you know an awful lot about vintage Broadway shows. I think Lerner and Loewe were brilliant, in general. Okay, so give. Are you a closet actor? Because I’m not sure how I feel about that.” Ed laughed, a response to the bubbling happiness of feeling understood by somebody this fabulous. “Both my parents worked, so my grandmother used to watch me after school every day, all through elementary and middle school. She listened to Broadway soundtracks on LPs all the time, so I learned them all. Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, Oliver, Gypsy. She had about a dozen favorites that got more air time than the others, and they’re permanently ingrained in my brain.” “You should do community theater,” Beth suggested. “Meh. I’m not that into public performances.” She pressed her lips together, turning her grin into a smirk. “Really? I find that hard to believe.” Ed felt himself blush, and hoped it didn’t look as obvious as it felt. “I don’t like singing in public.” “Okay. But you’re okay with...” He fiddled with the nearest corner of the character sheet, as one of his legs started bouncing under the table. Did she really have to ask? “Yeah, that was okay.” “Just okay. I see.” “No, it was—”

• From Quiet (2012)

  And you’d want to know that individuals on all points of the reward-sensitivity spectrum understand their own emotional preferences and can temper them to match market conditions. But it’s not just employers who benefit from taking a closer look at their employees. We also need to take a closer look at ourselves. Understanding where we fall on the reward-sensitivity spectrum gives us the power to live our lives well. If you’re a buzz-prone extrovert, then you’re lucky to enjoy lots of invigorating emotions. Make the most of them: build things, inspire others, think big. Start a company, launch a website, build an elaborate tree house for your kids. But also know that you’re operating with an Achilles’ heel that you must learn to protect. Train yourself to spend energy on what’s truly meaningful to you instead of on activities that look like they’ll deliver a quick buzz of money or status or excitement. Teach yourself to pause and reflect when warning signs appear that things aren’t working out as you’d hoped. Learn from your mistakes. Seek out counterparts (from spouses to friends to business partners) who can help rein you in and compensate for your blind spots. And when it comes time to invest, or to do anything that involves a sage balance of risk and reward, keep yourself in check. One good way to do this is to make sure that you’re not surrounding yourself with images of reward at the crucial moment of decision. Kuhnen and Brian Knutson have found that men who are shown erotic pictures just before they gamble take more risks than those shown neutral images like desks and chairs. This is because anticipating rewards —any rewards, whether or not related to the subject at hand—excites our dopamine-driven reward networks and makes us act more rashly. (This may be the single best argument yet for banning pornography from workplaces.) And if you’re an introvert who’s relatively immune to the excesses of reward sensitivity? At first blush, the research on dopamine and buzz seems to imply that extroverts, and extroverts alone, are happily motivated to work hard by the excitement they get from pursuing their goals. As an introvert, I was puzzled by this idea when I first came across it. It didn’t reflect my own experience. I’m in love with my work and always have been. I wake up in the morning excited to get started. So what drives people like me? One answer is that even if the reward-sensitivity theory of extroversion turns out to be correct, we can’t say that all extroverts are always more sensitive to rewards and blasé about risk, or that all introverts are constantly unmoved by incentives and vigilant about threats. Since the days of Aristotle, philosophers have observed that these two modes—approaching things that appear to give pleasure and avoiding others that seem to cause pain—lie at the heart of all human activity.

• From Quiet (2012)

  Sometimes they’re actually in conflict, and then our decisions are a function of which one is sending out stronger signals. So when Alan’s old brain sent its breathless messages up to his new brain, it probably responded as a neocortex should: it told his old brain to slow down. It said, Watch out ! But it lost the ensuing tug-of-war. We all have old brains, of course. But just as the amygdala of a high-reactive person is more sensitive than average to novelty, so do extroverts seem to be more susceptible than introverts to the reward-seeking cravings of the old brain. In fact, some scientists are starting to explore the idea that reward-sensitivity is not only an interesting feature of extroversion; it is what makes an extrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash. They’ve been found to have greater economic, political, and hedonistic ambitions than introverts; even their sociability is a function of reward-sensitivity, according to this view—extroverts socialize because human connection is inherently gratifying. What underlies all this reward-seeking? The key seems to be positive emotion. Extroverts tend to experience more pleasure and excitement than introverts do—emotions that are activated, explains the psychologist Daniel Nettle in his illuminating book on personality, “in response to the pursuit or capture of some resource that is valued. Excitement builds towards the anticipated capture of that resource. Joy follows its capture.” Extroverts, in other words, often find themselves in an emotional state we might call “buzz”—a rush of energized, enthusiastic feelings. This is a sensation we all know and like, but not necessarily to the same degree or with the same frequency: extroverts seem to get an extra buzz from the pursuit and attainment of their goals. The basis of buzz appears to be a high degree of activity in a network of structures in the brain—often called the “reward system”—including the orbitofrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala. The job of the reward system is to get us excited about potential goodies; fMRI experiments have shown that the system is activated by any number of possible delights, from anticipation of a squirt of Kool-Aid on the tongue, to money, to pictures of attractive people. The neurons that transmit information in the reward network operate in part through a neurotransmitter—a chemical that carries information between brain cells—called dopamine. Dopamine is the “reward chemical” released in response to anticipated pleasures. The more responsive your brain is to dopamine, or the higher the level of dopamine you have available to release, some scientists believe, the more likely you are to go after rewards like sex, chocolate, money, and status. Stimulating mid-brain dopamine activity in mice gets them to run around excitedly in an empty cage until they drop dead of starvation. Cocaine and heroin, which stimulate dopamine-releasing neurons in humans, make people euphoric. Extroverts’ dopamine pathways appear to be more active than those of introverts.

• From Quiet (2012)

  “I did it with as much or more excitement and enthusiasm as I did when I first made love some forty-two years ago,” exclaimed Ted Turner, one of those directors and the largest individual shareholder in the company. “TED TURNER: IT’S BETTER THAN SEX,” announced the New York Post the day after the deal was struck, a headline to which we’ll return for its power to explain why smart people can sometimes be too reward-sensitive. You may be wondering what all this has to do with introversion and extroversion. Don’t we all get a little carried away sometimes? The answer is yes, except that some of us do so more than others. Dorn has observed that her extroverted clients are more likely to be highly reward-sensitive, while the introverts are more likely to pay attention to warning signals. They’re more successful at regulating their feelings of desire or excitement. They protect themselves better from the downside. “My introvert traders are much more able to say, ‘OK, Janice, I do feel these excited emotions coming up in me, but I understand that I can’t act on them.’ The introverts are much better at making a plan, staying with a plan, being very disciplined.” To understand why introverts and extroverts might react differently to the prospect of rewards, says Dorn, you have to know a little about brain structure. As we saw in chapter 4 , our limbic system, which we share with the most primitive mammals and which Dorn calls the “old brain,” is emotional and instinctive. It comprises various structures, including the amygdala, and it’s highly interconnected with the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the brain’s “pleasure center.” We examined the anxious side of the old brain when we explored the role of the amygdala in high reactivity and introversion. Now we’re about to see its greedy side. The old brain, according to Dorn, is constantly telling us, “Yes, yes, yes! Eat more, drink more, have more sex, take lots of risk, go for all the gusto you can get, and above all, do not think!” The reward-seeking, pleasure-loving part of the old brain is what Dorn believes spurred Alan to treat his life savings like chips at the casino. We also have a “new brain” called the neocortex, which evolved many thousands of years after the limbic system. The new brain is responsible for thinking, planning, language, and decision-making—some of the very faculties that make us human. Although the new brain also plays a significant role in our emotional lives, it’s the seat of rationality. Its job, according to Dorn, includes saying, “ No, no, no! Don’t do that, because it’s dangerous, makes no sense, and is not in your best interests, or those of your family, or of society.” So where was Alan’s neocortex when he was chasing stock market gains? The old brain and the new brain do work together, but not always efficiently.

• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  When I was a child, my ambition was to be pope. I remember watching the funeral of John XXIII and asking my mother, “Who was that man?” I understood very little about him, but I did learn from the television coverage that he lived in Italy, had a very nice white suit and a great hat, and everyone seemed to love him. My mother responded, “That’s Pope John XXIII.” She, like most Jewish parents, was familiar with then cardinal Roncalli’s efforts to save Jews during World War II as well as with his convening of Vatican II, the gathering that finally condemned the teaching that all Jews, everywhere, were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Thus she added, “He was good for the Jews.” I immediately decided I would be pope: it meant lots of spaghetti, great accessories, and the job was good for the Jews. “I want to be pope,” I announced to my mother. “You can’t,” she replied. “You’re not Italian.” Clearly, for a variety of reasons, I was in desperate need of instruction regarding the relationship between church and synagogue. My parents explained to me that the church (in my neighborhood, there were no Protestants, so “the church” meant “the Catholic Church”) used the same Bible that we did, but whereas we in the synagogue read our texts in Hebrew and used scrolls, in the church Christians read their texts in English and used books. Further, they told me that Christians thought a Jewish man named Jesus was extremely important. I only later, and painfully, learned that because of these distinctions, and others, the separation between Jews and Christians was much more complicated. I was raised in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, a suburb of New Bedford, in a neighborhood that was predominantly Roman Catholic and Portuguese. Thus my introduction to the church was through ethnic Catholicism, and it was marvelous: feast days and festivals, pageantry and mystery, food and more food. I loved Christmas trees and Easter bunnies; I sang Christmas carols in the school choir (although like a number of Jews in similar settings I typically only mouthed words like “Christ” and “Jesus,” and although hesitant to admit it, I found “Silent Night” a much prettier song than “I Had a Little Dreidel”). My favorite movie was, appropriately, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, a 1952 production starring Gilbert Roland and, as Lucia, the girl who had the vision of the Blessed Virgin, Susan Whitney. I couldn’t decide which would be more exciting: to have a vision and become a nun, like Sister Lucia, or to elope with Gilbert Roland. When I was seven, this early fascination with Christianity came to a head with two events. First, I became insistent upon making my First Communion. All my friends were preparing for this special event, and I didn’t want to be left out. My desire was not motivated by religious fervor or even religious understanding; I lacked both.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  There would be the image of a lively queue of cars, led by our own. And, as we are going up the service road on the Avenue Foch, I have an urgent need to pee. Four or five cars brake behind us. As I get out and run over the strip of grass to squat next to a tree, car doors start to open; a few people, misunderstanding my manoeuvre, come over towards me. Éric rushes over to intercede, the place is open and very well lit. I get back into the car and the cortège sets off again. The car park at the porte de Saint-Cloud: suddenly the attendant sees fifteen or so cars diving into the tunnel one after the other, then surfacing again, in exactly the same order, an hour later. During that hour, I am taken by about thirty men, first of all several of them hold me up against a wall, and then they lay me on the car bonnet. Sometimes the script is complicated by the fact that we have to shake off a few cars on the way. The drivers agree on a destination, a line of cars forms up, and is spotted by others who join it, but then the file is too long and it is wiser to limit the number of participants. One night we drove around for such a long time that it felt like the beginning of a journey. One driver knew of a place, and then he admitted that he was no longer sure of the way. Through the rear windscreen I could see the pairs of headlights behind us navigating left and right, disappearing and reappearing. There were several stops, and several discussions, and eventually – on the terraces of a sports stadium somewhere in Vèlizy-Villacoublay – I had the pleasure of the patient pricks of those who had not got lost along the way.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Once done over, I too can get going. Whether I am lying down or on all fours, I play energetically on the suppleness of my waist, and the repercussions of my regular, vigorous thrusts provoke the fantasy melding of my mouth and my genitals. I want to know whether I am ‘sucking’ him well with my cunt. ‘Am I going to suck up all your cum?’ The answer I hope for subsumes my identity to that part of me in which all of me is concentrated: ‘Oh, Catherine! Your arse, your arse …’Knowing that what I cannot see myself is being attentively examined is just as stimulating. A focused ray of light (from an adjustable bedside light, for example) is preferable to more diffuse lighting. I have been known to suggest using a torch. By glancing back I can see the expression on a man’s face as he scrutinises the cleft between my buttocks which facilitates the disappearance of his precious appendage. I rely heavily on the description he gives me, however literal and crude it may be. ‘Can you see my arse?’ ‘Ah, yes, it’s lovely you know, it’s really taking in my dick. Huh, the little fucker wants more…’ If there happens to be a mirror nearby, if I put myself in profile, I myself can oversee the immersion and emergence of what looks like a piece of flotsam tossed by the swell. Because of this predilection for sensations in my rump, the doggie position has been my favourite for a long time, until I ended up admitting to myself – we always end up being sexually honest with ourselves, but this can, of course, take a long time – that, even though it allowed the rod to strike deep and hard, it still wasn’t the form of penetration that satisfied me the most. In other words, having gone in pursuit of the dick with the energetic buckings of my hips, and having been alternately pinned down and buffed up like a polisher’s duster, I like to be turned over and shagged in the classic position. The pleasure I take in exposing my arse goes back a long time. When I was six or seven I would expose it to my brother in a game which included some of the moves I used to masturbate. That is, with my skirt hitched up, I would crease my knickers up into the front of my crack, and I would push my buttocks out as far as I could beyond the back of the little bench I was sitting on. Then I would wait for the little chap to go behind me. What amused us about it was that I would pretend to have revealed myself quite absent-mindedly, and he pretended to brush my buttocks inadvertently.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  what a woman!” In a second he’s out again, with his hat on and the cracked cane in his hand. “I knew something like that was going to happen. She’s crazy!” He rummages around in the kitchen a while and then comes back to the studio with a bottle of Anjou. I have to sit up and down a glass with him. As far as I can piece the story together the whole thing started at the Rond-Point des Champs Elysées where he had dropped off for a drink on his way home. As usual at that hour the terrasse was crowded with buzzards. This one was sitting right on the aisle with a pile of saucers in front of her; she was getting drunk quietly all by herself when Fillmore happened along and caught her eye. “I’m drunk,” she giggled, “won’t you sit down?” And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do, she began right off the bat with the yarn about her movie director, how he had given her the go-by and how she had thrown herself in the Seine and so forth and so on. She couldn’t remember any more which bridge it was, only that there was a crowd around when they fished her out of the water. Besides, she didn’t see what difference it made which bridge she threw herself from—why did he ask such questions? She was laughing hysterically about it, and then suddenly she had a desire to be off—she wanted to dance. Seeing him hesitate she opens her bag impulsively and pulls out a hundred franc note. The next moment, however, she decided that a hundred francs wouldn’t go very far. “Haven’t you any money at all?” she said. No, he hadn’t very much in his pocket, but he had a checkbook at home. So they made a dash for the checkbook and then, of course, I had to happen in just as he was explaining to her the “No tickee, no shirtee” business. On the way home they had stopped off at the Poisson d’Or for a little snack which she had washed down with a few vodkas. She was in her element there with everyone kissing her hand and murmuring Princesse, Princesse . Drunk as she was, she managed to collect her dignity. “Don’t wiggle your behind like that!” she kept saying, as they danced. It was Fillmore’s idea, when he brought her back to the studio, to stay there. But, since she was such an intelligent girl and so erratic, he had decided to put up with her whims and postpone the grand event. He had even visualized the prospect of running across another princess and bringing the two of them back. When they started out for the evening, therefore, he was in a good humor and prepared, if necessary, to spend a few hundred francs on her. After all, one doesn’t run across a princess every day.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  That summer I spent hours lying crosswise on my plastic-coated twin bed, bare feet on the wall, reading Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I’d picked it up for its cover, the title written in loose jewel-toned cursive against a white backdrop, and for the author photo on the back flap, in which beautiful young Chabon appears in pensive black-and-white. His dark hair was gelled swoopily back, and his deep-set eyes were hawklike in their intensity, a sexy hawk. I didn’t really understand the book, but I loved it. Like me, I noticed, the narrator watched the world around him from a safe remove. But for one summer, the summer of the story, he somehow managed to get outside himself, to do dumb and impulsive and vitally important things. It was summer where I was too, and I could have done anything, but I didn’t know where to start. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] That summer I met my first lesbian. Catherine worked for a catering company that my parents sometimes hired for parties. They’d gotten to know the owner of the company, and because I was interested in food, she let me work for a few months in her catering kitchen, doing prep work. The kitchen was out Wilshire Boulevard, one of the main roads through Nichols Hills. But the kitchen was east of all the money, on the part of Wilshire where the mansions gave way to empty shopping strips, warehouses, and arid fields. By mid-June, it got so hot out there that the air above the road trembled like oil in a pan. The lanes were crisscrossed with tar, repairs where the concrete had cracked. When I got out of the car, the hum of cicadas was as loud as the thunderstorms had been in spring.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He’d had a glass of scotch at home to warm him up for the walk, and it buzzed nicely through his hands, his feet. Yale had been in a heightened state lately, waiting to hear back again from Nora, jumping every time his office phone rang for fear it would be Cecily. And now, on the street with Charlie, with nothing to worry about till Monday, that nervous energy had turned to pure elation. He was thrilled to walk beside a handsome man in a black wool dress coat, thrilled to give a dollar to a punk kid on a sidewalk blanket. Every day that week, Bill Lindsey had dropped into Yale’s office with more news from some Pascin or Metzinger expert who’d told him, off the record, what the works Bill described might be worth. “Not that I care about the money,” Bill said, “but the farther over two million this estimate gets, the better I feel.” Bill was a “paper and pencil man” to begin with—he said it the same way Yale’s uncle used to say “legs and tits man”—and he was more excited about the drawings than Yale was, but he was also particularly drawn to the painting of the bedroom, which was supposedly the work of Jeanne Hébuterne. Hébuterne, Modigliani’s common-law wife, had been an artist herself, although after her early death her family hadn’t allowed her work to be exhibited. Authentication would be particularly difficult, but perhaps its existence might bolster the claims on the Modiglianis. Yale loved the bedroom himself, the crooked walls and shadows. Ranko Novak and Sergey Mukhankin were unknowns, but with a little digging, Yale found that a Mukhankin drawing not unlike the one in Nora’s possession—both were charcoals of nudes—had done decently at Sotheby’s in ’79. Bill was taken with that piece, anyway. The Novak works, the ones Nora was so adamant that they display, were the only disappointments. Five of the pieces—two small, rough paintings and three sketches—were his. Curiosities, but not valuable. Yale didn’t mind the painting of a man in an argyle vest, the way the lines of the argyle extended beyond the bounds of his clothing, the dark depth of his eyes, but Bill hated it, and he hated the other painting, of a sad little girl, and he hated the sketches, which were all of cows. “Don’t promise her this stuff’s going on the wall,” he said. Yale cringed and Bill said, “Well, maybe she’ll, ah, pass away first. She’ll never know. But look, minus these cows , the collection holds together. I’m a happy man. There’s balance, there’s contrast, there’s a story, and it’s just the right size. You know, it’s a show . Someone is handing us a show.” He’d clapped Yale on the back like Yale had drawn the stuff himself. And so although the cold air had bored its way into every pore of his body, Yale was floating.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Let go!" We would come galloping up, finish off the hare, and give the dogs the tracks,9 tearing them off toe by toe, and throwing them to our favorites, who would catch them in the air. Then papa would teach us how to strap the hare on the back of the saddle. After the run we would all be in better spirits, and get to better places near Yasenki and Retinka. Gray hares would get up oftener. Each of us would have his spoils in the saddle-straps now, and we would begin to hope for a fox. Not many foxes would turn up. If they did, it was generally Tumashka, who was old and staid, who distinguished himself. He was sick of hares, and made no great effort to run after them; but with a fox he would gallop at full speed, and it was almost always he who killed. It would be late, often dark, when we got back home. "ANNA KARENINA"Table of ContentsI REMEMBER my father writing his alphabet and reading-book in 1871 and 1872, but I cannot at all remember his beginning "Anna Karenina." I probably knew nothing about it at the time. What did it matter to a boy of seven what his father was writing? It was only later, when one kept hearing the name again and again, and bundles of proofs kept arriving, and were sent off almost every day, that I understood that "Anna Karenina" was the name of the novel on which my father and mother were both at work. My mother's work seemed much harder than my father's, because we actually saw her at it, and she worked much longer hours than he did. She used to sit in the sitting-room off the zala, at her little writing-table, and spend all her free time writing. Leaning over the manuscript and trying to decipher my father's scrawl with her short-sighted eyes, she used to spend whole evenings over it, and often sat up late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. Sometimes, when anything was written quite illegibly, she would go to my father's study and ask him what it meant. But this was very rare, because my mother did not like to disturb him. When it happened, my father used to take the manuscript in his hand, and ask with some annoyance, "What on earth is the difficulty?" and would begin to read it out aloud. When he came to the difficult place he would mumble and hesitate, and sometimes had the greatest difficulty in making out, or, rather, in guessing, what he had written. He had a very bad handwriting, and a terrible habit of writing in whole sentences between the lines, or in the corners of the page, or sometimes right across it. My mother often discovered gross grammatical errors, and pointed them out to my father, and corrected them.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  The scent of fir trees penetrated through the cracks of the high, white lacquered, still tightly closed double doors and with its sweet spice awakened the idea of the miracles in the hall, which one watched every year anew with throbbing pulses as an incomprehensible, unearthly splendor ... What would be in there for him? What he had wanted, of course, because that's what you got without question, provided you hadn't been talked out of it as an impossibility beforehand. The theater would catch his eye and show him the way to his seat, the longed-for puppet theater that had been heavily underlined at the top of Grandma's wish list. Yes, as compensation and reward for a visit to Herr Brecht, Hanno had recently gone to the theater for the first time, the Stadttheater, where he had been able to breathlessly follow the sounds and events of Fidelio in the first rank at his mother's side. From then on he dreamed of nothing but opera scenes, and he was filled with a passion for the stage that hardly let him sleep. With unspeakable envy he looked at the people on the street who, like his uncle Christian, were known as theater habitués, Consul Döhlmann, broker Gosch ... Was the luck bearable to be able to be there almost every evening like them? If only he could peek into the hall once a week before the performance begins, hear the instruments playing and take a look at the closed curtain! Because he loved everything in the theater: the smell of gas, Will his puppet theater be big? Big and wide? What will the curtain look like? You have to make a small hole as soon as possible cut into it, because there was also a peephole in the curtain of the municipal theater... Whether grandmother or Mamsell Severin - because grandmother couldn't get everything - had found the necessary decorations for "Fidelio"? Tomorrow he'll lock himself up somewhere and give a performance all by himself... And already he had his characters singing in his head; because music had immediately connected him very closely with the theater ... “Rejoice loudly, Jerusalem!” concluded the choirboys, and the voices that had been fugue-like joined together peacefully and joyfully on the last syllable. The clear chord died away, and a deep stillness fell over the portico and the landscape room. The members of the family looked down under the pressure of the pause; only Director Weinschenk's eyes darted boldly and unselfconsciously around, and Frau Permaneder let out her dry throat, which I couldn't suppress. The Consul, however, walked slowly to the table and sat down in the midst of her relatives on the sofa, which was no longer separate from the table as it had been in the old days. She adjusted the lamp and pulled out the large Bible, the gold-edged surface of which, pale with age, was enormously wide.