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.

Page 79 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Anticipation implies that we are looking forward to something. It is an important ingredient of desire, and planning for sex helps to generate it. When Dominick prepares his osso buco, he can almost taste it in advance. He imagines Raoul’s surprise and pleasure. He hopes it will make his boyfriend feel special, and he envisions Raoul’s gratitude. Fantasy is the mortar of anticipation. It’s a way of imagining what something is going to be like. It’s a kind of foreplay that takes place outside the couple’s direct interaction. Anticipation is part of building a plot; that is why romance novels and soap operas are filled with it. I believe that longing, waiting, and yearning are fundamental elements of desire that can be generated with forethought, even in long-term relationships. When Nile and Sarah go out on Saturday, they often have a few things planned. Dinner, music, and—later—sex. In the past, an entire evening’s worth of wooing was undone the instant Sarah had to pay the babysitter. “All of a sudden, I’d be the mother again, and all that tension we worked to build up would just vanish. Now, Nile deals with the babysitter and I go straight to the bedroom. It’s an arrangement that lets me keep up the momentum.” Sarah and Nile have three kids who keep her running all day, every day. She has made it very clear to Nile that it takes a lot to get her out of that role, and very little for her to slip back in. “I used to think that it was a matter of being in the mood, but I was disabused of that idea a long time ago. Waiting for the mood is like waiting for the Second Coming. I like the planning. It gives me something to look forward to when I’m playing with Barbies and checking homework.” What Sarah looks forward to is more than the sex; it’s the ritual. Spending ample time together, woman to man, they temporarily slip out of the chains of reality. Their foreplay lasts hours. They’ve been at this for twelve years, and like a mastered discipline, they miss it when they skip it. They know that great sex generally demands more than fifteen minutes right after the eleven o’clock news. Cultivating Play When couples complain that their sex life is listless, I know it isn’t mere frequency they’re after. They may want more, but they certainly want better. For this reason, I prefer to talk about their erotic life rather than about their sex life. The physical act of sex is too narrow a subject, which easily degenerates into a conversation about numbers. Human nature abhors a vacuum of intensity. People long for radiance. They want to feel alive. If given half a chance, loving partners can fill the intensity void with transcendence.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  163Lecture 17—The Second Great Awakening õDow was very savvy at drumming up interest. He would randomly appear in a town and shout that Lorenzo Dow would preach at that very spot a year from now. Then he would vanish. One year later, he would show back up, and a crowd would appear, too. He was known for shouting and insulting his audiences—anything to get their attention. õSome scholars have suggested that the townsfolk welcomed evangelists like Lorenzo Dow not because their messages were liberating or entertaining, but because they offered a way of controlling ruffians. The cities and frontier towns of the early 19 th century featured a lot of unemployed young men wandering around, spending their evenings in pubs. Revival might have been a way of getting these wanderers into line and bringing marginal people into growing churches: a way of imposing social order. SUCCESS õBy 1850, the Methodist church was the single largest Christian group in America. An important reason why these evangelists did well was that their ideas appealed to Americans. John Wesley believed that John Calvin and Martin Luther didn’t have things quite right when it came to the subject of conversion. Wesley did not believe in predestination. He believed in justification by faith alone, but he taught that any sinner, not just the elect, could reach out to accept God’s grace. õAfter conversion, he taught that a born-again Christian experiences a process called sanctification: This gradually brings them to a state of Christian perfection, and their sinful urges are suppressed. Calvin and the Puritans believed in a sanctification process too, but the emphasis on Christian perfection was distinctly Methodist. õIn Great Britain, a substantial number of Methodists stuck to a Calvinist view of predestination and human depravity. But it’s no surprise that John Wesley’s empowering and egalitarian theology took off in America; it was a perfect match for the early republic. It meant that everyone—not just some small group of the elect—was worthy of salvation, even perfection.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  The counterargument to the law of diminishing returns is the principle that consistent investment leads to increased satisfaction. The more you do something, and the better you get at it, the more you’re going to enjoy it. The weekly tennis player who continues to improve his game would argue for the positive effects of frequency. For her, Paris just keeps getting better. The more she practices, the stronger her skills. The stronger her skills, the deeper her confidence. The more confident she feels, the more risks she takes. The more risks she takes, the more exciting the game. Of course, all this practice takes effort and discipline. It is not just a matter of being in the mood; it requires patience and sustained attention. The tennis player knows intuitively that growth is rarely linear; she may experience some plateaus and some slowdowns, but the reward is worth the effort. Unfortunately, all too often we associate effort with work, and discipline with pain. But there’s a different way to think of work. It can be creative and life-affirming, sparking a heightened sense of vitality rather than a bone-deep exhaustion. If we want sex to be fulfilling, then we have to apply effort in just this artful way. The Myth of Spontaneity There is a powerful ideal operating in many people’s view of sex—that it’s an instant fit, a hand-in-pocket, skin-to-skin compatibility that is perfect from the start. Good sex is supposed to be easy, tension-free, and uninhibited. Either you have it or you don’t. This idea is often accompanied by its good neighbor, the myth of spontaneity. The word “spontaneity” comes up like a mantra whenever men and women in my office talk about what constitutes, for them, exciting, thrilling, can’t-wait, truly erotic sex. It is hard to overstate their enthusiastic conviction that really sexy sex is supposed to be spur-of-the-moment. We like to believe that sex arises from an impulse or inclination that is natural, unprompted, and artless. We talk about being swept away. “I couldn’t resist…I felt such a rush through my veins…It was bigger than both of us…I was completely taken over.” This infatuation with the big bang theory of sex suggests our impatience with seduction and playful eroticism, which take up too much time, require too much effort, and—most important—demand full consciousness of what we are doing. For many of us, premeditated sex is suspicious. It threatens our belief that sex is subject only to the machinations of magic and chemistry. The idea that sex must be spontaneous keeps us one step removed from having to will sex, to own our desire, and to express it with intent. As long as sex is something that just happens, you don’t have to claim it. It’s ironic that in such a willful society, willfully conjuring up sex seems obvious and crass. It embarrasses us, as if we’ve been caught doing something inappropriate.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Along these same lines, I also suggest that they create new E-mail accounts reserved exclusively for erotic exchanges between them—their thoughts, memories, fantasies, and seductions. I point out that this correspondence is not meant to be about the problems in their relationship, it is meant to be a space for play. I want them to use cyberspace to elicit curiosity, a sense of intrigue, and a kind of wholesome anxiety. Writing has many advantages over talking. You get to say your fill, craft your response, and give voice in writing to things your lips dare not utter. It provides a built-in distance, and I hope this will help dismantle their inhibitions. By Valentine’s Day Jackie has eased into the art of seduction. She’s playful and daring, not only in her E-mails with Philip, but with other men as well. Several months later she tells me, “Your urging me to get a sense of myself from other men besides Philip has been very good for me.” She started doing things with her male friends, going to concerts and galleries, and she has generally been more flirtatious. “Nothing big, you know, but it’s been fun to be out there again, talking to men who are not my husband, knowing they enjoy my company. And now, Philip’s every word or look isn’t the most important thing in my life.” Jackie’s new confidence has left Philip slightly unmoored, and that turns out to be a good thing. He is intrigued by the way she writes to him, and is surprised to find that in the graphic lexicon of sex, she can certainly hold her own. All this sexualizes her in his eyes. Freed from the predictability of a script, he takes a second look. The pseudo anonymity of their E-mails has allowed him to see her as a subject with her own desires, turning her into the object of his desire. “I’m saying things to her that I never thought I could. I expected she’d be turned off, but she’s not. She needs a lot less taking care of than I projected onto her,” Philip admits. “I realized I put a lot of stuff on her that doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to me, or at least to my family.”

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  What? Jesus was Jewish? I said. I imagine you’re laughing at this point because that’s so obvious, and yes, I did know that Jesus was Jewish. But not like Richard knew it. Something about that one obvious line set off an explosion within me. Richard went on to say that Jesus lived in a first-century Jewish world of politics and economics and common stories and inside jokes, and the more you knew about that world, the more he and his message would come to life. Richard began dropping by my office with photocopied articles by people I’d never heard of explaining mikvahs and taxation rates and ketubahs and who Shammai was and who Hillel was and why that matters. Richard introduced me to friends of his who invited me to eat with them while they would discuss and debate and laugh and riff on the Bible for the sheer joy of it. And they knew their stuff. It was staggering. I could barely keep up. They would point out insightful political commentary or subversive poetry or discrepancies in the text that were actually on purpose because the writer was doing something really clever just below the surface. They’d take a verse or story I’d heard people talk about, and they’d start discussing it and turning it on its head and pointing out all the depth and surprise and power I hadn’t noticed—it was like music they were dancing to. This is in the Bible? I found myself continually asking. How did I miss this? It was like the Bible went from black and white to color, from two dimensions to three, or nine. Gradually what I was learning began to make its way into my sermons and, more significantly, into my life. And once you see, you can’t unsee. And once you taste, you can’t untaste. People started coming up to me after my sermons, sometimes visibly upset, asking, How come I’ve never heard any of this?! This makes so much more sense! This is so much more dangerous and interesting and provocative and timely and progressive and poetic and convicting and funny . . . Over time I began to realize that what was happening wasn’t just that I was learning new things about the Bible but that I was reading the Bible in a different way. A way that I hadn’t been exposed to. Until now. And now there was no going back. Which is why I’ve written this book: I want to help you read the Bible in a better way because lots of people don’t know how to read it. And so they either ignore it, or they read it badly and cause all kinds of harm.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  145Lecture 15—The First Great Awakening õThere were three things that were new and important about Whitefield’s preaching: his rhetorical style, his willingness to break with convention, and his connection with the audience. õHis style was both theatrical and extemporaneous. He did it all off the top of his head, or made it seem that way, and he also used music to excite his audience. ✳Whitefield didn’t respect the usual rules about where and when to preach. He preached wherever the people were, not just inside a church. ✳He had a charisma that electrified his listeners, and he capitalized on that. He relied on public opinion, not the church hierarchy, to make him a celebrity. Whitefield’s tactic was not to convince you to obey church authorities, but to persuade you that if you, the individual, would simply recognize your sins and open yourself up to God’s grace, you could be saved. He put aside that thorny problem of predestination. õWherever he went, he was controversial. He was not a social radical; his message was not pro-democracy or overtly political. He endorsed slavery, probably because he wanted to be able to preach in the South. Yet he had enemies: When he came to town, they booed and threw rotten eggs, even dead cats. õThe reason: He challenged the authority of the clerical establishment. But also, these revivals provoked a disagreement among ministers over how Christian conversion happened, and these fights split churches. õWhitefield was a so-called New Light; his enemies were Old Lights. New Lights were the evangelicals. They looked for the sudden, emotional born-again experience. Old Lights were very skeptical of the conversions that happened at revivals. They thought Whitefield was a charlatan who manipulated his listeners’ emotions, and that conversion was a subtle, years-long process.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Soon other boys approach and Tom does the same sell job on them, accumulating more pieces of fruit and toys. An hour later, we see Tom lying in the shade while a whole team of friends finishes the job for him. Tom used basic psychology to get what he wanted. First, he got Ben to reinterpret this job, not by saying anything but through his absorbed attention in the task and his body language: the task must be something interesting. Second, he framed the job as a test of skill and intelligence, a rare opportunity, something that would appeal to any competitive boy. And finally, as he knew, once the neighborhood boys saw others at the task, they would want to join in, making it a group activity. Nobody wanted to be left out. Tom could have pleaded with dozens of friends to help him and gotten nowhere. Instead he framed it in such a way that they wanted to do the work. They came to him, begging for the job. Your attempts at influence must always follow a similar logic: how can you get others to perceive the favor you want to ask for as something they already desire? Framing it as something pleasurable, as a rare opportunity, and as something other people want to do will generally have the proper effect. Another variation on this is to appeal directly to people’s competitive instincts. In 1948 the director Billy Wilder was casting for his new film A Foreign Affair , which was to be set in Berlin just after the war. One of the main characters was a woman named Erika von Shluetow , a German cabaret singer with suspicious ties to various Nazis during the war. Wilder knew that Marlene Dietrich would be the perfect actress to play the part, but Dietrich had publicly expressed her intense dislike of anything having to do with the Nazis and had worked hard for various Allied causes. When first approached about the role, she found it too distasteful, and that was the end of the discussion. Wilder did not protest or plead with her, which would have been futile, given Dietrich’s famed stubbornness. Instead he told her he had found two perfect American actresses to play the part, but he wanted her opinion on which would be better. Would she view their tests? Feeling bad that she had turned down her old friend Wilder, Dietrich naturally agreed to this. But Wilder had cleverly tested two well-known actresses whom he knew would be quite terrible for the role, making a mockery of the part of a sexy German cabaret singer. The ploy worked like a charm. The very competitive Dietrich was aghast at their performances and immediately volunteered to do the part herself. Finally, when giving people gifts or rewards as a possible means of winning them over to your side, it is always best to give smaller gifts or rewards than larger ones. Large gifts make it too apparent

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  fresh generation that could begin to forge a classless society not weighed down by the past. The events depicted in Born Red reveal in a microcosm the result of Mao’s experiment—how human nature cannot be uprooted; try to alter it and it merely reemerges in different shapes and forms. The results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and development cannot be radically reengineered by some scheme, particularly when it involves the behavior of humans in groups, which inevitably conforms to certain ancient patterns. (Although it might be tempting to see what happened at YMS as mostly relevant to group adolescent behavior, young people often represent human nature in a more naked and purer form than adults, who are cleverer at disguising their motivations. In any case, what happened at the school occurred throughout China—in government offices, factories, within the army, and among Chinese of all ages—in an eerily similar way.) Here’s exactly how Mao’s experiment failed and what it shows about human nature. Mao had the following specific strategy to enact his bold idea: Focus people’s attention on a legitimate enemy—in this case, revisionists, those who consciously or unconsciously were clinging to the past. Encourage people, particularly the young, to actively fight against this reactionary force, but also against any entrenched forms of authority. In struggling against these conservative enemies, the Chinese would be able to free themselves from old patterns of thinking and acting; they would finally get rid of elites and ranking systems; and they would unify as a revolutionary class with utmost clarity as to what they were fighting for. His strategy, however, had a fatal flaw at its core: when people operate in groups, they do not engage in nuanced thinking and deep analysis. Only individuals with a degree of calmness and detachment can do so. People in groups feel emotional and excited. Their primary desire is to fit in to the group spirit. Their thinking tends to be simplistic—good versus evil, with us or against us. They naturally look for some type of authority to simplify matters for them. Deliberately creating chaos, as Mao did, only makes the group more certain to fall into these primitive patterns of thinking, since it is too frightening for humans to live with too much confusion and uncertainty. Look at how the students at YMS responded to Mao’s call for action: When first confronted with the Cultural Revolution, they merely transformed Mao himself into the new authority to guide them. They swallowed his ideas with very little personal reflection. They imitated the actions of others in Beijing in the most conventional way. Looking for revisionists, they tended to base their judgments on appearances—the clothes the teachers wore, the special food or wine they drank, their manners, their family background. Such appearances could be quite deceptive. Teacher Wen was radical in her beliefs but was judged a revisionist based on her fondness for Western-style fashion. In the old order, the students were supposed to give total

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  studying another culture, for instance, it will want to get closer to it, to understand how it is experienced from within. It is more sensitive to information from the senses, not merely from abstract reasoning. For too long the masculine style has been seen as more rational and scientific, but this does not reflect the reality. All of the greatest scientists in history have displayed a powerful mix of the masculine and feminine styles. The biologist Louis Pasteur’s greatest discoveries came from his ability to open his mind to as many explanations as possible, to let them cook in his mind, in order to see the connections between wide-ranging phenomena. Einstein attributed all of his greatest discoveries to intuitions, in which long hours of thinking gave way to sudden insights about the interconnection of certain facts. The anthropologist Margaret Mead used the latest abstract models from her time to rigorously analyze indigenous cultures, but she combined this with months of living within it and gaining a feel from the inside position. In business, Warren Buffett is an example of someone who blends the two styles. When he considers buying a company, he breaks it down into its component parts and analyzes them in statistical depth, but he also tries to get a feel for the overall gestalt of the business, how the employees relate to one another, the spirit of the group as instilled by the man or woman at the top—a lot of the intangibles most businesspeople ignore. He looks at a company from both the outside and the inside. Almost all people will lean more toward one style of thinking. What you want for yourself is to create balance by leaning more in the other direction. If you are more on the masculine side, you want to widen the fields you look at, finding connections between different forms of knowledge. In looking for solutions, you want to consider more possibilities, give greater time to the deliberative process, and allow for freer associations. You need to take seriously the intuitions that come to you after much deliberation, and not discount the value of emotions in thinking. Without a sense of excitement and inspiration, your thinking can become stale and lifeless. If you lean more in the feminine direction, you need to be capable of focusing and digging into specific problems, tamping down the impulse to widen your search and multitask. You have to find pleasure in boring into one aspect of a problem. Reconstructing a causal chain and continually refining it will give depth to your thinking. You tend to see structure and order as dull affairs, giving greater emphasis to expressing an idea and feeling inspired by it. Instead, you need to derive pleasure in paying deep attention to the structure of a book, argument, or project. Being creative and clear with the structure will give your material its power to influence people. Sometimes you need to gain greater emotional distance to

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

  He’s in the bag.” Dwight said that all I had to do was sidestep when Arthur came at me, then uppercut him to the jaw. It was that simple: sidestep, uppercut. Using the peculiar patience, almost tenderness, that he reserved for instruction in combat, Dwight rehearsed this move with me several times before the smoker. I learned it but I didn’t believe in it, any more than I believed in the moves I’d been shown by my other counselors. I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell against Arthur unless I threw strategy aside and went absolutely berserk, as he was sure to do. EACH FIGHT CONSISTED of three one-minute rounds. All the fighters waited together in the locker room until Mr. Mitchell called them out. The locker room was dimly lit. We didn’t talk. Except for the real heavies we looked almost frail in our big gloves and oversized, billowing shorts. A few boys lay back on the benches, their forearms over their eyes. The rest of us sat hunched with our gloves on our knees and stared at the floor, listening to the noise in the gym. The roar was steady, almost mechanically so, except when it fell off during the breaks between rounds and when it rose during what must have been particularly violent passages in the fight then under way. At these times the roar became almost palpable. We raised our heads, then lowered them again as the sound ebbed. Every five minutes or so the door would swing open and two more boys would go out, passing on their way the sweating, gasping wrecks whose fight had just ended. Arthur and I had a long wait. We sat at opposite ends of the locker room and didn’t look at each other. Boys came and went. I had questions about what I was doing here, and what was to come. I entered a trance of perplexity and apprehension. Then I heard my name, and jumped to my feet, and ran outside into the gym with Arthur behind me. The lights dazzled my eyes. I saw the people in the stands only as a mass of color. They roared when we ran out, and the sound was even louder than I’d thought it would be, a thrilling pagan din that washed the fear clean out of me. We went to our corners and Mr. Mitchell introduced us as two boys with bad blood between us, which, by now, we were. I raised my gloves at the sound of my name and the stands roared again. That was when I realized that I was invincible. I was going to give him a beating, the beating of his life, and I couldn’t wait to start. The bell rang and we went at it. MY MOTHER WOULD hardly talk to me on the drive home that night, she was so appalled. She refused to understand that I’d really had to fight, that there was no choice.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I remembered this later, waiting for the bus that would take us to town. We were the only people in the little shelter at the stop, huddling together against the wind, which was sharper than I had expected; it wasn’t very cold but it was cold enough for our coats, for the scarves we had draped around each other before heading out. Then R. stepped up onto the bench, he grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face him. Now I’m the taller one, he said, and bent down to kiss me, not a chaste kiss, he gripped my hair and tilted my head farther back to probe my mouth with his tongue. I tried to pull away, laughing: it was a busy road, we were in full view of the passing cars. But he held me tight, kissing me with urgency, until I realized that exposure was the point, that he wanted to show off, here where nobody knew him, where he could be anonymous and free, could live out an ideal of candor. He leaned into me, pressing his pelvis into my stomach so I felt his cock hard between us; it turned him on to show off like this, I had had no idea. I gripped him, using my body to shield us, I gripped him hard with both my hands through his jeans. I started to undo his belt, wanting to meet him in his daring, to show him I was game; and he moaned into my mouth before he pulled back and pushed my hand away. Porta-te bem, he said, slapping my face lightly and laughing, behave.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Often the manifestation of the discharge was a gentle muscular fasciculation (minute muscular trembling and quivers) or temperature change—such as going from very cold to very hot. These changes are generally monitored by observing color changes in the hands and face. Over the following decades, I explored the biological basis of trauma from a comparative study of animals and their nervous systems. This, I felt, would help me develop a systematic approach to healing trauma that could be reproduced reliably and systematically, as well as being sufficiently safe. This journey also fulfilled an early dream of mine: I became a (small) part of the space adventure. While still a Berkeley graduate student in medical biophysics, I was given a fellowship as a stress consultant at NASA for a year. My primary task—to help prepare our astronauts for the first space shuttle flight—gave me a unique opportunity to study people whose stress resilience was unusually robust. These observations inspired me to reflect back on my session with Nancy some years earlier: on her profound lack of resilience and her spontaneous transformation. It seemed possible that the astronauts’ super-resilience was a skill that even the most highly traumatized individuals could learn to activate, a birthright that needed to be reclaimed. A First Step: Serendipity Gained In attempting to understand what had transpired that day with Nancy, I was struck by a “footnote” in an informal graduate seminar I was taking in comparative animal behavior. One of the professors, Peter Marler, had mentioned some peculiar behaviors exhibited by prey animals such as birds and rabbits when they were physically restrained. That night I awoke, shaking in excitement. Could Nancy’s reaction (when held down by the doctors) be similar to those of the experimentally restrained animals? As for my “hallucination” of the crouching tiger, that was undoubtedly a creative “waking dream” stimulated by that inspiring graduate seminar. In pursuing the arcane allusion from my seminar, I came across a 1967 article titled “Comparative Aspects of Hypnosis.” 6 I brought this article, along with my ideas about it, to my graduate research advisor, Donald M. Wilson. † His field was invertebrate neurophysiology, and he was familiar with these types of “freezing” behaviors. However, for one dedicated solely to the study of creatures like insects and lobsters, he was understandably skeptical about “animal hypnosis.” Nonetheless, I remained fascinated by the broadly observed phenomenon of animal paralysis and spent endless hours in the musty, dusty stacks of the Life Sciences graduate library. At the same time, I continued to see more clients referred primarily by Ed Jackson, the psychiatrist who had referred Nancy to me.

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

  I’d pump them for details about the places they lived as if they hailed from Greenland or Samoa. I’d give them my name and collect theirs on pieces of paper that thickened my wallet to a fistlike roundness. I worked my magic on these boys from Ballard and pretty soon it was old home week. I told them some of my amazing stories, like the one about the escaped lunatic who’d left his hook hanging on the door handle of Bobby Crow’s car, and they told me some of theirs. They were good friends with the cousin of a guy who’d lost his dick in an automobile accident. He crashed his convertible into a tree and his girlfriend was thrown high up into the branches. When the police got her down they found the guy’s dong in her mouth. If I didn’t believe them I could ask anyone from Ballard. When we ran out of true stories we told jokes. The Silver Saddle. The Glass Eye and the Wooden Leg. The Chinese Milkshake. One of them asked me if I smoked. “Do I smoke?” I said. “Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?” “Let’s go.” The four of us walked outside and sat down under some trees beside the football field. I noticed Arthur coming toward us. He stopped under the goalposts. I couldn’t believe he had followed me out here. The Ballard boys noticed him too. “Who’s that?” one of them asked. “Just a guy,” I said. “From your troop?” I nodded. “What’s his name?” “Arthur.” “As in King?” We all laughed. The Ballard boy held up a package of Hit Parades. “Hey Arthur,” he yelled. “Want a weed?” Arthur shook his head. He stuck his hands in his pocket and looked away. After a while he sauntered back toward the school. The Ballard boy passed the Hit Parades around. He took out another, smaller package and handed it to me; it was a six-pack of Trojans. I took out the one foilwrapped rubber left inside, looked at it, then put it back in the box and returned it to him. “That was full last night,” he said. We had a few cigarettes and went back to the school to catch our rides over to Glenvale, where we agreed to meet by the roller coaster. As soon as I got in the car, Dwight started talking about how sharp the Ballard drill team was and how our troop needed something like that, something that could really make it a force to contend with. He kept it up all the way to Glenvale. I got out of the car with him still talking and said I’d meet him later on. He looked at the overnight bag. “What do you need that for?” he asked. “That’s okay,” I said vaguely, and walked away from the car. I expected to hear him call me back, but he didn’t.

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

  The three Ballard boys were already in line for the roller coaster. All the rides were free that day. Everything was free except the food and the games of chance. While we waited in line we compared Ballard pussy with Concrete pussy and discussed the various roller coaster fatalities of which we had personal knowledge. Arthur stood some distance away, watching me. Finally he came up and asked me when I wanted to leave. “In a while,” I said. “I think we should go now.” “In a while.” One of the Ballard boys offered Arthur a place in line but he shook his head and turned away. He was still waiting when I got off the ride, and he waited again when the Ballard boys and I attached ourselves to another line. He waited the whole afternoon, following us from one ride to the next. He watched me stand treat at the refreshment stand, gaily peeling bills off my wad. When we headed toward the midway he followed us, and came up to me again while one of the Ballard boys was throwing darts. “I thought we were going to Alaska,” he said. “We are.” “Yeah, but when?” “Look, we’re going , okay? Jeez. Just hold your horses.” I threw some darts myself. I tossed rings. I pitched baseballs at weighted milk bottles. I tried my strength. And then I stopped by the Blackout booth. Blackout was an unfamiliar game to me, but it looked like a snap. For a quarter you got a board with several sections marked out on it and three metal disks etched with symbols. If the symbols on a disk matched up in certain ways with the symbols on a section, you could lay the disk over the section. You received points according to the configuration of the disks on the board, and the sum of these points entitled you to prizes arranged in tiers against the back of the stall: ashtrays, paperweights, Kewpie dolls, porcelain bulldogs on the lowest tier; baseball mitts, stuffed animals, lighters shaped like pistols, clock radios, stiletto knives, ID bracelets on the next; and so on up to the topmost tier, where they kept the big prizes. Portable TVs. Binoculars. Cameras. Gold pinky rings set with diamonds. Diamond necklaces on gold chains, draped casually among the other prizes. Gold watches. And, attached to each of these prizes by a ribbon, a rolled-up one-hundred-dollar bill. The two men behind the counter saw us eyeing the prizes. Smoke and Rusty, their names were. Rusty was thin and nervous. Smoke was a fat smiling guy with gaps between his teeth. It turned out that Smoke had been a Scout himself, so for auld lang syne he let each of us have a free game. Rusty tried to talk him out of it, but Smoke insisted. It was just as easy as it looked. Two of the Ballard boys won paperweights, and I racked up enough points for an ID bracelet.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There’s never been anything like this, M. said then, I mean maybe in 1989 but nothing I’ve ever seen. Something’s really happening, I feel like I’m part of something, not just here but something bigger. It’s the same as what’s happening in Taksim Square, in Brazil, the Arab Spring, something is happening, something real, I think there’s a chance for things really to change. I felt this too, it wasn’t to challenge her that I asked what she thought that change would be. She shrugged. I’m not sure, she said, but I feel like we’ll figure it out. She paused. I feel powerful in a way I never have before, she said, and then she glanced at me and laughed, I feel like one of the opalchentsi on Shipka. These were Bulgarian volunteers who fought with the Russians against the Ottomans, there was a poem about them by Ivan Vazov that every Bulgarian knew; I had heard a poet declaim it once, drunk at a dinner party, the room quiet with reverence. I feel the power of the people, she said gingerly, cringing at the cliché. Then she laughed again, pointing, and I saw that ahead of us a group of women were dancing on the sidewalk, their hair wet, their sundresses clinging to their bodies, and several stories above them an elderly man, shirtless and bald, his skin hanging loose around his frame, held a garden hose, pointing it up and half blocking the end with his thumb so that water fell down like rain. It was his gift to us, a chance to cool down, though most of the marchers avoided it, leaving it to the young women, who would be cold soon enough; the heat was fading, even on warm days the nights could be cool. It was an instant allegory, youth and age, Hephaestus and the Graces. And then my mind shuffled to the side a step and I thought of the water cannons in Taksim Square, of the luck that had held here so far. M. turned her head as we passed them, then looked back at me, smiling. My parents don’t like that I come, she said, they don’t like the government but they’re afraid of violence, they’re afraid I’ll get in trouble with the police. But it’s not like that at all, she said, people aren’t angry, there’s so much joy here, she said, they don’t understand that, have you ever seen so much joy? It makes me wish I weren’t leaving, she went on, my whole life I’ve been dying to get out of here and now I feel like I want to stay. This made me remember the taxi driver and what he had said about the Changes, how he had wasted his life for an idealism that had curdled, but I didn’t say this, I put my arm around her and squeezed her shoulder, another breach of decorum. I mean, look at that, she said after I dropped my arm, and she pointed at a sign being carried by a man just in front of us. The crowd had bunched and slowed as people climbed the stairs that led from the boulevard up to the plaza at NDK. I almost never came to NDK this way, I always circled around to the other side. I only climbed these stairs once a year, I realized, for the Pride march, when the organizers used the stairs for a security check; we opened our bags and showed our IDs and had colored plastic bands attached to our wrists, so that the police could tell us apart from the protesters who would line our path. M. was pointing at a poster that showed a bearded man’s face, and beneath it in block letters the name Vazov, the writer who had given M. her opalchentsi, and beside that another face, this one labeled Botev, another beloved poet. There was a whole group of them marching together, each with the face of a writer: there were Elin Pelin and Petko Slaveykov, and my favorite of the classic writers, Yordan Yovkov, the most elegant, he should be better known in English. Isn’t that beautiful, M. said, tell me, where else do they march with their poets, and I had to admit that I didn’t know, certainly not in America, I said, that’s something you would never see there, and she smiled, I could see this gratified her.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There were maybe seven or eight tables in our corner of the room, almost all of them taken by groups of young people, some of them high school students, I thought, two or three couples gathered at each. N. waved to catch our attention, then pointed back to the entrance, nodding to Z. before he left. Z. mouthed something at me but I didn’t understand, the music was too loud, and after he repeated it to no avail he dropped his hands to his crotch and mimed a man pissing, his hand curled as if around an impossibly large cock. I laughed, both because it was funny and because it hid the other thing I felt. I mocked him, first holding my hand up, curled like his, making a doubtful face, and then I dropped both hands to my own crotch, as if holding a cock twice as large, three times, and Z. laughed too, a genuine laugh, I thought, though it wasn’t very funny, and both of us seemed a little embarrassed once the laughter had passed. Then Z. said something else and again I didn’t understand, so he took his phone out of his pocket and typed, holding up the screen for me to read. This is a great night, he had written, and I looked up and said Yes, and we raised our glasses, clinking them before we drank.

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

  They had talked it over and come up with a plan they wanted us to consider. This was that I should come alone to Paris and live with them and go to school with my cousins, one of whom, Kathy, was my age and would be able to help me make friends and learn the ropes. While I lived with them my mother would be free to get away from Dwight and look for work. Once she got settled, really settled—say in a year or so—I could rejoin her. My uncle referred to a check he’d apparently enclosed, saying he was sorry he couldn’t send more. He hoped my mother would give every consideration to his plan, which seemed to him a good one. In the future he thought it would be best if she wrote him herself. “What do you think?” my mother asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Paris.” She said, “Just think of it. You in Paris.” “Paris,” I said. She nodded. “So what do you think?” “I don’t know. What about you?” “He has some pretty good points. It would be a great experience for you, living in Paris. And it would give me some time to see how things go here.” I was trying to be sober and so was she, but we ended up grinning at each other. “Just don’t say anything about the check,” my mother said. DWIGHT WAS ALL for packing me off to Paris. The thought that I would soon be leaving softened him and disposed him toward reminiscence. He said that his travels during the war had given him a whole nother outlook on life. He gave me advice on how to treat Frenchmen, and counseled me to be broad-minded when confronted with their effeminate customs. I heard a lot about the French people’s appetite for frogs, and learned that this was how they came to be known as Frogs by the people of other nations. From a set of pre-World War I English encyclopedias he had bought at a yard sale, Dwight read me long passages on French history (tumultuous, despotic, distinguished by the Gallic taste for conspiracy and betrayal), French culture (full of Gallic wit and high spirits, but generally derivative, superficial, arid, and atheistic), and the French national character (endowed with a certain Gallic warmth and charm, but excitable, sensual, and, on the whole, unreliable). Pearl burned. She could not accept that I was going to live in Paris. I added to her unhappiness by treating her with condescension. I also condescended to Arthur and my other friends, as if they had served their purpose and were already dematerializing into quaint, vaporous memories. At school I asked for and received permission to take time off from my regular studies to complete a series of “special projects” on the history, culture, and national character of France.

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

  Then Geoffrey would fly out from Princeton after graduation and the three of us would spend the whole summer together. Geoffrey would work on his novel while I started preparing for classes at Deerfield. When we wanted a break we could go for a swim at Wind and Sea Beach, which was just down the street from the apartment. And later, when she saw how well everything was going, my mother would join us. We would be a family again. “I’ve made some mistakes,” he told me. “We all have. But that’s behind us. Right, Tober?” “Right.” “You damn betcha. We’re starting from scratch. And look, no more of this Jack business. You can’t go off to Deerfield with a name like Jack. Understand?” I said I understood. “Good boy.” He asked if it was true that my stepfather had hit me. When I said yes, he said, “The next time he does it, kill him.” Then he asked to speak to my mother again. After she hung up I told her what he’d said to me. “Sounds real nice,” she said. “Don’t bank on it.” “He said you would come too.” “Hah! That’s what he thinks. I’d have to be crazy to do that.” Then she said, “Let’s see what happens.” MY MOTHER DROVE me down to Seattle for the tests. I took the verbal section in the morning and immediately began to enjoy myself. I recognized, behind the easyseeming questions on vocabulary and reading comprehension, a competitive intelligence out to tempt me with answers that were not correct. The tricks had a smugness about them that provoked me. I wanted to confound these sharpies, show them I wasn’t as dumb as they thought I was. When the monitor called the tests in I felt suddenly alone, as if someone had walked out on me in the middle of a good argument. The other boys who were taking the test gathered in the hallway to compare answers. They all seemed to know each other. I did not approach them, but I watched them closely. They wore rumpled sport coats and baggy flannel pants. White socks showing above brown loafers. I was the only boy there in a suit, a salt-and-pepper suit I’d gotten for eighth-grade graduation, now too small for me. And I was the only boy there with a “Princeton” haircut. The others had long hair roughly parted and left hanging down across their foreheads, almost to their eyes. Now and then they tossed their heads to throw the loose hair back. The effect would have been careless on just one of them, but it was uniform, an effect of style, and I took note of it. I also took note of the way they talked to each other, their predatory, reflexive sarcasm. It interested me, excited me; at certain moments I had to make an effort not to laugh. As they spoke they smiled ironically, and rocked on their heels, and tossed their heads like nickering horses.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Z. took the carton from me and screwed the lid back on, shaking it vigorously and for far too long, making us laugh again. It was the second flask of vodka, the second carton of juice, the second time Z. had taken in hand the mixing of our drinks. He would have poured for us if we had had anything to use as cups; instead we drank straight from the carton, which he handed to me first and then to N. before drinking from it himself. We were on a narrow street in the city center, standing beneath a streetlamp in front of the little twenty-four-hour shop where we had bought our supplies. It was already late, but we had an hour or so before the concert at the club that was our real destination. Sofia is famous for these clubs, where the city’s wealthy dance and drink; they’re called chalgoteki, after the pop-folk music they play. I had never been to one before. But now, since I was leaving Sofia, Z. had insisted that at least once I should have what he called a real Bulgarian night out, and the lure of him had overcome all my aversion to drunkenness and noise. I was eager for it, even, I planned to enjoy myself, to dance and drink, to relax in the company of these boys I genuinely liked, to be their friend for an evening and not their teacher.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  relatively simple to reach, and within a time frame of months and not years. You will want to break this down into mini steps and goals along the way. Your objective here is to enter a state of flow, in which your mind becomes increasingly absorbed in the work, to the point at which ideas come to you at odd hours. This feeling of flow should be pleasurable and addicting. You don’t allow yourself to engage in fantasies about other projects on the horizon. You want to absorb yourself in the work as deeply as possible. If you do not enter this state of flow, you are inevitably multitasking and stopping the focus. Work on overcoming this. This could be a project you work on outside your job. It is not the number of hours you put in but the intensity and consistent effort you bring to it. Related to this, you want this project to involve skills you already have or are in the process of developing. Your goal is to see continual improvement in your skill level, which will certainly come from the depth of your focus. Your confidence will rise. That should be enough to keep you advancing. Maintain a dialogue with reality. Your project begins with an idea, and as you try to hone this idea, you let your imagination take flight, being open to various possibilities. At some point you move from the planning phase to execution. Now you must actively search for feedback and criticism from people you respect or from your natural audience. You want to hear about the flaws and inadequacies in your plan, for that is the only way to improve your skills. If the project fails to have the results you imagined, or the problem is not solved, embrace this as the best way to learn. Analyze what you did wrong in depth, being as brutal as possible. Once you have feedback and have analyzed the results, you then return to this project or start a new one, letting your imagination loose again but incorporating what you have learned from the experience. You keep cycling endlessly through this process, noticing with excitement how you are improving by doing so. If you stay too long in the imagination phase, what you create will tend to be grandiose and detached from reality. If you only listen to feedback and try to make the work a complete reflection of what others tell you or want, the work will be conventional and flat. By maintaining a continual dialogue between reality (feedback) and your imagination, you will create something practical and powerful. If you have any success with your projects, that is when you must step back from the attention you are receiving. Look at the role that luck may have played, or the help you received from others. Resist falling for the success delusion. As you now focus on the next idea, see yourself back at square one. Each new project represents a new