Excitement

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  I fortuned to travel into Thessaly, about certain affairs which I had to do (for there, my ancestry by my mother’s side inhabiteth, descended of the line of that most excellent person Plutarch, and of Sextus the philosopher his nephew, which is to us a great worship and honour); and after that by much travel and great pain, I had passed over the high mountains and slippery valleys, and had ridden through the dewy grass and fallowed fields, perceiving that my horse, a white thoroughbred of that country, did wear somewhat slow, and to the intent likewise I might repose and strengthen myself (being weary of long sitting) I lighted off my horse on to my feet, and wiping carefully away the sweat from his head, and stroking his ears, I unbridled him, and walked him on to a gentle slope, to the end that he might by nature's relief ease himself of his weariness ; and while he went taking his morning graze in the field (casting his head sometimes aside as a token of re- joicing and gladness) I perceived a little before me two companions riding,and so I overtaking them made athird. And while I listened to hear their conversa- tion, one of them laughed, and mocked his fellow, saying: “Leave off, I pray thee, and speak no more, for I cannot abide to hear thee tell such absurd incredible lies." Which when I heard I desired to hear some news, and said: “I pray you, masters, make me partaker of your talk, that am not so curious as desirous to know all you say, or most of it. So shall the difficulty of this high 5 LUCIUS APULEIUS vel certe plurima: simul iugi quod insurgimus aspri- tudinem fabularum lepida incunditas levigabit.” 3 At ille qui coeperat, * Ne" inquit * Istud menda- cium tam verum est, quam si quis velit dicere magico susurramine amnes agiles reverti, mare pigrum colligari, ventos inanimes exspirare; solem inhiberi, lunam despumari, stellas evelli, diem tolli, noctem teneri." Tune ego in verba fidentior * Heus tu”? inquam * Qui sermonem ieceras priorem, ne pigeat te vel tae- deat reliqua pertexere," et ad alium * Tu vero crassis auribus et obstinato corde respuis quae forsitan vere perhibeantur. Minus Hercule calles pravissimis opinionibus ea putari mendacia, quae vel auditu nova vel visu rudia vel certe supra captum cogitationis ardua videantur; quae si paulo accuratius exploraris, non modo compertu evidentia, verum etiam factu facilia 4senties. Ego denique vespera, dum. polentae caseatae modico secus offulam grandiorem in con- vivas aemulus contruncare gestio, mollitie cibi glu- tinos faucibus inhaerentis et meacula spiritus distinentis minimo minus interii: et tamen Athenis proxime et ante Poecilen porticum isto gemino obtutu circulatorem aspexi equestrem spatham 6 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK I E before us be lightened by merry and pleasant alk.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I’m not really a classical music type of – ’ ‘ No , man, you remember – ’cos I remember I overheard your people, your moms and everybody – they were discussing whether he was a genius, remember, and – ’ ‘That was like a month ago,’ said Zora, confused. ‘Oh, I’m very memorizing – like I remember everything . You tell me something: I remember it. I never forget a face – you see how I don’t forget a face. And it was just – you know – inneresting to me, about Mozart, ’cos I’m a musician also – ’ Zora allowed herself a tiny smile at the unlikely comparison. ‘And then I found out about it a little more – ’cos, I’ve been reading about classical music, ’cos you can’t do what I do without knowing about other shit outside of your direct, like, your influences and shit – ’ Zora nodded politely. ‘ Right , you under stand me,’ said Carl vigorously, as if with this nod Zora had signed her name to a declaration of undisclosed principles of Carl’s choosing. ‘And so anyway, man, it turns out that that section – it wasn’t even by him – I mean, it was partly him, right? Obviously he passed away halfway through, and then other people had to be brought in to finish it off. And it turns out that the main business of the Lacrimosa was by this guy Su¨ssmayr –  the anatomy lesson which is the shit , man, ’cos it’s like the best thing in the Requiem, and it made me think damn , you can be so close to genius that it like lifts you up – it’s like Su¨ssmayr, this guy, stepped up to the bat, right, like a rookie, and then he went and hit it out of the park – and all these people be trying to prove that it’s Mozart ’cos that fits in with their idea of who can and who can’t make music like this, but the deal is that this amazing sound was just by this guy Su¨ssmayr, this average Joe Shmo guy. I was tripping when I read that shit.’ And all the time, while he spoke, and she tried, bewilderedly, to listen, his face was doing its silent voodoo on her, just as it seemed to work on everybody passing by him in this archway.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library full of flowers. There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room. Consequently, for at least five minutes I went about—lucidly insane, crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight hunter—turning whatever keys in whatever locks there were and pocketing them with my free left hand. The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood. Speaking of bathrooms—I was about to visit a third one when master came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall behind him. The corner of a passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a scanty balding way, but still perfectly recognizable, he swept by me in a purple bathrobe, very like one I had. He either did not notice me, or else dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination—and, showing me his hairy calves, he proceeded, sleepwalker-wise, downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into the entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door, to peer out through a sunny chink as one who thinks he has heard a half-hearted visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring the raincoated phantasm that had stopped in midstairs, master walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall from the drawing room, through which—taking it easy, knowing he was safe—I now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly unwrapped dirty Chum, taking care not to leave any oil stains on the chrome—I think I got the wrong product, it was black and awfully messy. In my usual meticulous way, I transferred naked Chum to a clean recess about me and made for the little boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy—too springy perhaps for success. But my heart pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched a cocktail glass underfoot. Master met me in the Oriental parlor. “Now who are you?” he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a point to the northeast of my head. “Are you by any chance Brewster?” By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself. “That’s right,” I answered suavely. “Je suis Monsieur Brustère. Let us chat for a moment before we start.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Algebra took her away from me, I would possess the means of putting two creatures to sleep so thoroughly that neither sound nor touch should rouse them. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting with various sleeping powders, trying them out on Charlotte, a great taker of pills. The last dose I had given her (she thought it was a tablet of mild bromides—to anoint her nerves) had knocked her out for four solid hours. I had put the radio at full blast. I had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight. I had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her—and nothing had disturbed the rhythm of her calm and powerful breathing. However, when I had done such a simple thing as kiss her, she had awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped). This would not do, I thought; had to get something still safer. At first, Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last prescription was no match for my insomnia. He suggested I try again, and for a moment diverted my attention by showing me photographs of his family. He had a fascinating child of Dolly’s age; but I saw through his tricks and insisted he prescribe the mightiest pill extant. He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, “would really work”; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries. I love to fool doctors, and though inwardly rejoicing, pocketed the pills with a skeptical shrug. Incidentally, I had had to be careful with him. Once, in another connection, a stupid lapse on my part made me mention my last sanatorium, and I thought I saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte or anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily explained that I had once done some research among the insane for a novel. But no matter; the old rogue certainly had a sweet girleen. I left in great spirits. Steering my wife’s car with one finger, I contentedly rolled homeward. Ramsdale had, after all, lots of charm. The cicadas whirred; the avenue had been freshly watered. Smoothly, almost silkily, I turned down into our steep little street. Everything was somehow so right that day.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Iw this Milesian tale I shall string together divers stories, and delight your kindly ears with a pleasant history, if you will not scorn to look upon this Egyptian paper written with a ready pen of Nile reeds— stories of men's forms and fortunes trans- formed into different shapes, and then restored again in due sequence back into their selves—a true subject for wonder. Who is the author? In a few words you shall understand. Hymettus of Athens, the Isthmus of Corinth, Taenarus of Sparta, being famous lands (as I pray you give credit to the books of more everlasting fame) be places where mine ancient progeny and lineage did sometime flourish : there when I was young I went first to school and learned the Attic speech. Soon after (as a stranger) I arrived at Rome, where by great industry, and without instruction of any schoolmaster, I arrived at the full perfection of the Latin tongue: behold, I first crave and beg your pardon, lest I should happen to dis- please or offend any of you by the rude and rustic utter- ance of this strange and foreign language. And verily this change of speech doth correspond to the enter- : 3 LUCIUS APULEIUS locutor offendero. Jam haec equidem ipsa vocis immutatio desultoriae scientiae stilo quem acces- simus respondet. Fabulam Graecanicam incipimus: lector intende ; laetaberis. .9 Thessaliam, nam et illic originis maternae nostrae fundamenta a Plutarcho illo inclito ac mox Sexto philosopho nepote eius prodita gloriam nobis faciunt, eam Thessaliam ex negotio petebam. Postquam ardua montium et lubrica vallium et roscida caespitum et glebosa camporum emensi, me equo indigena per- albo vehens eo quoque admodum fesso, ut ipse etiam fatigationem sedentariam incessus vegetatione dis- cuterem, in pedes desilio, equi sudorem a fronte curiose exfrico, aures remulceo, frenos detraho, in gradum lenem sensim proveho, quoad lassitudinis incommodum alui solitum ac naturale praesidium eliquaret. Ac dum is, ientaculum ambulatorium, prata quae praeterit ore in latus detorto pronus affectat, duobus comitum, qui forte paululum pro- cesserant, tertium me facio. Ac dum ausculto quid sermonis agitarent, alter exerto cachinno “ Parce" inquit “In verba ista haec tam absurda tamque immania mentiendo." Isto accepto sititor alioquin novitatis * Immo vero " inquam * Impertite sermonis non quidem curiosum, sed qui velim scire vel cuncta 4 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK I prise and matter whereof I purpose to treat, like a rider leaping from horse to horse; I set forth unto you a Grecian story : whereto, gentle reader, if thou attend and give ear, thou shalt be well contented withal.

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

  But taking pleasure in the unknown is more than just a scientific indulgence. It’s part of the spirit of adventure that makes us human. In the pages that follow, I invite you to share that adventure with me. Chapters 1–3 introduce the new science of emotion: how psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines are moving away from the search for emotion fingerprints and instead asking how emotions are constructed. Chapters 4–7 explain how, exactly, emotions are made. And chapters 8–12 explore the practical, real-world implications of this new theory of emotions on our approaches to health, emotional intelligence, child-rearing, personal relationships, systems of law, and even human nature itself. To close the book, chapter 13 reveals how the science of emotion illuminates the age-old mystery of how a human brain creates a human mind. 1 The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints” Once upon a time, in the 1980s, I thought I would be a clinical psychologist. I headed into a Ph.D. program at the University of Waterloo, expecting to learn the tools of the trade as a psychotherapist and one day treat patients in a stylish yet tasteful office. I was going to be a consumer of science, not a producer. I certainly had no intention of joining a revolution to unseat basic beliefs about the mind that have existed since the days of Plato. But life sometimes tosses little surprises in your direction. It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious. My first experiment in grad school was simply to replicate this well-known phenomenon before building on it to test my own hypotheses. In the course of this experiment, I asked a large number of volunteers if they felt anxious or depressed using well-established checklists of symptoms. 1 I’d done more complicated experiments as an undergraduate student, so this one should have been a piece of cake. Instead, it crashed and burned. My volunteers did not report anxious or depressed feelings in the expected pattern. So I tried to replicate a second published experiment, and it failed too. I tried again, over and over, each experiment taking months. After three years, all I’d achieved was the same failure eight times in a row. In science, experiments often don’t replicate, but eight consecutive failures is an impressive record.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  From this vantage point, she gasped and wrung Ron’s hand by the wrist. ‘Oh my God . . . I totally know him.’ For it was Carl, dressed in an old fifties-style football sweater and wearing a neat little multicoloured knapsack. He was pacing the stage in the same relaxed, homely manner with which he’d accompanied Zora to the gates of Wellington College, and he smiled prettily as he spoke, the complex rhymes tripping off his luminous teeth as if he were crooning in a barbershop troupe. The only sign of exertion was the river of sweat that came down his face. Doc Brown, in his enthusiasm, had joined Carl on the stage, and now found himself reduced to hype man, Yo-ing like Levi in the tiny syllabic gaps Carl left in his wake. ‘ What? ’ said Ron, unable to hear anything, not even Carl any more, over the roars and whistles of the audience. ‘I KNOW THAT GUY.’ ‘ THAT GUY ?’ ‘YES.’ ‘OH MY GOD . IS HE STRAIGHT?’ Zora laughed. The alcohol had done its work on all of them now. She smiled in a knowing way about things she did not know, and swayed with the beat as much as her footstool would allow. ‘Let’s try to get closer to the stage,’ suggested Claire, and in the last minute, following Ron’s unabashed elbowed course through the audience, they reached their original seats. ‘OH – MY – WORD !’ yelled Doc Brown, as Carl’s tape finished. He held up Carl’s right hand like a prizefighter’s. ‘I think we have  On Beauty a winner – correction: I know we have a champion – ’ But Carl released himself from Doc’s grip and jumped lightly off the stage on to the floor. Somewhere, underneath the cheering, you could hear the discontented boos of rival factions, but the cheers won out. The Creole boys and Levi were nowhere in sight. From all sides people clapped their hands to Carl’s back and rubbed his head fondly. ‘Hey – you don’t want your jeroboam? Brother’s shy – don’t want his prize!’ ‘No, no, no – hold my champagne,’ shouted Carl. ‘Brother got to wash his face, though. Too much sweat is too much.’ Doc Brown nodded sagely. ‘Well said, well said – gotta be fresh and clean. Ain’t no doubt. DJ, spin it for us in the interim.’ Music started up and the audience ceased being an audience and softened into a crowd. ‘Bring him over here,’ insisted Ron, and then to the class: ‘Zora knows that boy. We need him over here.’ ‘You know him? He’s very talented,’ said Claire. ‘I know him this much,’ said Zora, signifying an inch between her forefinger and thumb. Just as she said this, she turned and found Carl in front of her. He had in his face the elated buzz of the performer, just landed back in the plebeian world of his public.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Ad hune modum transactis voluptarie paucis. noctibus, quadam die percita Fotis ac satis trepida me accurrit indieatque dominam suam, quod nihil etiam tunc in suos amores ceteris artibus promoveret, nocte proxima in avem sese plumaturam atque ad suum cupitum sic devolaturam ; proin memet ad rei tantae speculam caute praepararem. lamque circa primam noctis vigiliam. ad illud superius. cubiculum suspenso et insono vestigio me perducit ipsa, perque rimam ostiorum quampiam iubet arbitrari quae sic gesta sunt. lam primum omnibus laciniis se devestit Pamphile et arcula quadam reclusa pyxides plusculas inde depromit, de quis unius opereulo remoto atque indidem egesta unguedine diuque palmulis suis affricta ab imis unguibus sese totam adusque summos capillos perlinit, multumque cum lucerna secreto collocuta membra. tremulo. succussu quatit : quis leniter fluctuantibus promicant molles plumulae, crescunt et fortes pinnulae, duratur nasus incurvus, coguntur ungues adunci, fit bubo Pamphile. Sic edito stridore querulo, iam sui periclitabunda pau- 1 The MSS have actenus, which was naturally read qe by the old editors. Ac tandem is Helm's emendation, which gives much better sense—hactenus, indeed, is almost the opposite of what is required. 1 130 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK III tunity and time for that which you desire, but always upon this condition, that, as I bade you: before, you secretly keep close such things as are done.” Thus as we reasoned together the courage of Venus assailed as well our desires as our members ; and so she un- rayed: herself and came to me, and we spent the night in pastime and dalliance, and Fotis giving me all that she might and more, at last drowsy and unlusty sleep came upon our eyes and we were constrained to lie still until it was now high day.

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

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

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  As soone as night was past, and the day began to spring, I fortuned to awake, and rose out of my bed as halfe amazed, and very desirous to know and see some marvellous and strange things, remembring with my selfe that I was in the middle part of all Thessaly, whereas by the common report of all the World, the Sorceries and Inchauntments are most used, I oftentimes repeated with my self the tale of my companion Aristomenus touching the manner of this City, and being mooved by great desire, I viewed the whole scituation thereof, neither was there any thing which I saw there, but that I did beleeve to be the same which it was indeed, but every thing seemed unto me to be transformed and altered into other shapes, by the wicked power of Sorcerie and Inchantment, insomuch that I thought that the stones which I found were indurate, and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees without the walls of the city, and the running waters, were changed from men into such kinde of likenesses. And further I thought that the Statues, Images and Walls could goe, and the Oxen and other brute beasts could speake and tell strange newes, and that immediately I should see and heare some Oracles from the heavens, and from the gleed of the Sun. Thus being astonied or rather dismayed and vexed with desire, knowing no certaine place whither I intended to go, I went from street to street, and at length (as I curiously gazed on every thing) I fortuned unwares to come into the market place, whereas I espied a certaine woman, accompanied with a great many servants, towards whom I drew nigh, and viewed her garments beset with gold and pretious stone, in such sort that she seemed to be some noble matron. And there was an old man which followed her, who as soon as he espied me, said to himself, Verily this is Lucius, and then he came and embraced me, by and by he went unto his mistresse and whispered in her eare, and came to mee againe saying, How is it Lucius that you will not salute your deere Cousin and singular friend? To whom I answered, Sir I dare not be so bold as to take acquaintance of an unknown woman. Howbeit as halfe ashamed I drew towards her, and shee turned her selfe and sayd, Behold how he resembleth the very same grace as his mother Salvia doth, behold his countenance and stature, agreeing thereto in each poynt, behold his comely state, his fine slendernesse, his Vermilion colour, his haire yellow by nature, his gray and quicke eye, like to the Eagle, and his trim and comely gate, which do sufficiently prove him to be the naturall childe of Salvia. And moreover she sayd, O Lucius, I have nourished thee with myne owne proper hand: and why not?

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  The other night being at supper with a sort of hungry fellowes, while I did greedily put a great morsel of meate in my mouth, that was fried with the flower of cheese and barley, it cleaved so fast in the passage of my throat and stopped my winde in such sort that I was well nigh choked. And yet at Athens before the porch there called Peale, I saw with these eyes a jugler that swallowed up a two hand sword, with a very keene edge, and by and by for a little money that we who looked on gave him, hee devoured a chasing speare with the point downeward. And after that hee had conveyed the whole speare within the closure of his body, and brought it out againe behind, there appeared on the top thereof (which caused us all to marvell) a faire boy pleasant and nimble, winding and turning himself in such sort, that you would suppose he had neither bone nor gristle, and verily thinke that he were the naturall Serpent, creeping and sliding on the knotted staffe, which the god of Medicine is feigned to beare. But turning me to him that began his tale, I pray you (quoth I) follow your purpose, and I alone will give credit unto you, and for your paynes will pay your charges at the next Inne we come unto. To whom he answered Certes sir I thank you for your gentle offer, and at your request I wil proceed in my tale, but first I will sweare unto you by the light of this Sunne that shineth here, that those things shall be true, least when you come to the next city called Thessaly, you should doubt any thing of that which is rife in the mouthes of every person, and done before the face of all men. And that I may first make relation to you, what and who I am, and whither I go, and for what purpose, know you that I am of Egin, travelling these countries about from Thessaly to Etolia, and from Etolia to Boetia, to provide for honey, cheese, and other victuals to sell againe: and understanding that at Hippata (which is the principall city of all Thessaly), is accustomed to be soulde new cheeses of exceeding good taste and relish, I fortuned on a day to go thither, to make my market there: but as it often happeneth, I came in an evill houre; for one Lupus a purveyor had bought and ingrossed up all the day before, and so I was deceived.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hy pocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any usc, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I had heard a great deal, long before I finally met him, of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and of the Nation of Islam movement, of which he is the leader. I paid very little atten tion to what I heard, because the burden of his message did not strike me as being very original; I had been hearing vari ations of it all my life. I sometimes fo und myself in Harlem on Saturday nights, and I stood in the crowds, at I 2 5 th Street and Seventh Avenue, and listened to the Muslim speakers. But I had heard hundreds of such speeches-or so it seemed to me at first. Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox. What these men were saying about white people I had often heard before. And I dismissed the Nation of Is lam's demand fo r a separate black economy in America, which I had also heard before, as willful, and even mischievous, non sense. Then two things caused me to begin to listen to the speeches, and one was the behavior of the police. After all, I had seen men dragged from their platforms on this very corner fo r saying less virulent things, and I had seen many crowds dispersed by policemen, with clubs or on horseback. But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to sec it. There they stood, in twos and threes and tours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, fo r anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Back in New Haven, electron microscopy of the different samples revealed that some had well-preserved melanosomes, others preserved impressions of melanosomes, and some areas had no preserved melanosomes at all. Our next innovation was to compare the size, shape, and density of the melanosomes from the Anchiornis fossil with those of living birds. It turns out that eumelanosomes from black and gray feathers tend to be long and sausage shaped, whereas pheomelanosomes from rufous or red-brown feathers are more rounded and jelly bean shaped. By comparing measurements from Anchiornis melanosomes with those of living birds, we could diagnose the color of the fossil feathers. Because we had sampled many places from all across the specimen, we could reconstruct the color of nearly its entire plumage. One of the most exciting moments in my scientific career was watching the plumage of Anchiornis come to life as I mapped the newly diagnosed colors—black, gray, rufous brown, and plain white—from the sample numbers back onto their anatomical positions in the animal’s plumage. The resulting picture was more stunning than we could ever have imagined! Describing the plumage coloration of Anchiornis huxleyi was like writing the very first entry in the Field Guide to Jurassic Dinosaurs. As a child, I had been inspired by field guides to go out into the world and study birds. Now, as a scientist, I had the opportunity to reimagine them in an entirely new way. What did Anchiornis huxleyi look like? Its body plumage was largely dark gray with black on the forewings (color plate 15). The long crest feathers on the top of the head were rufous brown. Most striking of all, the long feathers on both its forelimbs and its hind limbs were white with black tips, or spangles—like the modern breed of Spangled Hamburg chicken. The effect of these black spangled limb feathers was to boldly highlight the trailing edge of the feather and to produce a series of black bars on the wings. Interestingly, the long limb feathers on Anchiornis were not asymmetrical in shape, like modern avian flight feathers. So, it is not clear that this creature used its limbs as gliding “wings” at all. Furthermore, Anchiornis was heavily feathered all the way down to its toes and lacked the scaly legs and toes of most living birds. Discovering the color of a dinosaur is more than just fun; it raises a host of fundamentally new questions about dinosaur biology and about the origins of what we think of as bird biology. The bold and complex plumage pigment patterns of Anchiornis were obviously used as sexual or social signals. Thus, the evolution of aesthetic plumage ornaments originated not within birds but way back in terrestrial theropod dinosaurs. The dinosaurs coevolved to be beautiful—beautiful to dinosaurs themselves—long before one exceptional lineage of dinosaurs evolved to become flying birds. The rich aesthetic history of the birds goes all the way back to their theropod roots in the Jurassic age. —

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Each male displays at a few logs within a territory about twenty yards wide. The display excitement within a male’s territory is occasionally enhanced by the arrival of a rowdy, traveling band of two to six males of mixed age that display together and with the territory holder. The groups include both adult males that may have their own territories but have temporarily joined the wandering, group display and young males in various stages of preadult plumage, who apparently do not hold territories. These group displays are not coordinated but more like a highly competitive form of rabble-rousing. Males vie for access to the same display log, performing a rapid flurry of log-approach displays one after another and frequently displacing each other from the log. During the competition for control of the log, males “strafe” each other by flying low over the log and producing only a mechanical pop just over the male on the log, right at the nadir in flight. The result can be an exciting flurry of pops and log-approach calls in rapid succession by different males: POP-tickee-yeah—POP—POP-tickee-yeah—POP! [image "The log-approach display of the male White-throated Manakin." file=image_rsrc3MX.jpg] The log-approach display of the male White-throated Manakin. During months of observations at White-throated Manakin logs, I saw only two female visits. One or two green-plumaged individuals perched on a log and intently observed a displaying male while he performed a series of log-approach displays or wing-shiver displays. Interestingly, when performing the wing-shiver display for a visiting female, the male turned his back and crawled backward toward the female. Even during the bill-pointing posture, which displays his bright white throat, he turned his back on the female. With his beak held high, he often peered nervously over his shoulder to monitor how the visiting female was responding to his display. I myself saw no copulations. But both T. A. W. Davis in British Guiana back in the 1940s and Marc Théry in French Guiana many years later documented that copulation takes place on the log after a series of these displays, with the male mounting the female directly on the rebound from a log-approach display. [image "The bill-pointing (left) and wing-shiver (right) displays of the male White-throated Manakin." file=image_rsrc3MY.jpg] The bill-pointing (left) and wing-shiver (right) displays of the male White-throated Manakin. In November 1982, an unusual, and unusually talented, birder arrived at the Brownsberg. Tom Davis was a lanky, six feet eight, foulmouthed telephone company engineer and legendary New York birder from Woodhaven, Queens, with great identification skills and an audiophile’s obsession for recording bird song in the field. Through a series of birding vacations, Tom had become an outstanding expert on the birds of Suriname. When Tom arrived, he told me that during the previous year, while sitting on a bench overlooking the forested valley where he had been birding for so many years, he had discovered a spectacular above-the-canopy flight display by White-throated Manakins.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Michael, a huge college football fan and a “JoePa” devotee, looked at me as if seeking nonverbal permission to say something reckless. I gave him a cautionary stare; to my great relief, he seemed to understand. “How much is ‘Johnny D’ paying y’all?” Tate asked, using the nickname Walter’s friends and family had given him. “We work for a nonprofit. We don’t charge the people we represent anything,” I said as blandly and politely as I could. “Well, you’re getting money from somewhere to do what you do.” I decided to let that pass and move things forward. “I thought that it might be a good idea to sign something that verifies these are all the files you all have on this case. Can we index what you’re turning over to us and then all sign?” “We don’t need to do anything that formal, Bryan. These men are officers of the court, just like you and I. You should just take the files,” Chapman said, apparently sensing that this suggestion had provoked Tate and Ikner. “Well, there could be files that have inadvertently been missed or documents that dropped out. I’m just trying to document that what we receive is what you give us—same number of pages, same file folder headings, et cetera. I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity.” “The hell you ain’t.” Tate was direct. He looked at Chapman. “We can sign something confirming what we give him. I think we may need a record of that more than he does.” Chapman nodded. We got the files and left Monroeville with a lot of excitement about what we might find in the hundreds of pages of records we’d received. Back in Montgomery, we eagerly started reviewing them, and not just the files from the police and prosecutors. With our discovery order from the court, we were able to collect records from Taylor Hardin, the mental health facility where Myers was sent after he first refused to testify. We got the ABI file from Simon Benson, the only black ABI agent in South Alabama, as he had proudly told us. We got Monroeville city police department records and other city files. We even got Escambia County records and exhibits on the Vickie Pittman murder. The files were astonishing. We might have been influenced by the pain of Mozelle and Onzelle or drawn in by the elaborate conspiracies that Ralph Myers had described, but we soon started asking questions about some of the law enforcement officers whose names kept coming up around the Pittman murder. We even decided to talk to the FBI about some of what we had learned. It wasn’t long after that when the bomb threats started.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It gave me a shock but also the pleasure of a bitter little nodding to myself in recognition of what was afoot. ‘Right!’ I thought, and then, after turning quickly at the corner to look back—but there were other people on the street now, and the distance was all a pattern of shadows—more or less forgot about it for the rest of the night. I was too taken up with the honest but slightly unworthy excitement of coming back to my old haunt with such a luscious piece of goods as Phil. It was the half-hour after closing time and the narrow grid of Soho was rowdy with people, some shutting up shop, some stumbling from pubs, and others performing the awkward, drunken transition from one place of amusement to another, where money would pour off them into the early hours of the morning. There was a small crowd outside the Shaft, a gaggle of excited boys, and others waiting, staring challengingly at the arrivals. The thump of the music, like some powerful creature barely contained, came up out of the ground and gathered around us as we went in at the door. On the stairs it began to be really loud, the whole foundations humming with the bass while a thrilling electronic rinse of high-pitched noise set the ears tingling. From now on talk would be shouting, or confidences made with lips and tongue pressed close to the ear: we would be hoarse from our intimacies. The medium of the place was black music, and even the double-jointed spareness of reggae came over the dance floor like a whiplash. At the foot of the stairs, in his pink-bulbed cubbyhole, Denys took our money. ‘Hey Willy, I thought you was dead, man.’ ‘I’ve been resurrected, just for tonight.’ He grinned. ‘Whatever did happen to your nose, eh?’ I pinched the broken bridge with my fingers. ‘Ooh, a bit of trouble with some boys—a bit of rough, you might say.’ ‘Well, you take care, man—because you, are, pretty.’ He fluttered his long lashes, but kept the straightest of faces. ‘And I hope you will have a pleasant evening too sir,’ he said to Phil, who thanked him apprehensively. So we passed on, waved in to the pounding semi-darkness by the impassive Horace, whose twenty-stone bulk, toiling and yet stately in a Hawaiian short-sleeved shirt, was reflected in floor-length mirrors that flanked the door and repeated him ad infinitum, like exotic statuary surrounding a temple.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I didn’t want to bother or bore him. It was something he declined to see the interest in. I thought of how thrilled James would be to know about this: he had once paid hundreds of pounds in an auction for some postcards by Firbank saying almost nothing at all. ‘If you go to the bookcase,’ Charles said, ‘you’ll find one of his books.’ He went on talking as I scanned the shelves and I interrupted him as I spotted it and pulled open the tall door with its trembling panes of old glass. It was The Flower Beneath the Foot , in a still crisp, slightly torn grey wrapper with a drawing of a nun on the front. It felt deliciously light, cool and precious in my hand. Reverently, almost timidly, turning to the frontispiece, which was a drawing of the author protected by that sexy tissue that was strewn throughout Ronald Staines’s photographs, I found it to fall open half-way through, where a small cream envelope was packed right into the stitching. I took it out gently. It was addressed to Charles at Khartoum, in violet ink and large round writing, and bore at the top left-hand corner the pictorial device of the ‘Grand Hotel, Helouan’: a group of palm trees reflected in the Nile, a single distant pyramid, and a houseboat going by. The postmark, orthographically at variance, was ‘Hilwan-les-Bains’, with a blurred date in 1926. ‘What have you found there?’ said Charles, with a hint of possessiveness in his voice. I handed him the envelope with some excitement. It was empty. ‘Hey-ho,’ he said philosophically. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, old darling. Why don’t you keep the book, though. I’m sure you’ll get more out of it than I will.’ I started reading it on the Underground, rattling out eastward in an almost empty mid-afternoon carriage, the sun, once we had emerged from the tunnels, burning the back of my neck. The book was beautifully designed, refined but without pretension, with restfully little of the brilliant text on each thick, wide-margined page. It was a treasure, and I could not decide whether to keep it for myself or to give it to James. Imagining his pleasure at receiving it, and then feeling apprehensive about Arthur, I looked out of the window at the widening suburbs, the housing estates, the distant gasometers, the mysterious empty tracts of fenced-in waste land, grass and gravelly pools and bursts of purple foxgloves. Modern warehouses abutted on the line, and often the train ran on a high embankment at the level of bedroom windows or above shallow terrace gardens with wooden huts, a swing or a blown-up paddling pool. Everywhere the impression was of desertion, as if on this spacious summer day just touched, high up, with tiny flecks of motionless cloud, the people had made off.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Senator Simpson knew firsthand that you cannot judge a person’s full potential by his juvenile misconduct. Another brief was filed on behalf of former child soldiers whose terrifying behavior after being forced into violent African militias made the crimes of our clients seem much less aggravated by comparison. Yet these former child soldiers, rescued from their armies, had mostly recovered and been widely embraced at American colleges and universities, where many of them had thrived. In November 2009, after the briefs were filed in Joe’s case and the Graham case, I went to Washington for my third U.S. Supreme Court oral argument. There was a lot more media attention and national news coverage than in any of my earlier cases. The Court was packed. There were hundreds of people outside the Court as well. A wide assortment of children’s rights advocates, lawyers, and mental health experts were watching closely when we asked the Court to declare life-without-parole sentences imposed on children unconstitutional. During the argument, the Court was feisty, and it was impossible to predict what the justices were going to do. I told the Court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes life imprisonment without parole sentences on children. I explained that condemning children violates international law, which bans these sentences for children. We showed the Court that these sentences are disproportionately imposed on children of color. We argued that the phenomenon of life sentences imposed on children is largely a result of harsh punishments that were created for career adult criminals and were never intended for children—which made the imposition of such a sentence on juveniles like Terrance Graham and Joe Sullivan unusual. I also told the Court that to say to any child of thirteen that he is fit only to die in prison is cruel. I had no way of knowing if the Court had been persuaded. I had promised Joe, whose name and case were constantly being discussed on television, that I would visit him after the argument in the Supreme Court. At first Joe was very excited by all the attention his case was generating, but then the guards and other prisoners started making fun of him and treating him more harshly than usual. They seemed to resent the attention he was getting. I told him that now that the argument was over, things would calm down. For weeks he’d been working on memorizing a poem he said he’d written. When I asked if he had really written it, he acknowledged that another inmate had helped him, but his excitement about the poem was undiminished. He had repeatedly promised that he would recite it for me when I visited him after the argument. When I arrived at the prison, Joe was wheeled into the visitation area without any difficulty.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Tr. li. 2) Hosanna is a simple exclamation, rather indicating some excitement of the mind, than having any particular meaning; like many interjections that we have in Latin. BEDE. It is a compound of two words; Hosi is shortened into save; Anna a mere exclamation, complete. Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. The name of the Lord here is the name of God the Father; though we may understand it as His own name; inasmuch as He also is the Lord. But the former sense agrees better with the text above, I am come in My Father’s name. (5:43) He does not lose His divinity, when He teaches us humility. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxvi. 1) This is what more than any thing made men believe in Christ, viz. the assurance, that He was not opposed to God, that He came from the Father. The words shew us the divinity of Christ. Hosanna is, Save us; and salvation in Scripture is attributed to God alone. And cometh, it is said, not is brought: the former befits a lord, the latter a servant. In the name of the Lord, goes to prove the same thing. He does not come in the name of a servant, but in the name of the Lord. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. li. 4) It were a small thing to the King eternal to be made a human king. Christ was not the King of Israel, to exact tribute, and command armies, but to direct souls, and bring them to the kingdom of heaven. For Christ then to be King of Israel, was a condescension, not an elevation, a sign of Hispity, not an increase of His power. For He who was called on earth the King of the Jews, is in heaven the King of Angels. THEOPHYLACT. The Jews, when they called Him King of Israel, dreamed of an earthly king. They expected a king to arise, of more than human greatness, who would deliver them from the government of the Romans. But how did our Lord come? The next words tell us; And Jesus when He had found a young ass, sat thereon. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. li. 5) John relates the matter briefly, the other Evangelists are more full. The ass, we read in them, was the foal of an ass on which no man had sat: i. e. the Gentile world, who had not received our Lord. The other ass, which was brought, (not the foal, for there were two,) is the believing Jew. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxvi. 1) He did this prophetically, to figure the unclean Gentiles being brought into subjection to the Gospel; and also as a fulfilment of prophecy.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  Scope 424 not only inaugurating the reign of free verse in American poetry but also as fundamentally reconceiving the tradition of autobiographical writing that runs from Rousseau’s Confessions through Wordsworth’s Prelude to Thoreau’s Walden; in the early editions of Leaves of Grass (fi rst published 1855), he is also presented as a voice of brotherhood, love, and union at a time when the nation was fratricidally divided by the imminence of the Civil War. Wherever possible, each new author in this series is linked by comparison and contrast to one or more earlier ones. Besides the example of Whitman and Wordsworth just cited, the eponymous heroine of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is shown to mark a major departure from the precedent set by Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. While Elizabeth is the respectable, well-bred daughter of a gentleman living in comfortable circumstances, Tess is the daughter of a shiftless peddler who must earn her own living by hard labor. Further, while Elizabeth manages to marry a fabulously rich and handsome gentleman who conscientiously wins her heart, Tess’s dreams of a fairytale romance lead only to disaster. Likewise, if Dickens’s Great Expectations radically reworks the story of the foundling or poor boy miraculously reforged as a gentleman, Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest wittily reconceives the whole idea that accidents of birth—including one’s own given name—should determine the rest of one’s life. For all of their attention to plot, theme, intellectual currents, and historical context, the lectures never lose sight of their primary object: the richness, complexity, and literary brilliance of the works under discussion. To raise the curtain on each author, every lecture begins with a quotation that exemplifi es or encapsulates his or her creative power: a quotation typically plucked from the middle of a major work, then carefully scrutinized for its meaning in context, its implications for the work as a whole, and its impact on the reader. The lecture on Dostoevsky, for instance, begins with the horrifying passage from Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov brutally murders Lizaveta with an axe just after killing her sister—an event on which the whole novel turns. Likewise, the lecture on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick begins with the passage in which Captain Ahab defi es the rational arguments of Starbuck, his 425 fi rst mate, and vows everlasting vengeance on the great white whale that has devoured one of his legs. As a whole, then, the lectures aim to place each author within the framework of a specifi c historical period, to sketch the intellectual and literary infl uences that shaped him or her, and where possible, to link the authors with one another. But just as important, each lecture aims to show what sort of excitement, surprise, and revelation each author can deliver to the reader. ■