Fear

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 Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Then Beauty would serve the wine at the noon meal and woe to her if she spilt a drop of it. Then she would sleep in the afternoons so she might be fresh to attend the Prince in the evenings. And next Festival Night she would be entered in a race of Bridle Path slaves which he expected her to win after her daily training. All this Beauty heard out with flushes and tears, again and again stooping to kiss the Prince's boots as he gave his orders. He seemed still troubled in his love, and while the castle slept, he frequently awakened her with rough embraces. She could scarcely think of Alexi at these times, the Prince so frightened her and scrutinized her. And when each day dawned she was brought out in her leather horseshoe boots for Lady Juliana. Beauty was frightened but she was ready. Lady Juliana was a vision of loveliness in her crimson riding dress, and Beauty ran fast on the soft gravel path, the sun often causing her to squint as it flashed in the overhanging trees, and she was weeping when it was finished. Then she and Lady Juliana would be alone together in the garden. Lady Juliana carried a leather strap, but seldom did she use it, and the garden was soothing to Beauty. They would sit down on the grass, Lady Juliana's skirts a wreath of embroidered silk about her, and quite suddenly Lady Juliana might give Beauty a deep kiss that startled Beauty and weakened her. Lady Juliana stroked Beauty all over. She lavished her with kisses and compliments, and when she did beat her with the leather strap, Beauty cried softly with deep moaning breaths and languid sense of abandon. Very soon she was gathering little flowers in her teeth for Lady Juliana, or with great grace kissing the hem of her skirts, or even her white hands, all of these gestures delighting her mistress. "Ah, am I becoming what Alexi wanted me to become," Beauty thought. But most of the time she did not think at all. At meals she took great care to serve the wine gracefully. Yet there came that moment when she spilt the wine, and must take her punishment dangling from the Page's strong grip, scampering afterwards to the Prince's boots to beg silently for forgiveness. The Prince was furious with her, and when he ordered her spanked again, she was scalded with humiliation. That night, he whipped her mercilessly with his belt before taking her. He told her he loathed the slightest imperfection in her. And she was chained to the wall to spend the night in weeping and misery. She dreaded new and frightening punishments.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Given the perspective of history, it’s clear that Bennett and I owed our being in Heidelberg (and in fact our marriage) to the hoodwinking of the American public by the government, which was later revealed in the Pentagon Papers. In other words, we got married as a direct result of Bennett’s being drafted—and he was drafted as a direct result of the Vietnam troop buildup of 1965-66, which was a direct result of the hoodwinking of the American public by the government. But who knew that at the time? We suspected it, but we had no proof. We had ironic headlines promising that the buildup was to “end the war and bring a lasting peace.” We had good one-liners like: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it….” We had activists as articulate as any who came along later. But we had no proof in black and white on the front page of The Times. So Bennett, a child psychiatrist with half his analytic training done, was drafted at the age of thirty-one. We had known each other three months. We had come to each other from other unhappy love affairs—and on my part a disastrous first marriage. We were sick of being single; we were terrified of being alone; we were happy together in bed; we were frightened of the future; we were married one day before Bennett had to leave for Fort Sam Houston. From the first, the marriage was strange. We’d both expected rescue. And there we were both clawing at each other and drowning together. Things turned hostile in a matter of days. We quickly went from verbal assaults to utter silence, punctuated by lovemaking that kept on, amazingly enough, being good. Neither of us quite knew what we had gotten into, or why. Before we came to Heidelberg, the setting for the first two months of our marriage was as strange as our reason for getting married. There we were, two terrified, transplanted Manhattanites, plunked down in San Antonio, Texas. Bennett was shorn of his hair, stuffed into army greens, forced to sit through hour after hour of army propaganda on how to be an army doctor—something he detested with his whole heart.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  You know what it is like to be gazed at by all, soldiers, Knights, commoners. "It was small consolation to me that other naked slaves would follow. I was alone by the Queen's coach, and I thought only of pleasing her, and of appearing as she wanted me to appear to others. I held my head up, I contracted my buttocks to hold in the painful phallus. And soon, as we passed before hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers, I thought again, 'I am her servant, her slave, and this is my life. I have no other.' "Perhaps the most excruciating part of the day for me was the villages. You have been through the villages. I had not. The only common people I had seen were in the kitchen. "But this day of military parade was also the opening of the fairs in the villages. The Queen visited each of several, and after that the fair would open. "There was a platform in the center of the square of each, and when the Queen went inside of the house of the Lord of the village to drink a cup of wine with him, I was left on display as she had told me I would be. "But I was not to stand gracefully as I might have hoped. And the villagers knew this, though I didn't. When we reached the first village, the Queen went away, and as soon as my feet hit the platform, a great roar went up from the crowd who knew they were to see something amusing. "I had my head down, glad of the opportunity to move the rigid muscles of my throat and shoulders. And I was quite astonished when Felix removed the phallus from my anus. Of course the crowd cheered at this. I was then made to kneel up, hands behind my neck on a turntable. "Felix operated it with his foot. And telling me to spread my legs wide, he turned the turntable. I was perhaps more afraid in these first few moments than ever before, but never once did the fear rising and trying to escape come to me. I was virtually helpless. Naked, a slave of the Queen, I was in the midst of hundreds of common people who would have overpowered me at once, and cheerfully for all the sport it would have given them. It was then that I realized escape was quite impossible. Any naked Prince or Princess fleeing the castle would have been apprehended by these villagers. They would have given no shelter.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror, trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris—but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave, and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within. As it turned out, the flight to Beirut was designed to stir all my various paranoias. We flew into an epic storm over the Mediterranean, with rain beating against the windows and food slopping around inside the plane and the pilot coming on every few minutes with reassurances which I didn’t believe for a second. (Nothing sounds quite believable in Italian anyway—not even Lasciate Ogni Speranza.) I was fully prepared to die for having put “Unitarian” on my visa. That was, in fact, just the sort of transgression Jehovah would get you for—that and fucking heathens. Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece. The rest of the people on the plane were also not my idea of a fun group to die with. When things really got messy and we were being buffeted around like aphids clinging to a paper glider, some drunken idiot started yelling “Ooopsy-Daisy” every time we took a dive, and a few other fools kept laughing hysterically. The thought of dying with all these comical assholes and then arriving in the underworld with a visa marked “Unitarian” kept me praying avidly throughout the flight. There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes. Amazingly enough, the storm subsided (or we left it behind) by the time we flew over Cyprus. There was a greasy Egyptian (is there any other kind?) sitting next to me, and once he realized he was going to survive the flight, he began flirting with me. He told me that he published a magazine in Cairo and was going to Beirut on business. He also insisted that he hadn’t been scared at all because he always wore this blue bead against the evil eye. Blue bead or not, he’d looked pretty goddamned scared to me. He went on to reassure me that both he and I had “lucky noses” and therefore the plane couldn’t possibly crash while we were on it. He touched the tip of my nose and then touched his and said: “See—lucky.” “Christ—I’ve run into a nose freak,” I thought. And I wasn’t exactly flattered by the idea that our noses looked alike either. He had a huge nose, like Nasser’s (all Egyptians look like Nasser to me), while my nose, though not exactly retroussé, is at least small and straight.

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

  The same neural process of construction that simulates a bee from blobs also constructs feelings of attraction from a fluttering stomach and a flushing face. An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world. Philosophers have long proposed that your mind makes sense of your body in the world, from René Descartes in the seventeenth century to William James (considered the father of American psychology) in the nineteenth; as you will learn, however, neuroscience now shows us how this process—and much more—occurs in the brain to make an emotion on the spot. I call this explanation the theory of constructed emotion:9 In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. If a swarm of buzzing bees is squeezing underneath your front door while your heart is pounding in your chest, your brain’s prior knowledge of stinging insects gives meaning to the sensations from your body and to the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations from the world, simulating the swarm, the door, and an instance of fear. The exact same bodily sensations in another context, like watching a fascinating film about the hidden lives of bees, might construct an instance of excitement. Or if you see a picture of a smiling cartoon bee in a children’s book, reminding you of a beloved niece whom you took to a Disney movie, you could mentally construct the bee, the niece, and an instance of pleasant nostalgia. My experience in the coffee shop, where I felt attraction when I had the flu, would be called an error or misattribution in the classical view, but it’s no more a mistake than seeing a bee in a bunch of blobs. An influenza virus in my blood contributed to fever and flushing, and my brain made meaning from the sensations in the context of a lunch date, constructing a genuine feeling of attraction, in the normal way that the brain constructs any other mental state. If I’d had exactly the same bodily sensations while at home in bed with a thermometer, my brain might have constructed an instance of “Feeling Sick” using the same manufacturing process. (The classical view, in contrast, would require feelings of attraction and malaise to have different bodily fingerprints triggered by different brain circuitry.)10 Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I’d stopped trying to get up but he kept shoving me, pushing my head against my pillow, pulling at my legs, screaming the whole time. “This is my cock! Look at my cock, goddamnit!” It hung there, erect, wiggling as he moved, bouncing up each time he flexed to shove me again. He grabbed me by the side and pushed me against the wall. The Led Zeppelin LP I’d nailed above the bed fell and shattered against my head. “This is my cock and you are my pussy! You get it, fucker? This is my cock and you’re gonna look when I fucking tell you to look, pussy!” After a few minutes, he left my room. But, later that night, I heard him slumped outside my door, banging his head against it. I heard the sounds of a beer can being thrown against a wall. And I heard him crying, sobbing, wailing. “Don’t leave me. Oh, fuck, please don’t leave me. I love you, you can’t leave me.” He banged his head harder and harder against the door. “I swear, I’ll fucking kill myself if you leave me.” The next day, he set his TV tray full of tacos aside, started a movie, and pulled down his pants. He grinned that wide grin of his. “You ready to watch?” I SAID YES. TO EVERYONE. EVERY TIME. When my wife asked—just before we started dating—if I was straight, I said yes. When, a few weeks later, she asked if I was a virgin, I said yes. I said yes when she asked if I was okay, first after we’d made love for the first time and again after I told her about the man and the blanket and the fireworks. I said yes. It’s always seemed easier. Because I’m not sure whether I’m gay or straight or bisexual or asexual or antisexual. Because I’ve only been in one relationship, an opposite-sex relationship with the woman I married. Because I can’t understand a sexual identity that doesn’t involve rage or terror or power. Because even when I’m attracted to men, male bodies—even my own—it turns my stomach. Especially my own. Because I’m still that eleven-year-old boy and I love to smile, and I want to smile, but that hand is still covering my mouth.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  27 Ei alacri statim nisu lorum, quo fueram destinatus, abrumpo, meque quadripedi cursu proripio, nec tamen 1 The MSS have recurrunt relatori taedio. Wan der Vliet proposed reliqua ipsi laturi for the middle word, and I have followed him, omitting the ipsi. 286 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VI wounds since, and loss of our valiant captains.” Another said: “As soon as he has brought un- willingly home his burden, I will surely throw him out upon the mountain to be a prey for vultures.” While these gentle men reasoned together of my death, we fortuned to come home, for the fear that I was in caused my feet to turn into wings. After that we were discharged of our burdens, they took no account of our needs, nor even of my slaying ; they fetched their fellows that lay wounded, and returned again to bring the rest of the things, by reason (as they said) of our great tardiness and slow- ness by the way. Then was I brought into no small anguish, when I perceived my death prepared before my. face, and I communed with myself: “ Why standest thou still, Lucius? Why dost thou look for thy death? Knowest thou not that the thieves have cruelly ordained to slay thee, and they shall find it easy enough? Seest thou not these sharp precipices and pointed flints which shall bruise and tear thee in pieces or ever thou comest to the bottom ofthem? Thy gentle magician hath not only given thee the shape and travail of an ass, but also a skin so soft and tender as it were of a leech. Why dost thou not take a man's courage and run away to save thy life? Now hast thou the best occasion of flight while the thieves are from home. Art thou afraid of the old woman, which is more than half dead, whom with a stripe of thy heel, though lame, thou mayest easily dispatch? But whither shall I fly? What lodging shall I seek? Behold an assy cogita- tion of mine; for who is he that passes by the way and will not gladly take up a beast to carry him ?” Then while I devised these things, I broke sud- denly the halter wherewith I was tied, and ran away 287 28 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  As we walked through the city that Saturday night, it was his behavior which disturbed me far more than his wild talk. He wanted us both to close our eyes and cross streets against the lights (to prove we were gods). He would go into stores and ask the storekeepers to take down various items, then handle each one, talk elatedly about each one, and then walk out. He would go into a coffee shop and play with the sugar pourer on every table before he sat down. People kept staring at him. Sometimes the storekeepers or waiters would say, “Take it easy buddy, relax buddy” or sometimes they’d throw him out. Everyone sensed that something was wrong. His agitation jangled the air. To Brian, this was only proof of divinity. “You see,” he said, “they know I’m God and they don’t know how else to react.” It was doubly hard for me because I half believed Brian’s theory. Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world. If God did come back, he would probably wind up in the psycho ward. I was a Laingian way before Laing began publishing. But I was also scared to death. When we finally got home at 2 a.m., Brian was still frantic and wide-awake, though I was exhausted. He wanted to show me his power. He wanted to prove he could satisfy me. He hadn’t screwed me in about six weeks, but now he wouldn’t stop. He fucked like a machine, refusing to succumb to an orgasm himself but urging me to come again and again and again. After the first three times I was sore and wanted to stop. I begged him to stop but he wouldn’t. He kept banging away at me like an ax murderer. I was crying and pleading. “Brian, please stop,” I sobbed. “You thought I couldn’t satisfy you!” he screamed. His eyes were wild. “You see!” he said, lunging into me. “You see! You see! You see!” “Brian, please stop!” “Doesn’t that prove it? Doesn’t that prove I’m God?” “Please stop,” I whimpered. When he stopped at last, he withdrew from me violently and thrust his still-hard penis into my mouth. But I was crying too hard to blow him. I lay on the bed sobbing. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to stay alone with him, but where could I go? For the first time I really began to be convinced he was dangerous.

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

  The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Forward-looking thinkers speculate that simulation is a common mechanism not only for perception but also for understanding language, feeling empathy, remembering, imagining, dreaming, and many other psychological phenomena. Our common sense might declare that thinking, perceiving, and dreaming are different mental events (at least to those of us in Western cultures), yet one general process describes them all. Simulation is the default mode for all mental activity. It also holds a key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain creates emotions.4 Outside your brain, simulation can cause tangible changes in your body. Let’s try a little creative simulation with our bee. In your mind’s eye, see the bee bouncing lightly on the petal of a fragrant white flower, buzzing around as it searches for pollen. If you’re fond of bees, then the flutter of imaginary wings is right now causing other neurons to prepare your body to move in for a closer look—preparing your heart to beat faster, your sweat glands to fill, and your blood pressure to decrease. Or if you have been badly stung in the past, your brain may ready your body to run away or make a swatting motion, formulating some other pattern of physical changes. Each time your brain simulates sensory input, it prepares automatic changes in your body that have the potential to change your feeling. Your bee-related simulations are rooted in your mental concept of what a “Bee” is. This concept not only includes information about the bee itself (what it looks and sounds like, how you act on it, what changes in your autonomic nervous system allow your action, etc.), but also information contained in other concepts related to bees (“Meadow,” “Flower,” “Honey,” “Sting,” “Pain,” etc.). All this information is integrated with your concept “Bee,” guiding how you simulate the bee in this particular context. So, a concept like “Bee” is actually a collection of neural patterns in your brain, representing your past experiences. Your brain combines these patterns in different ways to perceive and flexibly guide your action in new situations.5 Using your concepts, your brain groups some things together and separates others. You can look at three mounds of dirt and perceive two of them as “Hills” and one as a “Mountain,” based on your concepts. Construction treats the world like a sheet of pastry, and your concepts are cookie cutters that carve boundaries, not because the boundaries are natural, but because they’re useful or desirable. These boundaries have physical limitations of course; you’d never perceive a mountain as a lake. Not everything is relative.6

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Risk it? “Alors, que fait-on?” he asked watching me closely. I stooped. He did not move. I stooped lower. “My dear sir,” he said, “stop trifling with life and death. I am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasies. I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth-century sexcapades. I’m the author of fifty-two successful scenarios. I know all the ropes. Let me handle this. There should be a poker somewhere, why don’t I fetch it, and then we’ll fish out your property.” Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same time to keep an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer had been reinstalled in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle. I decided to inspect the pistol—our sweat might have spoiled something—and regain my wind before proceeding to the main item in the program. To fill in the pause, I proposed he read his own sentence—in the poetical form I had given it. The term “poetical justice” is one that may be most happily used in this respect. I handed him a neat typescript. “Yes,” he said, “splendid idea. Let me fetch my reading glasses” (he attempted to rise). “No.” “Just as you say. Shall I read out loud?” “Yes.” “Here goes. I see it’s in verse. Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage ... That’s good, you know.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She could rest her weight on it and she did, as he forced her knees wide apart and then stretched out her legs so her knees didn't touch the table at all, her ankles bound by leather to the edges. Now her wrists were treated the same. She kept her face hidden as best as she could, weeping. "You will be silent," said the man icily to her, "or I shall see that you cannot be anything else. Do not misunderstand the Queen's leniency. She does not gag you only because it amuses to Court to see your mouth as it is, and to see you struggle with your own willfulness." And now, to Beauty's shame, he raised her chin and placed beneath it a long thick wooden chin rest. She could not lower her head, though she lowered her eyes. And she saw all the room about her. She saw the Lords and Ladies rising from the banquet tables. She saw the immense fire. And then she saw this man, too, with his thin angular face, and gray eyes that were not as cold as his voice, but for the moment seemed even to evince tenderness. A long shudder went through her as she contemplated herself -- spread out, yet mounted so that all could inspect even her face if they chose, and she tried to conceal her sobs by pressing her lips together. Even her hair was no covering, for it fell evenly on either side of her face and cloaked no part of her. "Young one, little one," said the gray-haired man under his breath. "You're so frightened and it's useless." There seemed a little warmth in his voice. "What is fear, after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none. Do not tense your limbs. It's wasted." Beauty bit her lip and felt the tears sliding down her face, but she was soothed by his speaking to her. He smoothed back the hair from her forehead. His hand was light and cold as if he were testing for a fever. "Now be still. Everyone is coming to see you." Beauty's eyes glazed over, but she could still see the distant thrones where the Prince and his mother were talking to one another quite naturally. But she realized all the Court had risen and was moving towards the dais. The Lords and Ladies were bowing to the Queen and the Prince, before turning and coming towards her. Beauty squirmed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  As it turned out, the flight to Beirut was designed to stir all my various paranoias. We flew into an epic storm over the Mediterranean, with rain beating against the windows and food slopping around inside the plane and the pilot coming on every few minutes with reassurances which I didn’t believe for a second. (Nothing sounds quite believable in Italian anyway—not even Lasciate Ogni Speranza.) I was fully prepared to die for having put “Unitarian” on my visa. That was, in fact, just the sort of transgression Jehovah would get you for—that and fucking heathens. Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece. The rest of the people on the plane were also not my idea of a fun group to die with. When things really got messy and we were being buffeted around like aphids clinging to a paper glider, some drunken idiot started yelling “Ooopsy-Daisy” every time we took a dive, and a few other fools kept laughing hysterically. The thought of dying with all these comical assholes and then arriving in the underworld with a visa marked “Unitarian” kept me praying avidly throughout the flight. There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes. Amazingly enough, the storm subsided (or we left it behind) by the time we flew over Cyprus. There was a greasy Egyptian (is there any other kind?) sitting next to me, and once he realized he was going to survive the flight, he began flirting with me. He told me that he published a magazine in Cairo and was going to Beirut on business. He also insisted that he hadn’t been scared at all because he always wore this blue bead against the evil eye. Blue bead or not, he’d looked pretty goddamned scared to me. He went on to reassure me that both he and I had “lucky noses” and therefore the plane couldn’t possibly crash while we were on it. He touched the tip of my nose and then touched his and said: “See—lucky.” “Christ—I’ve run into a nose freak,” I thought. And I wasn’t exactly flattered by the idea that our noses looked alike either. He had a huge nose, like Nasser’s (all Egyptians look like Nasser to me), while my nose, though not exactly retroussé, is at least small and straight. It may not be a plastic surgeon’s dream, but it’s not a Nasser nose either. If anything, its stubby tip betrays the genetic contribution of some pig-faced Polish thug who raped one of my great-grandmothers during some long-forgotten pogrom in the Pale.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  They weighted her breasts, made her painfully conscious of them. But he was telling her to stand up and spread her legs. And as she obeyed she saw another pair of brass bells taken from the casket. They were as large as walnuts. And, whimpering slightly, se felt his hands between her legs as he clamped these bells to her pubic lips quickly. It seemed she felt parts of herself which she had been unconscious. The bells touched her thighs. They tugged on the lips and cut into the flesh tightly. "O, come now, it isn't so dreadful, my little maid," he whispered, and he rewarded her with a kiss. "If it pleases you, my Prince..." she stammered. "Ah, that is lovely," he said. "And now to work, my beautiful one. And I want to see you work fast, yet gracefully. I want to see you do all things correctly, yet with some artfulness. In my closet on a hook you will see my red velvet scapular and gold girdle. Bring these things to me quickly and lay them out on the bed. You are going to dress me." Beauty rushed to obey. She had the clothing down from its hooks and hastened to bring it back, moving on her knees, the clothing in her arms. She laid it out on the foot of the bed, and turned waiting. "Now undress me," said the Prince. "And you must learn to use your hands only when you cannot accomplish something otherwise." Obediently Beauty took the leather lacings of his surcoat in her teeth, pulled loose the knot and saw them open. The Prince pulled the coat over his head and gave it to her. And now as he seated himself on a stool by the fire, she went to work unfastening his many buttons. It seemed she met with one obstacle after another. She was conscious of his body, its perfume and warmth, and his strange preoccupation. Soon she had the shirt off with his help, and then she must remove his long breeches. Now and then he would aid her, but most tasks she performed herself, taking the upper lip of his velvet-lined boots carefully in her teeth she pulled at the heels with her hands until they slipped off easily. It seemed a long time that she labored, learning every detail of his wear. And now she must dress him. She placed the white silk undershirt on him with both hands as he slipped his arms into it.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  His taut, cruelly bound body shuddered with one protracted groan after another, and then he lay still as Squire Felix drew back and moved into the shadows. It seemed he spoke to Prince Alexi then. Beauty leaned her head against the stone balustrade. After a little while, Squire Felix told Prince Alexi to wake, and he gave the organ those tormenting slaps again when it seemed reluctant, Squire Felix seemed fearful and became threatening. But Prince Alexi was deep asleep in his painful tethers, and Beauty was very pleased to see this. She turned and silently made her way back to the bedroom door when she realized that someone was near her. She was so frightened that she almost screamed, a mistake which would surely have destroyed her. But she covered her mouth, and lifting her eyes, she saw in the distant shadows the figure of Lord Gregory watching her. This was the gray-haired Lord who had wanted so to discipline her properly, who had called her spoilt. Yet he did not move. He stood still watching her. And when she stopped trembling, she rushed as quickly as she could back to the Prince's bed, and slipped under the coverlet beside him. He had never awakened. She lay in the dark waiting for Lord Gregory to come but he did not, and she soon realized he would not dream of waking the Prince, and then she was half dozing. She was thinking of Prince Alexi in a thousand ways, of the redness of his sore flesh after the paddle, of his beautiful brown eyes, and his strong, somewhat compact body. She was thinking of his glossy hair against her, the secret kiss he gave her thighs, and how, after this terrible humiliation, he had given her that smile which was so serene and affectionate. The torment between her legs was no worse than before, and no better. She dared not touch it with her fingers, lest she be discovered, and it was too shameful to think of such things, and she was sure the Prince would never allow it. THE SLAVES' HALL IT WAS late afternoon when Beauty awoke. She realized that the Prince and Lord Gregory were in an argument. Immediately, she was afraid, but as she lay still she perceived that Lord Gregory had obviously not told the Prince what he had seen. Surely her punishment would be terrible if he had. Rather Lord Gregory was arguing only that Beauty must be taken to the Slaves' Hall and properly groomed. "Your Highness, you are enamored of her, of course," Lord Gregory said, "but you remember, surely, your own censure of other Lords, especially your cousin, Lord Stefan, on account of his excessive love for his slave..."

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She shuddered almost instinctively but they were firmly attached, and he told her to fold her arms behind her back tightly. "Now forward, only you are to bend your knees slightly and to march, lifting each knee high," he told her. She started, awkwardly, reluctant to obey, but then she saw all about her other Princesses marching in an almost sprightly manner, their breasts bouncing gracefully as they moved into the corridor. She hurried, the heavy boots difficult for her to lift with any decorum, but soon she had fallen into a rhythm and Leon was walking beside her. "Now, darling," he said, "the first time is always difficult. Festival Night is frightening. I had thought some easier duty would be yours this first time, but the Queen has ordered you especially for the Bridle Path, and the Lady Juliana will drive you." "Ah, but what..." "Shah, or I shall have to gag you and that will very much displease the Queen as well as make your mouth quite ugly." All the girls were now in a long room, and through narrow windows on one wall, Beauty could see the garden. Torches flared in the dark trees, throwing an uneven glare on the leafy boughs above them. The line of girls formed right beside these windows, and Beauty was now able to see more of what lay beyond them. There was a great roar as of many people conversing, laughing. And then to her shock Beauty saw slaves all through the garden positioned in various ways for their torment. On high stakes here and there were strapped Princes and Princesses painfully contorted, their ankles bound to the stakes, their shoulders bent over the tops of them. They seemed no more than ornaments, the torchlight causing their twisted limbs to glow, the hair of the Princesses falling free in the air behind them. Surely they could see only the sky above, though all could see their miserable contortions. And everywhere beneath were the Lords and Ladies, the light falling upon a long embroidered cloak here, a pointed hat there with a veil trailing airily from it. There were hundreds in the garden, these tables placed far back into the trees, as far as Beauty could see in all directions. Beautifully adorned slaves moved about, pitchers in hand, little gold chains fixed to their breasts, the Princes adorned with gold rings on their erect organs. They hurried to fill the goblets, pass the platters of food, and as in the great hall there was music. The line of girls before Beauty grew restless. Beauty could hear one girl crying as her groom tried to comfort her, but most of the others were obedient. Here and there a groom rubbed more oil into plump buttocks or whispered in a Princess's ear, and Beauty's sense of apprehension deepened.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  On the other side of the Atlantic, migrants from the Middle East and Africa have washed up on the Italian and Greek coastlines and thronged to the rim of Eastern and Central Europe. While thousands have died en route to “Fortress Europe,” many of those who reach the borders of the world’s wealthiest economic bloc end up languishing indefinitely in detention centers as they plow through the asylum bureaucracy. A churning shadow population of “irregular” migrants floating through European cities is filtered into a professionalized humanitarian aid regime, or they fall into the underground economy’s smuggling and human trafficking industries. European Union ministers, meanwhile, remain continually deadlocked in negotiating a continent-wide humanitarian resettlement policy, reducing refugee bodies to political talking points in Brussels while rape survivors may be left to camp outdoors along border fences. Survival Rape The worst violations often happen before migrants reach Europe. On the route through Africa to the tip of Libya, which is the main hub for smuggling boats across the Mediterranean and itself engulfed in civil conflict, sexual violence becomes a routine hazard, prompting women to preinject contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. Rape is endemic at the migrant camps around the Libyan port—sometimes in official facilities, other times just in repositories where smugglers hold human cargo before sending them off to sea. An Eritrean woman described to Amnesty International how rape was systematized at her camp in Libya: “The guards would drink and smoke hashish [cannabis] and then come in and choose which women they wanted and take them outside. The women tried to refuse but when you have a gun pointed at your head, you don’t really have a choice if you want to survive. I was raped twice by three men . . . I didn’t want to lose my life.” Vulnerability to sexual violence also hinges on other social hierarchies: wealthier refugees have the money and connections to purchase access to safer routes; black African migrants are often subjected to more abuse than lighter-skinned counterparts; labor and sexual exploitation blur into each other, generating subcategories of rape like “survival sex” or “protection sex.” In a study of African migration into Europe in recent years, researchers Sharon Pickering and Alison Gerard quote one migrant, Aziza, describing a climate of sexual coercion while held under armed guard in Libya: “The living situation is difficult because you are not free. There are people standing over you and you have to negotiate to leave. Some people pay money to leave, others provide sex or are raped.” In a UN-led study, “Oumo” recalled the banality of transactional sex, which she undertook twice to obtain a fake passport and then to get a spot on a smuggling boat from Turkey to Greece. “I had no choice. I fear that I will go crazy.” The notion of freely offered consent becomes murky; the cost of returning home, rather than moving on, is too high.

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

  If you have ten feelings of fear that involve a particular brain network, each feeling can involve different neurons from the network. * This is degeneracy at the network level. Additionally, cookies and bread are discrete, physical objects, whereas instances of emotion are momentary snapshots of continuous brain activity, and we merely perceive these snapshots as discrete events. Nevertheless, you may find the kitchen analogy useful to imagine how interacting networks produce diverse mental states. 1 9 The core systems that construct the mind interact in complex ways, without any central manager or chef to run the show. However, these systems cannot be understood independently like the disassembled parts of a machine, or like so-called emotion modules or organs. That’s because their interactions produce new properties that are not present in the parts alone. By analogy, when you bake bread with flour, water, yeast, and salt, a new product emerges from the complex, chemical interplay of the ingredients. Bread has its own emergent properties, like “crustiness” and “chewiness,” that are not present in its ingredients alone. In fact, if you try to identify all the ingredients by tasting the finished bread, you are in for a difficult time. Consider the salt: bread doesn’t taste salty even though salt is absolutely essential. Similarly, an instance of fear cannot be reduced to mere ingredients. Fear is not a bodily pattern—just as bread is not flour—but emerges from the interactions of core systems. An instance of fear has irreducible, emergent properties not found in the ingredients alone, such as unpleasantness (as your car skids out of control on a slippery highway) or pleasantness (on an undulating rollercoaster). You cannot reverse-engineer a recipe for an instance of fear from a feeling of fear. 2 0 Even if we did know the ingredients of emotion but studied them only in isolation, we’d get an inaccurate understanding of how they work together to construct emotion. If we study salt in isolation by tasting and weighing it, we will not understand how it contributes to the creation of bread. That’s because salt interacts chemically with the other ingredients during baking: controlling yeast growth, shoring up the gluten in the dough, and, most importantly, enhancing flavor. To understand how salt transforms a recipe of bread, you must watch it work in context. Likewise, each ingredient of emotion must be studied in the context of the rest of the brain that influences it. This philosophy, known as holism, explains why I get different results each time I bake bread in my own kitchen, even using exactly the same recipe. I weigh every ingredient. I knead the dough for the same amount of time. I set the oven to the same temperature. I count the number of sprays of water I spritz into the oven to make the bread crusty.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest like Reva banging on my door. I gasped. I breathed. I’m here, I thought. I’m awake. I thought I heard something, a scratching sound at the door. Then an echo. Then an echo of that echo. I sat up. A rush of cold air hit my neck. “Kshhhh,” the air said. It was the sound of blood rushing to my brain. My vision cleared. I went back to the sofa. I watched Jenny Jones and Maury Povich and Nightline. • • • WHEN THE TWENTIETH CAME, I went downtown to see Dr. Tuttle. I felt drunk and crazy getting dressed and lacing up a pair of rubber-soled boots from the closet, which I hadn’t remembered buying. I felt drunk in the elevator, I felt drunk walking across York, I felt drunk in the cab. I toddled up the steps to Dr. Tuttle’s brownstone and leaned on the buzzer for a good minute until she came to the door. The snow-covered street blinded me. I shut my eyes. I was dying. I would tell Dr. Tuttle that. I was the walking dead. “You look troubled,” she said matter-of-factly through the glass. I looked at her standing in the foyer. She wore red long underwear under a fleece cape. Her hair came down over her forehead and covered the top halves of the lenses in her glasses. She had her neck brace on again. “I’ve done some reorganizing,” she said, opening the door. “You’ll see.” I hadn’t been to her office in over a month. A full menorah of candles had melted in a baking dish on top of the radiator in the waiting room. A fake Christmas tree had been wedged into the corner, the top third lopped off and placed next to it in a milk crate. The main part of the tree was decorated with purple strands of tinsel and what looked like costume jewelry—fake pearl necklaces, gold and silver bangles, children’s rhinestone tiaras, baubley clip-on earrings. Her office smelled like iodine and sage. Where the unsittable fainting sofa had been there was now a large, Band-Aid–colored massage table. “I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha- woman, if you please,” Dr.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty's cries were wordless pleas, but Lady Juliana's tone was angry, unsatisfied. It was dreadful to be struck in anger. "Hurry! Do you hear me!" Lady Juliana sounded almost contemptuous, spanking Beauty all the harder, and making little tisks now of impatience. Beauty's nipples scraped the carpet as she bent to obey, and with a shock she felt the toe of Lady Juliana's slipper in her pubis. She gave a startled cry and rushed back to the Queen with the rose as all about her it seemed was the muted laughter of the Pages and the Queen's higher laughter. But Lady Juliana had found the tender spot again, forcing that long pointed satin slipper right into Beauty's vagina. Suddenly as Beauty turned and saw yet more roses scattered before her, her sobs went into muffled shrieks and she turned to Lady Juliana even as the paddle spanked her thighs and her calves, and kissed and kissed those pink satin slippers. "What?" Lady Juliana said with genuine outrage. "You dare beg me for mercy before the Queen? Wretched, wretched girl!" She smacked Beauty's buttocks, but she had Beauty by the hair with her left hand and pulled her up, snapping her head back so that Beauty's knees went wide apart to keep her balance. Beauty's open-mouthed sobs were choked and uneven. And she saw the paddle being passed to one of the Pages who offered the Lady a heavy broad leather belt immediately. The belt struck Beauty's buttocks with a resounding wallop. Again it struck her. "Take another rose, another, two, three, four in your mouth at once and give them to your Queen immediately!" Beauty ran to obey, and it seemed for a moment all perception left her. She was frantic to obey, to outdistance Lady Juliana's anger. It was hotter, more frenzied than the Bridle Path at its worst, and as she turned to gather more of the little roses, she felt the Queen catch her face in both hands and hold her still so that Lady Juliana could beat her. It did not matter. She could not please. She deserved to be beaten. She quivered with every blow of the strap, yet, drenched with tears, she even lifted her buttocks to receive the punishment. But the Queen was not satisfied still, and she turned Beauty around, her hand on Beauty's hair to pull her head back, as Lady Juliana now smacked Beauty's breasts and her belly and made the wide leather strap lick at her pubis. The Queen held Beauty's hair fast. "Open your legs!" Lady Juliana commanded. "Oooooh..." Beauty sobbed aloud, but she obeyed, and desperately she thrust her hips forward to receive the angry punishment.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She turned the radio up, put the heating on full blast. Her face was tight and serious, but calm. I was surprised by my curiosity to know what she was thinking, but I kept quiet. When we got onto the Long Island Expressway, the radio DJ told listeners to call in to share their New Year’s resolutions. “In 2001, I want to embrace every opportunity. I want to say ‘yes’ to every invitation I receive.” “Two thousand and one is the year I finally learn to tango.” “I’m not making any resolutions this year,” Reva said. She turned down the volume on the radio and changed the station. “I can never keep my promises to myself. I’m like my own worst enemy. What about you?” “I might try to stop smoking. But the medications make it difficult.” “Uh-huh,” she said mindlessly. “And maybe I’ll try to lose five pounds.” I couldn’t tell if she was trying to insult me with sarcasm, or if she was being sincere. I let it go. The visibility was bad. The windshield wipers screeched, clearing away the wet splats of snow. In Queens, Reva turned up the radio again and began to sing along to the music. Santana. Marc Anthony. Enrique Iglesias. After a while, I began to wonder if she was drunk. Maybe we’d die in a car accident, I thought. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window and looked out at the dark water of the East River. It wouldn’t be that bad to die, I thought. Traffic slowed. Reva turned the radio down. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked stiffly. “I don’t want to be needy, but I’m afraid of being alone right now. I don’t feel like myself and I’m afraid something bad is going to happen.” “Okay,” I said, though I assumed she’d change her mind a few minutes past midnight. “We can watch a movie,” she said. “Whatever you want. Hey, can you dig my gum out of my purse? I don’t want to take my hands off the wheel.” Reva’s fake Gucci bag sat between us on the console. I fished around tampons and perfume and hand sanitizer and her makeup kit and rolled up issues of Cosmo and Marie Claire and a hairbrush and a toothbrush and toothpaste and her huge wallet and her cell phone and her datebook and her sunglasses and finally found a single piece of cinnamon Extra in the little side pocket otherwise full of old LIRR ticket receipts. The paper had turned pink and oily. “Wanna split it?” she asked. “Gross,” I said. “No.” Reva put her hand out. I watched her watching the road. Maybe she wasn’t drunk, I thought, just exhausted.