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 In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As such, they are unable to make use of their emotional intelligence. To some degree they represent, when we are under the influence of chronic stress or trauma, the Phineas Gages in all of us. Wholeness as Balance As above, so below. As below, so above. —Kybalion We are more than speaking animals; we are language creatures. However, whether we are confined by the tyranny of language, or liberated by it, is a question that is up for grabs. How we use, or abuse, language has a good deal to do with how we live our lives. Words, in and of themselves, are of little importance to an infant when it is upset. Language needs to be accompanied by close physical soothing in the form of holding, rocking and gentle sounds such as coos and ahs. It is our use of nonverbal tone and cadence that gives language its power to calm and dulcify a baby’s upset. As children develop, they begin both to understand the actual words and to be soothed by the mode in which they are uttered. However, words must still have a physical context in order for them to be healing and salubrious. You may recall a young boy named Elian Gonzalez, who became the pawn in an outrageous political battle in the state of Florida. Elian’s distant cousins (Cuban exiles living in Miami), supposedly concerned for the boy’s welfare, fought vehemently against Elian’s own father (who was living in Cuba) for custody of this young child. As in Bertolt Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, they were literally pulling this bewildered six-year-old child apart. Eventually, the Supreme Court interceded and blocked Governor Jeb Bush’s efforts to keep Elian in the United States as a “model anti- Castro citizen” and returned him to the custody of his father. National Guard soldiers were ordered to remove and guard Elian against a hostile, placard-wielding mob as a female federal agent snatched him from the cousins and angry onlookers, holding him securely to her body. Clearly, this unexpected and unwanted embrace from a stranger terrified the already frightened, disoriented and brainwashed child. But then something quite remarkable happened. The agent held him firmly enough to not be ripped away by the angry mob, yet gently enough for her embrace to match the words she calmly recited in Spanish: “Elian, this may seem scary to you right now, but it soon will be better. We’re taking you to see your papa ... You will not be taken back to Cuba [which was true for the time being] ... You will not be put on a boat again [he had been brought to Miami on a treacherous boat ride]. You are with people who care for you and are going to take care of you.” These words were carefully scripted, as you might have suspected, by a child psychiatrist who had known of Elian’s history and plight.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Demonic Possession You have always been interested in demon and possession narratives, no matter how cheesy or silly they are. It’s the perfect intersection of your morbid curiosities and the remnants of your religious upbringing; a reminder of a time when you believed in that sort of thing. After she blames those nights on a kind of amnesia, you do research while she mopes around. She feels bad, so bad, she says. There is remorse there, true remorse, and yet sometimes you catch her composing her face into sadness. You google memory loss, sudden onsets of rage and violence. The internet gives you nothing, except one article about how it has been shown that heavy marijuana use can, theoretically, trigger an onset of schizophrenia, if one were already genetically prone to it. This is terrifying; you feel deeply for her. You try to present your various theories, but she scoffs at all of them. She hasn’t been smoking much pot, she says. She doesn’t have schizophrenia. She says it with such disdain you begin to wonder if you’d exaggerated the events of that trip, whether perhaps you are remembering them wrong. This is not to say that you seriously consider demonic possession. You are a modern woman and you don’t believe in God or any accompanying mythologies. But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the next day? “I did what? I masturbated with a crucifix? I spit on a priest?” That’s what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she’s done without seeing horror on their faces. “But she was possessed, see.” “Oh well, that happens to everyone at one time or another, doesn’t it?” At night, you lie next to her and watch her sleep. What is lurking inside? Dream House as Naming the Animals Adam had one job, really. God said, “See this fuzzy thing? And that scaly thing there, in the water? And these feathery things, flying through the air? I really need you to give them names. I’ve been making the world for a week and I’m exhausted. Let me know what you decide.” So Adam sat there. What a puzzler, right? It’s obvious to us, now, that that is a squirrel and that is a fish and that is a bird, but how was Adam supposed to know that? He wasn’t just newly born, he was newly created; he didn’t have years of life experience to support this creative enterprise, or anyone to teach him about it. When I think about him, just sitting there with his brand-new fist under his brand-new chin, looking vaguely perturbed and puzzled and anxious, I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  higher up. It is not much different from the hierarchies we can observe among chimpanzees. If you stop focusing on people’s words and the façade they present, and concentrate on their actions and their nonverbal cues, you can almost sense the level of aggressiveness they emanate. In looking at this phenomenon, it is important that you be tolerant of people: we have all crossed the line at some point and turned more aggressive than usual, often because of circumstances. When it comes to those who are powerful and successful, it is impossible in this world to reach such heights without higher levels of aggression and some manipulation. For accomplishing great things, we can forgive them their occasional harsh and assertive behavior. What you need to determine is whether you are dealing with chronic aggressors, people who cannot tolerate criticism or being challenged on any level, whose desire for control is excessive, and who will swallow you up in their relentless quest to have more. Look for some telltale signs. First, if they have an unusually high number of enemies whom they have accumulated over the years, there must be a good reason, and not the one they tell you. Pay close attention to how they justify their actions in the world. Aggressors will tend to present themselves as crusaders, as some form of genius who cannot help the way they behave. They are creating great art, they say, or helping the little man. People who get in their way are infidels and evil. They will claim, as Rockefeller did, that no one has been criticized or investigated as much as they have; they are the victims, not the aggressors. The louder and more extreme their narrative, the more you can be certain you are dealing with chronic aggressors. Focus on their actions, their past patterns of behavior, much more than anything they say. You can look for subtler signs as well. Chronic aggressors often have obsessive personalities. Having meticulous habits and creating a completely predictable environment is their way of holding control. Obsessing over an object or a person indicates a desire to swallow it whole. Also, pay attention to the nonverbal cues. We saw with Rockefeller that he could not stand to be passed by anyone in the street. The aggressor type will show such physical obsessions— always front and center. In any event, the earlier you can spot the signs the better. Once you realize you are dealing with this type, you must use every ounce of your energy to disengage mentally, to gain control of your emotional response. Often what happens when you face aggressors is that you initially feel mesmerized and even paralyzed to some extent, as if in the presence of a snake. Then, as you process what they have done, you become emotional—angry, outraged, frightened. Once you are in that state, they find it easy to keep you reacting and not thinking. Your anger doesn’t lead to

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  These are known as take-profit (or take-gain) orders and stop-loss orders. (While poker players don’t generally establish take-gains, they do often set stop-losses, quitting games after they’ve lost a certain amount of money.) Notice that adhering to a stop-loss order forces the traders to turn a loss on paper into a realized loss, while a take-gain order does the opposite, causing the trader to keep gains on paper at risk if the trade goes against them. This is like committing in advance to refuse the coin flip when you are down $100 and taking the coin flip when you are up $100. The researchers wanted to find out if the traders stuck to their take-gain and stop-loss orders or if they looked more like Kahneman and Tversky’s participants, preferring to keep gambling when they were losing and quit when they were winning. As Alex Imas explained to me, “Almost nobody hits their take-profit order. They exit manually before that.” In other words, traders will quit earlier than the take-profit order would tell them to, in order to lock up a sure win, regardless of whether continuing to hold that position would be a winning decision. When they have a win on paper, they don’t have any interest in recruiting luck into the equation any further, risking losing gains that they could put in their pocket. (I hope it’s becoming very clear how bad the advice “quit while you’re ahead” really is, because it’s encouraging our natural tendency to be irrational in these situations already.) On the other hand, when traders are losing, they cancel their stop-loss orders, preferring to gamble that the position will recover and they won’t have to turn their loss on paper into one that’s realized, a decision that carries with it the risk of accumulating bigger and bigger negative returns. Our goal, obviously, should be to persist when we have a positive expected value, regardless of whether we have already won or lost to a prior course of action. Because these decisions are made under uncertainty, we rarely know for sure whether sticking or quitting is the best choice. In the same way that it’s easier for the cab drivers to see if they’ve met a daily goal, it’s easier for any of us to see whether we’re ahead or behind so we use that signal to determine whether or not to persevere. The result is that we’ll quit when we’re ahead, even if we’re giving up good opportunities to win more. If we’re behind, we don’t want to quit, even if persisting—to try to get to the other side of zero—is more likely to make things worse. I saw this routinely in poker. When most players were offered the slightest pretense to quit a game when they were ahead, they couldn’t get their chips off the table and over to the cashier fast enough. But it’s also true that when they were in the losses, they were superglued to the seat.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  If I say the woman. If I say the woman is bearing down, her back hunched below this man-made storm, would you see her? From where you are standing, inches, which is to say years, from this page, would you see the shred of blue shawl blowing across her collarbones, the mole at the outside corner of her left eye as she squints at the men, who are now close enough for her to realize they are not men at all, but boys—eighteen, twenty at most? Can you hear the sound of the chopper, its dismemberment of air so loud it drowns the shouting beneath it? The wind coarse with smoke—and something else, a sweat-soaked char, its odd and acrid taste blowing from a hut at the edge of the field. A hut that, moments ago, was filled with human voices. The girl, her ear pressed to the woman’s chest, listens as if eavesdropping behind a door. There is something running inside the woman, a beginning, or rather, a rearranging of syntax. Eyes closed, she searches, her tongue on the cliff of a sentence. The veins green over his wrists, the boy raises the M-16, blond hairs sweated brown along his arms. The men are drinking and laughing, their gapped teeth like mouthfuls of dice. This boy, his lips pulled at an angle, green eyes filmed pink. This private first class. The men are ready to forget, a few still have the scent of their wives’ makeup on their fingers. His mouth opens and closes rapidly. He is asking a question, or questions, he is turning the air around his words into weather. Is there a language for falling out of language? A flash of teeth, a finger on the trigger, the boy saying, “No. No, step back.” The olive tag stitched to the boy’s chest frames a word. Although the woman cannot read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat. She knows the first letter in the name is C. Like in Go Cong, the name of the open-air market she had visited two days ago, its neon marquee buzzing at the entrance. She was there to buy a new shawl for the girl. The cloth had cost more than what she had planned to spend, but when she saw it, day-bright among the grey and brown bolts, she peered up at the sky, even though it was already nightfall, and paid knowing there would be nothing left to eat with. Sky blue. —

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  and rallied to some cause, we have license to project and vent our spleen on various convenient scapegoats. By idealizing the leader and the cause, we are now free to act in ways we would normally shy away from as individuals. These demagogues are adept at exaggerating the threats we face, painting everything in black-and- white terms. They stir up the fears, insecurities, and desires for revenge that have gone underground but are waiting at any moment to explode in the group setting. We will find more and more such leaders as we experience greater degrees of repression and inner tension. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson expressed this dynamic in the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , published in 1886. The main character, Dr. Jekyll, is a well-respected and wealthy doctor/scientist with impeccable manners, so much like the paragons of goodness in our culture. He invents a concoction that transforms him into Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of his Shadow, who proceeds to murder and rape and indulge in the wildest of sensual pleasures. Stevenson’s idea is that the more civilized and moral we outwardly become, the more potentially dangerous is the Shadow, which we so fiercely deny. As the character Dr. Jekyll describes it, “My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.” The solution is not more repression and correctness. We can never alter human nature through enforced niceness. The pitchfork doesn’t work. Nor is the solution to seek release for our Shadow in the group, which is volatile and dangerous. Instead the answer is to see our Shadow in action and become more self-aware. It is hard to project onto others our own secret impulses or to overidealize some cause, once we are made aware of the mechanism operating within us. Through such self-knowledge we can find a way to integrate the dark side into our consciousness productively and creatively. (For more on this, see the last section of this chapter.) In doing so we become more authentic and complete, exploiting to the maximum the energies we naturally possess. Deciphering the Shadow: Contradictory Behavior In the course of your life you will come upon people who have very emphatic traits that set them apart and seem to be the source of their strength—unusual confidence, exceptional niceness and affability, great moral rectitude and a saintly aura, toughness and rugged masculinity, an intimidating intellect. If you look closely at them, you may notice a slight exaggeration to these traits, as if they were performing or laying it on just a little too thick. As a student of human nature, you must understand the reality: the emphatic trait generally rests on top of the opposite trait, distracting and concealing it from public view. We can see two forms of this: Early on in life some people sense a softness, vulnerability, or insecurity that might prove embarrassing or uncomfortable. They unconsciously develop the opposite trait, a

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Part of the reason for this essential ambivalence is that strong, pure emotions are frightening. They represent a momentary loss of control. They seem to negate our willpower. We unconsciously balance them with contrary or conflicting emotions. And part of it stems from the fact that our moods are continually shifting and overlapping. Whatever the cause, we are not aware of our own ambivalence because contemplating the complexity of our emotions is baffling, and we prefer to rely on simple explanations for who we are and what we are feeling. We do the same with the people around us, reducing our interpretations of their feelings to something simple and digestible. It would take effort, and much honesty on our part, to catch our own underlying ambivalence in action. Nowhere is this fundamental aspect of human nature more evident than in our relationship toward leaders, whom we unconsciously associate with parental figures. This ambivalence toward leaders operates in the following way. On the one hand, we intuitively recognize the need for leaders. In any group, people have their narrow agendas and competing interests. The members feel insecure about their own position and work to secure it. Without leaders who stand above these competing interests and who see the larger picture, the group would be in trouble. Hard decisions would never be made. No one would be guiding the ship. Therefore, we crave leadership and unconsciously feel disoriented, even hysterical, without someone fulfilling this role. On the other hand, we also tend to fear and even despise those who are above us. We fear that those in power will be tempted to use the privileges of their position to accumulate more power and enrich themselves, a common enough occurrence. We are also willful creatures. We don’t feel comfortable with the inferiority and dependence that comes with serving under a leader. We want to exercise our own will and feel our autonomy. We secretly envy the recognition and privileges that leaders possess. This essential ambivalence tips toward the negative when leaders show signs of abuse, insensitivity, or incompetence. No matter how powerful the leaders, no matter how much we might admire them, below the surface sits this ambivalence, and it makes people’s loyalties notoriously fickle and volatile. Those in power will tend to notice only the smiles of their employees and the applause they receive at meetings, and they will mistake such support for reality. They do not realize that people almost always show such deference to those above them, because their personal fate is in the hands of such leaders and they cannot afford to show their true feelings. And so leaders are rarely aware of the underlying ambivalence that is there even when things are going well.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  gender roles, the masculine and the feminine. The boy will tend to have an ambivalent relationship to his mother that will mark him for life. On the one hand he craves the security and adoring attention she gives him; on the other hand he feels threatened by her, as if she might suffocate him in her femininity and he would lose himself. He fears her authority and her power over his life. From a certain age forward, he feels the need to differentiate himself. He needs to establish his own sense of masculine identity. Certainly the physical changes that occur as he gets older will fuel this identity with the masculine, but in the process he will tend to overidentify with the role (unless he identifies with the feminine role instead), playing up his toughness and independence to emphasize his separation from the mother. The other sides to his character—the empathy, the gentleness, the need for connection, which he absorbed from the mother or were naturally a part of him—will tend to become repressed and sink into the unconscious. The girl may have an adventurous spirit and may incorporate the willpower and determination of her father into her own personality. But as she gets older, she will most likely feel pressure to conform to certain cultural norms and to forge her identity around what is considered feminine. Girls are supposed to be nice, sweet, and deferential. They are supposed to put the interests of others before their own. They are supposed to tame any wild streaks, to look pretty and to be objects of desire. For the individual girl, these expectations turn into voices she hears in her head, continually judging her and making her doubt her self-worth. These pressures may be subtler in our day and age, but they still exert a powerful influence. The more exploratory, aggressive, and darker sides of her character—both naturally occurring and absorbed from the father—will tend to become repressed and sink into the unconscious, if she adopts a more traditionally feminine role. The unconscious feminine part of the boy and the man is what Jung calls the anima . The unconscious masculine part of the girl and woman are the animus . Because they are parts of ourselves that are deeply buried, we are never really aware of them in our daily life. But once we become fascinated with a person of the opposite sex, the anima and animus stir to life. The attraction we feel toward another might be purely physical, but more often the person who draws our attention unconsciously bears some resemblance— physical or psychological—to our mother or father. Remember that this primal relationship is full of charged energy, excitement, and obsessions that are repressed but yearning to come out. A person who triggers these associations in us will be a magnet for our attention, even though we are not aware of the source of our attraction. If the relationship to the mother or father was mostly positive, we

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  No doubt, the person who trained and ran sixteen miles of a marathon is better off health-wise than the person who never started. If your goal is to be healthier, the person who tried has clearly made more progress toward that goal. But for so many of us, that fear of falling short makes us not want to start. As Richard Thaler quipped, “If a gold medal in the Olympics is the only grade that passes, you do not want to ever take your first gymnastics class.” Once we set a goal, that’s what we measure ourselves against. If we’re running in a marathon, anything but 26.2 miles is a failure. This is how goals exacerbate escalation of commitment, because anything short of the finish line is unacceptable to us. It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the world or what’s happening in our bodies. We don’t want to feel like we’ve failed. We’ll just keep running toward the finish line until our leg snaps. When it comes to our aversion to closing accounts in the losses, the pass-fail nature of goals makes this problem worse. As soon as you set a goal or a target, you put yourself immediately in the losses, at least in relation to your distance from the goal. As soon as you cross the starting line, you are now short of the finish line. When an economist talks about being in the gains or losses, they’re talking about whether you are currently winning or losing as compared with where you started. But as is so often the case, when it comes to goals, our cognition cares very little for what economists have to say. Being in the losses is as much a state of mind as anything else. We don’t see ourselves as being in the gains, even though we’ve gone farther than where we started, because we’re not measuring ourselves by how far we are past the starting line. We’re measuring ourselves by whether we’re short of the finish line. Because we don’t want to close mental accounts in the losses, we’re just going to keep running toward the finish line, even if we feel our leg is about to snap, and even after it does. If you turn around 300 feet from the summit of Everest, you will feel like you failed. That must have been the feeling that stuck with Rob Hall and his client Doug Hansen when they turned around that close to the summit in 1995, the year before the expedition chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book. Never mind that Hansen climbed more than 28,000 feet, something few humans have ever accomplished. Hansen expressed this feeling of failure from the previous year so poignantly when he told Krakauer, “The summit looked soooo close. Believe me, there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about it.” When Hall convinced Hansen to come back and try again, that started them both in the losses.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  is strong enough or lasts for too long, it can become unbearable. We are willful creatures who crave power. This desire for power is not evil or antisocial; it is a natural response to the awareness of our essential weakness and vulnerability. In essence, what drives much of our behavior is to have control over circumstances, to feel the connection between what we do and what we get—to feel that we can influence people and events to some extent. This mitigates our sense of helplessness and makes the unpredictability of life tolerable. We satisfy this need by developing solid work skills that help us secure our career status and give us a feeling of control over the future. We also try to develop social skills that allow us to work with other people, earn their affection, and have a degree of influence over them. When it comes to our needs for excitement and stimulation, we generally choose to satisfy them through various activities—sports, entertainment, seduction—that our culture provides or accepts. All of these activities help us to have the control that we crave, but they require that we recognize certain limits. To gain such power in our work and relationships, we must be patient. We cannot force things. It takes time to secure our career position, to develop genuine creative powers, to learn how to influence people and charm them. It also requires abiding by certain social codes and even laws. We cannot do just anything to get ahead in our careers; we cannot force people to do our bidding. We can call these codes and laws guardrails that we carefully stay within in order to gain power while remaining liked and respected. In certain moments, however, we find it hard to accept these limits. We cannot advance in our careers or make a lot of money as quickly as we would like. We cannot get people to work with us to the degree that we want them to, so we feel frustrated. Or perhaps an old wound from childhood is suddenly reopened. If we anticipate that a partner could be ending the relationship, and we have a great fear of being abandoned stemming from parental coldness, we could easily overreact and try to control him or her, using all of our manipulative powers and turning quite aggressive. (Feelings of love often turn to hostility and aggression in people, because it is in love that we feel most dependent, vulnerable, and helpless.) In these cases, our hunger for more money, power, love, or attention overwhelms any patience we might have had. We might then be tempted to go outside the guardrails, to seek power and control in a way that violates tacit codes and even laws. But for most of us, when we cross the line, we feel uncomfortable and perhaps remorseful. We scurry back to within the guardrails, to our normal ways of trying for power and control. Such aggressive acts can occur

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  unthinkable—they declared themselves the true representatives of the French people, equal to the king, and they called their body the National Assembly. They proposed the formation of a constitutional monarchy, and they claimed to have the overwhelming support of the country. If they did not get their way, they would make sure the government would be unable to raise the necessary taxes. At one point, as the king grew furious at this form of blackmail, he ordered the Third Estate to disband from their meeting place, and they refused, disobeying a royal decree. Never had any French king witnessed such insubordination from the lower classes. As he faced a growing uprising throughout the country, Louis sensed the urgency of nipping the problem in the bud. He decided to forget any attempts at conciliation and instead resort to force. He called in the army to establish order in Paris and elsewhere. But on July 13 messengers from Paris relayed some disturbing news: the Parisians, anticipating Louis’s use of the military, were quickly arming themselves, looting military stockades. The French troops that had moved in to quell the rebellion were unreliable, many of them refusing to fire on their compatriots. The following day, a vast contingent of Parisians marched on the Bastille, the royal prison in Paris that was a symbol of the most oppressive practices of the monarchy, and they took control of it. Paris was in the hands of the people now, and there was nothing Louis could do. He watched with horror as the National Assembly, still meeting in Versailles, quickly voted to eliminate the various privileges enjoyed by the nobility and clergy. In the name of the people, they voted to take over the Catholic Church and auction off to the public the vast lands that it owned. They went even further, proclaiming that henceforth all French citizens were equal. The monarchy would be allowed to survive, but the people and the king were to share power. In the following weeks, as the courtiers, shocked and terrified by these events, quickly fled Versailles to safe regions or to other countries, the king could now feel the full brunt of what had happened in the past few months. He wandered the halls of the palace, virtually alone. The paintings and august symbols of Louis XIV stared back at him in mockery of all that he had allowed under his rule. Somehow he had to retake control of France, and the only way to do so was to lean even more on the military, finding those regiments that had remained loyal to him. In mid-September he recalled the Flanders Regiment—containing some of the best soldiers in the country and renowned for its royalist sympathies—to Versailles. On the evening of October 1, the king’s personal guard decided to host a banquet in honor of the Flanders Regiment. All of the courtiers who had remained in the palace, along with the king and the queen, attended the banquet.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  least one successful relationship in our lives, but we will tend to have many more that were decidedly unsuccessful, that ended unhappily. And often we repeat the same types of bad choices of partners, as if compelled by some inner demon. We like to tell ourselves in retrospect that when we were in love, a type of temporary madness overcame us. We think of such moments as representing the exception, not the rule, to our character. But let us entertain for the moment the opposite possibility—in our conscious day-to-day life, we are sleepwalking, unaware of who we really are; we present a front of reasonableness to the world, and we mistake the mask for reality. When we fall in love, we are actually being more ourselves. The mask slips off. We realize then how deeply unconscious forces determine many of our actions. We are more connected to the reality of the essential irrationality in our nature. Let us look at some of the common changes that occur when we are in love. Normally our minds are in a state of distraction. The deeper we fall in love, however, the more our attention is completely absorbed in one person. We become obsessive. We like to present a particular appearance to the world, one that highlights our strengths. When in love, however, opposite traits often come to the fore. A person who is normally strong and independent can suddenly become rather helpless, dependent, and hysterical. A nurturing, empathetic person can suddenly become tyrannical, demanding, and self-absorbed. As adults we feel relatively mature and practical, but in love we can suddenly regress to behavior that can only be seen as childish. We experience fears and insecurities that are greatly exaggerated. We feel terror at the thought of being abandoned, like a baby who has been left alone for a few minutes. We have wild mood swings— from love to hate, from trust to paranoia. Normally we like to imagine that we are good judges of other people’s character. Once infatuated or in love, however, we mistake the narcissist for a genius, the suffocator for a nurturer, the slacker for the exciting rebel, the control freak for the protector. Others can often see the truth and try to disabuse us of our fantasies, but we won’t listen. And what is worse, we will often continue to make the same types of mistaken judgments again and again. In looking at these altered states, we might be tempted to describe them as forms of possession. We are normally rational person A, but under the influence of an infatuation, irrational person B begins to emerge. At first, A and B can fluctuate and even blend into each other, but the deeper we fall in love, the more it is person B who dominates. Person B sees qualities in people that are not there, acts in ways that are counterproductive and even self-destructive, is quite immature, with unrealistic expectations, and makes decisions

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 39. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Types T511.1.3, Conception from eating mango; T511.1.5, Conception from eating lemon; T511.2.1, Conception from eating mandrake; T511.2.2, Conception from eating watercress; T511.3.1, Conception from eating peppercorn; T511.3.2, Conception from eating spinach; T511.4.1, Conception from eating rose; T511.5.2, Conception from swallowing worm (in drink of water); T511.5.3, Conception from eating louse; T511.6.1, Conception from eating woman’s heart; T511.6.2, Conception from eating finger-bones; T511.7.1, Conception after eating honey given by lover; T511.8.6, Conception from swallowing a pearl; T512.4, Conception from drinking saint’s tears; T512.7, Conception from drinking dew; T513.1, Conception through another’s wish; T514, Conception after reciprocal desire for each other; T515.1, Impregnation through lustful glance; T516, Conception through dream; T517, Conception from extraordinary intercourse; T521, Conception from sunlight; T521.1, Conception from moonlight; T521.2, Conception from rainbow; T522, Conception from falling rain; T523, Conception from bathing; T524, Conception from wind; T525, Conception from falling star; T525.2, Impregnation by a comet; T528, Impregnation by thunder (lightning); T532.1.3, Impregnation by leaf of lettuce; T532.1.4, Conception by smell of cooked dragon heart; T532.1.4.1, Conception after smelling ground bone-dust; T532.2, Conception from stepping on an animal; T532.3, Conception from fruit thrown against breast; T532.5, Conception from putting on another’s girdle; T532.10, Conception from hiss of cobra; T533, Conception from spittle; T534, Conception from blood; T535, Conception from fire; T536, Conception from feathers falling on woman; T539.2, Conception by a cry.Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®You wake up and the air is milky and bright. The room glows with a kind of effervescent contentment, despite the boxes and clothes and dishes. You think to yourself: this is the kind of morning you could get used to. When you turn over, she is staring at you. The luminous innocence of the light curdles in your stomach. You don’t remember ever going from awake to afraid so quickly. “You were moving all night,” she says. “Your arms and elbows touched me. You kept me awake.” If you apologize profusely, go to this page. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to this page. If you tell her to calm down, go to this page. “I’m so sorry,” you tell her. “I really didn’t mean to. I just move my arms around a lot in my sleep.” You try to be light about it. “Did you know my dad does the same thing, the sleeping damsel swoon? So weird. I must have—” “Are you really sorry?” she says. “I don’t think you are.” “I am,” you say. You want the first impression of the morning to return to you; its freshness, its light. “I really am.” “Prove it.” “How?” “Stop doing it.” “I told you, I can’t.” “Fuck you,” she says, and gets out of bed. You follow her all the way to the kitchen. Go to this page.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  power. He had formed a new group called the East-Is-Red Corps; he and his team had kicked out Chairman Deng and were now running the school themselves. They had started their own newspaper, called Battlefield News , to promote and defend their actions. Jianhua also learned that another teacher had died under suspicious circumstances. One day, Fangpu visited Jianhua and invited him to be a star reporter for Battlefield News . Fangpu looked different—he had put on weight, was not so pale, and was trying to grow a beard. It was a tempting offer from his friend, but something made Jianhua put him off, and Fangpu did not like this, although he tried to disguise his annoyance with a forced smile. Fangpu was beginning to frighten Jianhua. Students were now joining the East-Is-Red Corps en masse, but within a few weeks a rival group, calling themselves the Red Rebels, emerged on campus. Their leader was Mengzhe, a student whose parents were peasants and who advocated revolution that was more tolerant, based on reason and not violence, which he felt was the purer form of Maoism. He gained some adherents, including Jianhua’s older brother, Weihua, who was a student at YMS. Mengzhe’s growing popularity infuriated Fangpu; he called him a royalist, a sentimentalist, and secret counterrevolutionary. He and his followers destroyed the Red Rebels’ office and threatened to do worse. It would certainly cause a complete rift with Fangpu, but Jianhua contemplated joining the Red Rebels. He was attracted to their idealism. Just as the tension between the two sides was escalating into outright war, a representative from the Chinese military arrived on campus and announced that the army was now in charge. Mao had dispatched army units throughout the country to take control of schools. The increasing chaos and violence that was engulfing YMS was going on all over China, not only in schools but in factories and government offices as well; the Cultural Revolution was spinning out of control. Soon thirty-six soldiers arrived on campus, part of an army unit known as the 901; they ordered that all factions disband and that classes resume. There would be military drilling and discipline would be reestablished. Too much had changed, however, in the eight months since this had all begun. The students could not accept such a sudden return to discipline. They sulked and did not turn up at classes. Fangpu took charge of the campaign to get rid of the soldiers: he put up posters accusing the 901 of being enemies of the Cultural Revolution. One day, he and his followers attacked one of the army officers with a slingshot and wounded him. Just as the students feared reprisals, the 901 unit was suddenly recalled from campus without any explanation. The students were now completely on their own, and it seemed a frightening prospect. They quickly allied themselves with one of the two groups. Some joined the East-Is-Red Corps because it was

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  several ways instead of just one. It could become more sensitive to the environment and learn. It stood a better chance of survival because its options were widened. This sensation of fear would last only a few seconds or even less, for speed was of the essence. For social animals, these arousals and feelings took on a deeper and more important role: they became a critical form of communication. Vicious sounds or hair standing on end could display anger, warding off an enemy or signaling a danger; certain postures or smells revealed sexual desire and readiness; postures and gestures signaled the desire to play; certain calls from the young revealed deep anxiety and the need for the mother to return. With primates, this became ever more elaborate and complex. It has been shown that chimpanzees can feel envy and the desire for vengeance, among other emotions. This evolution took place over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Much more recently, cognitive powers developed in animals and humans, culminating in the invention of language and abstract thinking. As many neuroscientists have affirmed, this evolution has led to the higher mammalian brain being composed of three parts. The oldest is the reptilian part of the brain, which controls all automatic responses that regulate the body. This is the instinctive part. Above that is the old mammalian or limbic brain, governing feeling and emotion. And on top of that has evolved the neocortex, the part that controls cognition and, for humans, language. Emotions originate as physical arousal designed to capture our attention and cause us to take notice of something around us. They begin as chemical reactions and sensations that we must then translate into words to try to understand. But because they are processed in a different part of the brain from language and thinking, this translation is often slippery and inaccurate. For instance, we feel anger at person X, whereas in fact the true source of this may be envy; below the level of conscious awareness we feel inferior in relation to X and want something he or she has. But envy is not a feeling that we are ever comfortable with, and so often we translate it as something more palatable—anger, dislike, resentment. Or let us say one day we are feeling a mood of frustration and impatience; person Y crosses our path at the wrong moment and we lash out, unaware that this anger is prompted by a different mood and out of proportion to Y’s actions. Or let us say that we are truly angry at person Z. But the anger is sitting inside of us, caused by someone in our past who hurt us deeply, perhaps a parent. We direct the anger at Z because they remind us of this other person. In other words, we do not have conscious access to the origins of our emotions and the moods they generate. Once we feel them, all

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Why I didn’t notice the racks right off I can’t say, but hours later I awoke from dreams of torture. Midafternoon one Saturday Travis comes home after digging sea clams with a buddy. Leaning on pitchforks knee-deep at low tide, they’d each managed to kill a case of beer before noon. He dumps the clams in the sink and tells my brother and me to circle around, he wants to show us his photo album. For the first few pages he’s a teenager, cocky beside hot rods, girls sitting on the hoods, one with her arm draped over his shoulders. The next page shows him at boot camp, Parris Island—crewcut, sudden adult. The next shows Vietnamese women dancing topless on tables, and on the next page a village is on fire. Corpses next, pages of corpses, bodies along a dirt road, a face with no eyes. As the stories of what he’d done unreel from inside him, my brother stands up and walks into his room, back to his wall of science fiction. I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire. Years later, when I track him down, he shows me another photo, one I hadn’t seen or don’t remember—him on a dusty road outside Da Nang, a peace sign dangling from his neck. The reason he signed up for a second hitch, he tells me, was so that he could go into villages ahead of his unit, ostensibly to check for landmines and booby traps, but once there he’d warn the villagers to run, because if they didn’t he knew there was a good chance they’d be killed by his advancing soldiers. Then he’d set off a couple rounds of C-4, radio in that it was still hot, smoke a joint, watch the villagers flee. The night he showed us his photo album, after the house went quiet, I crept into the kitchen for a glass of water, the sink still full of sea clams, forgotten. Under the fluorescent hum they’d opened their shells and were waving their feet, each as thick and long as my forearm. A box of snakes, some draped onto the countertop, some trying to pull themselves out.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  172 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles as prophets and making the “young men” (2:12) whom the Lord anointed Nazirites to drink prohibited wine. Consequently, and in words that echo the language of our passage in Mark 14 but also in Mark 13, the Lord promises that there is a day coming on which the Lord will judge the people with fire (2:5) and will “press” the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem until the swift and strong have no more speed or strength and will flee (καὶ ἀπολεῖται φυγὴ ἐκ δρομέως 2:14), a day on which even the “stoutest of heart” who have remained to the end will final y “flee away naked” after all of the others have fled (καὶ εὑρήσει τὴν καρδίαν αὐτοῦ ἐν δυναστείαις ὁ γυμνὸς διώξεται ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ λέγει κύριος 2:16).83 The constel ation of words and narrative sequence of action found in such close juxtaposition in a single prophetic text (Amos 2:5–11) and in our very brief text of Mark 14:51–52 and its immediately adjacent narratives seems unlikely to be coincidental.84 Loisy had drawn a similar conclusion, as had Klostermann, but the former saw it only as a further sign of messianic fulfilment while the latter saw it as an embellishment of the passion narrative. But there is a more compelling argument to be made, one that suggests that the invocation of a prophetic rhetorical unit is characteristic of Mark’s rhetoric. From the first voice heard in the gospel, namely Isaiah the prophet, to the next voice, namely John the Baptist, and through the subsequent words and deeds of Jesus that culminate in his prophetic announcement of the impending “day of the Lord” as judgment on Jerusalem (Mark 13), Mark has led his reader not by the hand through simple enthymematic argumentation but has provided one sophisticated intertextural clue after another regarding the impending “day of the Lord.” These clues are hidden from any but an audience that is rhetorical y attuned to the prophetic texts and one for whom it would be clear that the “day of the Lord” is nigh on the horizon, starting on the outer fringes with Galilee but concluding in the heartland, in Jerusalem. In this context, this apparently innocuous rhetorical unit of 14:51–52 is yet one more clue that is intended to conjure up in the readers’ mind the notion of the “day of the Lord.” It is one small clue, one more small stone placed for stumbling over for those who understand the prophetic enunciation—“let the reader understand”— but who fails to repent. But, commentators who have cast doubts on a connection with Amos have noted, among other things, the absence of other words found in 14:51–52, for example, σινδών. As noted, the word is found only twice in the LXX at Judg 14:12 and Prov 31:24.85

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  When we are mortally threatened, or when the threat is internal (say, from the flu or from eating a bacterially infected food), our survival response is to vomit or to expel the contents of our intestines with diarrhea, and then to lie still so as to conserve energy. It seems possible that prey animals also resort to this reaction when a predator suddenly springs on it from within striking distance. In this case, the violent expulsion of the animal’s intestinal contents may actually lighten its weight and give it a better chance of escaping. This fraction-of-a-second advantage could mean the difference between life or death. I have seen this happen on several occasions when a mountain lion has lunged at a group of deer drinking from the North St. Vrain River, which runs behind my Colorado home. The powerful effects of both the sympathetic and the vagus nerves on the viscera serve critical survival functions. The activation of these two systems is meant to be brief in response to acute emergency. When they become stuck (in either sympathetic overdrive or vagal overactivity), the survival function is drastically subverted: one may end up suffering from a painfully knotted gut, as in the case of persistent sympathetic hyperarousal, or be tormented by spasms of twisting cramps and disruptive diarrhea in chronic vagal hyperactivity. r When equilibrium is not restored, these states become chronic, and illness ensues. Together, these complex systems (the vagus and the enteric plexus), not unlike a great marriage, put gut and brain in either blissful harmony or in dreadful unending battle. When there is a coherent balance between the two, the hedonic (concerned with pleasure or pleasurable sensations) fulcrum is tipped toward heaven; when the regulatory relationship is disordered, the gates of hell are opened wide like the great maw of misery. The Medium Is the Message Our nervous system assesses threat in two basic ways. First of all, we use our external sense organs to discern and evaluate threat from salient features in the environment. So, for example, a sudden shadow alerts one to a potential risk, while the large looming contours of a bear or the sleek, crouching silhouette of a mountain lion let one know that one is in grave danger. We also assess threat directly from the state of our viscera and our muscles—our internal sense organs. If our muscles are tense, we unconsciously interpret these tensions as foretelling the existence of danger, even when none actually exists.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  However, when we are activated to this level and, like Sharon, are prevented from completing that course of action—as in fighting or fleeing—then the system moves into freeze or collapse, and the energized tension actually remains stuck in the muscles. In turn, these unused, or partially used, muscular tensions set up a stream of nerve impulses ascending the spinal cord to the thalamus (a central relay station for sensations) and then to other parts of the brain (particularly the amygdala), signaling the continued presence of danger and threat. Said simply, if our muscles and guts are set to respond to danger, then our mind will tell us that we have something to fear. And if we cannot localize the cause of our distress, then we will continue to search for one; a good example of this was Sharon’s struggle to understand her experience. We see this in Vietnam vets who are terrified by the sounds of the 4th of July fireworks, even though they “know” rationally that they are not in any danger. Other examples are people who fear driving a car after they have been involved in an accident or people who fear even leaving the house because they do not know where these danger signals are originating from. In fact, if we cannot find an explanation for what we are feeling, we will surely manufacture one, or many. We’ll often blame our spouses, children, bosses, neighbors (be they next door or another nation) or just plain bad luck. Our minds will stay on overdrive, obsessively searching for causes in the past and dreading the future. We will stay tense and on guard, feeling fear, terror and helplessness because our bodies continue to signal danger to our brains. Our minds may or may not “agree,” but these red flags (coming from nonconscious parts of the brain) will not disappear until the body completes its course of action. This is how we are made—it is our biological nature, hardwired into brain and body. These bodily reactions are not metaphors; they are literal postures that inform our emotional experience. For example, tightness in the neck, shoulders and chest and knots in the gut or throat are central to states of fear. Helplessness is signaled by a literal collapsing of the chest and shoulders, along with a folding at the diaphragm and weakness in the knees and legs. All of these “postural attitudes” represent action potentials. If they are allowed to complete their meaningful course of action, then all is well; if not, they live on in the theatre of the body. If frightening sensations, such as the ones Sharon was experiencing, are not given the time and attention needed to move through the body and resolve/dissolve (as in trembling and shaking), the individual will continue to be gripped by fear and other negative emotions. The stage is set for a trajectory of mercurial symptoms. Tension in the neck, shoulders and back will likely evolve over time to the syndrome of fibromyalgia.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Memory You spend the month after the breakup doing unofficial CrossFit with your friend Christa, who is brilliant and kind and pushes you. “You’re a natural athlete!” she says admiringly over and over again, and it is hilarious because you are so fat and the furthest possible thing from a natural athlete, but the year’s events have given you uncanny focus, and it’s true that you have been improving: you can now lightly jog a mile without stopping and deadlift two hundred pounds. One day, as you drag your aching body to the locker room, you see that you have nine missed calls. They are all from her, the woman from the Dream House, and there are voicemails to match. Suddenly the phone goes off again, vibrating like a maniacal insect, and you almost drop it on the floor. You sprint out to the parking lot. The whole drive home the phone is ringing, ringing. You run into the house where John is reading, and show him the phone. He leaps into action, attaches his computer to the elaborate speaker system he’s set up in your house, and begins to play some sort of chaotic noise metal. He runs around like Mickey from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” adding his own energy to the noise. “Resist, Carmen, resist!” he cries, slapping the counter with his hands and hitting pans with wooden spoons and amping up the music as loud as it will go. (In Angel Street , when the police sergeant finally makes contact with the tormented, gaslit wife, he tells her firmly, “You are up against the most awful moment in your life, and your whole future depends on what you are going to do in the next hour. Nothing less. You have got to strike for your freedom, and strike now, for the moment may not come again.”) You feel suddenly infused with the discordance, and yell “fuck you” at the phone (which has done nothing but its precise function!) before attempting to figure out how to block her number. You end up googling it, and once it’s done, the phone goes silent. But the voicemails are there, and you ask John to turn down the music. Each one is a little different. Some are steeped in sorrow: I love you, I miss you . Others are threatening. You fucking cunt, pick up this phone right now . (As if she has forgotten you own a cell phone and not a landline, and you are not standing still in the kitchen listening to her voice on an answering machine while she’s leaving her message.) You are so deeply freaked out by this seemingly unhinged sequence, like a bad and offensive movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder, that you try to imagine her leaving the messages—where she might be in the Dream House. You imagine her threatening you in the bedroom, weeping for you in the living room, pledging her undying love in the office. You think it will make you feel better, but it makes you feel worse. You save the voicemails, in case you need to get a restraining order. When you upgrade your phone a few months later, they are lost.