Grief

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 Art of Seduction (2001)

  Her voice, meanwhile, was like how it had fared with each. Then the one which was well content did reply she was exceeding well, indeed she was; indeed for the nonce she could scarce be better. The other, which was ill content, did declare for her part she had had to do with the biggest fool and most coward lover she had ever seen; and all the time the two gentlemen could see them laughing together as they walked and crying out: "Oh! the silly fool! the shamefaced poltroon and coward!" At this the successful gallant said to his companion: "Hark to our ladies, which do cry out at you, and mock you sore. You will find you have overplayed the prude and coxcomb this bout." So much he did allow; but there was no more time to remedy his error, for opportunity gave him no other handle to seize her by. —SEIGNEUR DE BRANTÔME, LIVES OF FAIR & GALLANT LADIES, TRANSLATED BY A. R.. ALLINSON The Anti-Seducer • 141 the voice of Nakanokimi, whom he had loved as well. Tears welled up in his eyes. A few months later Kaoru managed to find the house in the mountains where Ukifune lived. He visited her there, and she did not disappoint. "I once had a glimpse of you through a crack in a door," he told her, and "you have been very much on my mind ever since." Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her to a waiting carriage. He was taking her back to the shrine, and the journey there brought back to him the image of Oigimi; again his eyes clouded with tears. Looking at Ukifune, he silently compared her to Oigimi—her clothes were less nice but she had beautiful hair. When Oigimi was alive, she and Kaoru had played the koto together, so once at the shrine he had kotos brought out. Ukifune did not play as well as Oigimi had, and her manners were less refined. Not to worry—he would give her lessons, change her into a lady. But then, as he had done with Oigimi, Kaoru returned to court, leaving Ukifune languishing at the shrine. Some time passed before he visited her again; she had improved, was more beautiful than before, but he could not stop thinking of Oigimi. Once again he left her, promising to bring her to court, but more weeks passed, and finally he received the news that Ukifune had disappeared, last seen heading toward a river. She had most likely committed suicide. At the funeral ceremony for Ukifune, Kaoru was wracked with guilt: why had he not come for her earlier? She deserved a better fate.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. 4 I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!

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

  Was the boy correct in his assessment? Accuracy for categories of social reality, you may remember, is a matter of consensus. Let’s say that you and I are walking past Rowdy’s house and he growls loudly. You experience him as angry. I don’t. Accuracy could be: Do we agree? Do our experiences of Rowdy agree with his owner Angie’s experience, as she knows him best? Do our experiences of Rowdy match the social norms of the situation, because this is social reality after all? If we agree, then our constructions are in sync. Now let’s consider the second question, regarding Rowdy’s experience. Did he feel anger when he growled? Was he able to construct an experience of anger from his sensory predictions? The answer is almost certainly no. Dogs do not have the human emotion concepts necessary to construct an instance of anger. Lacking a Western concept of “Anger,” dogs cannot categorize their interoceptive and other sensory information to create an instance of emotion. Nor can they perceive emotion in other dogs or in humans. Dogs do perceive distress and pleasure and a handful of other states, a feat that requires only affect. Dogs may well have some emotion-like concepts. For example, a number of scientists now suspect that very social animals, such as dogs and elephants, have some concept of death and can experience some kind of grief. This grief need not have exactly the same features as human grief, but both could be rooted in something similar: the neurochemical basis of attachment, body budgeting, and affect. In humans, the loss of a parent, lover, or close friend can wreak havoc with your budget and cause much distress that operates similarly to drug withdrawal. When one creature loses another who helped to keep its body budget on track, the first creature will feel miserable from the budget imbalance. So Brian Ferry of the rock band Roxy Music was right—love is a drug.40 Rowdy’s misadventure has a backstory that may have affected his behavior on that fateful day. Earlier that week, before his arrest, Rowdy lost his “sister” Sadie, a Golden Retriever who died of old age. Their owner Angie believes this is why Rowdy jumped up on the boy that day. She said Rowdy was grieving, which in canine terms means he lost a creature who helped to regulate his body budget, and he temporarily forgot his training. Rowdy knows he is not supposed to jump, but maybe he just wasn’t himself that day—whatever self a dog can have.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, her slow languorous columbine kisses kept me from mischief. It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art. One rather mysterious spree that had interesting repercussions I must notice. I had abandoned the search: the fiend was either in Tartary or burning away in my cerebellum (the flames fanned by my fancy and grief) but certainly not having Dolores Haze play champion tennis on the Pacific Coast. One afternoon, on our way back East, in a hideous hotel, the kind where they hold conventions and where labeled, fat, pink men stagger around, all first names and business and booze—dear Rita and I awoke to find a third in our room, a blond, almost albino, young fellow with white eyelashes and large transparent ears, whom neither Rita nor I recalled having ever seen in our sad lives. Sweating in thick dirty underwear, and with old army boots on, he lay snoring on the double bed beyond my chaste Rita. One of his front teeth was gone, amber pustules grew on his forehead. Ritochka enveloped her sinuous nudity in my raincoat—the first thing at hand; I slipped on a pair of candy-striped drawers; and we took stock of the situation. Five glasses had been used, which, in the way of clues, was an embarrassment of riches. The door was not properly closed. A sweater and a pair of shapeless tan pants lay on the floor. We shook their owner into miserable consciousness. He was completely amnesic. In an accent that Rita recognized as pure Brooklynese, he peevishly insinuated that somehow we had purloined his (worthless) identity. We rushed him into his clothes and left him at the nearest hospital, realizing on the way that somehow or other after forgotten gyrations, we were in Grainball. Half a year later Rita wrote the doctor for news. Jack Humbertson as he had been tastelessly dubbed was still isolated from his personal past. Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The parents of Victor Hugo separated shortly after the novelist was born, in 1802. Hugo's mother, Sophie, had been carrying on an affair with her husband's superior officer, a general. She took the three Hugo boys away from their father and went off to Paris to raise them on her own. Now the boys led a tumultuous life, featuring bouts of poverty, frequent moves, and their mother's continued affair with the general. Of all the boys, Victor was the most attached to his mother, adopting all her ideas and pet peeves, particularly her hatred of his father. But with all the turmoil in his childhood he never felt he got enough love and attention from the mother he adored. When she died, in 1821, poor and debt-ridden, he was devastated. The following year Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle, who physically resembled his mother. It was a happy marriage for a while, but soon Adèle came to resemble his mother in more ways than one: in 1832, he discovered that she was having an affair with the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who also happened to be Hugo's best friend at the Effect a Regression • 339 time. Hugo was a celebrated writer by now, but he was not the calculating type. He generally wore his heart on his sleeve. Yet he could not confide in anyone about Adèle's affair; it was too humiliating. His only solution was to have affairs of his own, with actresses, courtesans, married women. Hugo had a prodigious appetite, sometimes visiting three different women in the same day. Near the end of 1832, production began on one of Hugo's plays, and he was to supervise the casting. A twenty-six-year-old actress named Juli- ette Drouet auditioned for one of the smaller roles. Normally quite adroit with the ladies, Hugo found himself stuttering in Juliette's presence. She was quite simply the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and this and her composed manner intimidated him. Naturally, Juliette won the part. He found himself thinking about her all the time. She always seemed to be surrounded by a group of adoring men. Clearly she was not interested in him, or so he thought. One evening, though, after a performance of the play, he followed her home, to find that she was neither angry nor surprised— indeed she invited him up to her apartment. He spent the night, and soon he was spending almost every night there. Hugo was happy again. To his delight, Juliette quit her career in the theater, dropped her former friends, and learned to cook. She had loved fancy clothes and social affairs; now she became Hugo's secretary, rarely leaving the apartment in which he had established her and seeming to live only for his visits. After a while, however, Hugo returned to his old ways and started to have little affairs on the side.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  To my fellow motorist I paid what he thought was fair. To Dr. Blue, who by then was stroking my hand, I spoke in tears of the liquor I bolstered too freely a tricky but not necessarily diseased heart with. To the hospital in general I apologized with a flourish that almost bowled me over, adding however that I was not on particularly good terms with the rest of the Humbert clan. To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man—free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother. 23 A thousand-mile stretch of silk-smooth road separated Kasbeam, where, to the best of my belief, the red fiend had been scheduled to appear for the first time, and fateful Elphinstone which we had reached about a week before Independence Day. The journey had taken up most of June for we had seldom made more than a hundred and fifty miles per traveling day, spending the rest of the time, up to five days in one case, at various stopping places, all of them also prearranged, no doubt. It was that stretch, then, along which the fiend’s spoor should be sought; and to this I devoted myself, after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly radiating roads in the vicinity of Elphinstone. Imagine me, reader, with my shyness, my distaste for any ostentation, my inherent sense of the comme il faut, imagine me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual pretext to flip through the hotel register: “Oh,” I would say, “I am almost positive that I stayed here once—let me look up the entries for mid-June—no, I see I’m wrong after all—what a very quaint name for a home town, Kawtagain. Thanks very much.” Or: “I had a customer staying her—I mislaid his address—may I ...?” And every once in a while, especially if the operator of the place happened to be a certain type of gloomy male, personal inspection of the books was denied me.

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

  My father taught me to read during the same period of time that he was raping me. He taught me to swim—to breathe without drowning—during the years when he was holding my mouth closed at night. I write, I think sometimes, because I need to wash words and language clean. WORDS WERE GAMES TO MY FATHER—CROSSWORDS, SCRABBLE, puns and jokes. Words didn’t have meaning, they had value: how much could they be inverted, messed around, fucked with. Used as weapons of control. What are the only two words in English that feature all five vowels in the correct order? Abstemious. Facetious. What are the longest words in the Oxford English Dictionary? antidisestablishmentarianism—in short, conservatism; getting in the way of change. floccinaucinihilipilification—the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. MY FATHER’S FAVORITE COMEBACK IN AN ARGUMENT: “DON’T be facetious.” Nothing I said had meaning. It was always simplistic, flippant, juvenile, unsubstantiable, silly, girlish. The synonyms pile up, evacuating whatever claim I’d made, whatever feeling or fact stood behind the claim, turning my mouth into a black hole. Now, educated by Rebecca Solnit and Sarah Seltzer, I’d knowingly call what he was doing gaslighting, sealioning, lollipopping. Actually, I’d go one better: I’d call it Cordelia-ing: “Nothing comes from nothing. Speak again.” The rendering of a daughter as puppet, scripted, voice too sweet and low to carry meaning. No. I’d call it floccinaucinihilipilification. All the mansplaining tactics summed up: the action and habit of estimating something as worthless. It worked. MY FATHER’S FAVORITE THREAT: “I WILL ANNIHILATE YOU.” annihilate—to render as nothing, to erase; generally, through violence. I SURVIVED. I TOOK THE LANGUAGE OF KNIVES I’D BEEN GIVEN and tore down the walls of my home and my body. There are other places where the skin barely meets, places I don’t show. Scars only a scan can see. Tattoos that (twelve hours in) reminded me I was not yet ready for a postmortem. “The creative adult is the child who has survived.” —MISATTRIBUTED BY THE INTERNET TO URSULA K. LE GUIN IN A BLOG POST RESPONDING TO THE MEME ATTRIBUTED TO her, Ursula K. Le Guin spoke of her: aversion to what the sentence says to me: that only the child is alive and creative—so that to grow up is to die. To respect and cherish the freshness of perception and the vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood is one thing. But to say that we experience true being only in childhood and that creativity is an infantile function—that’s something else. Le Guin’s post “The Inner Child and the Nude Politician” frees me from the anxiety generated by the meme: that only those who remember their childhoods—to the extent of preferring childhood to adulthood—can be creative adults. To extend creative adulthood to only those who had halcyon days in which the “vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood” were realized and can be remembered speaks of white middle-class cisgendered privilege.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911. Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets. Quine, Dolores. Born in 1882, in Dayton, Ohio. Studied for stage at American Academy. First played in Ottawa in 1900. Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers. Has disappeared since in [a list of some thirty plays follows]. How the look of my dear love’s name even affixed to some old hag of an actress, still makes me rock with helpless pain! Perhaps, she might have been an actress too. Born 1935. Appeared (I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence) in The Murdered Playwright. Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! 9 Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the States. In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects, attending to it whenever I had nothing better to do. On the other hand, I was urged by a war-time university in New York to complete my comparative history of French literature for English-speaking students. The first volume took me a couple of years during which I put in seldom less than fifteen hours of work daily. As I look back on those days, I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade: the light pertaining to the solace of research in palatial libraries, the shade to my excruciating desires and insomnias of which enough has been said. Knowing me by now, the reader can easily imagine how dusty and hot I got, trying to catch a glimpse of nymphets (alas, always remote) playing in Central Park, and how repulsed I was by the glitter of deodorized career girls that a gay dog in one of the offices kept unloading upon me. Let us skip all that. A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year; I went back to my work—only to be hospitalized again. Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  In the time I had to kill there in the dark of Reva’s childhood bedroom, I decided I would test myself to see what was left of my emotions, what kind of shape I was in after so much sleep. My hope was that I’d healed enough over half a year’s hibernation, I’d become immune to painful memories. So I thought back to my father’s death again. I had been very emotional when it happened. I figured any tears I still had left to cry might be about him. “Your father wants to spend his last days in the house,” my mother had said on the phone. “Don’t ask me why.” He had been dying in the hospital for weeks already, but now he wanted to die at home. I left school and took the train up to see him the very next day, not because I thought it would mean so much to him to have me there, but to prove to my mother that I was a better person than she was: I was willing to be inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering. And I didn’t expect that my father’s suffering would bother me very much. I barely knew him. His illness had been secretive, as though it were part of his work, something that ought not concern me, and nothing I’d ever understand. I missed a week of classes sitting at home, watching him wither. A huge bed had been installed in the den, along with various pieces of medical equipment that I tried to ignore. One of two nurses was always there, feeling my father’s pulse, swabbing his mouth with a soggy little sponge on a stick, pumping him with painkillers. My mother stayed mostly in her bedroom, alone, coming out every now and then to fill a glass with ice. She’d tiptoe into the den to whisper something to the nurse, hardly saying a word to me, barely looking at my father. I sat on the armchair by his bed pretending to read a course packet on Picasso. I didn’t want to embarrass my father by staring, but it was hard not to. His hands had grown bony and huge. His eyes had sunk into his skull and darkened. His skin had thinned. His arms were like bare tree branches. It was a strange scene. I studied Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. The Death of Casagemas. My father fit right into Picasso’s Blue Period. Man on Morphine. Occasionally he’d jerk and cough, but he had nothing to say to me. “He’s too drugged up to talk,” the nurse said to console me. I put on my headphones and played old tapes on my Walkman as I read. Prince. Bonnie Raitt. Whatever. The silence was maddening otherwise.

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

  I didn’t say anything on social media, though relatives tried to tag me in supportive status updates, which I did my best to untag myself from. I didn’t want to be a part of their mourning. I didn’t want to be involved in someone else’s grief when I knew so little about how to deal with my own. MY BROTHER’S WIFE RECENTLY POSTED A VIDEO OF MY brother crying at our mother’s grave. He was in a low crouch over the plain gray slab, his hand pressed against it for balance. He was wearing glasses that he must have purchased from the drugstore because he’s never been to an eye doctor in his life. There was the argyle sweater vest and lilac button-down shirt of some kind, and ugly brown slacks, and huge shoes. Sunday clothes. Crying on a grainy, blurry video taken with a cheap to-go phone down in Alabama, crying like a baby, crying like someone full of softness and heart. The audio crackled, broke open, and his crying turned to a soft wail, and then the video shut off. I do not know what to do with such mourning or such grief. The world in which my brother is not only moved to emotion but to open tears at the grave of our mother is a world that I don’t know how I came to inhabit. Watching the video, I felt as if I had slipped out of my life and into some gray replica tucked behind the real thing, a life glimpsed at the corner of the eye, where anything is possible. CANCER IS A DISEASE OF PROLIFERATION, A DISEASE OF ABUNDANCE. The body consumes itself to make cancer cells, so in one sense, it is a disease of success run wild, turning to ruin. I feel a measure of pain for my cousin as she watches her father, W., die in this way. My cousin and I were brought up together; my father watched her while my aunt worked, and we spent almost every moment of every day in each other’s company. Before she was born, I was the baby of the family, and so her mother had doted and loved on me. Sometimes it felt as though we shared a mother and a father, though our parents were brother and sister. In a way, my cousin is my little sister. But she has her own father, and I my own mother, dying and dead, respectively. I check her social media pages frequently for updates on her father, and though I am not sorry he is dying, it hurts to watch her suffer and grieve.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Suddenly Brian broke down and started to cry. He wanted to castrate himself, he said. He wanted our marriage to be purified of all carnality. He wanted to be like Abelard, and me to be like Héloïse. He wanted to be purified of all fleshly desires so that he could save the world. He wanted to be soft like a eunuch. He wanted to be soft like Christ. He wanted to be shot full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He threw his arms around me and sobbed in my lap. I stroked his hair, hoping he’d finally fall asleep. I fell asleep instead. I’m not sure what time I awakened, but Brian had been up for hours—probably the whole night. I staggered to the bathroom and the first thing I saw was a crude drawing Scotch-taped to the mirror. It depicted a short man with a halo and an enormous erect penis. Another man with a long beard was about to blow him. Behind them both was a huge eagle (resembling the American eagle) except that it had a very obvious and human-looking erection. “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost” Brian had scrawled above the picture. I went to my desk in the bedroom. Pieces of my index cards (containing all the notes for my thesis) were scattered on the floor beneath the desk like confetti. On the desktop was a display of books: the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton were propped open and certain words, phrases and letters were circled in various colored inks. I could make out no system or code at first glance, but there were furious notes in the margins. Phrases like “Oh Hell!” or “The Beast with Two Backs!” or “Womankind is too unkind!” Sprinkled over Shakespeare and Milton were the remains of a carefully tornup twenty-dollar bill. Elsewhere on the desk were reproductions ripped from art books. They all depicted God or Jesus or Saint Sebastian. I ran into the living room to look for Brian and found him adjusting the amplifier on the hi-fi. He was playing Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, and he began turning the volume up loud and then suddenly turning it down soft, to create a sort of siren effect. “How loud can you play Bach in this society?” he demanded. “This loud?” He turned it up. “This soft?” He turned it down so that it was barely audible. “You see! There’s no way to play Bach in this society!” “Brian, what did you do with my thesis?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew perfectly well what he had done with it. Brian was fiddling with the hi-fi and pretending he hadn’t heard me. “What did you do with my thesis?” “How loud do you think you can play Bach in this society without the police coming?” “What did you do with my thesis?” “This loud?” He turned the volume up. “What did you do with my thesis?” “This soft?” He turned the volume down.

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

  Contents Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints” Emotions Are Constructed The Myth of Universal Emotions The Origin of Feeling Concepts, Goals, and Words How the Brain Makes Emotions Emotions as Social Reality A New View of Human Nature Mastering Your Emotions Emotion and Illness Emotion and the Law Is a Growling Dog Angry? From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier Acknowledgments Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Appendix D Bibliography Notes Illustration Credits Index Sample Chapter from SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN Buy the Book About the Author Connect on Social Media Footnotes First Mariner Books edition 2018 Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Feldman Barrett Illustrations by Aaron Scott All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007. marinerbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barrett, Lisa Feldman, author. Title: How emotions are made : the secret life of the brain / Lisa Feldman Barrett. Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016038354 (print) | LCCN 2017004323 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544133310 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544129962 (ebook) ISBN 9781328915436 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Emotions. | Emotions—Sociological aspects. | Brain. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Emotions. | PSYCHOLOGY / Neuropsychology. | SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Neuroscience. Classification: LCC BF561 .B337 2017 (print) | LCC BF561 (ebook) | DDC 152.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038354 Cover design by David Drummond Cover image based on © Shutterstock Author photograph © 2017 Mark Karlsberg v8.0921 For Sophia Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption On December 14, 2012, the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people inside the school, including twenty children, were massacred by a lone gunman. Several weeks after this horror, I watched the governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, give his annual “State of the State” speech on television. He spoke in a strong and animated voice for the first three minutes, thanking individuals for their service. And then he began to address the Newtown tragedy: We have all walked a very long and very dark road together. What befell Newtown is not something we thought possible in any of Connecticut’s beautiful towns or cities. And yet, in the midst of one of the worst days in our history, we also saw the best of our state. Teachers and a therapist that sacrificed their lives protecting students. 1 As the governor spoke the last two words, “protecting students,” his voice caught in his throat ever so slightly. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have missed it. But that tiny waver devastated me. My stomach instantly knotted into a ball. My eyes flooded.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  And where do people go when they disappear? Perhaps we’ll never know.” Reva went to the thermostat and turned it up and came back to the sofa. The Bermuda Triangle episode ended and a new one started up, this time about the Loch Ness Monster. I closed my eyes. “My mom died,” Reva said during a commercial break. “Shit,” I said. What else could I have said? I pulled the blanket across our laps. “Thanks,” Reva said again, crying softly this time. The ghoulish voice of the TV show’s male narrator and Reva’s sniffles and sighs should have lulled me to sleep. But I could not sleep. I closed my eyes. When the next episode, about crop circles, started, Reva poked me. “Are you awake?” I pretended I wasn’t. I heard her get up and put her shoes back on, ticktock to the bathroom, blow her nose. She left without saying good-bye. I was relieved to be alone again. I got up and went to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. The Infermiterol pills Dr. Tuttle had given me were small and pellet-shaped, with the letter I etched into each one, very white, very hard, and strangely heavy. They almost seemed to be made of polished stone. I figured if there were ever a time to hit the sleep hard, it was now. I didn’t want to have to make it through Christmas with the lingering stink of Reva’s sadness. I took only one Infermiterol, as directed. The sharp beveled edges scraped my throat on the way down. • • • I AWOKE DRENCHED IN SWEAT to discover a dozen unopened boxes of Chinese takeout on the coffee table. The air stank of pork and garlic and old vegetable oil. A pile of unsheathed chopsticks lay beside me on the sofa. The television played an infomercial for a food dehydrator on mute. I looked for the remote control but could not find it. The thermostat was set in the nineties. I got up and turned it back down and noticed that the large Oriental rug—one of the few things I’d kept from my parents’ house —had been rolled up and set along the wall beneath the living room windows. And the blinds were raised. That startled me. I heard my phone ring and followed the sound into the bedroom. My phone was in a glass bowl sealed over in Saran Wrap sitting in the center of the bare mattress. “Huh?” I answered. My mouth tasted like hell. It was Dr. Tuttle. I cleared my throat and tried to sound like a normal person. “Good morning, Dr. Tuttle,” I said. “It’s four in the afternoon,” she said. “I’m sorry it took me so long to return your call. My cats had an emergency.

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

  There are anecdotal reports of dogs who stop eating or become apathetic after the death of another dog in the family. Some people see these cases as evidence of grief in dogs, but they also could be understood more simply as an effect of body-budget imbalance, accompanied by unpleasant affect. After all, Angie was probably grieving Sadie’s death, and Rowdy, being very sensitive to her behavior, could have detected some affective change in her, throwing off his own budget even more. Dividing our growling dog question into two questions, reflecting human and canine perceptions separately, is not a parlor trick. I’ll admit, the distinctions I’m making here are subtle. Construction views of emotion are frequently misinterpreted as saying “dogs don’t have emotions” (and sometimes even “people don’t have emotions”). Such simplistic statements are meaningless because they assume emotions have essences so that they can exist, or not, independent of any perceiver. But emotions are perceptions, and every perception requires a perceiver. And therefore every question about an instance of emotion must be asked from a particular point of view. … If apes, dogs, and other animals don’t have the capacity to experience human emotions, why are there so many news stories about emotions being discovered in animals, even in insects? It all comes down to a subtle mistake that’s repeated over and over in science, and which is very difficult to detect and overcome. Picture this: a rat is placed into a small box with an electrical grid on the floor. Scientists play a loud tone and then a moment later give the rat an electrical shock. The shock causes the rat to freeze and its heart rate and blood pressure to rise, as it stimulates a circuit that involves key neurons in the amygdala. The scientists repeat this process many times, pairing the tone and the shock, with the same results. Eventually, they play the tone without the shock, and the rat, having learned that the tone foreshadows the shock, again freezes and has increased heart rate and blood pressure. The rat’s brain and body respond as if expecting the shock.

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

  Even the U.S. Supreme Court is not immune to leaking passion from the bench. A team of political scientists examined 8 million words spoken by the members of the Court during oral arguments, and their questioning, over thirty years. They found that when judges focus “more unpleasant language” toward an attorney, that side is more likely to lose. You can predict the loser by simply counting the justices’ negative words during questioning. Not only that, but by examining the affective connotations in the judges’ words during oral arguments, you can predict their votes.55 Common sense dictates that judges experience strong affect in the courtroom. How could they not? They hold people’s futures in their hands. Their working hours are filled with heinous crimes and grievously harmed victims. I know how draining this can be, having been a therapist for victims of rape and childhood sexual abuse, and sometimes working with the perpetrators. Judges also encounter defendants who are more likable than the people they have preyed on, a situation that surely is challenging to grapple with, especially in a courtroom full of whispering spectators and bickering attorneys. And sometimes a judge must shoulder the affect of an entire country. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter suffered so much while deciding Bush v. Gore that he wept because of its deliberations (along with half of the United States). All this mental effort taxes a judge’s body budget. The judge’s life is one of intense and continual emotional labor under the fiction of equanimity.56 Nevertheless, the law continues to hold dear the fiction of the dispassionate judge, even at the highest levels. When Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, as a nominee in 2010, was asked whether it was ever appropriate for feelings to help decide a case, she replied to the contrary, “It’s the law all the way down.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor also ran into opposition during her confirmation hearings, as some senators feared that her emotions and empathy were in direct opposition to her abilities to judge fairly. Her take on all this, for the most part, was that judges do have feelings but should not make decisions based on them.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  His arms were like bare tree branches. It was a strange scene. I studied Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. The Death of Casagemas. My father fit right into Picasso’s Blue Period. Man on Morphine. Occasionally he’d jerk and cough, but he had nothing to say to me. “He’s too drugged up to talk,” the nurse said to console me. I put on my headphones and played old tapes on my Walkman as I read. Prince. Bonnie Raitt. Whatever. The silence was maddening otherwise. Then, on a Sunday morning, my father was suddenly lucid and told me matter-of-factly that he would die in the afternoon. I don’t know if it was the directness and certitude of his statement that rattled me—he was always clinical, always rational, always dry—or that his death was no longer just an idea—it was happening, it was real—or if, during the week I’d spent by his side, we had bonded without my knowledge or consent and, all of a sudden, I loved him. So I lost it. I started crying. “I’ll be all right,” my father told me. I got down on my knees beside him and buried my face in his stale blue blanket. I wanted him to pet my head. I wanted him to soothe me. He stared up at the ceiling as I begged him not to leave me alone with my mother. I was passionate in my supplication. “Promise me that you’ll send me a sign,” I pleaded, reaching for his huge, weird hand. He jerked it away. “A big sign, more than once, that you’re still here, that there’s life on the other side. Okay? Promise me you’ll come through to me somehow. Give me a sign that I won’t expect to see. Something so I’ll know you’re watching over me. Something huge. Okay? Please? Do you promise?” “Go get my wife,” he said to the nurse. When my mother came in, he pressed the button on his morphine drip. “Any last words?” my mother asked. “I hope this was all worth it,” he replied. For the rest of his life—around four hours—I sat on the chair and cried while my mother got drunk in the kitchen, ducking her head in every now and then to see if he was dead yet. Finally, he was. “That’s it, right?” my mother asked. The nurse took his pulse, then pulled the blanket over his head. The memory should have rustled up some grief in me. It should have reignited the coals of woe. But it didn’t. Remembering it all now in Reva’s bed, I felt almost nothing. Just a slight irritation at the lumpiness of the mattress, the loud swish of the sleeping bag whenever I turned over. Upstairs, Reva’s relatives had the television on high volume. The suspenseful sound effects from Law & Order echoed down through the floor.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I’D INHERITED the complete VHS set of Star Trek: The Next Generation from my father. Ordering those cassettes was probably the one time in my father’s life that he’d dialed a 1-800 number. Watching Star Trek as an adolescent was when I first came to regard Whoopi Goldberg with the reverence she deserves. Whoopi seemed like an absurd interloper on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Whenever she appeared on-screen, I sensed she was laughing at the whole production. Her presence made the show completely absurd. That was true of all her movies, too. Whoopi in her nun’s habit. Whoopi dressed like a churchgoing Georgian in the 1930s with her Sunday hat and Bible. Whoopi in Moonlight and Valentino alongside the pasty Elizabeth Perkins. Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof. After a few episodes, I got up and took a few Nembutals and a Placidyl and guzzled another half a bottle of children’s Robitussin and sat down to watch Whoopi—in a cornflower blue velour tunic and an upside-down cone-shaped hat like a futuristic bishop—have a heart-to-heart talk with Marina Sirtis. It was all nonsense. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept watching. I went through three seasons. I took Solfoton. I took Ambien. I even made myself a cup of chamomile tea, the nauseating sweet smell wafting up from my chipped coffee cup like a hot diaper. This was supposed to be relaxing? I took a bath and put on a brand new set of slippery satin pajamas I found in the closet. Still I wasn’t sleepy. Nothing was working. I thought I’d watch Braveheart again so I put it into the VCR and pressed “rewind.” And then the VCR broke. I heard the wheels spin, then whine, then screech, then stop. I hit “eject” and nothing happened. I poked at all the buttons. I unplugged and replugged the machine. I picked it up and shook it. I banged on it with the butt of my hand, then a shoe. Nothing was working. Outside, it was dark. My phone said it was January 6, 11:52 P.M. So now I was stuck with TV. I surfed the channels. A commercial for cat food. A commercial for home saunas. A commercial for low-fat butter. Fabric softener. Potato chips in individually portioned packages. Chocolate yogurt. Go to Greece, the birthplace of civilization. Drinks that give you energy. Face cream that makes you younger. Fish for your kitties. Coca-Cola means “I love you.” Sleep in the most comfortable bed in the world. Ice cream is not just for children, ladies: your husbands like it, too! If your house smells like shit, light this candle that smells like freshly baked brownies. My mother used to say that if I couldn’t sleep I should count something that matters, anything but sheep. Count stars. Count Mercedes-Benzes.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I dreamt that I dragged both my parents’ dead bodies down into a ravine, then waited calmly in the moonlight, watching for vultures. In a few dreams, I’d answer the phone and hear a long silence, which I interpreted as my mother’s speechless disdain. Or I heard crackling static, and cried out, “Mom? Dad?” into the receiver, desperate and devastated that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And other times, I was just reading transcripts of dialogues between the two of them, typed on aging onionskin paper that fell apart in my hands. Occasionally I’d spot my parents in places like the lobby of my apartment building or on the steps of the New York Public Library. My mother seemed disappointed and rushed, as though the dream had pulled her away from an important task. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me in the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue, then she trotted down the hall to the restroom. My father was always sick in my dreams, sunken eyes, greasy smudges on the thick lenses of his glasses. Once, he was my anesthesiologist. I was getting breast implants. He put his hand out a little hesitantly for me to shake, as though he wasn’t sure who I was or if we’d met before. I lay down on the steel gurney. Those dreams with him were the most upsetting. I’d wake up in a panic, take a few more Rozerem or whatever, and go back to sleep. In my waking hours, I often thought about my parents’ house—its nooks and corners, the way a room looked in the morning, in the afternoon, in the still of the night during summer, the soft yellow light of the streetlamp out front glinting off the polished wooden furniture in the den. The estate lawyer had recommended that I sell the house. The last time I’d been up there was the summer after my parents had died. Trevor and I were in the midst of one of our many failed romantic reunions, so we spent a weekend in the Adirondacks and took a detour to my hometown on the drive back down to the city. Trevor stayed in the rented convertible as I walked around the perimeter of the house, peering through the dusty windows at the empty spaces inside. It hardly looked any different from when I’d lived in it. “Don’t sell until the market improves,” Trevor yelled. I got emotional and embarrassed, ducked away and jumped in the mucky pond behind the garage, then emerged covered in rotting moss. Trevor got out of the car to hose me off in the garden, made me strip and put on his blazer before getting back into the car, then asked for a blow job in the parking lot of the Poughkeepsie Galleria before he went in to buy me a new outfit. I acquiesced. For him, this was erotic gold.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  A dozen people went up to say nice things about Reva’s mother. A few made jokes, a few broke down shamelessly. Everyone agreed that Reva’s mother had been a good woman, that her death was sad, but that life was mysterious, death more so, and what’s the use in speculating so let’s remember the good times—at least she’d lived at all. She’d been brave, she’d been generous, she’d been a good mother and wife, a good cook and a good gardener. “My wife’s only wish was that we move on quickly and be happy,” Reva’s father said. “Everyone has already said so much about her.” He looked out at the crowd, shrugged, then seemed to get flummoxed, turned red, but instead of bursting into tears, he started coughing into the microphone. Reva covered her ears. Someone brought her father a glass of water and helped him back to his seat. Then it was Reva’s turn to speak. She checked her makeup in her compact mirror, powdered her nose, dabbed her eyes with more tissues, then went up and stood at the rostrum and read lines off index cards, shuffling them back and forth as she sniffled and cried. Everything she said sounded like she’d read it in a Hallmark card. Halfway through, she stopped and looked down at me as though for approval. I gave her a thumbs-up. “She was a woman of many talents,” Reva said, “and she inspired me to follow my own path.” She went on for a while, mentioned the watercolors, her mother’s faith in God. Then she seemed to space out. “To be honest . . .” she began. “It’s like, you know . . .” She smiled and apologized and covered her face with her hands and sat back down next to me. “Did I look like a complete idiot?” she whispered. I shook my head no and put an arm around her, as awkwardly as such a thing can be done, and sat there until the funeral was over, this strange young woman in the throes of despair, trembling into my armpit. • • • THE RECEPTION AFTERWARD was at Reva’s house. The same middle-aged women were there, the same bald men, only multiplied. Nobody seemed to notice us when we walked in. “I’m starving,” Reva said and went straight to the kitchen. I trudged back down to the basement and fell into a kind of half sleep.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I hadn’t been to a funeral since my mother’s, almost exactly seven years earlier. Hers had been quick and informal in the funeral home chapel. The guests barely filled the first few rows—just me and my father’s sister, a few neighbors, the housekeeper. The names in her address book had been doctors—hers and my father’s. My high school art teacher was there. “Don’t let this take you all the way down, honey,” he said. “You can always call me if you need a grown-up to lean on.” I never called him. My father’s funeral, on the other hand, had been a real production. There were printed programs, long speeches. People flew in from across the country to pay their respects. The pews in the university chapel were uncushioned, and the bones in my butt rocked against the hard wood. I sat beside my mother in the front row, trying to ignore her sighs and throat clearings. Her frosty lipstick was put on so thick it started melting down her chin. When the president of the university announced that the science department would establish a research fellowship in my father’s name, my mother let out a groan. I reached for her hand and held it. It was bold of me to make such a move, but I thought we might bond now that we had something so huge in common—a dead man whose last name we shared. Her hand was cold and bony, like my father’s had been on his deathbed just days earlier. An obvious foreshadowing to me now, but I didn’t think of that then. Less than a minute later, she let go of my hand to dig around in her purse for her little pillbox. I didn’t know exactly what she was taking that day—an upper, I thought. She kept her coat on in the chapel during the ceremony, fidgeted with her stockings, her hair, glanced back viciously at the crowded pews behind us each time she heard somebody sigh or sniffle or whisper. The hours felt interminable, waiting for everyone to arrive, sitting through the formal proceedings. My mother agreed. “This is like waiting for a train to hell,” she whispered at some point, not to me directly, but up at the chapel ceiling. “I’m exhausted.” Highway to hell. Slow road to hell. Express bus. Taxicab. Rowboat. First-class ticket. Hell was the only destination she ever used in her metaphors. When it was time for people to go up and say nice things about my father, she glared at the line forming up the central aisle. “They think they’re special now because they know someone who died.” She rolled her red, quick-roving eyes. “It makes them feel important. Egomaniacs.” Friends, colleagues, coworkers, loyal students spoke emotionally from the rostrum. The people wept. My mother squirmed. I could see our reflections in the gloss of the casket in front of us. We were both just pale, floating, jittery heads.