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.

Page 126 of 263 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  R ICHARD F. S CHILLER ) 2 8 I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her navel—otherwise she might not have found it. “Alone” did I say? Pas tout à fait . I had my little black chum with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed Mr. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from the now remote highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a certain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time to spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey. The letter was dated September 18, 1952 (this was September 22), and the address she gave was “General Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.”—and not Coalmont, anyway—I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. At first I planned to drive all day and all night, but then thought better of it and rested for a couple of hours around dawn in a motor court room, a few miles before reaching the town. I had made up my mind that the fiend, this Schiller, had been a car salesman who had perhaps got to know my Lolita by giving her a ride in Beardsley—the day her bike blew a tire on the way to Miss Emperor—and that he had got into some trouble since then. The corpse of the executed sweater, no matter how I changed its contours as it lay on the back seat of the car, had kept revealing various outlines pertaining to Trapp-Schiller—the grossness and obscene bonhommie of his body, and to counteract this taste of coarse corruption I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart as I pressed home the nipple of my alarm clock before it exploded at the set hour of six A.M.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The note was on my father’s desk. My mother had used a page from a yellow legal pad to write it. Her penmanship started off as bold, capital letters, but by the end it petered out into tight, itchy cursive. The letter was totally unoriginal. She felt she wasn’t equipped to handle life, she wrote, that she felt like an alien, a freak, that consciousness was intolerable and that she was scared of going crazy. “Good-bye,” she wrote, then gave a list of people she’d known. I was sixth on the list of twenty- five. I recognized some of the names—long abandoned girlfriends, her doctors, her hairdresser. I kept the letter and never showed it to anybody. Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and scared and heard a voice in my mind say, “I want my mommy,” I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion. My mother had been like I turned out to be—an only child with dead parents, so there wasn’t any family left to contend with. My dad’s sister flew back up from Mexico over Christmas and took what she wanted from the house—a few books, the silver. She dressed in colorful serapes and fringed silk shawls, but she had my father’s septic attitude toward life. She wasn’t sad to have lost her brother, it seemed, but was angry at “toxic waste,” she said. “People didn’t get cancer a thousand years ago. It’s because of the chemicals. They’re everywhere—in the air, in the food, in the water we drink.” I guess she helped me insofar as she nodded along when I told her I was relieved my mother was gone but wished my father had held on long enough at least to help me take care of the house, put things in order. I tried to keep it together while she was around. After she left, I spent days in the house alone, poring over my childhood photo albums, sobbing over piles of my mother’s unopened packages of pantyhose. I cried over my father’s deathbed pajamas, the dog-eared biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Josef Mengele on his bedside table, a green nickel in the pocket of his favorite pants, a belt he’d had to drill holes in to make smaller as he’d grown sicker and thinner in the months leading up to his death. There was no big drama. Things were quiet. I imagined what I’d say to my mother if she suddenly reappeared now in Reva’s basement.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Make your targets feel secure and al- luring through your flattering words and their resistance will melt away. honorable men. \ I will not do them wrong. . . . \ But here's a parchment with the seal of Caesar. \ I found it in his closet; 'tis his will. \ Let but the commons hear this testament, \ Which (pardon me) I do not mean to read, \And they would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds \ And dip their napkins in his sacred blood. . . . \ PLEBEIAN: We'll hear the will! Read it, Mark Antony. \ ALL: The will, the will! We will hear Caesar's will! \ ANTONY: Have patience, gentle friends; I must not read it. \ It is not meet you know how Caesar loved you. \ You are not wood, you are not stones, but men; \ And being men, hearing the will of Caesar, \ It will inflame you, it will make you mad. \ 'Tis good you know not that you are his heirs; \ For if you should, O, what would come of it? . . . \ If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. \ You all do know this mantle. I remember \ The first time ever Caesar put it on. . . . \ Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through. \ See what a rent the envious Casca made. \ Through this the well- beloved Brutus stabbed; \ And as he plucked his cursed steel away, \ Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it. . . . \ For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel. \ Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him! \ This was the most unkindest cut of all; \ For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, \ Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms, \ Quite vanquished him. . . . \ O, now you weep, and I perceive you feel \ The dint of pity. These are gracious 260 • The Art of Seduction Sometimes the most pleasant thing to hear is the promise of something wonderful, a vague but rosy future that is just around the corner. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his public speeches, talked little about spe- cific programs for dealing with the Depression; instead he used rousing rhetoric to paint a picture of America's glorious future. In the various leg- ends of Don Juan, the great seducer would immediately focus women's at- tention on the future, a fantastic world to which he promised to whisk them off. Tailor your sweet words to your targets' particular problems and fantasies.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Her father was a composer and music profes- sor who dreamed of success in the world of light opera. Among his many children, Emma was his favorite: she was a delightful child, lively and flirta- tious, with red hair and a freckled face. Her father doted on her, and prom- ised her a brilliant future in the theater. Unfortunately Mr. Crouch had a "Geographical" escapism has been rendered ineffective by the spread of air routes. What remains is "evolutionary" escapism— a downward course in one's development, back to the ideas and emotions of "golden childhood," which may well be defined as "regress towards infantilism," escape to a personal world of childish ideas. • In a strictly- regulated society, where life follows strictly-defined canons, the urge to escape from the chain of things "established once and for all" must be felt particularly strongly. . . . • And the most perfect of them [comedians] does this with utmost perfection, for he [Chaplin] serves this principle . . . through the subtlety of his method which, offering the spectactor an infantile pattern to be imitated, pscyhologically infects him with infantilism and draws him into the "golden age" of the infantile paradise of childhood. —SERGEI EISENSTEIN, "CHARLIE THE KID," FROM NOTES OF A FILM DIRECTOR 60 • The Art of Seduction dark side: he was an adventurer, a gambler, and a rake, and in 1849 he abandoned his family and left for America. The Crouches were now in dire straits. Emma was told that her father had died in an accident and she was sent off to a convent. The loss of her father affected her deeply, and as the years went by she seemed lost in the past, acting as if he still doted on her. One day in 1856, when Emma was walking home from church, a well- dressed gentleman invited her home for some cakes. She followed him to his house, where he proceeded to take advantage of her. The next morning this man, a diamond merchant, promised to set her up in a house of her own, treat her well, and give her plenty of money. She took the money but left him, determined to do what she had always wanted: never see her family again, never depend on anyone, and lead the grand life that her fa- ther had promised her. With the money the diamond merchant had given her, Emma bought nice clothes and rented a cheap flat. Adopting the flamboyant name of Cora Pearl, she began to frequent London's Argyll Rooms, a fancy gin palace where harlots and gentlemen rubbed elbows. The proprietor of the Argyll, a Mr.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Good that you have each other. You’ve got friends, you’re all right, no matter what.” Steam filled the air around her. She looked exactly how I’d pictured Reva’s mother. Her hair was brown and short. She wore big fake pearl earrings. Her dress was dark brown with gold flecks, long and tight and stretchy. I could see the cellulite on her legs through the material. The steam from the dishwasher smelled like vomit. I took a step back. “Reva’s mother was my best friend,” she continued. “We talked every day on the phone. I don’t talk to my own children that much. Sometimes friends are better than family, because you can say anything. Nobody gets mad. It’s a different kind of love. I’ll really miss her.” She paused as she looked into a cabinet. “But she’s still here in spirit. I feel it. She’s standing right beside me, saying, ‘Debra, the tall glasses go on the shelf with the wine glasses.’ She’s bossing me around, like always. I just know it. The spirit never dies, and that’s the truth.” “That’s nice,” I said, yawning. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Reva appeared wearing a huge beaver coat—her mother’s, no doubt— big snow boots, and her gym bag slung over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said roughly. “I’m ready.” We headed for the door to the garage. “Tell Dad I’ll call him tomorrow,” she said to the women in the living room. They started to protest, but Reva kept walking. I followed her out and into her mother’s car again. • • • REVA AND I DIDN’T TALK MUCH on the ride back into the city. Before we got on the highway, I suggested we stop for coffee, but Reva didn’t respond. She turned the radio up, put the heating on full blast. Her face was tight and serious, but calm. I was surprised by my curiosity to know what she was thinking, but I kept quiet. When we got onto the Long Island Expressway, the radio DJ told listeners to call in to share their New Year’s resolutions. “In 2001, I want to embrace every opportunity. I want to say ‘yes’ to every invitation I receive. ” “Two thousand and one is the year I finally learn to tango.” “I’m not making any resolutions this year,” Reva said. She turned down the volume on the radio and changed the station. “I can never keep my promises to myself. I’m like my own worst enemy. What about you?” “I might try to stop smoking. But the medications make it difficult.” “Uh-huh,” she said mindlessly. “And maybe I’ll try to lose five pounds.” I couldn’t tell if she was trying to insult me with sarcasm, or if she was being sincere. I let it go. The visibility was bad. The windshield wipers screeched, clearing away the wet splats of snow. In Queens, Reva turned up the radio again and began to sing along to the music. Santana. Marc Anthony. Enrique Iglesias.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  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. 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning … She did not remember where the various things she wanted were…“Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and Mother’s trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying in the motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags over with the widow’s beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treasures to Mary … No doubt, I was a little delirious—and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I looked out of the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle—but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint— Saint , forsooth! While brown Dolores, On a patch of sunny green. With Sanchicha reading stories In a movie magazine— —which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to two P.M. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it. It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little. Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today? At twenty paces Frank used to look a mountain of health; at five, as now, he was a ruddy mosaic of scars—had been blown through a wall overseas; but despite nameless injuries he was able to man a tremendous truck, fish, hunt, drink, and buoyantly dally with roadside ladies. That day, either because it was such a great holiday, or simply because he wanted to divert a sick man, he had taken off the glove he usually wore on his left hand (the one pressing against the side of the door) and revealed to the fascinated sufferer not only an entire lack of fourth and fifth fingers, but also a naked girl, with cinnabar nipples and indigo delta, charmingly tattooed on the back of his crippled hand, its index and middle digit making her legs while his wrist bore her flower-crowned head.

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

  Remember how judges’ impartiality was easily swayed in parole cases held right before lunchtime, when they attributed their unpleasant affect to the prisoner instead of to hunger (chapter 4)? In another series of experiments, over 1,800 state and federal judges from the United States and Canada were handed scenarios of civil and criminal cases and asked what their rulings would be. Some scenarios were identical except the defendants were portrayed as more likeable or unlikeable. The experimenters found that judges tended to rule in favor of more likeable or sympathetic people. 54 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. Nonetheless, the evidence is clear that judges are not affectless in their rulings. The next question is: should they be?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He enclosed a snapshot of himself and a brunette in white wool beaming at each other among the snows of Chile. I remember letting myself into my flat and starting to say: Well, at least we shall now track them down—when the other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact voice: DEAR DAD: How’s everything? I’m married. I’m going to have a baby. I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write. I’m going nuts because we don’t have enough to pay our debts and get out of here. Dick is promised a big job in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it but it’s really grand. Pardon me for withholding our home address but you may still be mad at me, and Dick must not know. This town is something. You can’t see the morons for the smog. Please do send us a check, Dad. We could manage with three or four hundred or even less, anything is welcome, you might sell my old things, because once we get there the dough will just start rolling in. Write, please. I have gone through much sadness and hardship. Yours expecting, DOLLY (MRS. RICHARD F. SCHILLER) 28 I was again on the road, again at the wheel of the old blue sedan, again alone. Rita had still been dead to the world when I read that letter and fought the mountains of agony it raised within me. I had glanced at her as she smiled in her sleep and had kissed her on her moist brow, and had left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which I taped to her navel—otherwise she might not have found it. “Alone” did I say? Pas tout à fait. I had my little black chum with me, and as soon as I reached a secluded spot, I rehearsed Mr. Richard F. Schiller’s violent death. I had found a very old and very dirty gray sweater of mine in the back of the car, and this I hung up on a branch, in a speechless glade, which I had reached by a wood road from the now remote highway. The carrying out of the sentence was a little marred by what seemed to me a certain stiffness in the play of the trigger, and I wondered if I should get some oil for the mysterious thing but decided I had no time to spare. Back into the car went the old dead sweater, now with additional perforations, and having reloaded warm Chum, I continued my journey.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and Krug in Bend Sinister (1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in Speak, Memory, are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of The Eye, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Pale Fire, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Tyrants Destroyed [1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters. Although Speak, Memory clearly illuminates the self-parodic content of Nabokov’s fiction, no one has fully recognized the aesthetic implications of these transmutations or the extent to which Nabokov consciously projected his own life in his fiction. To be sure, this is dangerous talk, easily misunderstood. Of course Nabokov did not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is crucial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in Speak, Memory Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing “treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the “artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of Speak, Memory with The Gift, or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by comparing the attitudes toward exile expressed in Speak, Memory with the treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zembla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in Pale Fire Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. His is both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by a madman and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed otherwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre, / I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity, are not exclusive to the émigré.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  variis corporis sui schemis ac motibus tandem domo prolapsus est. Nec tamen, quamvis publica potitus libertate, salutem fuga quaerere pótuit, quippe cuncti canes de proximo angiportu satis feri satisque copiosi venaticis illis, qui commodum domo similiter inse- quentes processerant, se obmiscent agminatim. Miserum funestumque spectamen aspexi, Thrasy- leonem nostrum catervis canum saevientium cinctum atque obsessum multisque numero morsibus lania- tum. Denique tanti doloris impatiens populi circum- fluentis turbelis immisceor, et in quo solo poteram celatum auxilium bono ferre commilitoni, sic in- daginis principes dehortabar: ‘O grande’ inquam * Et extremum flagitium, magnam et vere pretiosam perdimus bestiam, Nec tamen nostri sermonis artes infelicissimo profuerunt iuveni, quippe quidam pro- currens e domo procerus et validus incunctanter lan- ceam mediis iniecit ursae praecordiis nec secus alius, et ecce plurimi iam timore discusso certatim gladios etiam de proximo congerunt: enimvero Thrasyleon, egregium decus nostrae factionis, tandem immor- talitate digno illo spiritu expugnato, magis quam patientia neque clamore ac ne ululatu quidem fidem sacramenti prodidit, sed iam morsibus laceratus ferroque laniatus, obnixo mugitu et ferino fremitu praesentem casum generoso vigore tolerans gloriam sibi reservavit, vitam fato reddidit. Tanto tamen terrore tantaque formidine coetum illum tur- baverat, ut usque diluculum, immo et in multum diem nemo quisquam fuerit ausus quamvis iacentem bes- tiam vel digito contingere, nisi tandem pigre ae timide quidam lanius paulo fidentior, utero bestiae 174 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  She did not complain—as long as she remained the one woman he kept returning to. And Hugo had in fact grown quite dependent on her. In 1843, Hugo's beloved daughter died in an accident and he sank into a depression. The only way he knew to get over his grief was to have an af- fair with someone new. And so, shortly thereafter, he fell in love with a young married aristocrat named Léonie d'Aunet. He began to see Juliette less and less. A few years later, Léonie, feeling certain she was the preferred one, gave him an ultimatum: stop seeing Juliette altogether, or it was over. Hugo refused. Instead he decided to stage a contest: he would continue to see both women, and in a few months his heart would tell him which one he preferred. Léonie was furious, but she had no choice. Her affair with Hugo had already ruined her marriage and her standing in society; she was dependent on him. Anyway, how could she lose—she was in the prime of life, whereas Juliette had gray hair by now. So she pretended to go along with this contest, but as time went on, she grew increasingly resentful about it, and complained. Juliette, on the other hand, behaved as if nothing had changed. Whenever he visited, she treated him as she always had, dropping everything to comfort and mother him. The contest lasted several years. In 1851, Hugo was in trouble with Louis-Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte and now the president of France. Hugo had attacked his dictatorial tendencies in the press, bitterly and perhaps recklessly, for Louis-Napoleon was a vengeful man. Fearing for 340 • The Art of Seduction the writer's life, Juliette managed to hide him in a friend's house and arranged for a false passport, a disguise, and safe passage to Brussels. Every- thing went according to plan; Juliette joined him a few days later, carrying his most valuable possessions. Clearly her heroic actions had won the con- test for her. And yet, after the novelty of Hugo's new life wore off, his affairs re- sumed. Finally, fearing for his health, and worried that she could no longer compete with yet another twenty-year-old coquette, Juliette made a calm but stern demand: no more women or she was leaving him. Taken com- pletely by surprise, yet certain that she meant every word, Hugo broke down and sobbed. An old man by now, he got down on his knees and swore, on the Bible and then on a copy of his famous novel Les Misérables, that he would stray no more. Until Juliette's death, in 1883, her spell over him was complete. Interpretation. Hugo's love life was determined by his relationship with his mother.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  You represent excitement and life; the friends and parents represent habit and boredom. In Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard III, Richard, when still the Duke of Gloucester, has murdered King Henry VI and his son, Prince Ed- ward. Shortly thereafter he accosts Lady Anne, Prince Edward's widow, who knows what he has done to the two men closest to her, and who hates him as much as a woman can hate. Yet Richard attempts to seduce her. His method is simple: he tells her that what he did, he did because of his love for her. He wanted there to be no one in her life but him. His feelings were so strong he was driven to murder. Of course Lady Anne not only resists this line of reasoning, she abhors him. But he persists. Anne is at a moment of extreme vulnerability—alone in the world, with no one to support her, at the height of grief. Incredibly, his words begin to have an effect. Murder is not a seductive tactic, but the seducer does enact a kind of killing—a psychological one. Our past attachments are a barrier to the pres- ent. Even people we have left behind can continue to have a hold on us. As a seducer you will be held up to the past, compared to previous suitors, perhaps found inferior. Do not let it get to that point. Crowd out the past with your attentions in the present. If necessary, find ways to disparage their pre- vious lovers—subtly or not so subtly, depending on the situation. Even go so far as to open old wounds, making them feel old pain and seeing by con- Isolate the Victim • 317 trast how much better the present is. The more you can isolate them from their past, the deeper they will sink with you into the present. The principle of isolation can be taken literally by whisking the target off to an exotic locale. This was Aly Khan's method; a secluded island worked best, and indeed islands, cut off from the rest of the world, have al- ways been associated with the pursuit of sensual pleasures. The Roman Emperor Tiberius descended into debauchery once he made his home on the island of Capri. The danger of travel is that your targets are intimately exposed to you—it is hard to maintain an air of mystery. But if you take them to a place alluring enough to distract them, you will prevent them from focusing on anything banal in your character. Cleopatra lured Julius Caesar into taking a voyage down the Nile. Moving deeper into Egypt, he was further isolated from Rome, and Cleopatra was all the more seductive. The early-twentieth-century lesbian seductress Natalie Barney had an on- again-off-again affair with the poet Renée Vivien; to regain her affections, she took Renée on a trip to the island of Lesbos, a place Natalie had visited many times.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  By then, the fire fighters had delivered my father from the bathroom and had laid him out on the living room carpet. I continued to sit on the edge of my bed in the middle room as they tried to restore the rhythm of my father’s heart. My father’s heart was unruly. The beats only flickered through the monitor. The defibrillator the fire fighters used only gave his heart another spasm, a shudder he did not feel. When the fire fighters were done, I rode with the body in the ambulance, its siren shouting.

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

  Title : How Emotions Are Made Author: Barrett, Lisa Feldman [image "title page" file=image_rsrc7A8.jpg] ContentsTitle 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 AssumptionOn 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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They do not so much repel as irritate and infuriate you by their constant misinterpretations, always viewing life from behind the screen of their ego and unable to see things as they really are. Meilcour is so caught up in himself he cannot see that Madame is expecting him to make the bold move to which she will have to succumb. His hesitation shows that he is thinking of himself, not of her; that he is worrying about how he will look, not feeling overwhelmed by her charms. Nothing could be more anti-seductive. Recognize such types, and if they are past the young age that would give them an excuse, do not entangle yourself in their awkwardness—they will infect you with doubt. 4. In the Heian court of late-tenth-century Japan, the young nobleman Kaoru, purported son of the great seducer Genji himself, had had nothing but misfortune in love. He had become infatuated with a young princess, Oigimi, who lived in a dilapidated home in the countryside, her father having fallen on hard times. Then one day he had an encounter with Oigimi's sister, Nakanokimi, that convinced him she was the one he actu- ally loved. Confused, he returned to court, and did not visit the sisters for some time. Then their father died, followed shortly thereafter by Oigimi herself. Now Kaoru realized his mistake: he had loved Oigimi all along, and she had died out of despair that he did not care for her. He would never meet her like again; she was all he could think about. When Nakanokimi, her fa- ther and sister dead, came to live at court, Kaoru had the house where Oigimi and her family had lived turned into a shrine. One day, Nakanokimi, seeing the melancholy into which Kaoru had fallen, told him that there was a third sister, Ukifune, who resembled his beloved Oigimi and lived hidden away in the countryside. Kaoru came to life—perhaps he had a chance to redeem himself, to change the past. But how could he meet this woman? There came a time when he visited the shrine to pay his respects to the departed Oigimi, and heard that the myste- rious Ukifune was there as well. Agitated and excited, he managed to catch a glimpse of her through the crack in a door. The sight of her took his breath away: although she was a plain-looking country girl, in Kaoru's eyes she was the living incarnation of Oigimi.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  On the other side of the street a garage said in its sleep— genuflexion lubricity; and corrected itself to Gulflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning, in the velvet heavens. How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen! This was not yet the last. Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made shadow-graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past. 31 At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Let all of this unfold slowly, each encounter re- vealing more ideal qualities. The sense of reliving a past pleasure is simply impossible to resist. 4. Some time in the summer of 1614, several members of England's upper nobility, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, met to decide what to do about the Earl of Somerset, the favorite of King James I, who was forty-eight at the time. After eight years as the favorite, the young earl had accumulated such power and wealth, and so many titles, that nothing was left for anyone else. But how to get rid of this powerful man? For the time being the conspirators had no answer. A few weeks later the king was inspecting the royal stables when he caught sight of a young man who was new to the court: the twenty-two- year-old George Villiers, a member of the lower nobility. The courtiers who accompanied the king that day watched the king's eyes following Vil- liers, and saw with what interest he asked about this young man. Indeed everyone had to agree that he was a most handsome youth, with the face of an angel and a charmingly childish manner. When news of the king's inter- est in Villiers reached the conspirators, they instantly knew they had found what they had been looking for: a young man who could seduce the king and supplant the dreaded favorite. Left to nature, though, the seduction would never happen. They had to help it along. So, without telling Villiers of their plan, they befriended him. King James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots. His childhood had been a nightmare: his father, his mother's favorite, and his own regents had all been murdered; his mother had first been exiled, later executed. When James was young, to escape suspicion he played the part of a fool. He hated the sight of a sword and could not stand the slightest sign of argument. When his cousin Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, leaving no heir, he be- came king of England. James surrounded himself with bright, happy young men, and seemed to prefer the company of boys. In 1612, his son, Prince Henry, died. The king was inconsolable. He needed distraction and good cheer, and his fa- vorite, the Earl of Somerset, was no longer so young and attractive. The timing for a seduction was perfect. And so the conspirators went to work on Villiers, under the guise of trying to help him advance within the court. They supplied him with a magnificent wardrobe, jewels, a glittering car- riage, the kind of things the king noticed. They worked on his riding, Effect a Regression • 347 fencing, tennis, dancing, his skills with birds and dogs. He was instructed in the art of conversation—how to flatter, tell a joke, sigh at the right mo- ment.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  He slid down the sloping levee wall to the floor of the river, which is nearly always dry. [image "Image" file=Image00015.jpg] 212 My mother died in 1979. Before she died, she lived through five years of increasing disability from heart disease. By the time she died, everything that might have been taken from her had been, even her fear. 213 Both my parents died before they were seventy, as did my mother’s sister and my uncles Jack, Frank, and Ken. I am forty-six. Given the odds, I am two-thirds through my life. The first third I spent daydreaming. The second third, I spent waiting. The last third begins with these stories. It is a proportion I can bear. 214 After his mother died, he chose to live here with his father. After his father died, he chose to stay here. He stayed partly because he said he would to the girl he had loved. She is married now. She and her husband have two daughters. They rent a house he owns. It’s one of the first houses the three developers built in 1950. He has dinner there occasionally, and makes jokes about being the landlord. [image "Image" file=Image00016.jpg] 215 The grid limited our choices, exactly as urban planners said it would. But the limits weren’t paralyzing. The design of this suburb compelled a conviviality that people got used to and made into a substitute for choices, including not choosing at all. There are an indefinite number of beginnings and endings on the grid, but you are always somewhere. 216 From 1st Street, opposite Los Angeles City Hall, numbered streets descend south across the nearly level plain formed by the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. The numbered streets as far as 33rd Street in Los Angeles are aligned with the plaza Colonel de Neve laid out in 1781. These streets are oriented at a 45-degree angle from the cardinal compass points. These streets run southeast to northwest, not east and west. Colonel de Neve recognized a line of authority that extended back three thousand miles to the Spanish viceroy in the City of Mexico, and five thousand miles further to a book in an archive in Seville. The book was the Laws of the Indies . It was a collection of royal ordinances assembled two hundred years earlier, for Philip II in 1573. That book was based on another book on town planning, written in 25 B.C.E. by the Roman architect Vitruvius. As he was ordered to, Colonel de Neve laid out the streets of an abstract city. It was a city where winds blow only from the north, and where the sun each day must light the sides of a small, square house equally. 217 For about three miles—and more than a hundred years—the streets of Los Angeles preserved the bias of Colonel de Neve’s drawing. Then Los Angeles boomed as a destination for tourists and immigrants.

• 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.