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 Lover (1984)

  He feels sorry for me, but I say no, I’m not to be pitied, no one is, except my mother. He says, You only came because I’m rich. I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different. He says, I wish I could take you away, go away with you. I say I couldn’t leave my mother yet without dying of grief. He says he certainly hasn’t been lucky with me, but he’ll give me some money anyway, don’t worry. He’s lain down again. Again we’re silent. The noise of the city is very loud, in recollection it’s like the sound track of a film turned up too high, deafening. I remember clearly, the room is dark, we don’t speak, it’s surrounded by the continuous din of the city, caught up in the city, swept along with it. There are no panes in the windows, just shutters and blinds. On the blinds you can see the shadows of people going by in the sunlight on the sidewalks. Great crowds of them always. The shadows are divided into strips by the slats of the shutters. The clatter of wooden clogs is earsplitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign. Outside it’s the end of the day, you can tell by the sound of the voices, the sound of more and more passers-by, more and more miscellaneous. It’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night. And night is beginning now, with the setting sun. The bed is separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There’s nothing solid separating us from other people. They don’t know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim. Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, the smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, incense, charcoal fires, they carry fire about in baskets here, it’s sold in the street, the smell of the city is the smell of the villages upcountry, of the forest. I suddenly saw him in a black bathrobe. He was sitting drinking a whisky, smoking. He said I’d been asleep, he’d taken a shower. I’d fallen asleep almost unawares. He’d switched on a lamp on a low table.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  It’s a bit useless, as ties go.” I gave him a tie. — The school had chartered buses to ferry students north to Alaska’s hometown of Vine Station, but Lara, the Colonel, Takumi, and I drove in Takumi’s SUV, taking the back roads so we didn’t have to drive past the spot on the highway. I stared out the window, watching as the suburban sprawl surrounding Birmingham faded into the slow-sloping hills and fields of northern Alabama. Up front, Takumi told Lara about the time Alaska got her boob honked over the summer, and Lara laughed. That was the first time I had seen her, and now we were coming to the last. More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi’s headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn’t even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating. Meriwether Lewis’s last words were, “I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.” I don’t doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind. I thought of Lewis as I followed Lara into the A-frame chapel attached to the single-story funeral home in Vine Station, Alabama, a town every bit as depressed and depressing as Alaska had always made it out to be. The place smelled of mildew and disinfectant, and the yellow wallpaper in the foyer was peeling at the corners. “Are y’all here for Ms. Young?” a guy asked the Colonel, and the Colonel nodded. We were led to a large room with rows of folding chairs populated by only one man. He knelt before a coffin at the front of the chapel. The coffin was closed. Closed. Never going to see her again. Can’t kiss her forehead. Can’t see her one last time. But I needed to, I needed to see her, and much too loud, I asked, “Why is it closed?” and the man, whose potbelly pushed out from his too- tight suit, turned around and walked toward me. “Her mother,” he said. “Her mother had an open casket, and Alaska told me, ‘Don’t ever let them see me dead, Daddy,’ and so that’s that. Anyway, son, she’s not in there. She’s with the Lord.”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  The cafeteria clamored with the sounds of plastic trays against wooden tables and forks scraping plates, but any conversations were muted. But more than the noiselessness of everyone else was the silence where she should have been, the bubbling bursting storytelling Alaska, but instead it felt like those times when she had withdrawn into herself, like she was refusing to answer how or why questions, only this time for good. The Colonel sat down next to me in religion class, sighed, and said, “You reek of smoke, Pudge.” “Ask me if I give a shit.” Dr. Hyde shuffled into class then, our final exams stacked underneath one arm. He sat down, took a series of labored breaths, and began to talk. “It is a law that parents should not have to bury their children,” he said. “And someone should enforce it. This semester, we’re going to continue studying the religious traditions to which you were introduced this fall. But there’s no doubting that the questions we’ll be asking have more immediacy now than they did just a few days ago. What happens to us after we die, for instance, is no longer a question of idle philosophical interest. It is a question we must ask about our classmate. And how to live in the shadow of grief is not something nameless Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims have to explore. The questions of religious thought have become, I suspect, personal.” He shuffled through our exams, pulling one out from the pile before him. “I have here Alaska’s final. You’ll recall that you were asked what the most important question facing people is, and how the three traditions we’re studying this year address that question. This was Alaska’s question.” With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? —A. Y. “I’m going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,” he said. “Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don’t want us to forget Alaska, and I don’t want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we’re trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers— how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called ‘people’s rotten lots in life.’” Hyde sat down. “So, how are you guys doing?” The Colonel and I said nothing, while a bunch of people who didn’t know Alaska extolled her virtues and professed to be devastated, and at first, it bothered me. I didn’t want the people she didn’t know—and the people she didn’t like—to be sad.

• From The Lover (1984)

  My younger brother died in December 1942, during the Japanese occupation. I’d left Saigon after graduating from high school in 1931. He wrote to me just once in ten years. I never knew why. The letter was conventional, made out in a fair copy in careful handwriting without any mistakes. He told me everyone was well, the school was a success. It was a long letter, two whole pages. I recognized his writing, the same as when he was a child. He also said he had an apartment, a car, he told me the make. That he’d taken up tennis again. That he was fine, everything was fine. That he sent his fondest love. He didn’t mention the war, or our elder brother. I often bracket my two brothers together as she used to do, our mother. I say, My brothers, and she too, outside the family, used to say, My sons. She always talked in an insulting way about her sons’ strength. For the outside world she didn’t distinguish between them, she didn’t say the elder son was much stronger than the younger, she said he was as strong as her brothers, the farmers in the North of France. She was proud of her sons’ strength in the same way as she’d been proud of her brothers’. Like her elder son, she looked down on the weak. Of my lover from Cholon she spoke in the same way as my elder brother. I won’t write the words down. They were words that had to do with the carrion you find in the desert. I say, My brothers, because that’s what I used to say too. It was only afterwards that I referred to them differently, after my younger brother grew up and was martyred. Not only do we never have any celebrations in our family, not a Christmas tree, or so much as an embroidered handkerchief or a flower. We don’t even take notice of any death, any funeral, any remembrance. There’s just her. My elder brother will always be a murderer. My younger brother will die because of him. As for me, I left, tore myself away. Until she died my elder brother had her to himself.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  Christian is on the phone. He’s dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt. His feet are bare. “He said what?” he shouts, making me jump. “Well, he could have told us the fucking truth. What’s his number? I need to call him. Welch, this is a real fuckup.” He glances up and doesn’t take his dark and brooding eyes off me. “Find her,” he snaps and presses the off switch. I walk over to the couch and collect my backpack, doing my best to ignore him. I take the Mac out of it and walk back toward the kitchen, placing it carefully on the breakfast bar, along with the BlackBerry and the car key. When I turn to face him, he’s staring at me, stupefied with horror. “I need the money that Taylor got for my Beetle.” My voice is clear and calm, devoid of emotion…extraordinary. “Ana, I don’t want those things—they’re yours,” he says in disbelief. “Take them.” “No, Christian. I only accepted them under sufferance, and I don’t want them anymore.” “Ana, be reasonable!” he scolds me, even now. “I don’t want anything that will remind me of you. I just need the money that Taylor got for my car.” My voice is quite monotone. “Are you really trying to wound me?” “No.” I frown, staring at him. Of course not. I love you. “I’m not. I’m trying to protect myself.” Because you don’t want me the way I want you. “Please, Ana, take that stuff.” “Christian, I don’t want to fight—I just need the money.” He narrows his eyes, but I’m no longer intimidated by him. Well, only a little. I gaze impassively back, not blinking or backing down. “Will you take a check?” he says acidly. “Yes. I think you’re good for it.” He doesn’t smile; he just turns on his heel and stalks into his study. I take a last, lingering look around his apartment: at the art on the walls—all abstracts, serene, cool…cold, even. Fitting, I think absently. My eyes stray to the piano. If I’d kept my mouth shut, we’d have made love on the piano. No, fucked—we would have fucked on the piano. Well, I would have made love. The thought lies heavy and sad in my mind and what’s left of my heart. He has never made love to me, has he? It’s always been fucking to him. Christian returns and hands me an envelope. “Taylor got a good price…it’s a classic car. You can ask him. He’ll take you home.” He nods in the direction over my shoulder. I turn, and Taylor is standing in the doorway, wearing his suit, as impeccable as ever. “That’s fine. I can get myself home, thank you.” I turn to stare at Christian, and I see the barely contained fury in his eyes. “Are you going to defy me at every turn?” “Why change a habit of a lifetime?” I give him a small, apologetic shrug.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Lara caught my eye and smiled wanly. I smiled back, but quickly turned and hid myself amid the mass of mourners filing out of the gym. — I am sleeping, and Alaska flies into the room. She is naked, and intact. Her breasts, which I felt only very briefly and in the dark, are luminously full as they hang down from her body. She hovers inches above me, her breath warm and sweet against my face like a breeze passing through tall grass. “Hi,” I say. “I’ve missed you.” “You look good, Pudge.” “So do you.” “I’m so naked,” she says, and laughs. “How did I get so naked?” “I just want you to stay,” I say. “No,” she says, and her weight falls dead on me, crushing my chest, stealing away my breath, and she is cold and wet, like melting ice. Her head is split in half and a pink-gray sludge oozes from the fracture in her skull and drips down onto my face, and she stinks of formaldehyde and rotting meat. I gag and push her off me, terrified. — I woke up falling, and landed with a thud on the floor. Thank God I’m a bottom- bunk man. I had slept for fourteen hours. It was morning. Wednesday, I thought. Her funeral Sunday. I wondered if the Colonel would get back by then, where he was. He had to come back for the funeral, because I could not go alone, and going with anyone other than the Colonel would amount to alone. The cold wind buffeted against the door, and the trees outside the back window shook with such force that I could hear it from our room, and I sat in my bed and thought of the Colonel out there somewhere, his head down, his teeth clenched, walking into the wind. four days after IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING and I was reading a biography of the explorer Meriwether Lewis (of & Clark fame) and trying to stay awake when the door opened and the Colonel walked in. His pale hands shook, and the almanac he held looked like a puppet dancing without strings. “Are you cold?” I asked. He nodded, slipped off his sneakers, and climbed into my bed on the bottom bunk, pulling up the covers. His teeth chattered like Morse code. “Jesus. Are you all right?” “Better now. Warmer,” he said. A small, ghost white hand appeared from beneath the comforter. “Hold my hand, will ya?” “All right, but that’s it. No kissing.” The quilt shook with his laughter. “Where have you been?” “I walked to Montevallo.” “Forty miles?!” “Forty-two,” he corrected me. “Well. Forty-two there. Forty-two back. Eighty-two miles. No. Eighty-four. Yes. Eighty-four miles in forty-five hours.” “What the hell’s in Montevallo?” I asked. “Not much.

• 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.