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 136 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Here I am!” I said, gasping. “I was afraid you’d leave without me.” “Would I do a thing like that, love?” (He would! He would!) “We’ll have a lovely time,” he said. We drove directly to the hotel without getting lost for once. Upstairs, I threw my clothes into my bag (the sequined dress from the ball, the damp swim-suits, shorts, nightgowns, raincoat, jersey dresses for traveling—everything creased and jumbled and thrown together). Then I sat down to write a note to Bennett. What could I say? The sweat was pouring down with the tears. The letter sounded more like a love letter than a dear John. I said I loved him (I did). I said I didn’t know why I had to get away (I didn’t) but only that I felt desperately that I had to (I did). I hoped he’d forgive me. I hoped we could think about our life and try again. I left him the address of the hotel in London where we had originally planned to stay together. I didn’t know where I was going, but I’d probably surface in London. I left him dozens of phone numbers of people I planned to look up in London. I loved him. I hoped he’d forgive me. (The letter was by now more than two pages long.) Perhaps I went on writing so as not to have to leave. I wrote that I didn’t know what I was doing (I didn’t). I wrote that I felt like hell (I did). And as I was writing “I love you” for the tenth time Bennett walked in. “I’m leaving,” I said crying. “I was just writing you a letter but now I don’t need to.” I started tearing up the letter. “Don’t!” he said, snatching it from me. “It’s all I have left of you.” Then I really began to cry in long awful sobs. “Please, please, forgive me,” I pleaded. (Executioner asks condemned’s forgiveness before the ax falls.) “You don’t need forgiveness,” he snapped. He began throwing his things into a suitcase we had gotten as a wedding present from the friend who’d introduced us. A long and happy marriage. Many travels down the road of life. Had I engineered this whole scene just for the intensity of it? Never had I loved him more. Never had I longed to stay with him more. Was that why I had to go? Why didn’t he say “Stay, stay—I love you?” He didn’t.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead. Three generations of frustrated artists: my grandfather fucking models and cursing Picasso and stubbornly painting in the style of Rembrandt, my mother giving up poetry and painting for arty clothes and compulsive reupholstering, my sister Randy taking up pregnancy as if it were a new art form she had invented (and Lalah and Chloe following after her like disciples). There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist. My grandfather, as I’ve said, used to paint over my mother’s canvases instead of going out to buy new canvas. She switched to poetry for a while, to escape him, but then met my father who was a song writer and stole her images to use in lyrics. Artists are horrible. “Never, never get involved with a man who wants to be an artist,” my mother used to say, who knew. Another interesting sidelight is that both my mother and my grandfather have a way of dismissing the efforts of anybody who seems to be having a good time working at something or having a moderate success at it. There is, for example, a middling-to-good novelist (whose name I won’t mention) who happens to be a friend of my parents. He has written four novels, none of them distinguished in style, none of them bestsellers, and none prizewinners, but nevertheless, he seems fairly pleased with himself and he seems to be enjoying the status of resident sage at cocktail parties and writer-in-residence at some junior college in New Jersey whose name escapes me. Maybe he actually likes writing. Some strange people do. “I don’t know how he keeps grinding them out,” my mother will say, “he’s such an ordinary writer. He’s not stupid, he’s nobody’s fool….” (My mother never calls people “intelligent”; “not stupid” is as far as she will commit herself.) “…But his books are so ordinary…and none of them has really even made money yet….”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And what finally became of him and his stories? Was he absorbed one day into the Yucatán jungle? I’ve been told that in some Indian villages in Mexico homosexual men live in a separate compound where they take care of the tribe’s children; is Fred still living as some ancient nanny respectably obscured by pure white veils of beard and hair, his glasses long since broken and abandoned, his constant murmur unheard below the squeal of warm, naked toddlers who clamber over him as though he were nothing but a weathered garden god half-sunk into the creepers and vines, his notebook of handwritten stories open to the elements to scatter its pages as the leaves of a calendar in old movies fly away to indicate the passage of years, even decades? And Marilyn? The last time I saw her the color of her makeup had gone iodine, her lips had thinned, her hair had become a spiky black cap and her large, rolling eyes no longer seemed a coquette’s but those of a virgin martyr, protuberant, cast up, the whites wept clean, the lower lids sooty with despair. She told me that for the last two years she’d been living in a boardinghouse in a room next to that of a young violinist whom she loved and who loved her fraternally but, alas, not passionately. He was planning to become a Benedictine and she thought she’d follow him into Holy Orders. “This is the great love of my life—not a woman as always before but a beautiful young man who doesn’t want me. How ironic! We met through music. His beauty, his music, his indifference—don’t you see?” “Not exactly.” She smiled the hazardous, hard-won smile of the lover determined to have found a consolation: “He was sent to me to awaken in me an appetite only God can feed. I’ve been such a sinner—waiter, another round—but I never became coarse or jaded or thick-skinned. I was ready for God’s gift.” Her hair didn’t satisfy her. She studied it in her compact mirror, shifting the small round glass from side to side, top to bottom; a macula of light searched her face intensely and dissected it inch by inch, swerving here, hovering there, highlighting the withered cheek, the crepey neck, the hard, jutting chin. It moved where the glance of the contemptuous beloved would go. She propped the compact up between the oil and vinegar cruets and her fingertips touched her hair with wonderful delicacy as the reflection glowed steadily in her right eye and even seemed to travel surgically through it. At last she blinked and snapped the glass shut. “I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen. And don’t you see”—her dry, rough hand with the painted nails seized mine—“I am a sort of spiritual debutante.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Her cheeks were swollen, her eyes red, her skin waxy. She’d looked like that when she used to throw up all the time. Senior year, she’d even popped blood vessels in her eyes, so for weeks she’d worn dark glasses around campus. She kept them off at home in our dorm. It was hard to look at her. She started driving. “Isn’t the snow so beautiful? It’s peaceful here, right? Away from the city? It really puts things in perspective. You know . . . life?” Reva looked at me for a reaction, but I gave none. She was going to be annoying, I could tell. She’d expect me to say comforting things, to put an arm around her shoulders while she sobbed at the funeral. I was trapped. The day would be hell. I would suffer. I felt I might not survive. I needed a dark, quiet room, my videos, my bed, my pills. I hadn’t been this far from home in many months. I was frightened. “Can we stop for coffee?” “There’s coffee at the house,” Reva said. I truly hated her in that moment, watching her navigating the icy roads, craning her neck to see over the dash from the sunken seat of the car. Then she gave a litany of everything that she’d been up to—cleaning the house, calling relatives and friends, making arrangements with the funeral home. “My dad decided to cremate,” she said. “He couldn’t even wait until after the funeral. It seems so cruel. And it’s not even Jewish. He was just trying to save money.” Her cheeks sagged as she frowned. Her eyes filled with tears. It always impressed me how predictable Reva was—she was like a character in a movie. Every emotional gesture was always right on cue. “My mom is in this cheap little wooden box now,” she whined. “It’s only this big.” She took her hands off the wheel to show me the dimensions, voguing. “They wanted us to buy this huge brass urn. They try to take advantage of you every step of the way, I swear. It’s so disgusting. But my dad is so cheap. I told him I’m going to dump her ashes out in the ocean and he said that was undignified. What? How is the ocean undignified? What’s more dignified than the ocean? The mantel over the fireplace? A cabinet in the kitchen?” She choked a bit on her own indignation, then turned to me softly. “I thought maybe you could come with me and we could drive down to Massapequa and do it and have lunch some time. Like next weekend, if you have time. Or any day, really. Maybe when it gets warmer. At least when it’s not snowing. What did you do with your mom?” she asked. “Buried her next to my father,” I said.

• 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 The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  With such and like flattering words they endeavoured to appease the gentlewoman, howbeit shee would in no case be comforted, but put her head betwixt her knees, and cried pittiously. Then they called the old woman, and commaunded her to sit by the maiden, and pacify her dolor as much as shee might. And they departed away to rob, as they were accustomed to doe, but the virgin would not asswage her griefes, nor mitigate her sorrow by any entreaty of the old woman, but howled and sobbed in such sort, that she made me poore Asse likewise to weepe, and thus she said, Alas can I poore wench live any longer, that am come of so good a house, forsaken of my parents, friends, and family, made a rapine and prey, closed servilely in this stony prison, deprived of all pleasure, wherein I have been brought up, thrown in danger, ready to be rent in pieces among so many sturdy theeves and dreadful robbers, can I (I say) cease from weeping, and live any longer? Thus she cried and lamented, and after she had wearied herself with sorrow and blubbered her face with teares, she closed the windowes of her hollow eyes, and laid her downe to sleepe. And after that she had slept, she rose again like a furious and mad woman, and beat her breast and comely face more that she did before. Then the old woman enquired the causes of her new and sudden lamentation. To whom sighing in pittifull sort she answered, Alas now I am utterly undone, now am I out of all hope, O give me a knife to kill me, or a halter to hang me. Whereat the old [woman] was more angry, and severely commanded her to tell her the cause of her sorrow, and why after her sleep, she should renew her dolour and miserable weeping. What, thinke you (quoth she) to deprive our young men of the price of your ransome? No, no therefore cease your crying, for the Theeves doe little esteeme your howling, and if you do not, I will surely burn you alive. Hereat the maiden was greatly feared, and kissed her hand and said, O mother take pitty upon me and my wretched fortune, and give me license a while to speake, for I think I shall not long live, let there be mercy ripe and franke in thy venerable hoare head, and hear the sum of my calamity.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘What does it say ?’ said Victoria and began to cry again, as she had been doing almost hourly for four days. ‘ To whom it may concern ,’ began Amelia, wide-eyed as a child and employing a babyish whisper. ‘ Upon my death I leave my Jean Hyp – Hyp – I can never say that name! – painting of Maıˆtresse Er – Erzu . . .’ ‘We know which bloody painting it is!’ snapped Michael. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ he added.  On Beauty ‘. . . to Mrs Kiki Belsey !’ announced Amelia as if these were the most remarkable words she’d ever been called upon to say out loud. ‘And it’s signed by Mrs Kipps!’ ‘She didn’t write that,’ said Michael again. ‘No way. She never would do something like that. Sorry. No way. That woman obviously had some power over Mum that we weren’t aware of – she must have had her eye on that painting for a while – we know she’d been in the house. No, sorry, this is completely out of order,’ concluded Michael, although his argument had neatly double-backed on itself. ‘She bedevilled Mrs Kipps’s mind!’ yelped Amelia, whose innocent imagination was infected by some of the more gaudy episodes in the Bible. ‘Shut up, Ammy,’ muttered Michael. He turned the note over as if its blank side might offer a clue to its provenance. ‘This is a family matter, Amelia,’ said Monty severely. ‘And you are not yet family. It would be preferable if you kept your comments to yourself.’ Amelia held on to the cross at her throat and lowered her eyes. Victoria rose up from her armchair and snatched the paper from her brother. ‘This is Mum’s handwriting. Absolutely.’ ‘Yes,’ said Monty, sensibly. ‘I don’t think there is any question of that.’ ‘Look, that painting is worth, what? About three hundred grand? Sterling?’ said Michael, for the Kippses, unlike the Belseys, had no horror of talking frankly about money. ‘Now there is absolutely no way, no way she would have let this fall out of the family . . . and what confirms it for me is that she’d already sort of mentioned, pretty recently – ’ ‘Giving it to us!’ squeaked Amelia. ‘As a wedding present!’ ‘As it happens, she had,’ agreed Michael. ‘Now you’re telling me she left the most valuable painting in the house to practically a stranger? To Kiki Belsey? I don’t think so.’ ‘Wasn’t there any other letter, anything else?’ asked Victoria bewilderedly.  on beauty and being wrong ‘Nothing,’ said Monty. He passed a hand over his shiny pate. ‘I can’t understand it.’ Michael whacked the arm of the chaise he sat upon. ‘Thinking of that woman taking advantage of somebody as ill as Mum – it’s disgusting.’ ‘Michael – the question is how should we deal with this?’

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

  The theory accounts for all of the phenomena of the classical view, plus its anomalies such as the huge variability in emotional experiences, in emotion concepts, and in physical changes during emotion. It dissolves useless nature/nurture debates (e.g., what is hardwired versus what is learned) by using a single framework to understand both physical reality and social reality, moving us one step closer to a scientific bridge between the social and natural worlds. And this bridge, like all bridges, will lead us to a new place, as you’ll see in the next chapter: a modern origin story of what it means to be human. 11 Emotion and the Law E very society has rules for which emotions are acceptable, when they are acceptable, and how to express them. In my American culture, it’s appropriate to feel grief when someone dies, and inappropriate to chuckle as the casket is lowered into the ground. A surprise party is a time to feel surprised and then joyful, and if you know about your own party in advance, it’s appropriate to feign surprise when you arrive. Members of the Ilongot tribe in the Philippines may feel the emotion liget when acting as a team to behead an enemy, in celebration of a job well done. 1 If you violate your culture’s rules of social reality, punishment may follow. Laughter at a funeral may get you shunned. Failure to be surprised at your own party may yield disappointed guests. And most cultures no longer prize decapitation. The ultimate rules for emotion in any society are set by its legal system. * That might seem like a surprising claim, but consider this. In the United States, if your accountant steals your life savings, or a banker sells you a bad mortgage, it’s considered unacceptable to kill them; but if you murder your spouse in a fit of rage for cheating on you with a secret lover, the law might cut you some slack, especially if you’re a man. It’s unacceptable to make your neighbor feel fear that you will harm him bodily—that is considered a form of assault—but in some states it’s okay for you to “stand your ground” and harm someone first, even if you kill the person. It’s acceptable for you to profess romantic love, but not (at various times in U.S. history) toward people whose sex is the same as yours or whose skin color isn’t. Violate these norms, and you might lose your money, your freedom, or your life.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  by it. He did not even get the opportunity to check the booklet in his hand; never discovered that this was Mozart’s Ave Verum , and this choir, Cambridge singers; no time to remind himself that he hated Mozart, nor to laugh at the expensive pretension of bussing down Kingsmen to sing at a Willesden funeral. It was too late for all that. The song had him. Aaaah Vay-ay, Aah, aah, vay sang the young men; the faint, hopeful leap of the first three notes, the declining dolour of the following three; the coffin passing so close to Howard’s elbow he sensed its weight in his arms; the woman inside it, only ten years older than Howard himself; the prospect of her infinite residence in there; the prospect of his own; the Kipps children weeping behind it; a man in front of Howard checking his watch as if the end of the world (for so it was for Carlene Kipps) was a mere inconvenience in his busy day, even though this fellow too would live to see the end of his world, as would Howard, as do tens of thousands of people every day, few of whom, in their lifetimes, are ever able to truly believe in the oblivion to which they are dispatched. Howard gripped the arms of his chair and tried to regulate his breathing in case this was an asthmatic episode or a dehydration incident, both of which he had experienced before. But this was different: he was tasting salt, watery salt, a lot of it, and feeling it in the chambers of his nose; it ran in rivulets down his neck and pooled in the dainty triangular well at the base of his throat. It was coming from his eyes. He had the feeling that there was a second, gaping mouth in the centre of his stomach and that this was screaming. The muscles in his belly convulsed. All around him people bowed their heads and joined their hands together, as people do at funerals, as Howard knew: he had been to many of them. At this point in the proceedings it was Howard’s more usual practice to doodle lightly with a pencil along the edge of the funeral programme while recalling the true, unpleasant relationship between the dead man in the box and the fellow presently offering a glowing eulogy, or to wonder whether the dead man’s widow will acknowledge the dead man’s mistress sitting in the third row. But at Carlene Kipps’s funeral Howard kept faith with her coffin. He did not take his eyes from that box. He was quite certain he  On Beauty was making embarrassing noises. He was powerless to stop them. His thoughts fled from him and rushed down their dark holes. Zora’s gravestone. Levi’s. Jerome’s. Everybody’s. His own. Kiki’s. Kiki’s. Kiki’s. Kiki’s.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Pym, Roland. Born in Lundy, Mass., 1922. Received stage training at Elsinore Playhouse, Derby, N.Y. Made debut in Sunburst. Among his many appearances are Two Blocks from Here, The Girl in Green, Scrambled Husbands, The Strange Mushroom, Touch and Go, John Lovely, I Was Dreaming of You. Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. 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! 9Divorce 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  25This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called “Dolorès Disparue,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster. Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her—as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed. One day I removed from the car and destroyed an accumulation of teen-magazines. You know the sort. Stone age at heart; up to date, or at least Mycenaean, as to hygiene. A handsome, very ripe actress with huge lashes and a pulpy red underlip, endorsing a shampoo. Ads and fads. Young scholars dote on plenty of pleats—que c’était loin, tout cela! It is your hostess’ duty to provide robes. Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. All of us have known “pickers”—one who picks her cuticle at the office party. Unless he is very elderly or very important, a man should remove his gloves before shaking hands with a woman. Invite Romance by wearing the Exciting New Tummy Flattener. Trims tums, nips hips. Tristram in Movielove. Yessir! The Joe-Roe marital enigma is making yaps flap. Glamourize yourself quickly and inexpensively. Comics. Bad girl dark hair fat father cigar; good girl red hair handsome daddums clipped mustache. Or that repulsive strip with the big gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide. Et moi qui t’offrais mon génie … I recalled the rather charming nonsense verse I used to write her when she was a child: “nonsense,” she used to say mockingly, “is correct.” The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits Have certain obscure and peculiar habits. Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets. The snake when he walks holds his hands in his pockets…

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  and said: ‘Father, it will give us much less pain, if thou wilt eat of us: thou didst put upon us this miserable flesh, and do chou strip it off.’ Then I calmed myself, in order not to make them more unhappy; that day and the next we all were mute. Ah, hard earth! why didst thou not open? When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself stretched out at my feet, saying: ‘My father! why don’t you help me?’ There he died; and even as thou seest me, saw I the three fall one by one, between the fifth day and the sixth: whence I betook me, already blind, to groping over each, and for three days called them, after they were dead; then fasting had more power than grief.”5 When he had spoken this, with eyes distorted he seized the miserable skull again with his teeth, which as a dog’s were strong upon the bone. Ah, Pisa; scandal to the people of the beauteous land where “sì” is heard, since thy neighbours are slow to punish thee, let the Caprara and Gorgona6 move, and hedge up the Arno at its mouth, that it may drown in thee every living soul. For if Count Ugolino had the fame of having betrayed thee of thy castles,7 thou oughtest not to have put his sons into such torture: their youthful age, thou modern Thebes!8 made innocent Uguccione and Brigata, and the other two whom my song above has named. We went farther on, where the frost9 ruggedly inwraps another people, not bent downwards, but all reversed. The very weeping there allows them not to weep; and the grief, which finds impediment upon their eyes, turns inward to increase the agony: for their first tears form a knot, and, like crystal vizors, fill up all the cavity beneath their eyebrows. And although, as from a callus, through the cold all feeling had departed from my face, it now seemed to me as if I felt some wind; whereat I: “Master, who moves this? Is not all heat extinguished here below?” Whence he to me: “Soon shalt thou be where thine eye itself, seeing the cause which rains the blast,10 shall answer thee in this.” And one of the wretched shadows of the icy crust cried out to us: “O souls, so cruel that the last post of all is given to you! Remove the hard veils from my face, that I may vent the grief, which stuffs my heart, a little, ere the weeping freeze again.” Wherefore I to him: “If thou wouldst have me aid thee, tell me who thou art; and if I do not extricate thee, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.” He answered therefore: “I am Friar Alberigo,11 I am he of the fruits from the ill garden, who here receive dates for my figs.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘How on earth did they get this number?’ asked Howard obtusely. ‘I don’t know . . . I suppose my office gave . . . I can’t believe this is happening . I saw her two weeks ago! She’s being buried here, in London. In Kensal Green Cemetery. The funeral’s on Friday.’ Howard’s brow contracted. ‘Funeral? But . . . we’re not going, surely.’ ‘YES, we’re going!’ shouted Kiki and began to cry, alerting her children, who now came over. Howard held his wife in his arms. ‘OK, OK, OK, we’re going, we’re going. Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that you . . .’ Howard stopped talking and kissed her temple. Physically, it was the closest he’d been to her in an age. Only a mile down the hill, in leafy Queen’s Park, the numb practicalities that follow a death were being attended to. An hour before Michael phoned Kiki, the Kipps family had been asked to step into Monty’s study – Victoria, Michael and Amelia, Michael’s fianceé. The tone of the request girded them for yet more distressing news. It was a week earlier, in Amherst, that they had discovered  on beauty and being wrong the cause of Carlene Kipps’s death: an aggressive cancer she had told her family nothing about. In her suitcases they found painkillers, of the kind only hospitals prescribe. The family did not yet know who had prescribed these; Michael was spending a good deal of his time shouting down the phone at doctors. It was easier to do this than to wonder why his mother, who must have known she was dying, had felt the need to hide the fact from the people who loved her most. In trepidation the young people came into the room and arranged themselves on Monty’s badly sprung Edwardian furniture. The blinds were shut. A floral-tiled fireplace with a small log fire was the only light in the room. Monty looked tired. His pug eyes were stained red, and his unbuttoned, dirty waistcoat hung either side of his belly. ‘Michael,’ said Monty, and passed his son a small envelope. Michael took it from him. ‘All we can assume,’ said Monty, as Michael drew a single piece of folded notepaper from it, ‘is that your mother’s illness had already gone some way towards affecting her mind. That was found in her side table. What do you make of it?’ Over her fiance´’s shoulder, Amelia craned to read what was written there and, when she did, let out a little gasp. ‘Well, first, there’s no way this is legally binding,’ said Michael at once. ‘It’s written in pencil!’ Amelia blurted out. ‘Nobody thinks it’s legally binding,’ said Monty, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘That’s hardly the point. The point is: what does it mean?’ ‘She would never have written this,’ said Michael solidly. ‘Who says this is her handwriting? I don’t think it is.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But that wasn’t where the nightmare ended. In June 2022, the three Trump justices overturned Roe. These justices took away a Constitutional right that women had had for almost half a century, and they did it with the stroke of a pen. The earth didn’t slide off its axis; the world continued on. The next day all of us got up and ate our breakfast as if we hadn’t lost a Constitutional right. Losing Roe felt weirdly abstract and distant…except to the women whose bodies it colonized like a malevolent, alien parasite. The three liberal Justices wrote, “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.” Read this book and then go and write your own Fear of Flying, because we need a million more. —Molly Jong-Fast INTRODUCTIONFear of Flying was not an immediate hit when it arrived on bookshelves in 1973. Its publisher, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, had given it a healthy first run of about thirty thousand copies, but those sold out immediately upon publication of a rave review by John Updike in the New Yorker. He called the book a “winner” in the first sentence, said it had “class and sass, brightness and bite” in the second, and placed it in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint. An octogeneric Henry Miller declared that there was finally a female Tropic of Cancer. It was these masculine endorsements—the enraged New York Times review, written by Terry Stokes and dripping with misogyny, allegations of whining, and a soupçon of antisemitism seemed to have backfired—that created the frenzy at the scarcity of new, buyable copies as the world awaited Fear of Flying’s second printing. But Holt never gave it a second run—there was a theory that they were having money problems—and so the book remained a critical hit and an object of desperate desire to those who couldn’t get their hands on it. A year later, it was published in paperback, debuting at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. As I write this half a century later, Fear of Flying has sold more than twenty million copies around the world.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When Trevor dropped me off at school, I called the lawyer and told him that I couldn’t let go of the house. “Not until I’m sure I’ll never get married and have children,” I said. It wasn’t true. And I didn’t care about the housing market or how much money I could get. I wanted to hold on to the house the way you’d hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t. There were moments when I was little, my mother could make me feel very special, stroking my hair, her perfume sweet and light, her pale, bony hands cool and jangling with gold bracelets, her frosted hair, her lipstick, breath woody with smoke and stringent from booze. But the next moment she’d be in a haze, distracted, suffering from some grave fear or worry and struggling to put up with even the thought of me. “I can’t listen to you now,” she’d say in these moments, and she’d move from room to room, away, looking for some piece of paper where she’d scrawled down a phone number. “If you threw it away, I swear,” she’d warn. She was always calling someone—some new friend, I guess. I never knew where she met these women, these new friends—at the beauty parlor? At the liquor store? I could have acted out if I’d wanted to. I could have dyed my hair purple, flunked out of high school, starved myself, pierced my nose, slutted around, what have you. I saw other teenagers doing that, but I didn’t really have the energy to go to so much trouble. I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it. I’d be punished if I showed signs of suffering, I knew. So I was good. I did all the right things. I rebelled in silent ways, with my thoughts. My parents barely seemed to notice I existed. Once I heard them whispering in the hallway while I was using the bathroom. “Did you see she has two blemishes on her chin?” my mother asked my father. “I can’t stand to look at them. They’re so pink.” “Take her to a dermatologist if you’re that concerned,” my father said. A few days later, our housekeeper brought me a tube of Clearasil. It was the tinted kind.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  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. I imagined her disgust at the cheapness of things, the mustiness of the air. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to ask her. I had no burning urge to proclaim any fury or sadness. “Hello,” was as far as I got in our hypothetical dialogue. I got up out of bed and fished through one of the cardboard boxes on Reva’s bureau. In her senior yearbook, I found only one photo of her, the standard portrait. Hers stood out in the rows of boring faces. She had big frizzy hair, chubby cheeks, overplucked eyebrows that zoomed across her forehead like crooked arrows, dark lipstick, thick black eyeliner. Her gaze was slightly off center, vague, unhappy, possessed. She looked like she’d been much more interesting before she left for college—a Goth, a freak, a punk, a reject, a delinquent, an outcast, a fuckup. As long as I’d known her, she’d been a follower, a plebeian, straitlaced and conformist. But it seemed as though she’d had a rich, secretive interior life in high school, with desires beyond the usual drinking and foosball soirees suburban Long Island had to offer. So, I gathered, Reva moved to Manhattan to go to college and decided she’d try to fit in—get skinny, be pretty, talk like all the other skinny, pretty girls. It made sense that she’d want me as her best friend. Maybe her best friend in high school had been one of the weirdos, like her. Maybe she’d had some kind of disability—a gimp arm, Tourette’s, Coke-bottle glasses, alopecia. I imagined the two of them together in that black basement bedroom listening to music: Joy Division. Siouxsie and the Banshees. It made me a little jealous to think of Reva being depressed and dependent on anyone but me. After my mother’s funeral, I went back to school. My sorority sisters didn’t ask if I was okay, if I wanted to talk. They all avoided me. Only a few left notes under my door. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this!” Of course, I was grateful to be spared the humiliation of a patronizing confrontation by a dozen young women who would probably have just shamed me for not “being more open.” They weren’t my friends. Reva and I were in French class together that year. We were conversation partners.

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

  See also heam.info/wolves-1 . [back] 40. experience some kind of grief: Morell 2013, 148; Bekoff and Goodall 2008, 66. operates similarly to drug withdrawal: Vernon et al. 2016. love is a drug: Fisher et al. 2010. [back] 41. why isn’t it “anger learning”: A similar point was made by Jerome Kagan (Kagan 2007). [back] 42. the “triune brain”: “Fear learning” studies, which assume a triune brain, have also been performed on humans, in support of the classical view (e.g., LaBar et al. 1998). [back] 43. this circuitry in elegant detail: E.g., the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s groundbreaking research illustrates how synapses change within key sites of the amygdala, allowing neutral sensory inputs, like sounds, to automatically elicit an inborn defense response, like freezing (LeDoux 2015). [back] 44. automatically and effortlessly: For an accessible introduction, see Wegner and Gray 2016. Mental inference is so ubiquitous in Western culture that scholars keep discovering it again and again and calling it by different names; see heam.info/inference-1 . [back] 45. meaningful by making an inference: This began with the first psychology experiment, which was conducted by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 1800s; see heam.info/wundt-2 . [back] 46. into an industry of fear: This confusion became institutionalized in psychology during behaviorism; see heam.info/behaviorism-1 . [back] 47. rats run away: E.g., Berlau and McGaugh 2003; see heam.info/rats-1 . in which case they attack: Reynolds and Berridge 2008. See heam.info/rats-2 . goes down instead of up: Iwata and LeDoux 1988. not all of these varied behaviors require the amygdala: Fear learning does not necessarily involve the amygdala. Aggression toward a preda tor (called “defensive treading” or “burying”) does not depend on the amygdala (De Boer and Koolhaas 2003; Kopchia et al. 1992). The amygdala is involved when the threat is maximally ambiguous and learning is required (i.e., when prediction error must be processed [Li and McNally 2014]). Even if amygdala neurons are routinely involved in learning, they may not be necessary for learning to occur. For example, infant monkeys who have their amygdalae removed about two weeks after birth are able to learn about aversive things; a body-budgeting region (the anterior cingulate cortex) had expanded in these monkeys during brain development, and this region also supports aversive learning (Bliss-Moreau and Amaral, under review). of the mental inference fallacy: Gross and Canteras 2012; Silva et al. 2013. See also heam.info/inference-2 . specific to freezing or fear: Tovote et al. 2015; see heam.info/inference-3 . [back] 48. be the circuitry for distress: Blumberg et al. 2000. According to the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (Panksepp 1998), “distress/panic” calls are made by infant rats and occur following social isolation.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  And now the practical hats of the Kippses were put on. The women in the room were not offered hats and instinctively sat back in their chairs as Michael and his father leaned forward with their elbows on their knees. ‘Do you think Kiki Belsey knows about this . . . note ?’ said Michael, barely allowing the last word the credence of its own existence. ‘This is what we don’t know. She’s certainly made no claims. As yet.’ ‘Whether she knows or not,’ flashed Victoria, ‘she can’t prove a thing, right? I mean she has no written evidence that would stand up in court or whatever. This is our birthright , for fuckssake.’ Victoria allowed sobs to take her again. Her tears were petulant. It was the first time death in any form had ever forced its way into the pleasant confines of her life. Running alongside the genuine misery and loss was livid disbelief. In every other walk of life when the Kippses were hurt they were given access to recourse: Monty had fought three different libel cases; Michael and Victoria had been brought up to fiercely defend their faith and their politics. But this – this could not be fought. Secular liberals were one thing; death was another. ‘I don’t want that language, Victoria,’ said Monty strongly. ‘You’ll respect this house and your family.’ ‘Apparently I respect my family more than Mum did – she doesn’t even mention us.’ She brandished the note and, in the process, dropped it. It floated listlessly to the carpet. ‘Your mother,’ said Monty, and stopped, shedding the first tear his children had yet seen since this began. To this tear Michael was unequal: his head fell back against the cushions; he let out a shrill,  On Beauty agonized croak and began to weep angry choking tears himself. ‘Your mother,’ tried Monty again, ‘was a devoted wife to me and a beautiful mother to you. But she was very sick at the end – the Lord alone knows how she bore it. And this,’ he said, retrieving the note from the floor, ‘is a symptom of sickness.’ ‘Amen!’ said Amelia and clutched her fiance´. ‘Ammy, please ,’ growled Michael, pushing her off. Amelia hid her head in his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry to have shown it to you,’ said Monty, folding the paper in half. ‘It means nothing.’ ‘No one thinks it means anything,’ snapped Michael, wiping his face with a handkerchief Amelia had thought to produce. ‘Just burn the thing and forget about it.’ Finally the word was out there. A log popped loudly, as if the fire were listening and hungry for new fuel. Victoria opened her mouth but said nothing. ‘Exactly,’ said Monty. He scrunched up the note in his fist and tossed it lightly into the flames. ‘Although we should invite her to the funeral, I think. Mrs Belsey.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  They spend half their stay in the Millers’ small brambly garden that makes up for its size by ending where the Hampstead ponds begin. Howard, the Belsey children, Rachel and Adam were all in the garden – the kids skimming pebbles into the water, the adults watching two magpies build a nest in a high tree – when Kiki pushed up a triple sash window and walked towards them, holding her hand over her mouth. ‘She’s dead!’ Howard looked at his wife and felt only slightly alarmed. Everybody he truly loved was right here with him in this garden. Kiki came very close to him and hoarsely repeated her message. ‘Who – Kiki, who’s dead?’ ‘Carlene! Carlene Kipps. Michael – that was him, the son, on the phone.’ ‘How on earth did they get this number?’ asked Howard obtusely. ‘I don’t know . . . I suppose my office gave . . . I can’t believe this is happening . I saw her two weeks ago! She’s being buried here, in London. In Kensal Green Cemetery. The funeral’s on Friday.’ Howard’s brow contracted. ‘Funeral? But . . . we’re not going, surely.’ ‘YES, we’re going!’ shouted Kiki and began to cry, alerting her children, who now came over. Howard held his wife in his arms. ‘OK, OK, OK, we’re going, we’re going. Darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that you . . .’ Howard stopped talking and kissed her temple. Physically, it was the closest he’d been to her in an age. Only a mile down the hill, in leafy Queen’s Park, the numb practicalities that follow a death were being attended to. An hour before Michael phoned Kiki, the Kipps family had been asked to step into Monty’s study – Victoria, Michael and Amelia, Michael’s fianceé. The tone of the request girded them for yet more distressing news. It was a week earlier, in Amherst, that they had discovered  on beauty and being wrong the cause of Carlene Kipps’s death: an aggressive cancer she had told her family nothing about. In her suitcases they found painkillers, of the kind only hospitals prescribe. The family did not yet know who had prescribed these; Michael was spending a good deal of his time shouting down the phone at doctors. It was easier to do this than to wonder why his mother, who must have known she was dying, had felt the need to hide the fact from the people who loved her most. In trepidation the young people came into the room and arranged themselves on Monty’s badly sprung Edwardian furniture. The blinds were shut. A floral-tiled fireplace with a small log fire was the only light in the room. Monty looked tired. His pug eyes were stained red, and his unbuttoned, dirty waistcoat hung either side of his belly. ‘Michael,’ said Monty, and passed his son a small envelope.

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

  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. 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.