Guilt

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 Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend’s calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I did. I came out of my daze and found myself still in Lo’s room. A full-page ad ripped out of a slick magazine was affixed to the wall above the bed, between a crooner’s mug and the lashes of a movie actress. It represented a dark-haired young husband with a kind of drained look in his Irish eyes. He was modeling a robe by So-and-So and holding a bridgelike tray by So-and-So, with breakfast for two. The legend, by the Rev. Thomas Morell, called him a “conquering hero.” The thoroughly conquered lady (not shown) was presumably propping herself up to receive her half of the tray. How her bedfellow was to get under the bridge without some messy mishap was not clear. Lo had drawn a jocose arrow to the haggard lover’s face and had put, in block letters: H.H. And indeed, despite a difference of a few years, the resemblance was striking. Under this was another picture, also a colored ad. A distinguished playwright was solemnly smoking a Drome. He always smoked Dromes. The resemblance was slight. Under this was Lo’s chaste bed, littered with “comics.” The enamel had come off the bedstead, leaving black, more or less rounded, marks on the white. Having convinced myself that Louise had left, I got into Lo’s bed and reread the letter. 17Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining to the business in hand—if I may coin an expression—had not drifted across my mind before. My mind had not retained them in any logical form or in any relation to definitely recollected occasions; but I cannot swear—let me repeat—that I had not toyed with them (to rig up yet another expression), in my dimness of thought, in my darkness of passion. There may have been times—there must have been times, if I know my Humbert—when I had brought up for detached inspection the idea of marrying a mature widow (say, Charlotte Haze) with not one relative left in the wide gray world, merely in order to have my way with her child (Lo, Lola, Lolita). I am even prepared to tell my tormentors that perhaps once or twice I had cast an appraiser’s cold eye at Charlotte’s coral lips and bronze hair and dangerously low neckline, and had vaguely tried to fit her into a plausible daydream. This I confess under torture. Imaginary torture, perhaps, but all the more horrible. I wish I might digress and tell you more of the pavor nocturnus that would rack me at night hideously after a chance term had struck me in the random readings of my boyhood, such as peine forte et dure (what a Genius of Pain must have invented that!) or the dreadful, mysterious, insidious words “trauma,” “traumatic event,” and “transom.” But my tale is sufficiently incondite already.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (We were so hopelessly lost by now that we pulled over and stopped the car.) “Catholic,” he said, “a Papist from Liverpool.” “What did she do?” “Midwife.” This was a strange bit of information. I didn’t know quite how to react to it. “He’d been married to a Catholic midwife from Liverpool,” I imagined myself writing. (In the novel, I’d change Adrian’s name to something more exotic and make him much taller.) “Why did you marry her?” “Because she made me feel guilty.” “Great reason.” “Well it is. I was a guilty son of a bitch in medical school. A real sucker for the Protestant ethic. I mean, I remember there were certain girls who made me feel good—but feeling good scared me. There was one girl—she used to hire this huge barn and invite everyone to come fuck everyone. She made me feel good—so, of course, I mistrusted her. And my wife made me feel guilty—so, of course, I married her. I was like you. I didn’t trust pleasure or my own impulses. It frightened the hell out of me to be happy. And when I got scared—I got married. Just like you, love.” “What makes you think I got married out of fear?” I was indignant because he was right. “Oh, probably you found yourself fucking too many guys, not knowing how to say no, and even liking it some of the time, and then you felt guilty for having fun. We’re programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You’re supposed to work and suffer—and the trouble is: you believe it. Well, it’s bullshit. It took me thirty-six years to realize what a load of bullshit it is and if there’s one thing I want to do for you it’s teach you the same.” “You have all kinds of plans for me, don’t you? You want to teach me about freedom, about pleasure, you want to write books with me, convert me…. Why do men always want to convert me? I must look like a convert.” “You look like you want to be saved, ducks. You ask for it. You turn those big myopic eyes up at me as if I were Big Daddy Psychoanalyst. You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human. You sit there the whole time keeping tabs, making mental notes, imagining people as books or case histories—I know that game. You tell yourself you’re collecting material. You tell yourself you’re studying human nature. Art above life at all times.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Because one is not easily rid of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossible to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his comically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of The Rape of the Lock , burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of detective novels and action films. (“Chum,” Humbert’s revolver, parodies the “phallic” pistols of “Freudian” Westerns and the American Gun Mystique at large.) Quilty returns to the scene of the crime—a bed—and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “ lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished. ” The last details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood, and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does the Gothic Doppelgänger convention, with all its own “juvenile connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is still “ all covered with Quilty .” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readily—McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism—and the ambiguities of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere “dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible self, we are left with “ Clare Obscure ” and “ quilted Quilty, ” the patchwork self. Quilty refuses to die, just as the recaptured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name (1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoevsky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelgänger fiction instead discovers himself adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’s. Having hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spectral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all. The parodic references to R. L. Stevenson suggest that Nabokov had in mind Henry Jekyll’s painfully earnest discovery of the “truth” that “man is not only one, but truly two.

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

  A clever study investigated this question. In each trial, a dog owner offered his or her dog a desirable biscuit, then explicitly instructed the dog not to eat it and promptly left the room. Unbeknownst to the owner, however, an experimenter then entered the room and influenced the dog’s behavior, either handing the treat to the dog (who ate it) or removing the treat from the room. Afterward, the experimenter either told the owner the truth or lied. Half the owners were told that their dog had obeyed and to greet their dog in a warm and friendly manner; the rest heard that the dog had eaten the biscuit and should be scolded. This created four different scenarios: obedient dog with a friendly owner, obedient dog being scolded, disobedient dog with a friendly owner, and disobedient dog being scolded. What happened? The scolded dogs performed more behaviors that people perceive as stereotypically guilty, regardless of whether or not the dogs had disobeyed. This is evidence that dogs were not experiencing guilt at performing a forbidden act; rather, their owners were perceiving guilt when they believed the dog had eaten the biscuit.36 Another study looked at jealousy in dogs, asking owners to interact with a toy dog while the real dog watched. The toy barked, whined, and wagged its tail. The study found that dogs in this situation would snap, whine, push at the owner and the toy, and insert themselves between the owner and the toy, more often than when the owner interacted with a different toy (a jack-o-lantern) or read a book. The authors interpreted these findings to mean that the dogs were jealous, particularly because many of the dogs tested sniffed the anus of the toy dog. Unfortunately, the experimenters did not test to see if the owners were behaving differently in the three conditions (toy dog, jack-o-lantern, and reading) in any way that could account for the dogs’ behavior. They assumed that the owner’s behavior was identical, and that the dog understood that jealously was called for in only one condition. So even though many pet owners are confident that their dogs experience jealousy, we have no scientific evidence to support this belief.37

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

  People will use whatever measure you give them to describe how they feel. If someone feels crappy and you give her only an anxiety scale, she’ll report her feelings using words for anxiety. She might even come to feel anxious as the words prime her to simulate an instance of “Anxiety.” Alternatively if you hand her a depression scale, she’ll report her feeling using words for depression and might likewise end up feeling depressed. This would explain my mysterious results. Concepts like “Anxiety” and “Depression” are highly variable and malleable. Words on questionnaires can influence people’s categorizations, just like the basic emotion method influences perceptions with its list of emotion words. 40 I encountered something similar in a physician’s office not long ago. I’d been feeling fatigued for some time and had gained some weight, and the doctor asked, “Are you depressed?” I responded, “Well, I don’t have sad feelings, but I do feel dead tired much of the time.” He countered with, “Maybe you’re depressed and you don’t know it.” My doctor did not realize that unpleasant affect can have a physical cause, which in my case was probably lack of sleep from running a lab of a hundred people, staying up late working on this book, and being a mother to my teenage daughter, plus a little thing called menopause. (I wound up explaining interoception and body budgets to him.) But here’s the thing: If he had simply diagnosed me with depression, he could have actually cultivated a feeling of depression in me in that instant. Sure, I was fatigued, and I probably had some inflammation going on due to a bit of chronic stress. If I hadn’t resisted, I could have come away with a prescription for antidepressants and a belief that something was seriously wrong with my life or myself for being unable to cope. This belief might have worsened my miscalibrated body budget, if I started to search for problems in my life . . . and you can always find something if you look. Instead, my doctor and I uncovered a body-budgeting issue and looked for ways to repair it. My doctor didn’t realize it, but he was co-constructing my experience. He wanted to construct one social reality, and I had another. When prediction error from the world dominates prediction, you can have anxiety. Suppose you couldn’t predict at all, ever. What would happen? For starters, your body budget would be screwed up because you couldn’t predict your metabolic needs. You’d have difficulty integrating sensory input from vision, hearing, smell, interoception, nociception, and your other sensory systems into a cohesive whole.

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

  Imagine if I’d described my conceptual combination to my lab members: “Robert probably feels horrible about his failure, and I am pleased about that.” My words would have been highly inappropriate. No one else in my lab knew my history with Robert, nor my simultaneous guilt and embarrassment, so they wouldn’t have understood my perspective and might have viewed me as an ass myself. So instead, I said, “I am feeling a bit of schadenfreude,” and everybody in the room smiled and nodded with recognition. One word efficiently communicated my emotional experience and made it socially acceptable, because everyone else in the lab had the concept and could construct a perception of schadenfreude. We couldn’t have done that with mere pleasantly valenced affect at someone else’s misfortune. The situation is exactly the same for a more familiar Western emotion like sadness. Any healthy human can experience low-arousal, unpleasant affect. But you cannot experience sadness with all of its cultural meaning, appropriate actions, and other functions of emotion unless you have the concept “Sadness.” Some scientists argue that without an emotion concept, the emotion still exists but the affected person doesn’t realize it, implying a state of emotion outside of consciousness. I suppose this is a possibility, but I doubt it. If you had no concept of “Flower” and someone showed you a rose, you’d experience only a plant, not a flower. No scientist would claim that you’re seeing a flower but just “don’t realize it.” Similarly, the blobby image in chapter 2 does not have a hidden bee in it. You perceived the bee only because of conceptual knowledge. The same reasoning applies to emotions; without the concept “Liget” or “Sadness” or “Chiplessness” to categorize with, there is no emotion, only a pattern of sensory signals.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We had been that close. And if I felt guilty, it was because I was able to go down and climb up again, whereas he was trapped. As if I were Dante and he were Ugolino (one of his favorite characters from the Inferno) and I could return from hell and relate his story, write the poetry I had culled from his madness, while he was utterly overwhelmed by it. You suck everyone dry, I accused myself; you use everyone. Everyone uses everyone, I answered. I remembered how dreadful I had felt about breaking up my marriage to Brian and it occurred to me that I had felt I deserved to spend the rest of my life immersed in his madness. My parents and Brian’s parents and the doctors had bullied me out of it. You’re only twenty-two, Brian’s psychiatrist had said; you can’t throw away your life. And I had fought him. I had accused him of betraying us both, of betraying our love. The fact was that I might easily have stayed with Brian if money and parental protestations hadn’t intervened. I felt I belonged with him. I felt I deserved to lose my life that way. I never suspected I had a life of my own at that point, and I was never good at leaving people, no matter how badly they treated me. Something in me always insisted on giving them another chance. Or perhaps it was cowardice. A kind of paralysis of the will. I stayed and wrote out my anger instead of acting on it. Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action, and even there it had been partly because of Adrian and the wild sexual obsession I had felt for him. Obviously it was dangerous to stare at your eyes in mirrors too long. I stood back to examine my body. Where did my body end and the air around it begin? Somewhere in an article on body image I had read that at times of stress—or ecstasy—we lose the boundaries of our bodies. We forget we own them. It was a sensation I often had and I recognized it as a significant part of my panics. Constant pain could do it, too. My broken leg had made me lose touch with the boundaries of my body. It was a paradox: great bodily pain or great bodily pleasure made you feel you were slipping out of your body. I tried to examine my physical self, to take stock so that I could remember who I was—if indeed my body could be said to be me. I remembered a story about Theodore Roethke alone in his big old house, dressing and undressing himself before the mirror, examining his nakedness in between bouts of composition. Perhaps the story was apocryphal, but it had the ring of truth for me. One’s body is intimately related to one’s writing, although the precise nature of the connection is subtle and may take years to understand.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  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. Kaoru and the others appear in the eleventh-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu. The characters are based on people the author knew, but Kaoru's type appears in every culture and period: these are men and women who seem to be searching for an ideal partner. The one they have is never quite right; at first glance a person excites them, but they soon see faults, and when a new person crosses their path, he or she looks better and the first person is forgotten. These types often try to work on the imperfect mortal who has excited them, to improve them culturally and morally. But this proves extremely unsatisfactory for both parties. The truth about this type is not that they are searching for an ideal but that they are hopelessly unhappy with themselves. You may mistake their dissatisfaction for a perfectionist's high standards, but in point of fact nothing will really satisfy them, for their unhappiness is deep-rooted. You can recognize them by their past, which will be littered with short-lived, stormy romances. Also, they will tend to compare you to others, and to try to remake you. You may not realize at first what you have gotten into, but people like this will eventually prove hopelessly anti-seductive because they cannot see your individual qualities. Cut the romance off before it happens.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  After filling for three years the post of president of one of the government boards at Moscow, Stepan Arkadyevitch had won the respect, as well as the liking, of his fellow-officials, subordinates, and superiors, and all who had had business with him. The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism—not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—the most important point—his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes. On reaching the offices of the board, Stepan Arkadyevitch, escorted by a deferential porter with a portfolio, went into his little private room, put on his uniform, and went into the boardroom. The clerks and copyists all rose, greeting him with good-humored deference. Stepan Arkadyevitch moved quickly, as ever, to his place, shook hands with his colleagues, and sat down. He made a joke or two, and talked just as much as was consistent with due decorum, and began work. No one knew better than Stepan Arkadyevitch how to hit on the exact line between freedom, simplicity, and official stiffness necessary for the agreeable conduct of business. A secretary, with the good-humored deference common to everyone in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s office, came up with papers, and began to speak in the familiar and easy tone which had been introduced by Stepan Arkadyevitch. “We have succeeded in getting the information from the government department of Penza. Here, would you care?...” “You’ve got them at last?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laying his finger on the paper. “Now, gentlemen....” And the sitting of the board began. “If they knew,” he thought, bending his head with a significant air as he listened to the report, “what a guilty little boy their president was half an hour ago.” And his eyes were laughing during the reading of the report. Till two o’clock the sitting would go on without a break, and at two o’clock there would be an interval and luncheon. It was not yet two, when the large glass doors of the boardroom suddenly opened and someone came in. All the officials sitting on the further side under the portrait of the Tsar and the eagle, delighted at any distraction, looked round at the door; but the doorkeeper standing at the door at once drove out the intruder, and closed the glass door after him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “But how can it be helped?” said Levin penitently. “It was my last effort. And I did try with all my soul. I can’t. I’m no good at it.” “It’s not that you’re no good at it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch; “it is that you don’t look at it as you should.” “Perhaps not,” Levin answered dejectedly. “Oh! do you know brother Nikolay’s turned up again?” This brother Nikolay was the elder brother of Konstantin Levin, and half-brother of Sergey Ivanovitch; a man utterly ruined, who had dissipated the greater part of his fortune, was living in the strangest and lowest company, and had quarreled with his brothers. “What did you say?” Levin cried with horror. “How do you know?” “Prokofy saw him in the street.” “Here in Moscow? Where is he? Do you know?” Levin got up from his chair, as though on the point of starting off at once. “I am sorry I told you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, shaking his head at his younger brother’s excitement. “I sent to find out where he is living, and sent him his IOU to Trubin, which I paid. This is the answer he sent me.” And Sergey Ivanovitch took a note from under a paper-weight and handed it to his brother. Levin read in the queer, familiar handwriting: “I humbly beg you to leave me in peace. That’s the only favor I ask of my gracious brothers.—Nikolay Levin.” Levin read it, and without raising his head stood with the note in his hands opposite Sergey Ivanovitch. There was a struggle in his heart between the desire to forget his unhappy brother for the time, and the consciousness that it would be base to do so. “He obviously wants to offend me,” pursued Sergey Ivanovitch; “but he cannot offend me, and I should have wished with all my heart to assist him, but I know it’s impossible to do that.” “Yes, yes,” repeated Levin. “I understand and appreciate your attitude to him; but I shall go and see him.” “If you want to, do; but I shouldn’t advise it,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “As regards myself, I have no fear of your doing so; he will not make you quarrel with me; but for your own sake, I should say you would do better not to go. You can’t do him any good; still, do as you please.” “Very likely I can’t do any good, but I feel—especially at such a moment—but that’s another thing—I feel I could not be at peace.” “Well, that I don’t understand,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “One thing I do understand,” he added; “it’s a lesson in humility. I have come to look very differently and more charitably on what is called infamous since brother Nikolay has become what he is ... you know what he did....” “Oh, it’s awful, awful!” repeated Levin.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Being a cop's just a job like any other." Giving this answer to the slightly scornful friend of long standing who was asking him why he had joined the police force, Mario knew that he was lying. He did not much care for women, although it was easy for him to get a piece of the action from prostitutes. The fact of Dede's presence made the hatred he felt all around him in his life as a policeman seem like a heavy burden. Being a cop embarrassed him. He wanted to ignore the fact, but it enveloped him. Worse, it flowed in his veins. He was afraid of being poisone9 by it. Slowly at first, then with increasing force, he became involved with Dede. Dede could be the antidote. The Police in his veins circulated a little less strongly, grew weaker. He felt a little less guilty. The blood in his veins was then less black, and this made him a target for the scorn of the hoodlums and the vengeance of Tony. Was it true that the prison of Bougen was filled with beauti · ful female spies? Mario kept hoping that he would be called in for a case involving a theft of documents concerning national defense matters. In Dede's room, Rue Saint-Pierre, Mario was sitting, feet on the floor, on the divan bed covered with a plain fringed blue 47 I QUERELLE cotton bedspread pulled over unmade sheets. Dede jumped on to the bed to kneel beside the immobile profile of Mario's face and torso. The detective didn't say anything. Not a muscle in his face moved. Never before had Dede seen him look so hard, dra\vn, and sad; his lips were dry and set in a mean expression. "And now what? \Vhat's going to happen? I'll go down to the port, take a good look around . . . I'll see if he's there. \Vhat d'you say?"

• From Querelle (1953)

  And that was enough said. A needle shot through the three men's heads, uniting them with the strong white thread of sudden comprehension. Gil turned his head. The mention of his face close to that officer's illuminated his own memory. As for the Commissioner, a quick tremor of intuition revealed the truth to him when he heard Seblon's tone of voice change on the words "his face . . . " For a couple of seconds (if that) a tight sense of complicity united the three men. Neverthelessnor will this seem strange to any but those readers who have never experienced similar instants of revelation-the police officer tried to suppress this recognition, as if it had been a potential danger. Let us say that he surmounted it. He also buried it, under the thick skin of his mode of thought. In the Lieutenant, the interior theatricals continued, and, so it seemed to him, with ever-increasing success. Now he felt sure that everything would tum out just right. He became more and more attached to the young mason, in a mystical and specific way-the more he appeared to be distancing himself from him, not only by denying his identity as the attacker, but then by defending himself against the assumption that he was protecting Gil out of a generous impulse. \Vhen he negated his generosity, the Lieutenant destroyed it within himself, and all he allowed to remain was a feeling of indulgence for the criminal plus the conviction that he now was a moral participant in the crime. It was this sense of culpability that was to betray him, in the end. Lieutenant Seblon proceeded to insult 211 I QUERELLE the Commissioner. He so to speak slapped him in the face. He knew that the creation of grave beauty that characterizes a true work of art often begins in the most despicable kind of hamacting. He caught up with Gil, surpassed him. The same mechanism that had made it possible for Lieutenant Seblon to say it wasn't Gil who attacked him, had formerly caused him to appear cowardly and mean in regard to Quere11e. "Come on, buddy! Cough it up, or I'll strangle you! Jewish combat. Five against one."

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To leave him with his mother was out of the question. The divorced mother would have her own illegitimate family, in which his position as a stepson and his education would not be good. Keep him with him? He knew that would be an act of vengeance on his part, and that he did not want. But apart from this, what more than all made divorce seem impossible to Alexey Alexandrovitch was, that by consenting to a divorce he would be completely ruining Anna. The saying of Darya Alexandrovna at Moscow, that in deciding on a divorce he was thinking of himself, and not considering that by this he would be ruining her irrevocably, had sunk into his heart. And connecting this saying with his forgiveness of her, with his devotion to the children, he understood it now in his own way. To consent to a divorce, to give her her freedom, meant in his thoughts to take from himself the last tie that bound him to life—the children whom he loved; and to take from her the last prop that stayed her on the path of right, to thrust her down to her ruin. If she were divorced, he knew she would join her life to Vronsky’s, and their tie would be an illegitimate and criminal one, since a wife, by the interpretation of the ecclesiastical law, could not marry while her husband was living. “She will join him, and in a year or two he will throw her over, or she will form a new tie,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch. “And I, by agreeing to an unlawful divorce, shall be to blame for her ruin.” He had thought it all over hundreds of times, and was convinced that a divorce was not at all simple, as Stepan Arkadyevitch had said, but was utterly impossible. He did not believe a single word Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him; to every word he had a thousand objections to make, but he listened to him, feeling that his words were the expression of that mighty brutal force which controlled his life and to which he would have to submit. “The only question is on what terms you agree to give her a divorce. She does not want anything, does not dare ask you for anything, she leaves it all to your generosity.” “My God, my God! what for?” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, remembering the details of divorce proceedings in which the husband took the blame on himself, and with just the same gesture with which Vronsky had done the same, he hid his face for shame in his hands. “You are distressed, I understand that. But if you think it over....” “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.

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

  So as a human being, you have the ability to shape your environment to modify your conceptual system, which means that you are ultimately responsible for the concepts that you accept and reject. As we discussed in chapter 8 , the predictive brain expands the horizon of self-control beyond the moment of action and therefore broadens your responsibility in a complicated way. Your culture might teach you that people of a certain skin color are more likely to be criminals, but you have the ability to mitigate the harm that such beliefs can cause, and hone your predictions in a different direction. You can befriend people of different skin tones and see for yourself that they’re law-abiding citizens. You can choose not to watch TV shows that reinforce racist stereotypes. Or you can blindly follow the norms of your culture, accept the stereotyped concepts bestowed upon you, and increase the chances that you’ll treat certain people badly . Dylann Roof, the man who shot African American members of a Bible study group, chose to surround himself with symbols of white supremacy. Sure, he grew up in a society struggling with racism, but so did most adults in the United States, and most of us don’t go around shooting people. So at the level of neurons, you and your society jointly cause certain predictions to become more likely in your brain. However, you still bear responsibility to overcome harmful ideology. The difficult truth is that each of us, ultimately, is responsible for our own predictions. The law has precedent for this prediction-based view of responsibility. For example, if you drive drunk and hit someone with your car, you are responsible for the harm you caused, even though you could not control your limbs effectively in your inebriated state. You should have known better, because every adult in our society knows that drunkenness carries a risk of bad decision-making, so you are culpable for bad things that happen downstream. The law calls this a foreseeability argument. It doesn’t matter whether you intended to cause harm or not: you are liable. And we now have enough scientific evidence to extend the foreseeability argument from large-scale common sense to the millisecond predictions of the brain. You know full well that some of your concepts, such as racial stereotypes, can lead you into trouble. If your brain predicts that an African American youth in front of you is holding a weapon, and you perceive a gun where none is present, you have some degree of culpability even in the face of affective realism, because it is your responsibility to change your concepts. If you educate yourself and inoculate yourself against such stereotypes, expanding your conceptual system with the goal to change your predictions, you still might mistakenly see a gun where none is present, and a tragedy still might occur.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I am glad it has all ended so satisfactorily, and that you are back again,” he went on. “Come, what do they say about the new act I have got passed in the council?” Anna had heard nothing of this act, and she felt conscience-stricken at having been able so readily to forget what was to him of such importance. “Here, on the other hand, it has made a great sensation,” he said, with a complacent smile. She saw that Alexey Alexandrovitch wanted to tell her something pleasant to him about it, and she brought him by questions to telling it. With the same complacent smile he told her of the ovations he had received in consequence of the act he had passed. “I was very, very glad. It shows that at last a reasonable and steady view of the matter is becoming prevalent among us.” Having drunk his second cup of tea with cream, and bread, Alexey Alexandrovitch got up, and was going towards his study. “And you’ve not been anywhere this evening? You’ve been dull, I expect?” he said. “Oh, no!” she answered, getting up after him and accompanying him across the room to his study. “What are you reading now?” she asked. “Just now I’m reading Duc de Lille, _Poésie des Enfers,_” he answered. “A very remarkable book.” Anna smiled, as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love, and, putting her hand under his, she escorted him to the door of the study. She knew his habit, that had grown into a necessity, of reading in the evening. She knew, too, that in spite of his official duties, which swallowed up almost the whole of his time, he considered it his duty to keep up with everything of note that appeared in the intellectual world. She knew, too, that he was really interested in books dealing with politics, philosophy, and theology, that art was utterly foreign to his nature; but, in spite of this, or rather, in consequence of it, Alexey Alexandrovitch never passed over anything in the world of art, but made it his duty to read everything. She knew that in politics, in philosophy, in theology, Alexey Alexandrovitch often had doubts, and made investigations; but on questions of art and poetry, and, above all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding, he had the most distinct and decided opinions. He was fond of talking about Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, of the significance of new schools of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with very conspicuous consistency. “Well, God be with you,” she said at the door of the study, where a shaded candle and a decanter of water were already put by his armchair. “And I’ll write to Moscow.” He pressed her hand, and again kissed it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “She’s still here,” she thought. “What am I to say to her? Oh, dear! what have I done, what have I said? Why was I rude to her? What am I to do? What am I to say to her?” thought Kitty, and she stopped in the doorway. Varenka in her hat and with the parasol in her hands was sitting at the table examining the spring which Kitty had broken. She lifted her head. “Varenka, forgive me, do forgive me,” whispered Kitty, going up to her. “I don’t remember what I said. I....” “I really didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Varenka, smiling. Peace was made. But with her father’s coming all the world in which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle to which she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it seemed to her intolerable, and she felt a longing to get back quickly into the fresh air, to Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she knew from letters, her sister Dolly had already gone with her children. But her affection for Varenka did not wane. As she said good-bye, Kitty begged her to come to them in Russia. “I’ll come when you get married,” said Varenka. “I shall never marry.” “Well, then, I shall never come.” “Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now, remember your promise,” said Kitty. The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home to Russia cured. She was not so gay and thoughtless as before, but she was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her. PART THREE Chapter 1

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  CHAPTER 8 CHANGE YOUR LIFE In this section, we want to stay alert during the process of creation, so much so that the story and the self change each other beneath each other’s attention. Let’s continue searching for the story, for more material, wrestling with the material in the present to shape the past. We can do this by adding facets and valences—looking for other angles, other connections, deepening everything with richer material from more sources. Having more material from which to edit down is a healthy state for a creator to be in. And better if that material is rich, vibrant, and unique. So we’ll look at making our work and our material multifaceted and complex, like people. We’ll look at creating thoughts and explorations that have many opportunities for combination with our other thoughts and representations. In short, we’ll try to make our material more alive. If our memoir is a story of a time past, our present-tense experience of telling the story can bring insight and experience. The word reflection begins to take on a new meaning. It’s looking backward, yes, but this looking reflects on our present selves and changes us. This is what we want from art: to be changed. So in this section we’ll look at work that through multiplicity of thought and attention changed their authors during the process of making the book. WHY I KILLED PETER by Alfred and Olivier Ka Why I Killed Peter (2008, NBM), written by Olivier Ka and drawn by the comics artist Alfred, is a difficult and harrowing story of abuse and trying to reconcile the past with the present. The protagonist is young Olivier, who found himself abused by the priest, Peter, at a summer camp.Olivier’s awareness builds as he grows older and is able to comprehend the situation with more clarity at each age.Each chapter begins with a drawing of Olivier at a particular age and a new reason why he had to symbolically “kill Peter.” THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT The bulk of the book is rich with clever and elegant drawings and symbolism. Bold and loose brush strokes create atmosphere, while the characters are rendered in consistent cartoon lines. Occasional scratch pen lines create a feeling of angst and trauma. The book culminates as adult Ka and artist Alfred visit the scene of the transgressions, but the path toward atonement is presented in raw, inelegant digital photos. It scrapes away our appreciation of the artistry of the earlier story to see it for what it really is: real life, banal, ugly, hidden in plain sight. This scene is too urgent and raw to render in drawings. The artists want you to see it for yourself. This is a great example of a book that begins before the story is completely known. Ka began his book without knowing how this final scene, a confrontation with the place, and perhaps the person, would play out. Creating the book instigated the scene.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When she came into the bedroom, he was already in bed. His lips were sternly compressed, and his eyes looked away from her. Anna got into her bed, and lay expecting every minute that he would begin to speak to her again. She both feared his speaking and wished for it. But he was silent. She waited for a long while without moving, and had forgotten about him. She thought of that other; she pictured him, and felt how her heart was flooded with emotion and guilty delight at the thought of him. Suddenly she heard an even, tranquil snore. For the first instant Alexey Alexandrovitch seemed, as it were, appalled at his own snoring, and ceased; but after an interval of two breathings the snore sounded again, with a new tranquil rhythm. “It’s late, it’s late,” she whispered with a smile. A long while she lay, not moving, with open eyes, whose brilliance she almost fancied she could herself see in the darkness. Chapter 10 From that time a new life began for Alexey Alexandrovitch and for his wife. Nothing special happened. Anna went out into society, as she had always done, was particularly often at Princess Betsy’s, and met Vronsky everywhere. Alexey Alexandrovitch saw this, but could do nothing. All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she confronted with a barrier which he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity. Outwardly everything was the same, but their inner relations were completely changed. Alexey Alexandrovitch, a man of great power in the world of politics, felt himself helpless in this. Like an ox with head bent, submissively he awaited the blow which he felt was lifted over him. Every time he began to think about it, he felt that he must try once more, that by kindness, tenderness, and persuasion there was still hope of saving her, of bringing her back to herself, and every day he made ready to talk to her. But every time he began talking to her, he felt that the spirit of evil and deceit, which had taken possession of her, had possession of him too, and he talked to her in a tone quite unlike that in which he had meant to talk. Involuntarily he talked to her in his habitual tone of jeering at anyone who should say what he was saying. And in that tone it was impossible to say what needed to be said to her. Chapter 11 That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why. “Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake!...”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Nevertheless, my objections made him more and more impatient with me, and I began to wonder if I were not guilty of great disloyalty and indiffe rence concerning the lot of American Negroes abroad. (I find that there is some thing helplessly sardonic in my tone now, as I write this, which also handicapped me on that distant afternoon. Richard, more than anyone I have ever known, brought this tendency to the f(>re in me. I always wanted to kick him, and say, "Oh, come off it, baby, ain't no white fo lks around now, let's tell it like it is. ") Still, most of the Negroes I knew had not come to Paris to ALAS, POOR RICHARD look for work. They were writers or dancers or composers, they were on the G.I. Bill, or fe llowships, or more mysterious shoestrings, or they worked as jazz musicians. I did not know anyone who doubted that the American hiring system re mained in Paris exactly what it had been at home-but how was one to prove this, with a handful, at best, of problematical Negroes, scattered throughout Paris? Unlike Richard, I had no reason to suppose that any of them e\'en wanted to work fo r Americans-my evidence, in fa ct, suggested that this was just about the last thing they wanted to do. But, e\·en if they did, and even if they were qualified, how could one prove that So-and-So had not been hired by TIVA because he was a Ne gro? I had found this almost impossible to do at home. Isn't this, I suggested, the kind of thing which ought to be done fr om Washington? Richard, however, was not to be put otl� and he had made me fe el so guilty that I agreed to find out how many Negroes were then working tor the ECA. There turned out to be two or three or fo ur, I forget how many. In any case, we were dead, there being no way on earth to prove that there should have been six or seven. But we were all in too deep to be able to turn back now, and, ac cordingly, there was a pilot meeting of this extraordinary or ganization, quite late, as I remember, one evening, in a pri\'ate room over a bistro.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The confession he had promised was the one painful incident of this time. He consulted the old prince, and with his sanction gave Kitty his diary, in which there was written the confession that tortured him. He had written this diary at the time with a view to his future wife. Two things caused him anguish: his lack of purity and his lack of faith. His confession of unbelief passed unnoticed. She was religious, had never doubted the truths of religion, but his external unbelief did not affect her in the least. Through love she knew all his soul, and in his soul she saw what she wanted, and that such a state of soul should be called unbelieving was to her a matter of no account. The other confession set her weeping bitterly. Levin, not without an inner struggle, handed her his diary. He knew that between him and her there could not be, and should not be, secrets, and so he had decided that so it must be. But he had not realized what an effect it would have on her, he had not put himself in her place. It was only when the same evening he came to their house before the theater, went into her room and saw her tear-stained, pitiful, sweet face, miserable with suffering he had caused and nothing could undo, he felt the abyss that separated his shameful past from her dovelike purity, and was appalled at what he had done. “Take them, take these dreadful books!” she said, pushing away the notebooks lying before her on the table. “Why did you give them me? No, it was better anyway,” she added, touched by his despairing face. “But it’s awful, awful!” His head sank, and he was silent. He could say nothing. “You can’t forgive me,” he whispered. “Yes, I forgive you; but it’s terrible!” But his happiness was so immense that this confession did not shatter it, it only added another shade to it. She forgave him; but from that time more than ever he considered himself unworthy of her, morally bowed down lower than ever before her, and prized more highly than ever his undeserved happiness. Chapter 17 Unconsciously going over in his memory the conversations that had taken place during and after dinner, Alexey Alexandrovitch returned to his solitary room. Darya Alexandrovna’s words about forgiveness had aroused in him nothing but annoyance. The applicability or non-applicability of the Christian precept to his own case was too difficult a question to be discussed lightly, and this question had long ago been answered by Alexey Alexandrovitch in the negative. Of all that had been said, what stuck most in his memory was the phrase of stupid, good-natured Turovtsin—“_Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and shot him!_” Everyone had apparently shared this feeling, though from politeness they had not expressed it.