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.

Page 24 of 99 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I could persuade her to do so many things—their list might stupefy a professional educator; but no matter how I pleaded or stormed, I could never make her read any other book than the so-called comic books or stories in magazines for American females. Any literature a peg higher smacked to her of school, and though theoretically willing to enjoy A Girl of the Limberlost or the Arabian Nights , or Little Women , she was quite sure she would not fritter away her “vacation” on such highbrow reading matter. I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert —or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter , which I got at the same store where I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially “beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid . But even at our very best moments, when we sat reading on a rainy day (Lo’s glance skipping from the window to her wrist watch and back again), or had a quiet hearty meal in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch (Lo, as we drove on: “That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to describe to that jerk in the store”); on all those random occasions, I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Of course, in my old-fashioned, old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of “normal child” had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C. and its fascinating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlighted era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place—even bearing in mind the crude behavior of American schoolchildren—I still was under the impression that whatever went on among those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the “latency” period of girlhood. Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred—and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret! Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita—the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt the writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonizing thought that her mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a nice country road where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert Humbert was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and inanely driving toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip, under the bright wing of which he might dare turn to his seatmate. It was she, however, who broke the silence: “Oh, a squashed squirrel,” she said. “What a shame.” “Yes, isn’t it?” (eager, hopeful Hum). “Let us stop at the next gas station,” Lo continued. “I want to go to the washroom.” “We shall stop wherever you want,” I said. And then as a lovely, lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I suggested we might perhaps — “Drive on,” my Lo cried shrilly. “Righto. Take it easy.” (Down, poor beast, down.) I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling. “You chump,” she said, sweetly smiling at me. “You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man.” Was she just joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her. The sweat rolled down my neck, and we almost ran over some little animal or other that was crossing the road with tail erect, and again my vile-tempered companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the filling station, she scrambled out without a word and was a long time away. Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken nose wiped my windshield—they do it differently at every place, from chamois cloth to soapy brush, this fellow used a pink sponge. She appeared at last. “Look,” she said in that neutral voice that hurt me so, “give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that hospital. What’s the number?” “Get in,” I said. “You can’t call that number.” “Why?” “Get in and slam the door.” She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Hyde,” his “ talons still tingling. ” In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Kurtz is Marlow’s “shadow” and “shade.” Although Humbert calls Quilty his “shadow,” the pun on Humbert’s name ( ombre = shadow) suggests that he is as much a shadow as Quilty, and like the shadow self who pursues the professor in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow” (1850), Humbert is dressed all in black. Quilty in fact first regards Humbert as possibly being “ some familiar and innocuous hallucination ” of his own; and in the novel’s closing moments the masked narrator addresses Lolita and completes this transferral: “And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.” The book might have been told by “C.Q.,” the doubling reversed; “H.H.” is simply a better artist, more likely to possess the “secret of durable pigments.” If the Humbert-Quilty doubling is a conscious parody of “William Wilson” (1839), it is with good reason, for Poe’s story is unusual among Doppelgänger tales in that it presents a reversal of the conventional situation: the weak and evil self is the main character, pursued by the moral self, whom he kills. Nabokov goes further and with one vertiginous sweep stands the convention on its head: in terms of the nineteenth-century Double tale, it should not even be necessary to kill Quilty and what he represents, for Humbert has already declared his love for Lolita before he goes to Quilty’s Pavor Manor, and, in asking the no longer nymphic Lolita to go away with him, he has transcended his obsession. Although Humbert’s unqualified expression of “ guilt ” comes at the end of the novel, in the chronology of events it too occurs before he kills Quilty. As a “symbolic” act, the killing is gratuitous; the parodic design is complete. Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “ I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd! ” he tells Humbert, and his words are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him totally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov parody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to connect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the confessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged: “ because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die. ” Since Quilty has been described as “the American Maeterlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene should be extravagantly “symbolic.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Listen, kiddies, we’ve got the real thing on our hands so you can just put your porno paperbacks aside and lend me your dirty ears….” Lalah looked at Chloe and Chloe looked at Lalah and they both began to laugh as if they knew something I didn’t know. “Well—what is it?” They kept laughing conspiratorially. “Come on you idiots—tell me!” “You’re going to say Pierre tried to seduce you…” Lalah said, still giggling. “How the fuck did you know?” “Because he tried it with me,” she said. “And me,” said Chloe. “You’re kidding.” “We are not kidding,” Lalah said. “Would that we were….” “So what happened?” “Well I laughed him out of bed, and Chloe says she did, too…but I’m not entirely sure I believe her….” “You bitch!” Chloe yelled. “OK…OK…I believe you.” “And you mean you just stuck around here after that happened?” “Well, why not?” Lalah said nonchalantly. “He’s pretty harmless…. He’s just a bit horny because Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy.” “A bit horny? You call that a bit horny? I call that incest.” “Oh God, Isadora, you really are too much. That’s just your fucking brother-in-law…. It isn’t really incest.” “It isn’t?” I think I was disappointed. “It scarcely counts at all,” Lalah said contemptuously, “but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it seem more lurid on paper.” (Lalah hated my writing even then.) “I’ll work on it,” I said. On the way back from Karkabi with the new maid, Pierre was utterly cool and unruffled. He pointed out landmarks. Arabs, I thought, goddamned Arabs. What a disproportionate sense of guilt I had over all my petty sexual transgressions! Yet there were people in the world, plenty of them, who did what they felt like and never had a moment’s guilt over it—as long as they didn’t get caught. Why had I been cursed with such a hypertrophied superego? Was it just being Jewish? What did Moses do for the Jews anyway by leading them out of Egypt and giving them the concept of one God, matzoh-ball soup, and everlasting guilt? Couldn’t he just have left them alone worshipping cats and bulls and falcons or living like the other primates (to whom—as my sister Randy always reminds me—they are so closely related)? Is it any wonder that everyone hates the Jews for giving the world guilt? Couldn’t we have gotten along nicely without it? Just sloshing around in the primeval slush and worshipping dung beetles and fucking when the mood struck us? Think of those Egyptians who built the pyramids, for example. Did they sit around worrying about whether they were Equal Opportunity Employers? Did it ever dawn on them to ask whether their mortal remains were worth the lives of the thousands upon thousands who died building their pyramids? Repression, ambivalence, guilt. “What—me worry?” asks the Arab. No wonder they want to exterminate the Jews. Wouldn’t anybody?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He felt that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it is called, from the heart—that is to say, had said only just what they were thinking and feeling—they would simply have looked into each other’s faces, and Konstantin could only have said, “You’re dying, you’re dying!” and Nikolay could only have answered, “I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” And they could have said nothing more, if they had said only what was in their hearts. But life like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried to do what he had been trying to do all his life, and never could learn to do, though, as far as he could observe, many people knew so well how to do it, and without it there was no living at all. He tried to say what he was not thinking, but he felt continually that it had a ring of falsehood, that his brother detected him in it, and was exasperated at it. The third day Nikolay induced his brother to explain his plan to him again, and began not merely attacking it, but intentionally confounding it with communism. “You’ve simply borrowed an idea that’s not your own, but you’ve distorted it, and are trying to apply it where it’s not applicable.” “But I tell you it’s nothing to do with it. They deny the justice of property, of capital, of inheritance, while I do not deny this chief stimulus.” (Levin felt disgusted himself at using such expressions, but ever since he had been engrossed by his work, he had unconsciously come more and more frequently to use words not Russian.) “All I want is to regulate labor.” “Which means, you’ve borrowed an idea, stripped it of all that gave it its force, and want to make believe that it’s something new,” said Nikolay, angrily tugging at his necktie. “But my idea has nothing in common....” “That, anyway,” said Nikolay Levin, with an ironical smile, his eyes flashing malignantly, “has the charm of—what’s one to call it?—geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness. It may be a Utopia. But if once one allows the possibility of making of all the past a _tabula rasa_—no property, no family—then labor would organize itself. But you gain nothing....” “Why do you mix things up? I’ve never been a communist.” “But I have, and I consider it’s premature, but rational, and it has a future, just like Christianity in its first ages.” “All that I maintain is that the labor force ought to be investigated from the point of view of natural science; that is to say, it ought to be studied, its qualities ascertained....”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He began to speak, trying to find words not to dissuade but simply to soothe her. But she did not heed him, and would not agree to anything. He bent down to her and took her hand, which resisted him. He kissed her hand, kissed her hair, kissed her hand again—still she was silent. But when he took her face in both his hands and said “Kitty!” she suddenly recovered herself, and began to cry, and they were reconciled. It was decided that they should go together the next day. Levin told his wife that he believed she wanted to go simply in order to be of use, agreed that Marya Nikolaevna’s being with his brother did not make her going improper, but he set off at the bottom of his heart dissatisfied both with her and with himself. He was dissatisfied with her for being unable to make up her mind to let him go when it was necessary (and how strange it was for him to think that he, so lately hardly daring to believe in such happiness as that she could love him—now was unhappy because she loved him too much!), and he was dissatisfied with himself for not showing more strength of will. Even greater was the feeling of disagreement at the bottom of his heart as to her not needing to consider the woman who was with his brother, and he thought with horror of all the contingencies they might meet with. The mere idea of his wife, his Kitty, being in the same room with a common wench, set him shuddering with horror and loathing. Chapter 17 The hotel of the provincial town where Nikolay Levin was lying ill was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels. This hotel had already reached that stage, and the soldier in a filthy uniform smoking in the entry, supposed to stand for a hall-porter, and the cast-iron, slippery, dark, and disagreeable staircase, and the free and easy waiter in a filthy frock coat, and the common dining-room with a dusty bouquet of wax flowers adorning the table, and filth, dust, and disorder everywhere, and at the same time the sort of modern up-to-date self-complacent railway uneasiness of this hotel, aroused a most painful feeling in Levin after their fresh young life, especially because the impression of falsity made by the hotel was so out of keeping with what awaited them.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery,” said Levin, conscious that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and dishonesty. “Such as banking, for instance,” he went on. “It’s an evil—the amassing of huge fortunes without labor, just the same thing as with the spirit monopolies, it’s only the form that’s changed. _Le roi est mort, vive le roi_. No sooner were the spirit monopolies abolished than the railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit without work.” “Yes, that may all be very true and clever.... Lie down, Krak!” Stepan Arkadyevitch called to his dog, who was scratching and turning over all the hay. He was obviously convinced of the correctness of his position, and so talked serenely and without haste. “But you have not drawn the line between honest and dishonest work. That I receive a bigger salary than my chief clerk, though he knows more about the work than I do—that’s dishonest, I suppose?” “I can’t say.” “Well, but I can tell you: your receiving some five thousand, let’s say, for your work on the land, while our host, the peasant here, however hard he works, can never get more than fifty roubles, is just as dishonest as my earning more than my chief clerk, and Malthus getting more than a station-master. No, quite the contrary; I see that society takes up a sort of antagonistic attitude to these people, which is utterly baseless, and I fancy there’s envy at the bottom of it....” “No, that’s unfair,” said Veslovsky; “how could envy come in? There is something not nice about that sort of business.” “You say,” Levin went on, “that it’s unjust for me to receive five thousand, while the peasant has fifty; that’s true. It is unfair, and I feel it, but....” “It really is. Why is it we spend our time riding, drinking, shooting, doing nothing, while they are forever at work?” said Vassenka Veslovsky, obviously for the first time in his life reflecting on the question, and consequently considering it with perfect sincerity. “Yes, you feel it, but you don’t give him your property,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, intentionally, as it seemed, provoking Levin. There had arisen of late something like a secret antagonism between the two brothers-in-law; as though, since they had married sisters, a kind of rivalry had sprung up between them as to which was ordering his life best, and now this hostility showed itself in the conversation, as it began to take a personal note. “I don’t give it away, because no one demands that from me, and if I wanted to, I could not give it away,” answered Levin, “and have no one to give it to.” “Give it to this peasant, he would not refuse it.” “Yes, but how am I to give it up? Am I to go to him and make a deed of conveyance?” “I don’t know; but if you are convinced that you have no right....”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Of course not, Will, don’t be so bloody silly. He doesn’t leave messages. He’s six years old.’ ‘I’m sure I left messages when I was six and I wasn’t nearly so clever as Rupert.’ ‘Will, we are talking about my baby.’ (I suppressed recall of the song of that name by the Four Tops.) ‘Look, I’m coming round straight away.’ ‘OK. Or give it a minute or two. We haven’t really had a chance for a little chat yet.’ I was aware that Rupert had entered the room. ‘Are you talking to Mummy?’ he said, with a solemn look on his face. I nodded as I carried on listening to Philippa, and winked at him. I sat on the edge of the bed and he came and leant beside me and slipped his arm around my back. ‘You can have a little chat with him any time you like,’ his mother asserted. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock—it’s way past his bedtime. We were supposed to be going to the Salmons for supper—I had to ring and say there was this crisis, we couldn’t come. It’s just ruined everything.’ ‘I’ll bring him over if you like,’ I offered, the problem of Arthur and visitors suddenly surfacing in my mind. ‘No, that would take far too long. I’ll come in the car.’ She put down the receiver as I was about to make another suggestion. ‘Is Mummy coming round here?’ asked Rupert, his expression an intriguing transition between petulance and relief. ‘She’ll be round in a minute,’ I confirmed. And it would not be very much more than that. I walked abstractedly towards the door. He trotted round, looking up at me. ‘Was she frightfully cross?’ he asked. ‘I’m afraid she was a bit, old chap.’ I made a plan. ‘Look, you can keep a secret, can’t you?’ ‘Of course I can,’ he said, assuming a very responsible air. ‘Well, look. What time was it when you left home?’ ‘About six o’clock.’ ‘And what did you do then?’ ‘First of all I went for a walk. A really long walk, actually, up that very steep path, you know—where the homosexuals go.’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ I muttered. ‘And then down to the bottom where we went roller-skating that time. And then all the way round to the top again. And then’ (he raised his arm in the air to designate the main thrust of his campaign) ‘all the way down here. I rang the bell for quite some time, but I could see there was a light on, and at last that African boy came down.’ ‘Did you tell him who you were?’ ‘Naturally. I told him I had to come in and wait for you.’ ‘Well the thing is, love, that that African chap, wants us to keep it a secret that he’s here. So what we’re going to do is hide him away when Mummy comes round, and pretend we’ve never seen him. All right?’

• 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)

  “Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m treating you and him. But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.” “But it’s insulting to him! _Et puis c’est ridicule_.” “And to me it’s both insulting and distressing! And I’m not at fault in any way, and there’s no need for me to suffer.” “Well, this I didn’t expect of you! _On peut être jaloux, mais à ce point, c’est du dernier ridicule!_” Levin turned quickly, and walked away from him into the depths of the avenue, and he went on walking up and down alone. Soon he heard the rumble of the trap, and saw from behind the trees how Vassenka, sitting in the hay (unluckily there was no seat in the trap) in his Scotch cap, was driven along the avenue, jolting up and down over the ruts. “What’s this?” Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house and stopped the trap. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had totally forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something to Veslovsky, then clambered into the trap, and they drove off together. Stepan Arkadyevitch and the princess were much upset by Levin’s action. And he himself felt not only in the highest degree _ridicule_, but also utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering what sufferings he and his wife had been through, when he asked himself how he should act another time, he answered that he should do just the same again. In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone except the princess, who could not pardon Levin’s action, became extraordinarily lively and good-humored, like children after a punishment or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious reception, so that by the evening Vassenka’s dismissal was spoken of, in the absence of the princess, as though it were some remote event. And Dolly, who had inherited her father’s gift of humorous storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter as she related for the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous additions, how she had only just put on her new shoes for the benefit of the visitor, and on going into the drawing-room, heard suddenly the rumble of the trap. And who should be in the trap but Vassenka himself, with his Scotch cap, and his songs and his gaiters, and all, sitting in the hay. “If only you’d ordered out the carriage! But no! and then I hear: ‘Stop!’ Oh, I thought they’ve relented. I look out, and behold a fat German being sat down by him and driving away.... And my new shoes all for nothing!...” Chapter 16

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “You’ve been enjoying yourself,” she began, trying to be calm and spiteful. But as soon as she opened her mouth, a stream of reproach, of senseless jealousy, of all that had been torturing her during that half hour which she had spent sitting motionless at the window, burst from her. It was only then, for the first time, that he clearly understood what he had not understood when he led her out of the church after the wedding. He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself. He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain. Never afterwards did he feel it with such intensity, but this first time he could not for a long while get over it. His natural feeling urged him to defend himself, to prove to her she was wrong; but to prove her wrong would mean irritating her still more and making the rupture greater that was the cause of all his suffering. One habitual feeling impelled him to get rid of the blame and to pass it on to her. Another feeling, even stronger, impelled him as quickly as possible to smooth over the rupture without letting it grow greater. To remain under such undeserved reproach was wretched, but to make her suffer by justifying himself was worse still. Like a man half-awake in an agony of pain, he wanted to tear out, to fling away the aching place, and coming to his senses, he felt that the aching place was himself. He could do nothing but try to help the aching place to bear it, and this he tried to do.

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

  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. But your culpability is diminished somewhat, because you’ve acted responsibly to change what you can. Eventually, the legal system must come to grips with the tremendous influence of culture on people’s concepts and predictions, which determine their experiences and actions. After all, the brain wires itself to the social reality it finds itself in. This ability is one of the most important evolutionary advantages we have as a species. So we bear some responsibility for the concepts we help wire into future generations of little human brains. But this is not an issue for criminal law. It is actually a policy issue relevant to the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech. The First Amendment was founded on the notion that free speech produces a war of ideas, allowing truth to prevail. However, its authors did not know that culture wires the brain. Ideas get under your skin, simply by sticking around for long enough. Once an idea is hardwired, you might not be in a position to easily reject it. … The science of emotion is a convenient flashlight for illuminating some of the law’s long-held assumptions about human nature—assumptions that we now know are not respected by the architecture of the human brain. People don’t have a rational side and an emotional side, with the former regulating the latter. Judges can’t set aside affect to issue rulings by pure reason. Jurors can’t detect emotion in defendants. The most objective-looking evidence is tainted by affective realism. Criminal behavior can’t be isolated to a blob in the brain. Emotional harm is not mere discomfort but can shorten a life. In short, every perception and experience within the courtroom—or anywhere else—is a culturally infused, highly personalized belief, corrected by sensory inputs from the world, rather than the result of an unbiased process.

• From Querelle (1953)

  259 I QUERELLE his mind. He wa s able to shelter behind his severe countenance. 41My ravisher! he's my ravisher! trotting out of the fog like a wolf, to kill me. For I did defend the money in the face of death." After a couple of days in the infirmary he spent his days at his desk. Carrying his arm in a sling he took walks on deck, then rested, stretched out in his cabin. "Would you like me to get you some tea, sir?" .. Yes, why not." He regretted that his ravisher had not been Querelle. How happy I should have been to struggle with him over my satchel! He \vould, at long last, have given me a chance to dem· onstrate my courage. But then, would I have charged him? Strange question that leads me to discover-what?-in myself. Let us remember the detectives' visit to my .cabin and my dizzi· ness then. I carne very close to handing Querelle over to them. I still ask myself whether my attitude and my responses did not, after all, point him out to the police. I hate the police, yet I came very close to doing their dirty work. It would be madness to believe that Querelle murdered Vic, except in that dream. I would like hin1 to have done it, but that is only because I can then con· struct a daydream around a tragedy of love. To offer Querelle my entire devotion! When he would come, at the end of his tether with remorse and torment, his temples throbbing, his hair damp with sweat, hounded by his deed, to confide in me! Then I could be his confessor and give him absolution, hold him in my arms and console him, and finally go to prison with him! If only I could have made myself believe a little more in his being the murderer, then I could have denounced him, thus immediately gaining the opportunity to console him and to share his punish· ment! \Vithou t knowing it, Querelle stood on the brink of in· credible peril. I came so very close to delivering him up into the hands of the cops!

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Lionel looked at Charles’s plate. He had two fish portions, the kind with the head still on and the skin all crispy and brown. They looked like brim or something. Lionel had stopped eating meat the year before, when he was in the hospital. There was something so awful about it. Meat was so proximal to death, and he’d spent too much time looking at videos of the commercial food industry while he was in the private care facility. The kind shot on shaky camera phones and involving a lot of panting and rustling clothes, up-close shots of the cows pressing their snouts to mud-streaked bars or lying pathetically on their sides, suffering, with oozing sores and distended abdomens. He wasn’t radically vegetarian. He possessed no militant energy whatsoever. But still he felt insecure about it, because the origin of his desire to forgo meat wasn’t environmental or even about the animals, really. It was selfish. Because the thought of consuming dead things, when he had been so close to dying, when he had wanted to die, was too much. Lionel waited for Charles to say something dismissive about vegetarians, for that moment when people projected onto him whatever lingering guilt they felt about the consumption of meat. He missed hamburgers terribly sometimes. “How do you know our mutual friend?” Charles asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you at one of his dumb parties before.” Lionel was prepared for the abruptness of the transition this time. “We were in the same department,” he said. He had known the host for several years, first when they were undergrad interns in the computer science department—Lionel from Michigan, the host from Arizona. Then both of them had been accepted into the same applied mathematics program at Wisconsin, and they’d been students together there for a few years, though Lionel was more pure math, while the host was working on applications to shielding and space exploration. They met for coffee and lunch after and before seminars and bonded over the fact that they hadn’t been math prodigies as kids. They slept together that first, itchy summer, fresh from undergrad and waiting for their lives to change. The host was now on track to graduate early—his project had attracted interest from the Department of Defense, which wanted to turn it into a weapon to be deployed in foreign wars. “Oh, you’re a weird genius too, huh? That must be nice.” Charles whistled in fake appreciation. “Definitely not a genius,” Lionel said. The word made him a little queasy. “I’m not in school right now, anyway. I’m on leave.” Charles spun his fork around with a flick of his fingers. The metal flashed as it moved across his wrist and came to rest right side up. He did it again, just like that, a neat little trick. “Then what do you do?” “I proctor exams,” Lionel said. “You what now?”

• From Querelle (1953)

  91 I QUERRLE stressing the hardness of his metallic voice or by giving exceed ingly laconic commands-sometimes in sheer telegraphese-the police officers shook his self-confidence. Faced with them, their authority, he immediately felt guilty and slipped into acting like a distracted girl, giving further indications of his guilt feelings . Mario decided to open the proceedings: "I'm sorry to take up your time, Lieutenant ... " "And so you should be." That remark, apparently accidental, certainly inadvertent, made him appear both cynical and rude. The inspector thought that he was trying to be funny, and this set him on edge. While the Lieutenant's embarrassment grew, Mario, who had been somewhat intimidated at first, started putting his questions more bluntly. To the fairly obvious "Did you ever notice any goings-on between Vic and any particular buddy of his?" Seblon gave the reply-cut in half by a frog-in-the-throat that did not go unnoticed by the ques tioners-: "How exactly does one recognize such affairs?" His own, obviously overstated retort made him blush. His embarrassment grew. To Mario, the strangeness of the officer's replies was only too apparent. Since the Lieutenant's strength lay in his speech-his weakness, too-he now tried to regain the upper hand by this sorely undermined verbal ability. He said : ccHow can I keep track of what the boys do in their own time? Even if that crewman, Vic, got murdered because of some unsavory involvement, I just wouldn't know about it." "Of course not, Lieutenant. But, sometimes one happens to hear something." "You must be joking. I do not eavesdrop on my men. And you better realize that even if some of the young fellows did have dealings with revolting types such as you have in mind, th ey wouldn't boast about them. I should imagine their meet ings arc shruuded in such secrecy ... " He realized that he wasn't far from singing the praises of

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  But as Constantine sought Silvestro within Soracte to cure his leprosy, so this man called me as an adept to cure the fever of his pride; he demanded counsel of me; and I kept silent, for his words seemed drunken. And then he said to me: ‘Let not thy heart misdoubt; even now I do absolve thee, and do thou teach me so to act, that I may cast Penestrino to the ground. Heaven I can shut and open, as thou knowest; for two are the keys that my predecessor held not dear.’ Then the weighty arguments impelled me to think silence worst; and I said: ‘Father! since thou cleansest me from that guilt into which I now must fall, large promise, with small observance of it, will make thee triumph in thy High Seat.’ Saint Francis afterwards, when I was dead, came for me;11 but one of the Black Cherubim said to him: ‘Do not take him; wrong me not. He must come down amongst my menials; because he give the fraudulent counsel, since which I have kept fast by his hair: for he who repents not, cannot be absolved; nor is it possible to repent and will a thing at the same time, the contradiction not permitting it.’ O wretched me! how I started when he seized me, saying to me: ‘May be thou didst not think that I was a logician!’ To Minos he bore me, who twined his tail eight times round his fearful back, and then biting it in great rage, said: This is a sinner for the thievish fire’; therefore, I, where thou seest, am lost; and going thus clothed, in heart I grieve.” When he his words had ended thus, the flame, sorrowing, departed, writhing and tossing its sharp horn. We passed on, I and my Guide, along the cliff up to the other arch that covers the fosse, in which their fee is paid to those who, sowing discord, gather guilt.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Milton doesn’t put the sweater with the dried blood back on. There’s too much of Abe on him already by the time they load him into the back of the ambulance, groaning and gummy. Milton leans against the side of a tree at the edge of the park. He feels like he’s made of something insubstantial. Nolan is coming toward him through the twilight of the cop car headlights. He’s just given his statement on the matter, probably. Milton had walked away after giving his, unable to stomach the way he knew Nolan could effortlessly tell a lie. They were all standing around, and Abe must have tumbled off the side of the hill. No, sir, they weren’t drinking. Freak accident. Tate had gone home, chewing his fingers raw, eaten up with nerves. Nolan, their fearless leader. Nolan reaches Milton, looking tired, run down. He smells like blood. Like a wild thing. Like when they used to play in the woods and come home smelling like wildcats, their mothers said, wrinkling their noses. Half raised, half animal. Nolan drops down to the ground and sits among the roots of the tree, and Milton wants to join him down there, to put an arm around his shoulder, to hold him close. Milton hands him the yellow hat from before. They’re both a little shocked it’s not covered in blood. Nolan lets out a snort. “Oh, thanks.” “Sure thing.” “Jesus,” Nolan says, shaking his head. Milton kicks one of the roots. “Think he’ll be okay?” “Some birthday.” Milton’s fingers are still sticky. He’s got blood caked under his fingernails. “Fucking Abe,” Nolan says, a wet creak of sympathy in his voice. “Ah, well.” “You really did a number on him.” “Seems like I did.” “You all right?” “What do you think, Milton? I bashed Abe’s head in. How do you think I feel?” “I wish I knew,” Milton says, which makes Nolan sigh loudly. He picks up a loose rock and hurls it into the night. “Man, I’m tired. Would you just spit it out already?” “I’m leaving,” Milton says. “Well, fine. You smell like shit anyway.” “No, I mean I’m leaving this spring. My parents are sending me away.” “Fuck. Where?” “Idaho,” Milton says. “They’re sending me there because I get into all this shit here, and they want to fix my fucking life.” “Maybe then you’ll stop being such a little bitch,” Nolan says, and there’s a hint of levity in his voice. “Oh, great, can’t wait,” Milton says. “Cannot wait.” “Hey, come on, Milton. It’s been a terrible night already.” “I can’t be here anymore,” Milton says. “What does that mean?”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Most were quiet about their families for some reason, from speaking only Polish or Hungarian at home, to a father who drank too much or an out-of-work relative sleeping on the couch. By tacit agreement, we tended to meet on street corners. Only many years later would I meet a high school classmate who confessed that she had always worried about me, that my mother was called the Crazy Lady of the neighborhood. During those years, my mother told me more about her early life. Long before I was born, she had been a rare and pioneering woman reporter, work that she loved and had done so well that she was promoted from social reporting to Sunday editor for a major Toledo newspaper. She had stayed on this path for a decade after marrying my father, and six years after giving birth to my sister. She was also supporting her husband’s impractical dreams and debts, suffering a miscarriage and then a stillbirth, and falling in love with a man at work: perhaps the man she should have married. All this ended in so much self-blame and guilt that she suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown, spent two years in a sanatorium, and emerged with an even greater feeling of guilt for having left my sister in her father’s care. She also had become addicted to a dark liquid sedative called chloral hydrate. Without it, she could be sleepless for days and hallucinate. With it, her speech was slurred and her attention slowed. Once out of the sanatorium, my mother gave up her job, her friends, and everything she loved to follow my father to isolated rural Michigan, where he was pursuing his dream of building a summer resort. In this way, she became the mother I knew: kind and loving, with flashes of humor and talent in everything from math to poetry, yet also without confidence or stability. While I was living with her in Toledo, my father was driving around the Sunbelt, living almost entirely in his car. Once each summer, he drove back to the Midwest for a visit, his timing always dependent on his mysterious deals. He once wrote me about a short story whose principal character was always waiting for the Big Deal, a story he said could have been about him. Between visits he sent postcards signed “Pop,” fifty-dollar monthly money orders tucked into various motel envelopes, and letters written on his idea of business stationery, a heavy ragged-edge paper without address or his first name—which was Leo—just at the top in big exploding red letters, “It’s Steinemite!” This way of life ended when I was seventeen, and our Toledo house was sold as a teardown for a parking lot, a sale my mother had long planned so I would have money to pay for college.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They’d gone back and forth like that all the way to Sophie’s apartment building, and when she asked if he wanted to come up, he said he’d go home and sleep, that he was feeling tired and a little drunk, and she said he shouldn’t drive in the snow that way, and he’d just sat there behind the wheel, the car idling, issuing exhaust into the night, until she got out and shut the door not hard, but firm, which to him had seemed sadder than anything else in the whole world, that she wasn’t even mad, that she was just concerned for him, and he was about to go do something shitty. But then she was gone, and he was in the car, and he texted Lionel at the number he’d watched him type into Sophie’s phone and had committed to memory, as if he knew even then what he was going to do. Charles looked up from the album, and Sophie was sitting on the table with her legs crossed, looking back at him. The light, a sea of white in the window, lay over her like a shroud, a veil. “I’m sorry.” “It’s fine—are you going to see him again?” Charles thought of Lionel, his body not full of lines but yielding edges, curves. He seemed as if he’d bleed into the air around him. Last night he’d put his hands all over Lionel, gripped and tugged and pulled and sunk ever deeper. This morning, when Charles left, he had kissed Lionel and said he would be back, which at the time seemed like something to say. It was what you said after you slept with someone: See you around, see you next time, I’ll be back. It didn’t mean anything. But now, with the question put to him this way, he felt unsure what he’d meant by that—I’ll be back. “Maybe,” Charles said. “Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.” He snapped the book closed and got up to hand it back to her. She took it from him, but he didn’t let go right away, so they were connected through the book. He stood between her open knees, holding the book, feeling its weight and the tension of her hand on the other side of it. He leaned down, kissed her softly. “You stink,” she said. “I know—do you care if I see him again?” “No, Charlie. I don’t. But if you do, don’t lie to me.” “Okay,” he said. “I do like him,” Sophie said after a moment, and it startled Charles. “How? You don’t know him. I don’t know him.” “There’s something good and wounded about him. Like you.” Sophie rolled her shoulders and smiled. “I like him.”