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 On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Could I maybe talk to her?’ ‘I think it would be preferable if you left a message.’ Kiki’s imagination went to work. It was, after all, a good deal easier on her own conscience to envisage a Mrs Kipps kept from the world by dark, marital forces than to acknowledge a Mrs Kipps offended by Kiki’s own rudeness. So she had booked a two-hour lunch break today with the purpose of going over to Redwood and  On Beauty seeing about liberating Carlene Kipps from Montague Kipps. She would bring a pie. Everybody loves pie. Now she took out her cell and with a dextrous thumb scrolled down to – and pressed ‘Call’. ‘Hey . . . Hi, Mom . . . wait a minute . . . getting my glasses.’ Kiki heard a thump and then the sound of water spilling. ‘Oh, man . . . Mom, wait up.’ Kiki tensed her jaw. She could hear the tobacco in his voice. But it was no good attacking on that front, seeing as how she’d started up smoking again herself. Instead she attacked obliquely. ‘Every time I call you, Jerome, every time you always just getting out of bed. It’s amazing, really. Don’t matter what time I call, you still in bed.’ ‘Mom . . . please . . . less of the Mamma Simmonds . . . I’m in pain here.’ ‘Baby, we all in pain . . . now, look, Jay,’ said Kiki seriously, abandoning her own mother’s Southern stylings as too unwieldy for the delicate task at hand, ‘quickly – when you were in London . . . Mrs Kipps, her relationship with her husband, with Monty – they were, you know, cool with each other?’ ‘How do you mean?’ asked Jerome. Kiki could feel a little of the jittery anxiety of last year coming through the phone. ‘Mom, what’s going on?’ ‘Nothing, nothing . . . Nothing about that . . . It’s just every time I try to call her, Mrs Kipps – you know, I just want to see how she is – she is my neighbour – ’ ‘Give me some gossip, I am your neighbour!’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Nothing. It’s a song,’ said Jerome and chuckled gently to himself. ‘Sorry – go on, Mom. Neighbourly concern, etcetera . . .’ ‘Right. And I just want to say hello, and every time I call it’s like he won’t let me speak to her . . . like he’s got her locked away or . . . I don’t know, it’s strange. First I thought she was offended – you know how easy folk like that get offended, they’re worse than white folk that way – but now . . . I don’t know. I think it’s more than that. And I was just wondering if you knew anything.’  the anatomy lesson

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I picked a long green weed and chewed it. “Why do you ask such incisive questions?” “I’m not incisive at all. You’re just transparent.” “Great,” I said. “I mean it. Don’t you think fun figures at all in life? Or is it all this sickly stuff about ‘my analysis—his analysis,’ ‘love-me-love-my-disease.’ You and Bennett do seem to whine an awful lot. And apologize an awful lot. You’re all full of obligations and duties and what he’s done for you. Why shouldn’t he do for you? Are you some kind of monster?” “Sometimes I think so.” “For God’s sake why? You’re not ugly, not stupid, you’ve a lovely cunt, a beautiful pot belly, loads of blond hair, and the biggest arse between Vienna and New York—pure lard—” He slapped it for emphasis. “What have you got to worry about?” “Everything. I’m very dependent. I fall apart regularly. I go into horrible depressions and hardly come up for air. Besides, no man wants to be stuck with a lady writer. They’re liabilities. They daydream when they’re supposed to be cooking. They worry about books instead of babies. They forget to clean the house....” “Jesus Christ! You’re some fine feminist.” “Oh I talk a good game, and I even think I believe it, but secretly, I’m like the girl in Story of O. I want to submit to some big brute. ‘Every woman adores a fascist,’ as Sylvia Plath says. I feel guilty for writing poems when I should be cooking. I feel guilty for everything. You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty. That’s Isadora Wing’s first principle of the war between the sexes. Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture. Do you know what Teddy Roosevelt said?” “No.” “Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.” “Teddy Roosevelt never said that.” “No, but I did.” “You’re just scared of him—that’s what you are.” “Who? Teddy Roosevelt?” “No—you idiot—Bennett. And you won’t admit it. You’re afraid he’ll leave you and you’ll fall apart. You don’t know that you can get along without him and you’re afraid to find out because then your whole potty theory will come tumbling down. You’ll have to stop thinking of yourself as weak and dependent and you hate that.” “You’ve never seen me when I’m ready to fall apart.” “Piffle.” “You should see. You’d run miles away.” “Why? Are you so unbearable?” “Bennett says so.” “Then why hasn’t he run? Actually that’s just bullshit to keep you in line. Look—I lived with Martine once when she fell apart.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And so to the elevator, daughter swinging her old white purse, father walking in front (nota bene: never behind, she is not a lady). As we stood (now side by side) waiting to be taken down, she threw back her head, yawned without restraint and shook her curls. “When did they make you get up at that camp?” “Half-past—” she stifled another yawn—“six”—yawn in full with a shiver of all her frame. “Half-past,” she repeated, her throat filling up again. The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us. “Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room. “Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?” Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass. “Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.” Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina! When the dessert was plunked down—a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream for her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie—I produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the stopper, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep. “Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?” “Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.” “No, seriously—please.” “Oh, just Purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?” Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously. I had hoped the drug would work fast.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Three hours later he called me. “You really want me to translate this?” he asked. “Yes,” and I began with a burst of outrage about how he’d promised not to censor me. “I will keep my word,” he said, “but you’re young and you really don’t understand the Germans.” “What do you mean I don’t?” “The Germans loved Hitler,” he said quietly. “If they were to be honest, you wouldn’t like what you would hear. But they are not honest. For twenty-five years they have not been honest. They never cried for their war dead and they never cried for Hitler. They swept it all under the rug. Even they don’t know their real feelings. If they were honest, you would hate it worse than their hypocrisy.” Then he began to tell me about what it was like to be a press correspondent under Hitler. It was a quasi-military position and all news was censored from above. The press corps knew plenty of things which were kept from the general public and they deliberately concealed them. They knew about death camps and deportations. They knew and they still cranked out propaganda. “But how could you do it?” I shouted. “How could I not do it?” “You could have left Germany, you could have joined the Resistance, you could have done something!” “But I was not a hero, and I didn’t want to be a refugee. Journalism was my profession.” “So what!” “All I am saying is that most people are not heroes and most people are not honest. I don’t say I’m good or admirable. All I am saying is that I am like most people.” “But why? ” I whined. “Because I am,” he said. “No reason.” I had no answer to that and Horst knew it. I began to wonder then if I too was like most people. Would I have been more heroic than he? I thought of how long it had taken me to stop writing clever columns about ruined castles, and neat little sonnets about sunsets and birds and fountains. Even without fascism, I was dishonest. Even without fascism, I censored myself. I refused to let myself write about what really moved me: my violent feelings about Germany, the unhappiness in my marriage, my sexual fantasies, my childhood, my negative feelings about my parents. Even without fascism, honesty was damned hard to come by. Even without fascism, I had pasted imaginary oak-tag patches over certain areas of my life and steadfastly refused to look at them. I decided then that I was not going to be self-righteous with Horst until I had learned to be honest with myself. Perhaps our sins of omission were not equal, but the impulse in both cases was the same. Unless I could produce some proof of my own honesty in writing, what right had I to rage at his dishonesty?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Is this serious ?’ interrupted Zora. She yanked the paper from her mother’s hands, bringing it very close to her myopic eyes. ‘This is a fucking joke, right?’ Howard rested his forehead on the thick glass pane and felt the condensation soak his eyebrows. Outside, the democratic East Coast snow was still falling, making the garden chairs the same as the garden tables and plants and mail-boxes and fence-posts. He breathed a mushroom cloud and then wiped it off with his sleeve. ‘Zora, you need to get to class, OK? And you really need to not use that language in my house – Hup! Hap! Nap! No! ’ said Kiki, each time masking a word Zora was attempting to begin. ‘OK? Take Levi to the cab rank. I can’t drive him today – you can ask Howard if he’ll drive him, but it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen. I’ll phone Jerome.’ ‘I don’t need drivin’,’ said Levi, and now Howard properly noticed Levi and the new thing about Levi: a woman’s stocking, thin and black, on his head, tied at the back in a knot, with a small inadvertent teat like a nipple, on top. ‘You can’t phone him,’ said Howard quietly. He moved tacti-cally, out of sight of his family to the left side of their awesome refrigerator. ‘His phone’s out of credit.’ ‘What did you say?’ asked Kiki. ‘What are you saying? I can’t hear you.’ Suddenly she was behind him. ‘Where’s the Kippses ’ phone number?’ she demanded, although they both knew the answer to this one. Howard said nothing. ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right,’ said Kiki, ‘it’s in the diary , the diary that was left in Michigan , during the famous conference when you had more important things on your mind than your wife and family.’ ‘Could we not do this right now?’ asked Howard. When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement.  On Beauty ‘Whatever, Howard. Whatever – either way it’s me who’s going to be dealing with it, with the consequences of your actions, as usual, so – ’ Howard thumped their icebox with the side of his fist. ‘Howard, please don’t do that. The door’s swung, it’s . . . everything’ll defrost, push it properly, properly , until it – OK: it’s unfortunate . That’s if it really has happened , which we don’t know. We’re just going to have to take it step by step until we know what the hell is going on. So let’s leave it at that, and, I don’t know . . . discuss when we . . . well, when Jerome’s here for one thing and there’s actually something to discuss, agreed? Agreed?’ ‘Stop arguing,’ complained Levi from the other side of the kitchen, and then repeated it loudly.

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

  Westerners surely do experience pleasant aggression. Athletes feel it in the heat of competition. Videogame players cultivate it during first-person shooter games. But these people are not experiencing liget with all its meaning, prescribed actions, body-budget changes, communication, and social influence unless they can construct “Liget” using conceptual combination. Liget is the whole conceptual package, and if your brain cannot make this concept, then you cannot experience liget, although you can experience parts of it: the pleasant, high arousal affect; the aggression; the thrill of pursuing a risky challenge; or the feeling of brother- or sisterhood that comes from being part of a group. Next, consider an emotion concept that’s more recently adopted by U.S. culture. In a recent meeting with my lab members, I learned that an acquaintance (call him Robert) failed in his bid to win a Nobel prize. Robert had treated me poorly in the past (which is polite scientist-speak for “he acted like an ass”), so when I heard the news, I have to admit that I had a complex emotional experience: I felt some empathy for Robert, plus a small measure of gratification about his misfortune, plus a large wave of guilt at my pettiness, as well as embarrassment that someone might discover my uncharitable feeling. 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.

• 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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  I had spent my whole life feeling that it was. And maybe I was responsible, in a way. Parents and children are umbilically attached and not only in the womb. Mysterious forces bind them. If my generation is going to spend its time denouncing our parents, then maybe we should allow our parents equal time. “I would have been a famous artist except for you kids,” my mother said. And for a long time I believed it. There was always, of course, the problem of her own father: an artist too and fanatically jealous of her talent. She had gone to Paris to escape him, so why did she come back to New York, move in with him, and live with him until she was forty? They shared a studio, and from time to time he painted over her canvases (only, of course, when he had no clean canvas). She had become a cubist in Paris and was on her way to developing a style of her own in some contemporary vein, but Papa, for whom painting began and ended with Rembrandt, mocked her until she gave up trying; she just kept getting pregnant. “Damned modern smudging,” Papa said. “Phony baloney.” Why didn’t she move out? I say this with the full weight of ambivalence behind it, knowing that then I might never have been born. We grew up in a sprawling fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. The roof leaked (we lived on the top floor), the fuses all blew when you pushed the toast down in the toaster, the bathtubs were claw-footed and the plumbing rusty, the stove in the kitchen looked like something out of a TV commercial for old-Grandma-something-or-other’s-preserves, and the window frames were so old and cruddy that the wind whistled right through them. But it was a “Stanford White building” and there were “two studios with north light” and the library had “paneled walls” and “leaded windows” and the “forty-foot ceiling” in the living room was “real gold leaf.” I remembered these real-estate phrases echoing through my childhood. Gold leaf. I imagined a maple leaf which was made of gold. But how did they stick the leaves on the ceiling? And why didn’t they look like leaves? Maybe they ground them up and made them into paint? Where, I wondered, could you pick a “real gold leaf"? Did they grow on real gold trees? On real gold boughs? (I was the sort of kid who knew words like “bough.”) There was, in fact, a fat, darkly printed book in my parents’ library called The Golden Bough. I used to look in vain through its pages for any mention of “real gold leaf.” But there was plenty of sexy stuff in there. (Those were also the days when I used to hide Love Without Fear in my dresser drawer—beneath my undershirts.) So we stayed with Mama and Papa for the sake of “good north light” and “real gold leaf"—or at least my mother said so.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There’s something to be said for passion. Can’t you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?” “Apparently not. The trouble is I’m really a puritan at heart. All pornographers are puritans.” “You are certainly not a pornographer,” he said. “No, but it sounded good. I liked those two p ’s. The alliteration.” Dr. Happe smiled. Did he know the word “alliteration"? I wondered. I remembered how I always used to ask him if he understood my English. Perhaps for two and a half years he’d understood nothing. “You are a puritan,” he said, “and of the worst sort. You do what you like but you feel so guilty that you don’t enjoy it. What, actually, is the point?” During his London exile, Happe had picked up some Englishisms. I remembered that he loved the word “actually.” “That’s what I want to know,” I said. “But the worst thing is how you always insist on normalizing your life. Even if you’re analyzed, your life may not be simple. Why do you expect it to be? Maybe this man is part of it. But why do you have to throw everything away before you give yourself time to decide? Can’t you wait and see what happens later?” “I could wait if I were cautious—but I’m afraid I always have trouble being cautious.” “Except with writing letters,” he said. “There you were very cautious.” “Not anymore,” I said. Then the meetings began letting out and we got up, shook hands, and said goodbye. I was left to sort out my dilemma by myself. No good Daddy to rescue me this time. — Bennett and I spent a long night of mutual recrimination, wondered whether to attempt a trial separation or a double suicide, declared our love for each other, our hatred for each other, our ambivalence for each other. We made love, screamed, cried, made love again. There is no use going into detail about all this. At one time I may have aspired to a marriage as witty as an Oscar Wilde farce with brittle, cleverly arranged adulteries out of Iris Murdoch, but I had to admit that the quality of our fights was more like Sartre’s No Exit —or still worse, As the World Turns. In the morning, we haggardly made our way to the Congress, and listened to the closing remarks on aggression by Anna Freud and the other dignitaries (among whom Adrian was included, reading a paper I had written for him a few days earlier).

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “But I want you,” I said, crying. I wanted to want him. I wanted it more than anything. I thought of all the times we’d spent together, the miserable times we’d come through together, the times when we’d been able to comfort each other and encourage each other, the way he’d stood behind my work and steadied me when I looked as if I was ready to hurl myself off some cliff. The way I’d endured the army with him. The years put in. I thought of all we knew about each other, the way we’d worked to stay together, the stubborn determination that had held us together when all else failed. Even the misery we’d shared seemed a greater bond than anything I had with Adrian. Adrian was a dream. Bennett was my reality. Was he grim? Well then, reality was grim. If I lost him, I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name. We put our arms around each other and began to make love, crying. “I wanted to give you a baby there,” he said, thrusting deeper and deeper into me. The next afternoon I was back with Adrian, lying on a blanket in the Vienna woods, the sun coming down through the trees. “Do you really like Bennett or do you just enumerate his virtues?” Adrian asked. I picked a long green weed and chewed it. “Why do you ask such incisive questions?” “I’m not incisive at all. You’re just transparent.” “Great,” I said. “I mean it. Don’t you think fun figures at all in life? Or is it all this sickly stuff about ‘my analysis—his analysis,’ ‘love-me-love-my-disease.’ You and Bennett do seem to whine an awful lot. And apologize an awful lot. You’re all full of obligations and duties and what he’s done for you. Why shouldn’t he do for you? Are you some kind of monster?” “Sometimes I think so.” “For God’s sake why? You’re not ugly, not stupid, you’ve a lovely cunt, a beautiful pot belly, loads of blond hair, and the biggest arse between Vienna and New York—pure lard—” He slapped it for emphasis. “What have you got to worry about?” “Everything. I’m very dependent. I fall apart regularly. I go into horrible depressions and hardly come up for air. Besides, no man wants to be stuck with a lady writer. They’re liabilities. They daydream when they’re supposed to be cooking. They worry about books instead of babies. They forget to clean the house….” “Jesus Christ! You’re some fine feminist.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Bigger ideas than these . It’s got down to fundamentals, out there, in the world. Fundamentals . We’ve let down your kids, we’ve let down everybody’s kids. Looking at this country the way it is now, I’m thankful I never had any kids myself.’ Howard, who doubted the veracity of this, hid his disbelief by making a study of the yellowing oak floorboards beneath them. ‘God, when I think of this next semester I just feel sick . Nobody gives a fuck about Rembrandt , Howard – ’ She stopped herself and began to laugh sadly. ‘Or Wallace Stevens. Bigger ideas,’ she repeated, finished her wine and nodded. ‘It’s all interconnected,’ said Howard dully, tracing the toe of his shoe around a wood-wormed gap in the flooring. ‘We produce new ways of thinking, then other people think it.’ ‘You don’t believe that.’ ‘Define believe ,’ said Howard and, as he said it, felt shattered. There was almost not enough breath even to complete the sentence. Why wouldn’t she go away? ‘Oh, dear God – ’ huffed Claire, stamping her little foot and laying a hand flat against his chest, priming up for one of their age-old battles. Essence versus theory. Belief versus power. Art versus cultural systems. Claire versus Howard. Howard felt one of her fingers thoughtlessly, drunkenly, slip under a gap in his shirt to his skin. Just then, they were interrupted.  kipps and belsey ‘What are you two gossiping about?’ Too quickly, Claire removed her hand from Howard’s body. But Kiki wasn’t looking at Claire; she was looking at Howard. You’re married to someone for thirty years: you know their face like you know your own name. It was so quick and yet so absolute – the deception was over. Howard realized it at once, but how could Claire pick up on that tiny piece of tight skin on the left side of his wife’s mouth, or know what it meant? In her innocence, thinking she was rescuing the situation, Claire enclosed both of Kiki’s hands in her own. ‘I want to meet Sir Montague Kipps. Howard’s being tricky about it.’ ‘Howard’s always tricky,’ said Kiki, flashing him a second steely, confirmatory glance that put the matter beyond doubt. ‘He thinks it makes him look clever.’ ‘God, you look great, Keeks. You should be in a fountain in Rome.’ Howard expected that this flattery of his wife’s appearance by Claire was compulsive. All he wanted to do was to stop her saying another word. Wild, violent fantasies took hold of him. ‘Oh, you too, honey,’ said Kiki calmly, dampening down this false enthusiasm. So there wasn’t going to be a scene. Howard had always loved this about his wife, her ability to play things cool – but at this moment he would have been happier to hear her scream. She stood like a zombie, her eyes quite dead to any appeal from him, her smile nailed on. And still they were stuck in this ludicrous conversation.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the deepest moan of shame. From the very beginning of our concourse, I was clever enough to realize that I must secure her complete co-operation in keeping our relations secret, that it should become a second nature with her, no matter what grudge she might bear me, no matter what other pleasures she might seek. “Come and kiss your old man,” I would say, “and drop that moody nonsense. In former times, when I was still your dream male [the reader will notice what pains I took to speak Lo’s tongue], you swooned to records of the number one throb-and-sob idol of your coevals [Lo: “Of my what? Speak English”]. That idol of your pals sounded, you thought, like friend Humbert. But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting his dream daughter. “My chère Dolorès! I want to protect you, dear, from all the horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways, and, alas, comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, in the blueberry woods during the bluest of summers. Through thick and thin I will still stay your guardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize that guardianship before long. Let us, however, forget, Dolores Haze, so-called legal terminology, terminology that accepts as rational the term ‘lewd and lascivious cohabitation.’ I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the therapist—a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction. I am your daddum, Lo. Look, I’ve a learned book here about young girls. Look, darling, what it says. I quote: the normal girl—normal, mark you—the normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father. She feels in him the forerunner of the desired elusive male (‘elusive’ is good, by Polonius!). The wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise, had she lived) will encourage a companionship between father and daughter, realizing—excuse the corny style—that the girl forms her ideals of romance and of men from her association with her father. Now, what association does this cheery book mean—and recommend? I quote again: Among Sicilians sexual relations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter of course, and the girl who participates in such relationship is not looked upon with disapproval by the society of which she is part. I’m a great admirer of Sicilians, fine athletes, fine musicians, fine upright people, Lo, and great lovers.

• 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. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines.” The “serial selves” of Pale Fire “outstrip” Stevenson and a good many other writers, and rather than undermining Humbert’s guilt, the Double parody in Lolita locks Humbert within that prison of mirrors where the “real self” and its masks blend into one another, the refracted outlines of good and evil becoming terrifyingly confused.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head. Pulse rates and secretions have nothing to do with it. That’s why all the best-selling sex manuals are such gyps. They teach people how to fuck with their pelvises, not with their heads. What did it matter that technically I was “faithful” to Bennett? What did it matter that I hadn’t screwed another guy since I met him? I was unfaithful to him at least ten times a week in my thoughts—and at least five of those times I was unfaithful to him while he and I were screwing. Maybe Bennett was pretending I was someone else, too. But so what? That was his problem. And doubtless 99 percent of the people in the world were fucking phantoms. They probably were. That didn’t comfort me at all. I despised my own deceitfulness and I despised myself. I was already an adulteress, and was only holding off the actual consummation out of cowardice. That made me an adulteress and a coward (cowardess?). At least if I fucked Adrian I’d only be an adulteress (adult?). I THREE Knock, Knock Sex, as I said, can be summed up in three P’s: procreation, pleasure, and pride. From the long-range point of view, which we must always consider, procreation is by far the most important, since without procreation there could be no continuation of the race.... So female orgasm is simply a nervous climax to sex relations...and as such it is a comparative luxury from nature’s point of view. It may be thought of as a sort of pleasure-prize like a prize that comes with a box of cereal. It is all to the good if the prize is there, but the cereal is valuable and nourishing if it is not. —Madeline Gray, The Normal Woman (sic), 1967 n my dream Adrian and Bennett were going up and down on a seesaw in the playground in Central Park where I used to go as a child. “Maybe she ought to be analyzed in England,” Bennett was saying as his end of the seesaw swung up in the air. “I’ll turn her passport and shot record over to you.” Adrian had his feet on the ground now and he began shaking the seesaw like a big kid unloosed in the little kids’ playground. “Stop that!” I yelled. “You’re hurting him!” But Adrian kept grinning and shaking the seesaw. “Don’t you see you’re hurting him! Stop it!” I tried to scream, but, as always in dreams, my words became garbled. I was terrified that Adrian was going to bounce Bennett to the ground and break his back. “Please, please stop!” I pleaded. “What’s wrong?”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  This was kind, and Claire thanked him for it. He looked at her oddly. He had told this lie to save his wife’s feelings, not Claire’s face. He finished his short, factual speech. He wobbled a little on his feet. This was a different Howard from the one Claire had known these thirty years. No longer the steely academic who’d always (she suspected) found her slightly ridiculous, who never seemed quite certain what the point of poetry was. That day in her office Howard had looked as if a good, comforting piece of verse was just what he needed. Throughout their friendship, Claire had satirized his scrupulous intellectualism, just as he had teased her about her artistic ideals. It was her old joke that Howard was only human in a theoretical sense. This was the general feeling in Wellington too: his students found it near impossible to imagine that Howard should have a wife, a family, that he went to the bathroom, that he felt love. Claire was not as naive as the students; she knew he did love, and intensely, but she also saw that it was not articulated in him in the normal way. Something about his academic life had changed love for him, changed its nature. Of course, without Kiki, he couldn’t function – anyone who knew him knew that much. But it was the kind of marriage you couldn’t get a handle on. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice. Claire had always  On Beauty been curious how a marriage like that worked. Dr Byford went so far as to suggest that this was exactly the reason Claire had chosen to get involved with Howard after all these years. At the moment of her own greatest emotional commitment she intervened in the most successful marriage she knew. And it was true: sitting behind her desk, examining this abandoned, rudderless man, she had felt perversely vindicated. Seeing him like that had meant she was right, after all, about academics. (And shouldn’t she know? She’d married three of them.) They had no idea what the hell they were doing. Howard had no way of dealing with his new reality. He was unequal to the task of squaring his sense of himself with what he had done. It was not rational, and therefore, he could not comprehend it. For Claire, their affair was only confirmation of what she knew of the darkest parts of herself. For Howard, it was clearly revelation.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  One for those who knew, one for those who didn’t know, and one for Kiki, to whom it was addressed and who both did and didn’t know. The people who didn’t know had smiled and whooped and clapped as Howard touched upon the rewards of love; they sighed sweetly when he expanded on the joys of marrying your best friend, also the difficulties. Encouraged by this moonlit attention, Howard had strayed from his prepared script. He segued into Aristotle’s praise of friendship, and from there to some aperc¸us of his own. He spoke of how friendship expands tolerance. He spoke of the fecklessness of Rembrandt and the forgiveness of his wife, Saskia. This was close to the knuckle, but none of it seemed to be greeted with any undue attention by the majority of his audience. Fewer people knew than he had feared. Kiki had not, after all, told the whole world of what he had done, and tonight he was more grateful for this fact than ever. Speech concluded, the applause had settled  kipps and belsey snug around him like a comfort blanket. He had hugged the two American children available to him hard around their shoulders, and felt no resistance. So that’s how it was. His infidelity had not ended everything, after all. It had been self-pity to think that, and self-aggrandizement. Life went on. Jerome showed him that first, by having his own romantic cataclysm so soon after Howard’s – the world does not stop for you. At first, he had thought otherwise. At first he had despaired. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before – he had no idea what to do, which move to make. Later on, when he retold the story to Erskine – a veteran of marital infidelity – his friend had gifted him with some belated, obvious advice: Deny everything . This was Erskine’s long-term policy, and he claimed it had never failed him. But Howard had been discovered and confronted in the oldest way – a condom in the pocket of his suit – and she had stood before him holding it between her fingers, alive with a pure contempt he had found almost impossible to bear. He had many choices before him that day, but the truth had simply not been one of them, not if he wanted to retain any semblance of the life he loved. And now he felt vindicated: he had made the right decision. He had not told the truth. Instead he said what he felt he must in order to enable all of this to continue: these friends, these colleagues, this family, this woman. God knows, even the story he ended up giving – a one-night stand with a stranger – had caused terrible damage. It broke that splendid circle of Kiki’s love, within which he had existed for so long, a love (and it was to Howard’s credit that he knew this) that had enabled everything else.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  How could I wish that on a baby? “If it weren’t for you, I’d have been a famous artist,” my furious redheaded mother used to say. She had studied art in Paris, learned anatomy and cast- drawing, water color and graphics, and even how to grind her own pigments. She had met famous artists and famous writers and famous musicians and famous hangers-on (she said). She had danced naked in the Bois de Boulogne (she said), sat in Les Deux Magots in a black velvet cloak (she said), driven through the streets of Paris on the fenders of Bugattis (she said), gone to the Greek islands three and a half decades before Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (she said), and then she had come home, married a Catskill Mountains comedian who was about to make a killing in the tzatzka business, and had had four daughters all of whom received the most poetic names: Gundra Miranda, Isadora Zelda, Lalah Justine, and Chloe Camille. Was any of that my fault? I had spent my whole life feeling that it was. And maybe I was responsible, in a way. Parents and children are umbilically attached and not only in the womb. Mysterious forces bind them. If my generation is going to spend its time denouncing our parents, then maybe we should allow our parents equal time. “I would have been a famous artist except for you kids,” my mother said. And for a long time I believed it. There was always, of course, the problem of her own father: an artist too and fanatically jealous of her talent. She had gone to Paris to escape him, so why did she come back to New York, move in with him, and live with him until she was forty? They shared a studio, and from time to time he painted over her canvases (only, of course, when he had no clean canvas). She had become a cubist in Paris and was on her way to developing a style of her own in some contemporary vein, but Papa, for whom painting began and ended with Rembrandt, mocked her until she gave up trying; she just kept getting pregnant. “Damned modern smudging,” Papa said. “Phony baloney.” Why didn’t she move out?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Even without fascism, I was dishonest. Even without fascism, I censored myself. I refused to let myself write about what really moved me: my violent feelings about Germany, the unhappiness in my marriage, my sexual fantasies, my childhood, my negative feelings about my parents. Even without fascism, honesty was damned hard to come by. Even without fascism, I had pasted imaginary oak-tag patches over certain areas of my life and steadfastly refused to look at them. I decided then that I was not going to be self-righteous with Horst until I had learned to be honest with myself. Perhaps our sins of omission were not equal, but the impulse in both cases was the same. Unless I could produce some proof of my own honesty in writing, what right had I to rage at his dishonesty? The article was printed as I wrote it. Horst translated faithfully. I thought the town of Heidelberg would go up in smoke, but writers greatly exaggerate the importance of their work. Nothing happened. A few of my acquaintances made ironic remarks about how involved I tended to get in things. That was all. I wondered if anyone even read Heidelberg Alt und Neu. Probably not. My columns were like sending letters during a postal strike or keeping a secret journal. I felt I was blowing history wide open, but nobody even blinked. All that Sturm und Drang came down to silence. It was almost like publishing poetry. D FIVE A Report from the Congress of Dreams or Congressing I’m Isadora. Fly me. —National Airlines r. Goodlove is chairing the meeting. In the damp cellar of the university, in a windowless basement amphitheater with clattery wooden seats, Adrian has put on his official English manners (and his same old holey shirt) and is enunciating syllables (English) to the candidates (polyglot) scattered through the tiers of seats. He looks like Christ at the Last Supper. To the right of him and to the left of him are somberly dressed analysts in ties and jackets. He is earnestly leaning toward the microphone, sucking his pipe, and summing up the earlier portion of the meeting—which we missed. One bare foot swings back and forth toward the audience while its tattered sandal rests under the table. I indicated to Bennett that I want to sit in the back row, near the door—and as far as possible from the heat generated by Adrian. Bennett gives me a sour look implying that that doesn’t suit him and marches to the front of the room where he sinks down next to some henna-haired candidate from Argentina. I sit in the last row staring at Adrian. Adrian stares back at me. He sucks on his pipe as if he were sucking on me. His hair falls over his eyes. He brushes it back. My hair falls over my eyes.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  So I had been wounded by music, madness, and miscellaneousness. And silent Bennett was my healer. A physician for my head and a psychoanalyst for my cunt. He fucked and fucked in ear splitting silence. He listened. He was a good analyst. He knew all Brian’s symptoms before I told him. He knew what I’d been through. And most astonishing of all—he still wanted to marry me after I told him about myself. “Better find a nice Chinese girl,” I said. It wasn’t racism, just my skittishness about marriage. Such permanence terrified me. Even the first time, with Brian, it had terrified me, and I had married against my better judgment. “I don’t want a nice Chinese girl,” Bennett said. “I want you.” (It turned out Bennett had never taken out a Chinese girl in his whole life—much less screwed one. He was all hung up on Jewish girls. Men like that seem to be my fate.) “I’m glad you want me,” I said. Grateful. I was really grateful. At what point had I started pretending Bennett was somebody else? Somewhere around the end of the third year of our marriage. And why? Nobody had been able to tell me that. q : “Dear Dr. Reuben: Why does the fucking always become like processed cheese?” a : “ You seem to have a food fetish, or what is known in psychoanalytic parlance as an oral fixation. Have you ever considered seeking professional help?” I shut my eyes tightly and pretended that Bennett was Adrian. I transformed B into A. We came—first me, then Bennett—and lay there sweating on the awful hotel bed. Bennett smiled. I was miserable. What a fraud I was! Real adultery couldn’t be worse than these nightly deceptions. To fuck one man and think of another and keep the deception a secret—it was far, far worse than fucking another man within your husband’s sight. It was as bad as any betrayal I could think of. “Only a fantasy,” Bennett would probably say. “A fantasy is only a fantasy, and everyone has fantasies. Only psychopaths actually act out all their fantasies; normal people don’t.” But I have more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head. Pulse rates and secretions have nothing to do with it. That’s why all the best-selling sex manuals are such gyps. They teach people how to fuck with their pelvises, not with their heads. What did it matter that technically I was “faithful” to Bennett? What did it matter that I hadn’t screwed another guy since I met him? I was unfaithful to him at least ten times a week in my thoughts—and at least five of those times I was unfaithful to him while he and I were screwing.

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

  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. Think of how useful the concept of “ Liget ” could be in Western culture. When military cadets train in the art of war, a small percentage of them reportedly develop a feeling of pleasure in killing. They do not seek to kill to feel pleasure; they are not psychopaths. But when they do kill, they experience pleasure. Their stories of combat often depict intense feelings of pleasure from the thrill of the hunt, or from a job well-done with comrades-in-arms. In Western culture, however, killing with pleasure is considered terrible and shameful; it is difficult to empathize with or muster compassion for those who have experienced this feeling. So consider this: what if we taught the concept and the word liget to cadets, including a set of social rules for when liget is appropriate to feel? We could embed this emotion concept in our broader cultural context of values and norms, just like we did with schadenfreude. The concept might even allow servicepeople to flexibly cultivate the experience of liget when needed for their military duties.