Hope

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 Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In 1988, Roy Romer, then governor of Colorado, faced a feeding-frenzy of questions about his long-running extramarital affair that had become publicly known. Romer did what few public figures have dared. In the spirit of the Yucatán, he refused to accept the premise underlying the intrusive questions: that his extramarital relationship was a betrayal of his wife and family. Instead, he called an extraordinary press conference where he pointed out that his wife of forty-five years had known about and accepted the relationship all along. Romer confronted the tittering reporters with “life as it really happens.” “What is fidelity?” he asked the suddenly silent gaggle of reporters. “Fidelity is what kind of openness you have. What kind of trust you have, which is based on truth and openness. And so, in my own family, we’ve discussed that at some length and we’ve tried to arrive at an understanding of what our feelings are, what our needs are, and work it out with that kind of fidelity.”21 The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon In a sky swarming with uncountable stars, clouds endlessly flowing, and planets wandering, always and forever there has been just one moon and one sun. To our ancestors, these two mysterious bodies reflected the female and the male essences. From Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, people attributed the Sun’s constancy and power to his masculinity; the Moon’s changeability, unspeakable beauty, and monthly cycles were signs of her femininity. To human eyes turned toward the sky 100,000 years ago, they appeared identical in size, as they do to our eyes today. In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind. But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon’s, thus bringing them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet with anyone around to notice.22 Some will say, “Interesting coincidence.” Others will wonder whether there isn’t an extraordinary message contained in this celestial convergence of difference and similarity, intimacy and distance, rhythmic constancy and cyclical change. Like our distant ancestors, we watch the eternal dance of our sun and our moon, looking for clues to the nature of man and woman, masculine and feminine here at home. [image file=image_rsrc68M.jpg] Luc Viatour/www.lucnix.be

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

  Perhaps our core ingredients like interoception and concepts will one day be seen as too essentialist, as we discover something even more finely constructed going on behind the scenes. Our scientific story is still evolving, but that’s not surprising. Progress in science isn’t always about finding the answers; it’s about asking better questions. Today, those questions have forced a paradigm shift in the science of emotion, and more broadly in the science of mind and brain. In the coming years, I hope we’ll all see fewer and fewer news stories about brain blobs for emotion in people or rats or fruit flies, and more about how brains and bodies construct emotion. In the meantime, whenever you see an essentialism-steeped news story about emotion, if you even feel a twinge of doubt, then you’re playing a role in this scientific revolution. Like most important paradigm shifts in science, this one has the potential to transform our health, our laws, and who we are. To forge a new reality. If you’ve learned within these pages that you are an architect of your experience—and the experiences of those around you—then we’re building that new reality together. 3 The Myth of Universal Emotions T ake a look at the woman in figure 3-1 , who is screaming in terror. Most people who were born and raised in a Western culture can effortlessly see this emotion in her face, even with no other context in the photograph. Figure 3-1: Perceiving terror in a woman’s face Except . . . she isn’t feeling terror. This photograph actually shows Serena Williams immediately after she beat her sister Venus in the 2008 U.S. Open tennis finals. Turn to page 310 (appendix C) to see the full photograph. In context, the facial configuration takes on new meaning. 1 If Williams’s face subtly transformed before your eyes once you knew the context, you are not alone. This is a common experience. How did your brain accomplish this shift? The first emotion word I used, “terror,” caused your brain to simulate past facial configurations that you have seen of people feeling fear. You were almost certainly not aware of these simulations, but they shaped your perception of Williams’s face. When I explained the photo’s context—winning a crucial tennis match—your brain applied its conceptual knowledge of tennis and winning to simulate facial configurations that you’ve seen of people experiencing exultation. These simulations again influenced how you perceived Williams’s face. In each case, your emotion concepts helped you make meaning from the image. 2 In real life, we usually encounter faces in context, attached to bodies and associated with voices, smells, and other surrounding details. These details cue your brain to use particular concepts to simulate and construct your perception of emotion. That’s why, in the full photo of Serena Williams, you perceive triumph, not terror. In fact, you depend on emotion concepts each time you experience another person as emotional.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  No. If you think about it, the neo-Hobbesian vision is far sunnier than ours. To have concluded, as we have, that our species has an innate capacity for love and generosity at least equal to our taste for destruction, for peaceful cooperation as much as coordinated attack, for an open, relaxed sexuality as much as for jealous, passion-smothering possessiveness…to see that both these worlds were open to us, but that around ten thousand years ago a few of our ancestors wandered off the path they’d been on forever into a garden of toil, disease, and conflict where our species has been trapped ever since…well, this is not exactly a rose-colored view of the overall trajectory of humankind. Who are the naïve romantics here, anyway? PART IV Bodies in Motion Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book. JOHN DONNE (1572–1631) Everybody has a story to tell. So does every body, and the story told by the human body is rated XXX. Like any narrative of prehistory, ours rests on two types of evidence: circumstantial and material. We’ve already covered a good bit of the circumstantial evidence. As for more tangible material evidence, the song says, “What goes up must come down,” but unfortunately for archaeologists and those of us who rely on their findings, what goes down rarely comes back up. And even when it does, ancient social behavior is hard to see reflected in bits of bone, flint, and pottery—fragments that represent only a fraction of what once existed. At a conference not long ago, the subject of our research came up over breakfast. Upon hearing that we were investigating human sexual behavior in prehistory, the professor sitting across the table from us scoffed and asked (rhetorically), “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?” While one should never scoff with a mouthful of scone, he had a point. As social behavior presumably doesn’t leave physical artifacts, any theorizing must amount to little but “dreaming.” Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was an early scoffer at the notion of evolutionary psychology, asking, “How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago?”1 Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, agrees, warning, “Many characteristics of early human behaviour are…difficult to reconstruct, as no appropriate material evidence is available. Mating patterns and language are obvious examples…[they] leave no traces in the fossil record.” But he then adds, as if under his breath, “Questions of social life…may be accessible from studies of ancient environments, or from certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence.”2 Certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence…. Can we glean reliable information about the contours of ancient social life—even sexual behavior—from present-day human anatomy? Yes we can. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Little Big Man

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  But one had to forget and act. Only action could deliver both sides from their mutual isolation. It was then only a few weeks before our school certificate examinations, and soon we would be distracted from these problems by reviewing. Ben Smaan was again on duty with me as a boarding-school prefect. I decided to go with him the day Poinsot, in his endless curiosity, wanted to find out the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew. He thought he had found the answer, but his curiosity made me angry. I had too much confidence in his intelligence and, as Poinsot was well-meaning and incapable of prejudice, there surely existed a gulf between us, if he saw one. There were not many of us at these secret meetings, and we felt strongly even if we had no very definite ideas. But I always left this Arab house filled with warmth and a feeling of generosity. The communion which ten of us could achieve was of good augury for the rest of the city. I smiled at the little street vendors and was amiable to the ticket collector in the streetcar; when two women began to argue, I sided with the Moslem one. But the vendors did not understand my smiles, the ticket collector hardly returned my politeness, and the Moslem women formed such a solid bloc in their opposition to the Jewess that I ended up by feeling sorry for her as the victim. Perhaps, I thought, if they only knew that I had just left an Arab home in the middle of the Halfaouine section, with a fig tree growing in the middle of the patio, and that I had just drunk tea there with Ben Smaan and the others, if only they knew that I was working for them, who I was and what I thought... But I had to overcome the hostility of the ticket collector and teach the shopkeepers not to insult Jewish housewives by calling them bitches, and I had to send Jewish and Moslem girls to the same schools. Our success depended on our work and patience and on time. Naturally, I had my ups and my downs. When I was discouraged, I thought of the sufferings of the Jews, of their despair in the ghetto: “They will never never like us!” I thought also of the utter misery which so blinded the Moslems. How could one cut a path through such tangled darkness? Then again, when I was strong enough to view it all with the calm of a Spinoza and to recover from my own nervousness, I seemed to see the solution clearly, and this vision gave me a certain serenity and a philosopher’s joy.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  He must be received in heaven, you see, until the time which God spoke about through the mouth of his holy prophets from ancient days, the time when God will restore all things. Moses said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, one from among your own brothers; whatever he says to you, you must pay attention to him. And everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be cut off from the people.” All the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and his successors, spoke about these days too. You are the children of the prophets, the children of the covenant which God established with your ancestors when he said to Abraham, “In your seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed,” When God raised up his servant he sent him to you first, to bless you by turning each of you away from your wicked deeds.” (3:18–26) That last phrase should allay any puzzled suspicions that might have been arising over the last page or two, suspicions that the phrase “forgiveness of sins” was now being used in a purely technical sense (to mean simply “end of exile”) without any reference to actual wicked deeds. Far from it. This is not an either/or. My point is rather that in the early preaching—and it is very interesting that Luke, writing (we assume) at least a generation or more after the events, does not attempt here to inject any more developed “atonement theology” into the picture—we find the goal of God’s rescue operation so firmly and explicitly anchored in the biblical narrative and prophecies. This is what “for our sins in accordance with the Bible” actually meant: that the scriptural narrative of the restoration of Israel and then the welcome of the non-Jews into this restored people (though this is not yet in view in Acts 2–3) had been launched through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that the single-phrase summary of all this, operating at both the large, national scale and the small, personal level, was the “forgiveness of sins.” Of course, there was one particular “sin” for which, in the early chapters of Acts, repentance would be required: the rejection by the Jewish leaders of Jesus as Messiah. That, presumably, is why the chief priests and Sadducees accused the apostles of “trying to bring this man’s blood on [them]” (5:28).

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She never asked how my work in Chicago was going, or what I was doing there. Dr. Tuttle knew nothing about my hibernation project. I wanted her to think I was a nervous wreck, but fully operative, so she’d prescribe whatever she thought might knock me out the hardest. I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life. I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation. • • • I SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in a soft twilight zone. I didn’t leave the apartment at all, not even for coffee. I kept a jar of macadamia nuts by the bed, ate a few whenever I rose to the surface, sucked a bottle of Poland Spring, gravitated to the toilet maybe once a day. I didn’t answer the phone— nobody but Reva ever called me anyway. She left me messages so long and breathless that they got cut off midsentence. Usually she called while she was on the StairMaster at her gym. One night, she came over unannounced. The doorman told her he thought I’d gone out of town. “I’ve been worried,” Reva said, barging in with a bottle of sparkling rosé. “Are you sick? Have you been eating? Did you take time off of work?” “I quit,” I lied. “I want to devote more time to my own interests.” “What interests? I didn’t know you had interests.” She sounded utterly betrayed. She stumbled a little on her heels. “Are you drunk?” “You really quit your job?” she asked, kicking her shoes off and flopping down on the armchair. “I’d rather eat shit than have to work for that cunt one more day,” I told her. “Didn’t you say she was married to a prince or something?” “Exactly,” I answered. “But that was just a rumor anyway.” “So you’re not sick?” “I’m resting.” I lay down on the sofa to demonstrate. “That makes sense,” Reva said, nodding compliantly, although I could tell she was suspicious. “Take some time off and think about your next move. Oprah says we women rush into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will ever come along. And that’s how we get stuck in dissatisfying careers and marriages. Amen!” “I’m not making a career move,” I started to explain, but I went no further. “I’m taking some time off. I’m going to sleep for a year.” “And how are you going to do that?” I pulled a vial of Ativan out from between the sofa cushions, unscrewed the cap, and fished out two pills. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Reva squirming. I chewed the pills up—simply to horrify her—swallowed and gagged, then stuffed the vial back between the cushions and lay down and closed my eyes. “Well, I’m glad you have a life plan.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  On Christmas Day, 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman read this prayer to a world audience: “Give us, O God, the vision which can see thy love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust the goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts, and show us what each one of us can do to set forth the coming of the day of universal peace. Amen.”28. Tierney (2000), p. 18. Tierney’s book sparked a conflagration that makes any chimpanzee community seem downright pacific in comparison. The bulk of the controversy concerns Tierney’s charges that Chagnon and his colleague, James Neel, may have caused a fatal epidemic among the Yanomami. Not having examined these charges in detail, we have nothing to add to that discussion, limiting our critique to Changnon’s methodology and scholarship as it applies to Yanomami warfare.29. By comparison, Chagnon’s total time among the Yanomami adds up to about five years. Readers interested in knowing more about the Yanomani might start with Good (1991). This is a very personal and accessible account of his time living with them (and ultimately, taking a wife there). Tierney (2000) outlines the case against Chagnon, though going far beyond the critiques we’ve outlined here. Ferguson (1995) offers an in-depth analysis of Chagnon’s calculations and conclusions. For more of Ferguson’s views on the origins of war, the following two papers can be downloaded from his departmental web page (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/socant/brian.htm): Tribal, “Ethnic,” and Global Wars, and Ten Points on War, which includes a broad discussion of biology, archaeology, and the Yanomami controversy. Borofsky (2005) offers a balanced account of the controversy and the context in which it occurred. Of course, Chagnon’s work is readily available as well.30. Quoted in Tierney (2000), p. 32.31. Washington Post review of Darkness in El Dorado: Jungle Fever, by Marshall Sahlins, Sunday, December 10, 2000, p. X01.32. Chagnon (1968), p. 12.33. Tierney (2000), p. 14.34. Sponsel (1998), p. 104.35. October 23, 2008.Chapter 14: The Longevity Lie (Short?)

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty, when you accept it you will flower in the pain, you will flower in your suffering." "There was a girl ahead of me in line last night who ran the Bridle Path just before me. She was resigned, wasn't she?" Beauty asked. "No, forget about her, she is nothing, that is Princess Claire and she is silly and playful and always was and feels nothing. She has no depth, no great mystery. But you have these and you will always suffer more than she does." "But does everyone sooner or later acquire this ability to accept?" "No, some never do, but it is very hard to tell who has attained it. I can tell, but our masters are not always so wise, I can assure you. For example, Felix told me yesterday you saw Princess Lizetta strung up in the Hall of Punishments. Do you think she is resigned?" "Certainly not!" "Ah, but she is, and she is a great and valuable slave Princess. But Princess Lizetta adores being bound up, being unable to move, and when she is greatly bored, she endures the displeasure of her betters, the better to amuse them by letting them punish her." "Ah, no, you can't be serious." "Yes, I can. That is her way. All slaves have their way. And you must find yours. It will never be easy for you. You will suffer much before you know it, but don't you see that on the Bridle Path and tonight when you gave the rose to Lady Juliana you felt the beginnings of it. Princess Lizetta is a struggler. You shall be a yielder, much as I am. That shall be your way, exquisite and personal devotion. Great calm, great serenity. In time perhaps you will see other slaves who are exemplary in this. Prince Tristan, for example, the slave of Lord Stefan, is incomparable. His Lord is in love with him as the Prince is with you, which makes it both difficult and simple." Beauty gave a deep sigh. She was flooded suddenly with the sensation of kneeling before Lady Juliana and offering her the rose. She felt herself running on the Bridle Path, and the breeze touching her, and her body burning all over with her striving. "I don't know, I feel ashamed when I give in, I feel as if I have truly lost myself." "Yes, that is it. But listen. We have the night here together. I want to tell you the story of how I came here and how I attained the path I speak of. When I am finished, if you still feel rebellious, I ask you to think on it. I shall go on loving you, no matter, and go on striving for moments to see you in secret. But if you listen to me, you shall see that you can conquer everything about you.

• From Querelle (1953)

  events became quite curious. In order to assign to him his definitive and perhaps final meanings, we have to resort to a couple of flashbacks. Dede was-or thought he was-informed of all the young boys' sentimental involvements--in Brest. In order to serve better-serve Mario, no doubt, and beyond him, the police authorities, but, primarily, to serve-he distinguished himself (and this, again, seemed to originate in his physical and ethical agility, in his quick eye) by his speedy powers of observation. Before he acquired a sense of his own consciousness ( and with it, anxiety ) , Dede was a marvelous recording device. ( His admiration for Robert may be regarded the exception to the rule. ) The mission Mario had given him, to keep an eye on Querelle, was primarily designed to create a new, sympathetic relationship between those hoodlums the detective had doublecrossed and the detective himself. Dede never dared to remind Robert of the fight between the two brothers that he had been witness to, but he regarded it as a solid item of information that Roger was Gil's lover-boy. Yet he never thought to watch his movements or follow him. One day he said to Mario : "That's little Roger, Turko's buddy." Round about the same time Gil said to Querelle who did not pay much attention to it : "Sometimes I think, if I get arrested, maybe I could make some sort of deal with Mario." � "How?" "What? Well, you know . . " "What kind of deal?'' "You never know. He's a homo. He's buddies with Dede." Gil's musings reflect a common enough notion : from the very moment of his arrest, the adolescent thinks about turning the fact of homosexuality to his advantage. Since we are talking a bout a general reaction, something beyond ourselves, we'll attempt merely a cursory and controversial explanation : is . it 255 I QUERELLE that the child wishes to sacrifice what is most precious to him; or is it that the danger throws him at the mercy of his most secret desires; is he hoping to appease fate by such immolation; does he suddenly recognize the entire, powerful fraternity of pederasts and put his faith in it; does he believe in the power of love? To know the answers, we would merely have to dip into the inner workings of Gil, but we do not have enough time left to do so. Nor faith. This book goes on for too many pages, and it bores us. But let us simply record the profound hope that fiBs the young suspects' hearts when they hear that the judge or the lawyer appointed to defend them is a homo. "Who's Dede?" "Dede? Oh, I'm sure you've seen him with Mario. He's a kid. He spends a lot of _time with that cop. But I don't think there's any other reason. \Vhat I mean is, I don't think Dede is an informer." ''\Vhat's he look like?"

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In Hierarchy in the Forest, primatologist Christopher Boehm argues that egalitarianism is an eminently rational, even hierarchical political system, writing, “Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition, and they do so for the express purpose of keeping the strong from dominating the weak.” According to Boehm, foragers are downright feline in refusing to follow orders, writing, “Nomadic foragers are universally—and all but obsessively—concerned with being free of the authority of others.”24 Prehistory must have been a frustrating time for megalomaniacs. “An individual endowed with the passion for control,” writes psychologist Erich Fromm, “would have been a social failure and without influence.”25 What if—thanks to the combined effects of very low population density, a highly omnivorous digestive system, our uniquely elevated social intelligence, institutionalized sharing of food, casually promiscuous sexuality leading to generalized child care, and group defense—human prehistory was in fact a time of relative peace and prosperity? If not a “Golden Age,” then at least a “Silver Age” (“Bronze Age” being taken)? Without falling into dreamy visions of paradise, can we—dare we—consider the possibility that our ancestors lived in a world where for most people, on most days, there was enough for everyone? By now, everyone knows “there’s no free lunch.” But what would it mean if our species evolved in a world where every lunch was free? How would our appreciation of prehistory (and consequently, of ourselves) change if we saw that our journey began in leisure and plenty, only veering into misery, scarcity, and ruthless competition a hundred centuries ago? [image file=image_rsrc689.jpg] Difficult as it may be for some to accept, skeletal evidence clearly shows that our ancestors didn’t experience widespread, chronic scarcity until the advent of agriculture. Chronic food shortages and scarcity-based economies are artifacts of social systems that arose with farming. In his introduction to Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, Gowdy points to the central irony: “Hunter-gatherers…spent their abundant leisure time eating, drinking, playing, socializing—in short, doing the very things we associate with affluence.” Despite no solid evidence to support it, the public hears little to dispute this apocalyptic vision of prehistory. The sense of human nature intrinsic to Western economic theory is mistaken. The notion that humans are driven only by self-interest is, in Gowdy’s words, “a microscopically small minority view among the tens of thousands of cultures that have existed since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago.” For the vast majority of human generations that have ever lived, it would have been unthinkable to hoard food when those around you were hungry. “The hunter-gatherer,” writes Gowdy, “represents uneconomic man.”26

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  224 As Long Beach grew, the numbered streets extended north from 1st Street to 72nd Street. A few blocks further north is 226th Street, the last numbered street anchored in downtown Los Angeles. The numbered streets in my city count back to Colonel de Neve’s drawing of the plaza in Los Angeles. But the house numbers count back to the center of William Willmore’s map, from which his name had been removed. 225 In 1923, Long Beach annexed a worthless, hundred-foot-wide “shoestring strip” around the ten square miles of Clark family land. Under California law, one city could not annex the unincorporated land enclosed in another city. Long Beach’s narrow strip, marked on the county recorder’s map in the Hall of Administration, was enough to fend off the expansion of Los Angeles. The fiction of the “shoestring strip” did not require Long Beach to provide municipal services to the subdivisions Clark Bonner planned to build or burden Bonner’s remaining agricultural land with city taxes. It was an arrangement Bonner and Long Beach city officials both found agreeable. 226 In 1929, Clark Bonner wanted the house numbers in his subdivision calculated from downtown Long Beach, rather than counted eastward from the plaza in Los Angeles, about fifteen miles away. When the county engineer reviewed Bonner’s plans, he saw that the empty white space on Bonner’s subdivision map was bounded by a narrow black line. The line represented the hundred-foot-wide strip of the city of Long Beach that ran through the Montana Land Company’s truck farms and pastures. Because of the Long Beach annexation strip, the county engineer agreed with Bonner that the middle-class houses he planned to build should be numbered from Long Beach, not Los Angeles. 227 The line on the county recorder’s map prevented Los Angeles from annexing twenty square miles of alfalfa, lima beans, hog farms, and dairies. It also put the land that supplied Long Beach’s water out of the reach of Los Angeles. Long Beach city officials thought the line on the county recorder’s map decided the political future of the Montana Land Company’s real estate developments. They were wrong. The Montana Land Company put up only four tracts of houses before the company was sold. Louis Boyar, Mark Taper, and Ben Weingart put up 17,500 inexpensive houses on the land they bought from the company. In 1953, residents of the new suburb defeated a series of annexation elections that would have brought their community into Long Beach neighborhood by neighborhood. A year later, twelve thousand residents signed incorporation petitions. Their names were published on six pages of agate type in the local newspaper. In March, they voted for the astonishing choice to make their still raw-looking neighborhoods a city. 228 William Willmore left Long Beach after the collapse of Willmore City. He was reported to be in Arizona. He was thought to be a victim of sunstroke.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me,” he said, getting up. “Good-bye, Darya Alexandrovna, till we meet again.” “No, wait a minute,” she said, clutching him by the sleeve. “Wait a minute, sit down.” “Please, please, don’t let us talk of this,” he said, sitting down, and at the same time feeling rise up and stir within his heart a hope he had believed to be buried. “If I did not like you,” she said, and tears came into her eyes; “if I did not know you, as I do know you....” The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and more, rose up and took possession of Levin’s heart. “Yes, I understand it all now,” said Darya Alexandrovna. “You can’t understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it’s always clear whom you love. But a girl’s in a position of suspense, with all a woman’s or maiden’s modesty, a girl who sees you men from afar, who takes everything on trust,—a girl may have, and often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.” “Yes, if the heart does not speak....” “No, the heart does speak; but just consider: you men have views about a girl, you come to the house, you make friends, you criticize, you wait to see if you have found what you love, and then, when you are sure you love her, you make an offer....” “Well, that’s not quite it.” “Anyway you make an offer, when your love is ripe or when the balance has completely turned between the two you are choosing from. But a girl is not asked. She is expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot choose, she can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” “Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky,” thought Levin, and the dead thing that had come to life within him died again, and only weighed on his heart and set it aching. “Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, “that’s how one chooses a new dress or some purchase or other, not love. The choice has been made, and so much the better.... And there can be no repeating it.” “Ah, pride, pride!” said Darya Alexandrovna, as though despising him for the baseness of this feeling in comparison with that other feeling which only women know. “At the time when you made Kitty an offer she was just in a position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt. Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing every day, and you she had not seen for a long while. Supposing she had been older ... I, for instance, in her place could have felt no doubt. I always disliked him, and so it has turned out.” Levin recalled Kitty’s answer. She had said: “_No, that cannot be_....”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Even if we limit ourselves to the chimpanzee model, the dark self-assurance of modern-day neo-Hobbesian pessimists may be unfounded. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Recent findings in comparative primate intelligence have led researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare to wonder whether an impulse toward cooperation might actually be the key to our species-defining intelligence. They write, “Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids—because they were better at solving problems together—who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time.”11 Humans got smart, they hypothesize, because our ancestors learned to cooperate. Innately selfish or not, the effects of food provisioning and habitat depletion on both wild chimpanzees and human foragers suggest that Dawkins and others who argue that humans are innately aggressive, selfish beasts should be careful about citing these chimp data in support of their case. Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical social organization, intergroup violence, territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend. In Search of Primate Continuity Two elements women share with bonobos are that their ovulation is hidden from immediate detection and that they have sex throughout their cycle. But here the similarities end. Where are our genital swellings, and where is the sex at the drop of a hat? FRANS DE WAAL12 Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands…. It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly. PAUL THEROUX13 Whatever one concludes about chimp violence and its relevance to human nature, our other closest primate cousin, the bonobo, offers a fascinating counter-model. Just as the chimpanzee seems to embody the Hobbesian vision of human origins, the bonobo reflects the Rousseauian view. Although best known today as the proponent of the Noble Savage, Rousseau’s autobiography details a fascination with sexuality that suggests that he would have considered bonobos kindred souls had he known of them. De Waal sums up the difference between these two apes’ behavior by saying that “the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  Hopeful, imperfect people live in my suburb. Their hope has sometimes led them to acts of courage and generosity. Their flaws lead them sometimes to abuse and violence. Holy Land is about the effects of hope in the midst of the imperfect lives we lead in imperfect places. Your roots are deep, but perhaps not enough to hold you in place. Will you ever move out of Lakewood ? I’m not sure. Probably. What would you be seeking that you don’t have now? What would please you to leave behind ? I don’t think there is anything that I could erase from the story I tell myself, despite the appeal of amnesia. If I moved away, I’d go looking for a different kind of solitude. ABOUT THE AUTHORD. J. Waldie still lives in the house his parents bought in 1946 in Lakewood. His essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, and the New York Times . PHOTOGRAPHSGrading lots in Lakewood in mid-1950 (William Garnett Photo) Trenching foundations on July 20, 1950 (William Garnett Photo) Framing houses in August 1950 (William Garnett Photo) Finished houses on November 20, 1950 (William Garnett Photo) Lakewood on March 2, 1951 (William Garnett Photo) Stuccoing (Rothschild Photo) Road grader (Author’s collection) Houses under construction in 1951 (Rothschild Photo) Letter M (Rothschild Photo) The May Co. (Rothschild Photo) Grand opening platform (Rothschild Photo) Moving day (J.R. Eyerman for Life Magazine, July 13, 1953 Time Warner Inc.) May Co. opening day—Herman E. Platt, manager of the May Co. music and TV department (Security Pacific National Bank Photograph, Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library) Shopping at night (Rothschild Photo) Shoe store opening (Rothschild Photo) Model living room (Rothschild Photo) Model kitchen (Rothschild Photo) Sales office tower (Rothschild Photo) Waiting in line (Rothschild Photo) FURTHER PRAISE FORHOLY LAND“Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.” —Joan Didion “Waldie is much too close to Lakewood to sentimentalize it and far too deeply rooted there to buy into any glib notions of its placelessness. He has written a quirky, multidimensional portrait of Lakewood in the form of a mosaic.… And by the end of this short, fascinating book, he has presented Lakewood with a history as rich and various—as storied—as the most ancient of cities.” —Michael Pollan, New York Times “A writer of pithy grace, compassion and insight.… In D. J.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Kitty found all this out not from words. Madame Stahl talked to Kitty as to a charming child that one looks on with pleasure as on the memory of one’s youth, and only once she said in passing that in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ’s compassion for us no sorrow is trifling—and immediately talked of other things. But in every gesture of Madame Stahl, in every word, in every heavenly—as Kitty called it—look, and above all in the whole story of her life, which she heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized that something “that was important,” of which, till then, she had known nothing. Yet, elevated as Madame Stahl’s character was, touching as was her story, and exalted and moving as was her speech, Kitty could not help detecting in her some traits which perplexed her. She noticed that when questioning her about her family, Madame Stahl had smiled contemptuously, which was not in accord with Christian meekness. She noticed, too, that when she had found a Catholic priest with her, Madame Stahl had studiously kept her face in the shadow of the lamp-shade and had smiled in a peculiar way. Trivial as these two observations were, they perplexed her, and she had her doubts as to Madame Stahl. But on the other hand Varenka, alone in the world, without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in the past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that perfection of which Kitty dared hardly dream. In Varenka she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble. And that was what Kitty longed to be. Seeing now clearly what was _the most important_, Kitty was not satisfied with being enthusiastic over it; she at once gave herself up with her whole soul to the new life that was opening to her. From Varenka’s accounts of the doings of Madame Stahl and other people whom she mentioned, Kitty had already constructed the plan of her own future life. She would, like Madame Stahl’s niece, Aline, of whom Varenka had talked to her a great deal, seek out those who were in trouble, wherever she might be living, help them as far as she could, give them the Gospel, read the Gospel to the sick, to criminals, to the dying. The idea of reading the Gospel to criminals, as Aline did, particularly fascinated Kitty. But all these were secret dreams, of which Kitty did not talk either to her mother or to Varenka. While awaiting the time for carrying out her plans on a large scale, however, Kitty, even then at the springs, where there were so many people ill and unhappy, readily found a chance for practicing her new principles in imitation of Varenka.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Perel is the rare therapist willing to publicly consider the possibility that heterosexual couples might find alternative arrangements that can work well for them—even if they find themselves outside the bounds of what mainstream society approves. She writes, “It’s been my experience that couples who negotiate sexual boundaries…are no less committed than those who keep the gates closed. In fact, it is their desire to make the relationship stronger that leads them to explore other models of long-term love.”18 There are an infinite number of ways to adapt a flexible and loving partnership to our ancient appetites. Despite what most mainstream therapists claim, for example, couples with “open marriages” generally rate their overall satisfaction (with both their relationship and with life in general) significantly higher than those in conventional marriages do.19 Polyamorists have found ways to incorporate additional relationships into their lives without lying to one another and destroying their primary partnership. Like many gay male couples, these people recognize that additional relationships need not be taken as indictments of anyone. Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, authors of The Ethical Slut, write, “It is cruel and insensitive to interpret an affair as a symptom of sickness in the relationship, as it leaves the ‘cheated-on’ partner—who may already be feeling insecure—to wonder what is wrong with him…. Many people have sex outside their primary relationships for reasons that have nothing to do with any inadequacy in their partner or in the relationship.”20 Despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted. This collapse has left many of us isolated and unfulfilled. Blind insistence and well-intentioned inquisitions have failed to turn the tide, and show no signs of future success. Rather than endless War Between the Sexes, or rigid adherence to a notion of the human family that was never true to begin with, we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations. Perhaps it will require more community assistance for single mothers and their children. Or maybe it just means we must learn to adjust our expectations concerning sexual fidelity. But this we know: vehement denial, inflexible religious or legislative dictate, and medieval stoning rituals in the desert have all proved powerless against our prehistoric predilections.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Lord have mercy on us! pardon us! aid us!” he repeated the words that for some reason came suddenly to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated these words not with his lips only. At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love? The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting for the horse, and told Kouzma to overtake him. At the corner he met a night cabman driving hurriedly. In the little sledge, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a kerchief round her head. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, overjoyed to recognize her little fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even stern expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along beside her. “For two hours, then? Not more?” she inquired. “You should let Pyotr Dmitrievitch know, but don’t hurry him. And get some opium at the chemist’s.” “So you think that it may go on well? Lord have mercy on us and help us!” Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping into the sledge beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor’s. Chapter 14 The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that “he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon.” The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew or was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall of indifference and attain his aim. “Don’t be in a hurry or let anything slip,” Levin said to himself, feeling a greater and greater flow of physical energy and attention to all that lay before him to do. Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin considered various plans, and decided on the following one: that Kouzma should go for another doctor, while he himself should go to the chemist’s for opium, and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to get up, he would either by tipping the footman, or by force, wake the doctor at all hazards.

• From Querelle (1953)

  138 I JEAN GENET sailor, and that lighter, so it said in the newspapers, belonged to Gilbert Turko_. This discovery of a dangerous detail exalted him as if it had suddenly tuned him in to the entire u niverse. It was the point of contact permitting him to re-do his deed in re verse-thus, to undo it-but, from that detail on, to cut it into pieces, with noisy and radiant gestures, so that the entire unraveled act would C?nly concern God or some other witness and judge, any longer. In that deed he discerned the presence of the powers of Hell, and yet, already, mustered against them, there appeared a patch of dawn, as pure as the con:ter of heaven adorne d with a blue and naive Virgin l\1ary that had appeared, as the fog parted for a moment, in between the votive ships of the church in La Rochelle. Querelle kne\v he would be saved. Slowly he re-entered himself. He then went on, very far, almost to the point of getting lost in those secret realms, in order to meet his brother there. Querelle knew that he would be there. It was true that he had just fought him in a fight that might have had a deadly outcome, but the hatred he felt for him on the surface did not prevent him from finding Robert there, in the most distant inner reaches of himself. What Madame Lysiane had suspected, came to pass: their beauty turned into a snarl, showing its teeth, hatred distorted their faces, their bodies became locked in the coils of a battle to the death . And no mistress of either one, had she attempted to intervene in this battle, would have gotten out of it alive. Even when they viere still little boys fighting, one could not help thinking that some where, back of their faces twisted with pain, in a more faraway region, their resemblances were celebrating their union. It was, thus, in the shadow of such appearances that Querelle was able to find his brother again. When they had arrived at the end of th e street, Robert automatically turned left, toward the brothel, and Querelle

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

  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. We’re at a turning point where the new science of mind and brain can begin to shape the law. By educating judges, jurors, attorneys, witnesses, police officers, and other participants in the legal process, we should be able to produce a legal system that is ultimately more fair. Perhaps we cannot move away from trial by jury anytime soon, but even simple steps, like educating jurors that emotions are constructed, can improve the current situation. For now at least, the legal system still considers you to be an emotional beast enrobed in rational thought. Throughout this book, we’ve systematically challenged this myth by evidence and observation, but there’s one remaining assumption that we haven’t questioned yet: are beasts even emotional? Are the brains of our close primate cousins, such as chimps, capable of constructing emotion?

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  residents remains strong enough to bring out 400 volunteer park coaches in the fall and 600 to clean up the weedy yards of the disabled on Volunteer Day and over 2,000 to sprawl on lawn chairs and blankets to listen to concerts in the park every summer. Is southern California still the “future”? In some ways, it is. As metropolitan regions reach their limits, either geographically (like Los Angeles) or because of growth boundaries set by voters, more places will become like Los Angeles. A moderately dense assemblage of continuous suburban landscape is the future of many metropolitan regions. Los Angeles just got there first. But is that the future that anyone wants? Paradoxically, some places consciously chose the fate of Los Angeles. In the mid-1990s, the growth management agency for Portland, Oregon, set out to replicate some of the features of southern California, and they’re succeeding. Portland, by design, is becoming more like Los Angeles. Can you compare the suburban residents of the 1950s with those of today? Have we become more resentful of our neighbors than we once were? Mass-produced suburbs were new then. No one knew what would happen when tens of thousands of working-class husbands and wives were thrown together in a suburb and expected to make a fit place to live. It’s hard for us to imagine all the demands made on them. We’re unprepared to see them as uncertain but courageous actors in the making of the places in which they chose to live. Newly made suburban places today are governed by the hard certainties of a homeowners association. The accommodations and politics built into suburban life in the 1950s have been replaced with the rigidity and authority of contract law. Citizens are being made into mere consumers. The loss is obvious. You don’t deal with real violence in Holy Land. You stay away from the crimes that have marred your town and other suburbs. In the tabloid and nightly news versions of our lives—in stories that swing from the heartwarming to the horrific—suburban crime is the final proof that no place is safe, every comfort is an illusion, and all efforts at making a community are merely ironic. These are despairing beliefs. Hopeful, imperfect people live in my suburb. Their hope has sometimes led them to acts of courage and generosity. Their flaws lead them sometimes to abuse and violence. Holy Land is about the effects of hope in the midst of the imperfect lives we lead in imperfect places. Your roots are deep, but perhaps not enough to hold you in place. Will you ever move out of Lakewood? I’m not sure. Probably. What would you be seeking that you don’t have now? What would please you to leave behind? I don’t think there is anything that I could erase from the story I tell myself, despite the appeal of amnesia. If I moved away, I’d go looking for a different kind of solitude.