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.

Page 39 of 216 · 20 per page

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Fifteen minutes later Zora peeled it all off again in the women’s locker room of Wellington’s college pool. This was part of the new Zora Self-Improvement Programme for the fall: wake early, swim,  On Beauty class, light lunch, class, library, home. She crushed her hat into the locker and pulled her bathing-cap down low over her ears. A naked Chinese woman who looked eighteen from the back now turned and surprised Zora with her crumpled face, in which two little obsidian eyes struggled under the pressure of folded skin from above and below. Her pubic hair was very long and straight and grey, like dead grass. Imagine being her , thought Zora vaguely, and the thought puttered along for a few seconds, collapsed, vanished. She pinned her locker key to the black fabric of her own functional costume. She walked the long edge if the pool, her flat feet meeting the ceramics with a wet slap. Up beyond the stadium seating, at the very top of this giant room, a glass wall let the autumn sun in and shot it across the room, like the searchlights in a prison yard. From this superior vantage point, a long line of athletes on tread-mills was looking down on Zora and all the other people not fit enough for the gym. Up there behind glass the ideal people were exercising; down here the misshapen people were floating around, hoping. Twice a week this dynamic changed when the swim team graced the pool with their magnificence, relegating Zora and everyone else to the practice pool to share lanes with infants and senior citizens. Swim-team people launched themselves from the edge, remade their bodies in the image of darts, and then entered the pool like something the water had been waiting for and gratefully accepted. People like Zora sat carefully down on the gritty tiles, gave the water only their feet and then had a debate with their bodies about committing to the next stage. It was not at all unusual for Zora to get undressed, walk the pool, look at the athletes, sit down, put her toes in, get back up, walk the pool, look at the athletes, get dressed and leave the building. But not today. Today was a new beginning. Zora pushed forward an inch and then launched herself; the water rushed up to her neck like a garment she was wearing. She tread water for a minute and then let herself go under. Blowing water out of her nose, she began to swim slowly, indecorously – never quite able to coordinate her arms and legs but still feeling a partial grace that dry land never offered her.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And think it not an injury to be alwayes serviceable towards me, since as by my meane and benefit thou shalt become a man: thou shalt live blessed in this world, thou shalt live glorious by my guide and protection, and when thou descendest to Hell, where thou shalt see me shine in that subterene place, shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and raigning in the deepe profundity of Stix, thou shalt worship me, as one that hath bin favourable to thee, and if I perceive that thou art obedient to my commandement, addict to my religion, and merite my divine grace, know thou, that I will prolong thy dales above the time that the fates have appointed, and the celestial Planets ordeined.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  If they were going to take him, they could take him as he truly was. He pulled out black jeans, dark blue short-sleeved shirt, sandals. Today, supposedly, there would be people from Pomona in the audience, and from Columbia University and from the Courtauld. Smith was excited about all these possibilities, and now Howard did his best to be too. This is the big one , read Smith’s e-mail of this morning, Howard, it’s time for tenure. If Wellington can’t give you that, you move on. This is how it’s supposed to be. See you at ten thirty! Smith was right. Ten years in one place, without tenure, was a long time. His children were grown. They would soon leave. And then the house, if it were to stay as it was, without Kiki, would be intolerable. It was in a university that he must now put all his remaining hope. Universities had been a home for him for over thirty years. He only needed one more: the final, generous institution to take him in his dotage and protect him. Howard pulled a baseball cap on to his head and hurried downstairs, Murdoch struggling behind him. In the kitchen, his children were hooking their various bags and knapsacks round their shoulders. ‘Wait – ’ said Howard, padding his hand around the empty sideboard. ‘Where’re my car keys?’ ‘No idea, Howard,’ said Zora callously. ‘Jerome? Car keys!’ ‘ Calm down .’ ‘I’m not going to calm down – no one’s leaving until I find them.’ In this way, Howard made everybody late. It’s strange how children, even grown children, will accept the instruction of a parent. Obediently they tore up the kitchen hunting for what Howard needed. They looked everywhere likely and then in stupid unlikely places because Howard went ballistic if anyone, for a moment, appeared to have ceased looking. The keys were nowhere. ‘Aw, man, I’m done with this, it’s too hot – I’m out,’ cried Levi, and left the house. A minute later he returned, having found Howard’s car keys in the door of his car. ‘Genius!’ cried Howard. ‘OK, come on, come on, everybody out – alarm on, everyone get keys, come on , people.’  on beauty and being wrong Out on the scorching street, Howard opened the door of his baking car by wrapping the corner of his shirt round his hand. The leather interior was so hot he had to sit on his own bag. ‘I’m not coming,’ said Zora, protecting her eyes from the sun with her hand. ‘Just in case you thought I was. I didn’t want to change my shift.’ Howard smiled charitably at his daughter.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Your genes are not your destiny. Which is why self-care is health care—it’s that important. Even more so when we’re shells of our former selves. Regardless of the DNA blueprint you were born with, you can help determine where your health goes from here. Once I learned about epigenetics, I never looked back. True, cancer was still in my body, but now I had an answer as to what I could do to help. I could create an environment in my body where cancer and other diseases were less likely to thrive and health was more likely to flourish. People often ask me, “What’s one thing I can do to support my health?” My answer is always the same, whether you’re a patient or you hope to never become one: “Tend to your garden.” THE FIVE PILLARS OF WELLNESS In my online community, I teach simple practices to support what I call the Five Pillars of Wellness: the five areas that will have the biggest impact on your well-being—body, mind, and spirit. I’m going to walk you through a condensed version of the pillars to help you jump-start your own self-care practice, but if you want to go deeper, or get coaching from me, go to my website (kriscarr.com) for more details. The Five Pillars are as follows: being mindful of what you’re eating, drinking, and thinking, and how you’re resting and renewing. I designed this holistic approach for one very important purpose—to combat the number one garden killer: inflammation. As you may know, chronic inflammation is like living in a constant state of fight-or-flight in your body. And it’s often triggered by prolonged stress. If you’re overburdened at work or carrying financial or family pressure; if you haven’t been sleeping well for a long period of time; or if you’re struggling to eat well, stay hydrated, and move your body, all of this can contribute to chronic inflammation. (And let’s face it, we’re under no greater stress than when we’re grieving, missing a loved one, or otherwise trying to piece our fractured selves back together. That’s why tending to your garden is extra important.) Whatever the cause, that inflamed condition eventually stresses your system so much that it gets confused and starts attacking its own healthy tissue. The result is a slew of nasty symptoms, including chronic pain, joint stiffness, headaches, fatigue, loss of appetite, fever, and chills. Long term, it also makes us more susceptible to serious disease, including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. That’s why caring for the pillars can help you so much right now. Let’s go through some simple ways to do that. Pillar One—What You’re Eating When we’re just trying to survive whatever storm we find ourselves in, it’s easy to skimp on nutrition. Yet the more we shortchange ourselves, the worse we feel, and the tougher it becomes to get through the day and function at the levels a crisis demands.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  This is how I learned that there was a difference between healing and curing. Curing takes place at the physical level. It’s absolutely possible but never guaranteed. Healing, on the other hand, takes place at the spiritual level and is available to all of us—no matter who we are, what we look like, or where we come from. And just like love, healing never ends. In fact, we can be healing and dying at the very same time. The only thing required to enter the healing path is the decision to do so. Nothing and no one can take it away from you—not even your own mortality. While figuring out how to truly accept this paradigm is by no means easy, know that on the other side of this awareness is a greater ease and appreciation for life, as well as a deeper compassion for yourself and others. Accepting my disease freed me up to love my life, again. It allowed me to embrace living as a cancer “thriver”—someone who lives fully with cancer— who coexists with something that isn’t easy or desired but doesn’t define me, either. Identifying as a thriver helped me stop taking care of myself for cancer (or because “I have to”) and start doing it for me. Because I deserve to feel good—and so do you. Now, instead of eating my vegetables or moving my body for cancer, I do healthy things so that I can have more energy and joy for my life. This may seem like a small mental shift, but for me it was epic. Now, I’m not going to lie, some days are more triumphant than others. Healing is never linear. We zig and zag, take two steps forward and one step back. And that’s OK. It’s yet another thing I’m working on accepting. Before Dad got sick, I thought I had a Ph.D. in acceptance, but after his terminal prognosis, the prospect of losing him demanded that I do some postgrad work. No matter how irrational and misplaced my feelings were, the little girl inside me was still terrified of being left. For a while, denial or gin or researching more medical procedures (that didn’t exist) provided an excellent distraction from those feelings. When I finally had to wake up and accept that the only thing left to do was to make Dad feel as comfortable and loved as possible, I didn’t think I could do it. I wanted to keep running. But in actuality, my resistance was keeping me running in the opposite direction of love. ACCEPTING LOSS The hardest thing for any of us to accept is loss, especially when it comes to the death of someone we love or even our own mortality. As we’ve explored, allowing the pain of our losses is how we ultimately start feeling alive again.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I assured him it had in that it had removed me from my dependency on my mother. Paraphrasing Dr. O’Reilly, I added, “But you see, Daddy, I’ve internalized my mother and when I fall in love I merely project her introjected image—” “Love?” I could hear the wires singing between us as they dipped and rose in rhythmic arcs over the cindered sidings of railroad tracks or plunged underground and threaded their way through the entrails of American cities. Instantly I recognized that in such a big, hardworking country and in the vocabulary of such a sober man the word love took on a coy, neurasthenic ring. Women lived for love and talked about it and made their decisions by its guttering, scented light; men (at least a real man like my dad) took the love that came their way gratefully but suffered its absence in silence. Certainly no real man ever discussed love or made a single move to woo it. “Let me put my thoughts on paper,” I said, for by now I’d learned he preferred personal transactions to resemble business invoices. That night during study period, as I sat in my cold room at my desk, my pen flew over page after page as I drew in a portrait of myself as an adolescent desperate for medical attention. Once again I wrote on my special parchment, once again I was petitioning someone. But this time I had more confidence, for I felt I was within my rights. I knew Dr. O’Reilly was my one chance to escape the cage and treadmill of neurosis, to head out, ears up and whiskers twitching, into the enchanting unknown. The dorm master tiptoed past my open door. He was on the lookout for boys breaking rules. Across the hall from me at his own desk a square-jawed German lad—who wrestled for the team, excelled at trig and played records of music he called “easy listening”—was working a slide rule and jotting down figures in his minuscule hand. His glasses blazed when he cocked his head at a certain angle, as though the numerical intelligence projected light rather than drank it in. On the wall above his head was an Eton pennant, placed with mathematical precision at the correct, casual angle, Gustav’s concession to frivolity. The master tiptoed back past my door. In fact, he was cutting up, taking giant, slow-motion steps, his hands raised high as a marionettists’s, his mouth turned down as though he himself were a truant who feared making a floorboard squeak—good for a chuckle. In my letter to my father I used the word homosexuality , thereby breaking a taboo and forcing two responses from him: silence and the money I wanted.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  1. For first three stanzas, cf. Ecloga, i, and the Ecloga responsiva of Johannes del Virgilio, and Gardner, iii.2. fleece; keeping up the metaphor of the lamb and the sheepfold.3. Peter.4. James, of the “Peter, James and John,” referred to in the Gospels, is James son of Zebedee, and is identified with the James said, by tradition, to have preached the Gospel in Spain, whose most celebrated shrine was at Compostela in Galicia. Cf. Vita Nuova, xli. But the James associated with Peter and John as a “pillar” of the Church in Gal. ii. 9. is “James the Lord’s brother” (Gal. i. 19) mentioned in Acts xv. 13 and elsewhere. It is to him, and not to the son of Zebedee that the Epistle of James has usually been assigned. But Dante forgets or ignores the distinction.5. James i. 5.6. i.e., admitted Peter, James and John to more intimate knowledge and familiarity than was extended to the other disciples. Cf. Conv. ii. 1. The occasion specially referred to are the Transfiguration, the raising of the daughter of Jairus, and the agony of Gethsemane.7. The Exodus from Egypt had a manifold significance. Amongst other things it was the symbol of the liberation of the soul from the bondage of the flesh; as the entry into the Promised Land and the City of God was the symbol of the heavenly life. Cf. Purg. ii, Epist. ad Can. Grand., § 7, and the cruder statement in Conv. ii. 1.8. Cf. Cantos xvii and xxiv.9. It is to be noted that the theological virtue of Hope, as understood by the Catholic Church, is not a general hopefulness of disposition, but the specific hope of the bliss of heaven. Dante’s definition is closely copied from Peter Lombard’s “Hope is the certain expectation of future Bliss, coming from the grace of God and from preceding merits.”10. Psalm ix. 10. In the Vulgate, ix. 11, where the reading is sperent = “let them hope.”11. James i. 12. “With his dropping” = “in combination with his (David’s) teaching.”12. Martyrdom and death.13. “Isaiah (lxi. 7,10); in describing the gathering of the redeemed, declares that they shall possess double things, to wit robes, as your brother-apostle John in describing the same scene (Revelation, vii. 9), makes yet clearer. Scripture tells us, then, in symbolical language, that we shall have two robes, and this symbol, in its turn, assures me that we shall have joy of body as well as joy of soul. The content of my hope, then, is the unbroken immortality of the soul and the resurrection to immortality of the body.” (Cf. Canto xiv, note 4.) The fanciful and indirect character of this scriptural support for the belief in the resurrection of the body is the more remarkable when we consider that 1 Cor. xv. would have furnished Dante with a perfectly explicit statement. Thomas Aquinas, as one would expect, makes frequent use of this chapter.14.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  As the pupil who followeth the teacher, eager and glad, in that wherein he is expert, in order that his excellence may be revealed; “Hope,” said I, “is a certain expectation of future glory, the product of divine grace and precedent merit.9 From many stars cometh this light to me; but he first distilled it into my heart who was the supreme singer of the supreme leader. Let them hope in thee,10 in his divine song he saith, who know thy name; and who knoweth it not, having my faith? Thou then didst drop it on me with his dropping, in thine Epistle,11 so that I am full and pour again your shower upon others.” Whilst I was speaking, within the living bosom of that flame trembled a flash sudden and dense like unto lightning. Then breathed forth: “The love whence I am still aflame to-ward that virtue which followed me even to the palm and issuing from the field,12 willeth that I breathe on thee who dost delight thee in her; and further, ’tis my pleasure that thou tell the thing which hope doth promise thee.” And I: “The new and the ancient scriptures set down the symbol, which again doth point me to the thing itself. Of the souls which God hath made his friends Isaiah saith that each one shall be c?ad with double garb in its own land, and its own land is this sweet life. And more worked out by far, doth thy brother, where he treateth of the white robes, set forth this revelation to us.”13 And, close upon the ending of these words, first rang above us, Let them hope in thee, whereunto all the carols answered; then, from amongst themselves, a light flashed out, in fashion such that if the Crab contained a crystal like it winter would have a month of one unbroken day.14 And as doth rise and go her way and enter on the dance a joyous virgin, only to do honour to the bride, and not for any failing,15 so did I see the illumined splendour join the other two, who were wheeling round in such guise as their burning love befitted. There it launched itself into their music and their words; and my Lady held her look upon them just like a bride, silent and unmoving. “This is he who lay upon the breast of our Pelican, and this was he chosen from upon the cross for the great office.”16 My Lady thus; but no more after than before her words moved she her eyes from their fixed intent. As who doth gaze and strain to see the sun eclipsed a space, who by looking grows bereft of sight; so did I to this last flame till a word came: “Wherefore dost dazzle thee to see that which hath here no place? Earth in the earth my body is, and there it shall be, with the rest, until our number equalleth the eternal purpose.17

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  That was the winter I began to write in earnest. I began to write as if it were my only hope for survival, for escape. I had always written, after a fashion. I had always worshipped authors. I used to kiss their pictures on the backs of books when I finished reading. I regarded anything printed as a holy relic and authors as creatures of superhuman knowledge and wit. Pearl Buck, Tolstoy, or Carolyn Keene, the author of Nancy Drew. I made none of the snotty divisions you learn to make later. I could happily go from Through the Looking Glass to a horror comic, from Great Expectations or The Secret Garden to Mad Magazine. Growing up in my chaotic household, I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, “the absentminded professor.” They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe. Bennett’s grandfather—that courageous old man who came from China at the age of twenty, who was converted to Christianity by a missionary who promised to teach him English (and never did), who preached the gospel to Chinese laborers in mining camps of the Northwest, who finally ended his days keeping a gift shop on Pell Street—and never in all his 99 or 100 years learned to speak more than a few words of intelligible English, much less write it—launched me on my career as a writer by dying. Sometimes death is the beginning of things. While Bennett mourned in silence through the long winter, I wrote. I threw out all my college poems, even the ones that had been published. I threw out all my false starts at stories and novels. I wanted to make myself anew, to make a new life for myself by writing. I immersed myself in the work of other writers. I used to send for books from Foyle’s in London or ask my friends or parents to send them from New York. I would study one contemporary poet or novelist at a time, reading and rereading their books, studying how they had changed from book to book, imitating a different author’s style every few months. The whole time I was terrified and regarded myself as a failure. Once, when I was eighteen or so and thought of thirty as old age, I had promised to kill myself if I hadn’t published my first book by the age of twenty-five. And here I was already twenty-five! And just beginning.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Charlie’s father, however, did amputate half his nose (with the result that he wound up looking like a Jew with an absurdly small nose). But the main thing was that the Feldsteins left Brooklyn and turned up in the Beresford (that gilded ghetto, that pseudocastle) on Central Park West. The family business was a worldwide chain of dancing schools which sold life memberships to lonely old people. It wasn’t exactly a racket any more than psychoanalysis or religion or encounter groups or Rosicrucianism can be said to be rackets, but, like them, it also promised an end to loneliness, powerlessness, and pain, and of course it disappointed many people. Charlie had worked in the dance-studio business for a few summers during college, but this was only a token gesture. He hated any kind of everyday job—even if it consisted of gliding across the dance floor with an eighty-year-old lady who had just become a life member to the tune of several thousand dollars. When I knew him, Charlie was very sensitive on the subject of ballroom dancing. He did not want it generally known that this was what his father did for a living. Nevertheless, he dropped his famous uncle’s name frequently among his friends and mine. Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own. But what did Charlie do? He prepared himself for greatness. He daydreamed about his conducting debut—which otherwise he did nothing much to hasten—and he began symphonies. They were—every one of them—unfinished symphonies. He also began sonatas and operas (based on works by Kafka or Beckett). These were unfinished bars (but which he always promised to dedicate to me). Perhaps to others he was a failure, but to himself he was a romantic figure. He spoke of “silence, exile, and cunning.” (Silence: the unfinished symphonies. Exile: he had left the Beresford for the East Village. Cunning: his affair with me.) He was going through the initial trials of all great artists. As a conductor, he had not yet had his break and was further handicapped, he thought, by the fact of not being a homosexual. As a composer, it was a question of learning to cope with the crisis of style which bedeviled the age. That too would come in time. One had to think in decades, not years. Dreaming at the piano bench or over a plate of cherry blintzes in Ratner’s, Charlie thought of himself as he would be when he finally made it—graying at the temples, suave, and eccentrically dressed. After conducting his own new opera at the Met, he would not be above running down to the Half Note for a jam session with aspiring jazz musicians.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  22 Dixerat sacerdos, nec impatientia corrumpebatur obsequium meum, sed intentus miti quiete et proba- bili taciturnitate sedulum quot dies obibam culturae sacrorum ministerium. Nec me fefellit vel longi temporis prolatione cruciavit deae potentis benignitas salutaris, sed noctis obscurae non obscuris imperiis evidenter monuit advenisse diem mihi semper opta- bilem, quo me maximi voti compertiret, quantoque sumptu deberem procurare supplicamentis ; ipsumque Mithram illum suum sacerdotem praecipuum, divino quodam stellarum consortio, ut aiebat, mihi coniunc- tum, sacrorum ministrum decernit. Quis et ceteris benivolis praeceptis summatis deae recreatus animi, necdum satis luce lucida, discussa quiete, protinus ad receptaculum sacerdotis contendo, atque eum cubi- culo suo commodum prodeuntem continuatus saluto. Solito constantius destinaveram iam velut debitum sacris obsequium flagitare: at ille statim, ut me conspexit prior, * O " inquit « Luci, te felicem, te beatum, quem propitia voluntate numen augustum tantopere dignatur: et quid ” inquit “Iam nunc stas otiosus teque ipsum demoraris? Adest tibi dies votis assiduis exoptatus, quo deae multino- minis divinis imperiis per istas meas manus piissimis Sacrorum arcanis insinueris" : et iniecta dextera senex comissimus ducit me protinus ad ipsas fores aedis amplissimae, rituque sollemni apertionis cele- 516 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK XI apt and clean to the knowledge of the secrets of the religion.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  36, after citing which, with some others, Petrus Lombardus adds: “but since almost every syllable of the New Testament agrees in suggesting this truth of the ineffable Unity and Trinity, let us dispense with gathering testimonies on this latter.”C A N T O X X VIt was the Faith that gained Dante the high privilege of the apostolic benediction. Therefore if his poem should ever melt the heart of the Florentines he will take the poet’s crown at that same font whereat he was received into the Faith. St. James now joins St. Peter. When we read of the three chosen disciples to whom Jesus reveals more than to the others we are to take Peter as representing faith, James hope, and John love; and therefore Beatrice urges James to test Dante as to Hope. James questions him. Beatrice herself declares on his behalf that he possesses in fullest measure the virtue of hope, and that it is on that very ground that he has been allowed to anticipate death in his vision of divine things. As to the nature of Hope and its source he shall answer for himself. Dante defines hope with exclusive reference to the future life, and derives it from Scripture. James, whose own hope, which followed him even to death, is now swallowed up in victory, still loves the virtue he once practised, and demands to hear the content of Dante’s hope, and its source. Dante declares that Isaiah and John tell him of the double garments of the blessed, and that this symbol indicates to him the resurrection of the body as well as the immortality of the soul as the substantive content of his hope. A light as bright as the sun now joins Peter and James, and is declared by Beatrice to be the Apostle John. Dante strains his sight to see John’s body, but is blinded by the glory, and is told that his body is dust, and awaits the general resurrection; Jesus and Mary alone of human beings having arisen with their bodies to heaven. Then of a sudden the harmony is stilled, and the blinded Dante turns in vain to look upon Beatrice.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then she, fetching a sigh from the bottom of her heart, lifted up her eyes unto the heavens, saying: “ O sovereign gods, deliver me, if it be your pleasure, from these present dangers ; and thou, cruel fortune, cease thy wrath; let the sorrow suffice thee which I have already sustained. And thou, little ass, that art the occasion of my safety and liberty, if thou canst once render me safe and sound to my parents, and to that comely one that so greatly desireth to have me to his wife, thou shalt see what thanks I will give thee, with what honour I will reward thee, and how I will feed thee. First I will finely comb thy mane and adorn it with my maiden necklaces, and then I will bravely dress the hair of thy fore- head, and tie up thy rugged tail trimly, whose bristles are now ragged and matted by want of care : I will deck thee round about with golden trappings and tassels, in such sort that thou shalt glitter like the stars of the sky, and shalt go in triumph amid the applause of the people: I will bring thee every day in my silken apron the kernels of nuts, and will pamper thee up with dainty delights; I will set store by thee, as by one that is the preserver of my life. Finally, thou shalt lack no manner of thing, and amongst thy glorious fare, thy great ease, and the bliss of thy life, thou shalt not be destitute of dignity, for thou shalt be chronicled perpetually in memory of my present fortune, and the providence divine. All the whole history of this our present flight shall be painted upon the wall of our house: thou shalt be renowned throughout all the world, and this tale (though rude) shall be registered in the books of doctors, how an ass saved the life of a young maiden, a princess, that was a captive amongst thieves. Thou shalt be numbered amongst the 291 LUCIUS APULEIUS iam credemus exemplo tuae veritatis et Phrixum arieti supernatasse et Arionem delphinum guber- nasse et Europam tauro supercubasse. Quod si vere Iupiter mugivit in bovem, potest in asino meo latere aliqui vel vultus hominis vel facies deorum." Dum haec identidem puella replicat votisque cre- bros intermiscet suspiritus, ad quoddam pervenimus trivium, unde me arrepto capistro dirigere dextrorsum magnopere gestiebat, quod ad parentis eius ea scilicet iretur via. Sed ego gnarus latrones illac ad reliquas commeasse praedas, renitebar firmiter atque sic in animo meo tacitus expostulabam : “ Quid facis, infelix puella? Quid agis? Cur festinas ad Orcum? Quid meis pedibus facere contendis? Non enim te tantum, verum etiam me perditum ibis." Sic nos diversa tendentes et in causa finali de proprietate soli, immo viae hereiseundae contendentes, rapinis suis onusti coram deprehendunt ipsi latrones et ad lunae splen- dorem iam inde longius cognitos risu maligno salu-

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

  Yes, it’s enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but the writers of that landmark document had no inkling of how the human brain works, nor that one day we could detect a defendant’s DNA under a victim’s fingernails. Before DNA evidence, the law could not say whether a judgment of guilt was true or false. The legal system could only decide whether or not the judgment was rendered fairly, meaning that the rules and procedures of law were followed consistently. The law was therefore not about truth but consistency. Due process was about avoiding procedural errors in rendering a decision of guilt or innocence, not about the validity of the decision itself. Today’s legal system works only if we assume that consistency produces a just outcome. DNA testing is changing all that. It’s not perfect, but it’s immeasurably more objective than the affect-laden perceptions of human jurors. 7 1 When DNA evidence is unavailable or irrelevant, perhaps trials might dispense with a jury and instead feature the collective wisdom of multiple judges working together, randomly drawn from a larger pool of judges. As I’ve said already, I’m not a legal scholar, just a scientist, so perhaps wiser legal minds can construct a balanced judicial panel system in better ways. A panel of skilled judges who are trained to be self-aware and emotionally granular might avoid affective realism more effectively than a jury would. It’s not a perfect solution by any means: in the United States at least, judges tend to be on the older side, predominantly European American, and may overrepresent a particular set of beliefs while maintaining the illusion that they are free of them. Judges are also more likely to hand out maximum sentences. But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain. 7 2 And now we get to the toughest issue of all: what it means to control your behavior and therefore be responsible for your actions. The law (like much of psychology) usually considers responsibility in two parts: actions caused by you, where you have more responsibility, and actions caused by the situation, where you have less. This simple dichotomy of internal versus external does not mesh with the reality of the predictive brain. In a construction view of human nature, every human action involves three types of responsibility, not two. The first is traditional: your behavior in the moment. You pull the trigger. You grab the money and run. (The legal system names this behavior actus reus, the harmful action.) The second type of responsibility involves your specific predictions that brought about the unlawful act (known as mens rea, the guilty mind).

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

  Affective realism, when left unchecked, leads people to be dead certain and inflexible. When two opposing groups believe deeply that they are right, they engage in political skirmishes, ideological battles, even wars. The two views of human nature you’ve seen in this book, from the classical view and construction, have been duking it out for several thousand years. 12 In this ongoing battle, affective realism has led each side to stereotype the other’s point of view. The classical view is caricatured as biological determinism, that culture is completely irrelevant and genes are absolute destiny, justifying the present social order of who is wealthy and who struggles. That caricature depicts an extreme version of favoring “getting ahead” over “getting along.” Construction, on the other hand, is criticized as absolute collectivism at the expense of the individual, or as the mistaken view that humans are one big superorganism like the Borg from Star Trek, and that the brain is “a uniform meatloaf” in which every neuron has exactly the same function. It’s an exaggerated version of “getting along” trumping “getting ahead.” Each side in this battle ignores the subtleties and variations that necessarily arise in scientific communities. If you’ve read this far, you’ve seen that the evidence points to a more nuanced conclusion: the dividing line between biology and culture is porous. Culture arose from natural selection, and as culture gets under the skin and into the brain, it helps to shape the next generation of humans. 13 Affective realism is an inevitability, and yet you are not helpless against it. The best defense against affective realism is curiosity. I tell my students to be particularly mindful when you love or hate something you read. These feelings probably mean that the ideas you’ve read are firmly in your affective niche, so keep an open mind about them. Your affect is not evidence that the science is good or bad. The biologist Stuart Firestein in his lovely book Ignorance encourages curiosity as a way to learn about the world. Try to become comfortable with uncertainty, he suggests, finding pleasure in mystery, and being mindful enough to cultivate doubt. These practices will help you take a calm look at evidence that violates your own deeply held beliefs and experience the pleasure of the hunt for knowledge. 14 The second inevitability of the mind is that you have concepts, because the human brain is wired to construct a conceptual system.

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

  Depression is an imbalance of many entwined parts of the nervous system that we can understand only by treating the whole person, not by treating one system in isolation like the parts of a machine. The tipping point into a major depressive episode can come from many different sources. You could suffer prolonged stress or abuse, particularly in childhood, leaving you carrying around a model of the world built from toxic past experiences. You could have physical conditions like chronic heart disease or insomnia that lead to bad interoceptive predictions. Your genes could leave you sensitive to your environment and every little problem. Also, if you’re a woman of reproductive age, the connectivity within your interoceptive network changes throughout the month, leaving you more vulnerable, at certain points in your cycle, to unpleasant affect, rumination, and perhaps even increased risk of mood disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. “Thinking positive thoughts” or taking antidepressants might not be enough to bring your body budget back into balance: other lifestyle changes or system adjustments might be necessary. 3 3 The theory of constructed emotion suggests that we can treat depression by breaking the cycle of misbudgeting, that is, by changing interoceptive predictions to be more in line with what’s going on around you. Scientists have found evidence that this is the case. As treatments like antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy start to work and you feel less depressed, your activity in a key body-budgeting region returns to normal levels, and connectivity in your interoceptive network is restored. These changes are consistent with the idea of reducing the excessive predictions. We might also treat depression by letting in more prediction error, say, by asking people to keep a diary of their positive experiences, which can ease the drain on the body budget. The problem, of course, is that no treatment works for everyone, and there are some people for whom no treatments work. 3 4 One of the most promising avenues for treatment I’ve seen is the groundbreaking work of neurologist Helen S. Mayberg ( chapter 4 ), who electrically stimulates the brains of unrelentingly depressed patients. Her technique instantly relieves the agony of depression, if only while the current is on, as the patient’s brain shifts from all-consuming internal focus to the external world, so it can predict and process prediction error normally. Let’s hope that these preliminary yet encouraging results will ultimately lead scientists to a more lasting treatment for depression.

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

  And this bridge, like all bridges, will lead us to a new place, as you’ll see in the next chapter: a modern origin story of what it means to be human. 8 A New View of Human Nature The theory of constructed emotion is not just a modern explanation of how emotions are made. It’s also an ambassador for a radically different view of what it means to be a human being. This view is consistent with the latest research in neuroscience. It also gives you more control over your feelings and behavior than the classical view does, and it has deep implications for how to live your life. You are not a reactive animal, wired to respond to events in the world. When it comes to your experiences and perceptions, you are much more in the driver’s seat than you might think. You predict, construct, and act. You are an architect of your experience. Another compelling view of human nature comes from the classical view of emotion. It’s been around for thousands of years and is still embedded in law, medicine, and other critical elements of society. The two views have in fact been at war with each other throughout recorded history. In previous battles, the classical view of human nature has consistently come out on top for reasons we’ll see. But now, as we’re in the midst of a revolution of mind and brain, modern neuroscience has given us the tools to settle the conflict, and based on overwhelming evidence, the classical view has lost. In this chapter, I lay out the distinctive new view of human nature represented by the theory of constructed emotion and compare it to the traditional ideas espoused by the classical view. I also introduce you to a shadowy culprit that has kept the classical view so prominent for so long, entrenched in science and culture, despite a steady stream of contrary evidence. Most of us think of the outside world as physically separate from ourselves. Events happen “out there” in the world, and you react to them “in here” in your brain. In the theory of constructed emotion, however, the dividing line between brain and world is permeable, perhaps nonexistent. Your brain’s core systems combine in various ways to construct your perceptions, memories, thoughts, feelings, and other mental states. You experienced this with the blobby bee picture, when you saw shapes that didn’t physically exist, demonstrating that your brain models your world through simulation. Your brain issues a storm of predictions, simulates their consequences as if they were present, and checks and corrects those predictions against actual sensory input. Along the way, your interoceptive predictions produce your feelings of affect, influence every action that you perform, and determine which parts of the world you care about in the moment (your affective niche). Without interoception, you wouldn’t notice or care about your physical surroundings or anything else, and you’d be unlikely to survive for long.

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

  Those beliefs are correct” when compared to census figures. He and others argue that many scientists dismiss stereotypes as inaccurate because we are bullied into political correctness, are condescending toward ordinary people, or are biased by our own muddled assumptions about human nature. But as you’ve just seen, there is another possibility: the official welfare statistics are true because we, as a society, made them so. 19 By virtue of our values and practices, we restrict options and narrow possibilities for some people while widening them for others, and then we say that stereotypes are accurate. They are accurate only in relation to a shared social reality that our collective concepts created in the first place. People aren’t a bunch of billiard balls knocking one another around. We are a bunch of brains regulating each other’s body budgets, building concepts and social reality together, and thereby helping to construct each other’s minds and determine each other’s outcomes. Some readers might dismiss this sort of constructionist worldview as a stereotypically bleeding-heart liberal ivory tower academic viewpoint from the Land Where Everything Is Relative. In fact, this view cuts across traditional political lines. The idea that you’re molded by your culture is stereotypically liberal. At the same time, as we discussed in chapter 6, you are responsible in a broad sense for the concepts you have, which ultimately influence your behavior. Individual responsibility is a deeply conservative idea. You are also somewhat responsible to others, not only the less fortunate but also future generations, for how you influence their wiring. It matters how you treat other people. That is a fundamentally religious idea. The American Dream traditionally says, “If you work hard, anything is possible.” Construction agrees that you’re indeed the agent of your own destiny, but you are bounded by your surroundings. Your wiring, determined in part by your culture, influences your later options. I don’t know about you, but I find some comfort in a bit of uncertainty. It’s refreshing to question the concepts that have been given to us, and to be curious about which are physical and which are social. There is a kind of freedom in realizing that we categorize to create meaning, and therefore it is possible to change meaning by recategorizing. Uncertainty means that things can be other than they appear. This realization brings hope in difficult times and can prompt gratitude in good times. ... Now it’s time for me to drink my own Kool-Aid. Prediction, interoception, categorization, and the roles I’ve described for your various brain networks are not objective facts. They are concepts invented by scientists to describe the physical activity within a brain. I claim these concepts are the best way to understand certain computations being performed by neurons. However, there are many other ways to read the brain’s wiring diagram (some of which wouldn’t call it a wiring diagram at all).

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

  There is no known validity to these particular facial poses, and studies that use more objective methods like facial EMG and facial coding do not find evidence that people routinely make these movements in real life during episodes of emotion. Yet scientists continue to use the basic emotion method regardless. After all, it produces very consistent results. 24 Each time a scientific “fact” is overturned it leads to new avenues for discovery. The physicist Albert Michelson won a Nobel Prize in 1907 for disproving a conjecture made by Aristotle, that light travels through empty space via a hypothetical substance called luminiferous ether. His detective work set the stage for Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In our case, we’ve cast substantial doubt on the evidence for universal emotions. They only appear to be universal under certain conditions—when you give people a tiny bit of information about Western emotion concepts, intentionally or not. These observations, and others like them, set the stage for the new theory of emotion that you are about to learn. So Tomkins, Ekman, and their colleagues did contribute to a remarkable discovery. It just wasn’t the discovery that they expected. 25 The many cross-cultural studies employing the basic emotion method suggest something else exciting: it may be easy to teach emotion concepts across cultural boundaries, even unintentionally. Such a worldwide understanding would be hugely beneficial. If Saddam Hussein’s half-brother had only understood the American emotion concept of anger, he might have perceived anger in Secretary of State James Baker, which might have averted the first Gulf War with the United States, saving thousands of lives. Given how easy it is to teach emotion concepts by accident, there is also a danger in using Western stereotypes of emotion in cultural research. For instance, an ongoing series of studies called the Universal Expressions Project is attempting to document what is universal about emotional expressions in the face, body, and voice. So far, they’ve identified “about 30 facial expressions and 20 vocal expressions that are very similar around the world.” The catch is that the project uses only the basic emotion method, so it’s investigating universality with a tool that cannot provide such evidence. (Also, they’re asking people to pose what they believe are their cultural expressions, which is not the same thing as observing actual body movements during emotion.) More importantly, if the project reaches its goal, everyone in the world might learn the Western stereotypes for emotions. 26 In the long run, scientists who still subscribe to the basic emotion method are very likely helping to create the universality that they believe they are discovering.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was safe. Bennett’s grandfather—that courageous old man who came from China at the age of twenty, who was converted to Christianity by a missionary who promised to teach him English (and never did), who preached the gospel to Chinese laborers in mining camps of the Northwest, who finally ended his days keeping a gift shop on Pell Street—and never in all his 99 or 100 years learned to speak more than a few words of intelligible English, much less write it— launched me on my career as a writer by dying. Sometimes death is the beginning of things. While Bennett mourned in silence through the long winter, I wrote. I threw out all my college poems, even the ones that had been published. I threw out all my false starts at stories and novels. I wanted to make myself anew, to make a new life for myself by writing. I immersed myself in the work of other writers. I used to send for books from Foyle’s in London or ask my friends or parents to send them from New York. I would study one contemporary poet or novelist at a time, reading and rereading their books, studying how they had changed from book to book, imitating a different author’s style every few months. The whole time I was terrified and regarded myself as a failure. Once, when I was eighteen or so and thought of thirty as old age, I had promised to kill myself if I hadn’t published my first book by the age of twenty-five. And here I was already twenty-five! And just beginning. Sending work to magazines was entirely out of the question. Though I had been class poet in college and had won the usual prizes, I was now convinced that nothing I was writing was good enough to send anywhere. I viewed editors of quarterlies as godlike creatures who would not even deign to read anything short of masterpieces. And I believed this despite the fact that I subscribed to quarterlies and religiously read the work in them. The work was often not good, I had to admit, but still, I was sure my own must be much, much worse. I lived in a world peopled by phantoms. I would have imaginary love affairs with poets whose work I regularly read in quarterlies. Certain names came to seem almost alive to me. I would read the biographical sketches of the writers and feel I knew them. It’s odd how intimate a relationship you can have with someone you’ve never met—and how erroneous your impressions can be. Later, when I came back to New York and began publishing poems, I met some of these magical names. They were usually entirely different from what I’d imagined. Wits in print might turn out to be halfwits in person. Authors of gloomy poems about death might turn out to be warm and funny.