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 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.

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

  You slam that desk because your brain predicted an instance of anger, using your concept of “Anger,” and your past experience (whether direct, or from movies or books, etc.) includes an action of slamming the desk in a similar situation. Your control network, you may recall, constantly shapes the course of your predictions and prediction error to help select among multiple actions, whether you experience yourself as in control or not. This network can only work with the concepts that you’ve got. So the question of responsibility becomes, Are you responsible for your concepts? Not all of them, certainly. When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts. 2 As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. No particular conflict is predetermined by evolution. Conflicts persist due to social circumstances that wire the brains of the individuals who participate. Someone must take responsibility to change these circumstances and concepts. Who’s going to do it, if not the people themselves? To make this point, a scientific study provides some preliminary hope. Researchers trained a group of Israelis to think about various negative events, such as Palestinians’ launching rockets and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, and recategorize them as less negative. The trainees were not only less angry afterward but they showed greater support for policies leading to more peaceful and conciliatory resolutions, such as providing aid to Palestinians, as well as less support for aggressive tactics toward Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Surrounding the recent Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, this training in recategorization led people to support giving up security control over neighborhoods in East Jerusalem in exchange for full peace, and to show less support for restrictive policies like prohibiting Palestinians from using the Israeli medical system. These latter changes persisted for five months after training.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I think it would be much more powerful if it was you speaking your own mind. I mean, what I’d really like to do is send Carl himself, but you know . . .’ said Claire, sighing. ‘Depressing as it is, the truth is these people won’t respond to an appeal to their consciences in any language other than Wellington language. And you know Wellington language, Zora. You of all people. And I don’t mean to get overly dramatic here, but when I think of Carl, I’m thinking of someone who doesn’t have a voice and who needs someone like you, who has a very powerful voice, to speak for him. I actually think it’s that important. I also think it’s a beautiful thing to do for a dispossessed person in this climate. Don’t you feel that?’  On Beauty  Two weeks later Wellington College closed for the Christmas recess. The snow continued. Every night unseen Wellington street workers shovelled it back from the sidewalk. After a while every road was edged with grey ice banks, some over five feet high. Jerome came home. Many dull parties followed: for the Art History Department, drinks at the President’s house, and at the Vice-President’s, at Kiki’s hospital, at Levi’s school. More than once Kiki found herself walking around the perimeters of these hot, crowded rooms, champagne in hand, hoping to see Carlene Kipps somewhere among the tinsel and the quiet black maids, circulating with their trays of shrimp. Often enough she spotted Monty, leaning against the wainscoting in one of his absurd nineteenth-century three-piece suits, with his timepiece on a chain, bombastically opinionated, and almost always eating – but Carlene was never with him. Was Carlene Kipps one of these women who promises friendship but never truly delivers it? A friendship flirt? Or was Kiki herself mistaken in her expectations? This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn’t feel you could call people. They didn’t feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons? And then a note arrived at the Belsey house, hand-delivered. It was from Carlene. Christmas was approaching, and Carlene felt she was behind as far as presents were concerned. She had spent another spell in bed of late, and her family had gone to New York for a short break so the children might shop and Monty attend to some of his charity work. Would Kiki think about accompanying her on a shopping trip into Boston? On a drear Saturday morning, Kiki picked up her friend in a Wellington taxi. She put Carlene in  the anatomy lesson

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

  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). The theory of constructed emotion maps to the brain more closely than do so-called psychological essences or mental organs. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more useful and functional concepts for the brain’s structure emerge. As Firestein observes in Ignorance, no fact is “safe from the next generation of scientists with the next generation of tools.” 2 0 The history of science, however, has been a slow but steady march in the direction of construction. Physics, chemistry, and biology began with intuitive, essentialist theories, rooted in naive realism and certainty. We progressed beyond these ideas because we noticed that the old observations held true only under certain conditions. So, we had to replace our concepts. A scientific revolution swaps out one social reality for another, just like a political revolution does with its new government and social order. Again and again in science, our new sets of concepts have led us away from essentialism toward variation, and from naive realism to construction. 2 1 The theory of constructed emotion predicts and matches the latest scientific evidence about emotion, the mind, and the brain, and yet so much about the brain is still a mystery. We’re finding that neurons aren’t the only important cells in the brain; glial cells, long ignored, turn out to do a hell of a lot, possibly even communicating with each other without synapses. The enteric nervous system, which controls your stomach and intestines, is looking more and more important for understanding the mind, but it’s extremely difficult to measure and therefore largely unexplored. We’re even finding that microbes in your stomach have a huge effect on mental states, and nobody knows how or why. There’s so much innovative research going on that in ten years, today’s experts might feel like Plato in the presence of a brain-scanning machine. As our tools improve and our knowledge grows, I am confident that we’ll discover the brain to be even more steeped in construction than we now know it to be.

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

  You can’t predict efficiently when you don’t know the local concepts. You must get by with conceptual combination, which can be effortful and yields only an approximate meaning. Or you will be awash in prediction error much of the time. The process of acculturation therefore taxes your body budget. In fact, people who are less emotionally acculturated report more physical illness. Once again, categorization gets under your skin. 3 6 … In this book, I am trying to acculturate you into a new way of thinking about emotion. Whether you realize it or not, you have a set of concepts about emotions: what they are, where they come from, and what they mean. Perhaps you began this book with classical view concepts such as “Emotional Reaction” and “Facial Expression” and “Emotion Circuit in the Brain.” If so, I’ve been slowly replacing them with a new set, including “Interoception,” “Prediction,” “Body Budget,” and “Social Reality.” In a sense, I am attempting to draw you into a new culture called the theory of constructed emotion. A new culture’s norms may seem odd, or even wrong, until you’ve lived there for a while and come to understand them . . . and I hope you already do, or you will. Ultimately, if I and other like-minded scientists are successful in substituting the new concepts for the old, well, that’s a scientific revolution. The theory of constructed emotion explains how you experience and perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological fingerprints in the face, body, or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interoceptive network to your primary sensory cortices, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept. The simulation that’s closest to your actual situation is the winner that becomes your experience, and if it’s an instance of an emotion concept, then you experience emotion. This whole process occurs, with the help of your control network, in the service of regulating your body budget to keep you alive and healthy. In the process, you impact the body budgets of those around you, to help you survive to propagate your genes into the next generation. This is how brains and bodies create social reality. This is also how emotions become real. Yes, that’s a mouthful. And some details are still reasoned speculation, like the exact mechanisms of the concept cascade. But we can say confidently that the theory of constructed emotion is a viable way to think about how emotions are made.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  He promised me that he would lock me up and keep my sleeping prison a secret, that he wouldn’t allow anyone to accompany him into my apartment, not an assistant, not even a cleaning person. If he was going to bring in props or furniture or materials, he’d have to bring them in himself, and above all, each time he went away, no trace of his activities could be left. Not a scrap. When I came to on the third day of each Infermiterol blackout, there was to be no evidence of what had happened since my last awakening. There was to be no narrative that I could follow, no pieces for me to put together. Even a shade of curiosity could sabotage my mission to clear my mind, purge my associations, refresh and renew the cells in my brain, my eyes, my nerves, my heart. “I wouldn’t want you to know what I’m up to anyway. It would screw up my work. The creative incentive for me is that you’ll be constantly . . . naive.” I think it disappointed him that I wasn’t begging him to tell me what the work was going to be about. It didn’t worry me that he could make sex tapes. He was obviously homosexual. I wasn’t threatened. “As long as the place is clean and empty and you’re gone before I wake up every third day, and I don’t starve to death or break any bones, I don’t care about your artwork. You have carte blanche. Just don’t let me out of here. I’m doing important work of my own. Tit for tat.” “Tit for tit makes more sense,” he said. “What about just burning your passport or cutting up your driver’s license,” he suggested. I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining how the critics would describe the video. He needed fodder for analysis. But the project was beyond issues of “identity” and “society” and “institutions.” Mine was a quest for a new spirit. I wasn’t going to explain that to Ping Xi. He would think he understood me. But he couldn’t understand me. He wasn’t supposed to. And anyway, I needed my birth certificate and my passport and my driver’s license. At the end of my hibernation, I’d wake up—I imagined—and see my past life as an inheritance. I’d need proof of the old identity to help me access my bank accounts, to go places. It wasn’t as if I’d wake up with a different face and body and name. I’d appear to be the old me. “But that’s cheating,” he said. “If you’re planning to walk out of here and go back to being the same person you are now, what’s the point?” “It’s personal,” I said. “It’s not about ID cards. It’s an inside job. What do you want me to do? Walk out into the woods, build a fort, hunt squirrels?”

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  as the cause of such a condition. In that passage, God cursed the earth because of Adam’s sin: “cursed is the ground because of you.” Sin brings to the world corruption, disease, death, decay, suffering and sorrow. In the end, for Paul, creation will share in the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Rom 8:21). In this manner, both Paul and the author of Jubilees presuppose that there is an intrinsic and genuine link between creation (the cosmos) and humanity. When humanity is redeemed, the material world, which humanity has dominion over, will also become what God intends it to be. In other words, there is a real interconnectedness between the earth and humans groaning together. For Paul, redemption includes creation. Creation will 49 See Karina Martin Hogan, “The Apocalyptic Eschatology of Romans: Creation, Judgment, Resurrection, and Glory,” in The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought (ed. Benjamin E. Reynolds and Loren T. Stuckenbruck; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 205–31. In this chapter, Hogan endeavors to show how the apocalyptic themes of creation, resurrection, judgment, and glory function in Romans, with particular attention to 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. Hogan’s contribution presents some similarities to what I am doing here in the sense that she focuses on points of contact between Paul in Romans with some Jewish apocalyptic works. See also Moyer Hubbard, New Creation in Paul’s Letters and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especial y 26–53, where he addresses the connections between Paul’s new creation language in relation to the book of Jubilees. 50 It is as if Paul has siphoned creation anew into an ongoing aspect of the present, and the destruction then becomes not the ekpurosis of all things, but the burning away of the corruptible. 73 New Creation Motif 73 enjoy complete freedom when corruption ends and when it shares the eschatological glory of the children of God. In Rom 8:18–27 the children of God suffer with creation and their redemption is securing the hope of redemption for the cosmos. It is only when they appear in their eschatological glory that creation will final y be delivered from its bondage and decay. The creation is already in the process of redemption in Paul through the redeemed humanity in Christ. As Paula Fredriksen puts it, “Christ as God’s eschatological champion redeems the whole cosmos, of which Israel is certainly a part (Rom 8–15); Christ’s Parousia coincides with the raising of the dead, among whom certainly number Jews. ”51 Its final deliverance will come in the revealing of the children of God and then, and only then, will creation completely be delivered from its present futility and corruption.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 1: Since hope regards a possible good, there arises in man a twofold movement of hope; for a thing may be possible to him in two ways, viz. by his own power, or by another’s. Accordingly when a man hopes to obtain something by his own power, he is not said to wait for it, but simply to hope for it. But, properly speaking, he is said to await that which he hopes to get by another’s help as though to await [exspectare] implied keeping one’s eyes on another [ex alio spectare], in so far as the apprehensive power, by going ahead, not only keeps its eye on the good which man intends to get, but also on the thing by whose power he hopes to get it; according to Ecclus. 51:10, “I looked for the succor of men.” Wherefore the movement of hope is sometimes called expectation, on account of the preceding inspection of the cognitive power. Reply to Objection 2: When a man desires a thing and reckons that he can get it, he believes that he can get it, he believes that he will get it; and from this belief which precedes in the cognitive power, the ensuing movement in the appetite is called confidence. Because the movement of the appetite takes its name from the knowledge that precedes it, as an effect from a cause which is better known; for the apprehensive power knows its own act better than that of the appetite. Reply to Objection 3: Certainty is ascribed to the movement, not only of the sensitive, but also of the natural appetite; thus we say that a stone is certain to tend downwards. This is owing to the inerrancy which the movement of the sensitive or even natural appetite derives from the certainty of the knowledge that precedes it. Whether hope is in dumb animals?Objection 1: It would seem that there is no hope in dumb animals. Because hope is for some future good, as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. ii, 12). But knowledge of the future is not in the competency of dumb animals, whose knowledge is confined to the senses and does not extend to the future. Therefore there is no hope in dumb animals. Objection 2: Further, the object of hope is a future good, possible of attainment. But possible and impossible are differences of the true and the false, which are only in the mind, as the Philosopher states (Metaph. vi, 4). Therefore there is no hope in dumb animals, since they have no mind. Objection 3: Further, Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. ix, 14) that “animals are moved by the things that they see.” But hope is of things unseen: “for what a man seeth, why doth he hope for?” (Rom. 8:24). Therefore there is no hope in dumb animals. On the contrary, Hope is an irascible passion. But the irascible faculty is in dumb animals. Therefore hope is also.