Humiliation

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 Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “So it’s a good thing you get to fuck his ass as part of the job,” Stan continued. “Otherwise he’d be no use as an assistant.” Raymond nearly choked on his drink. “I beg your pardon?” Stan shrugged apologetically. “I know this job can be a bit boring, and I’m afraid there are going to be times when you’ll have nothing to do, so you’ll be able to spend the whole day in Damian’s ass if you wish. Why don’t you try him out now to see if this is the right kind of workplace for you? Here, boy, get on all fours and offer yourself,” Stan ordered, snapping his fingers. A warm wave of humiliation washed over Damian, and now his weariness was eclipsed by the arousal he felt in his throat, his gut and his stiff dick. Why was he always so horny for debasement? He got into position to allow himself to be fucked doggie-style. “Holy cow, that ass is amazing,” Raymond murmured. “I can’t believe—this has got to be some kind of joke you’re playing on me.” Stan got up from his lounger, shaking his head. “Not a joke at all. Here, to prove it, I’ll start fucking that hole first.” Stan pulled out condoms from the pocket of his bathrobe and then slipped the bathrobe off. Stan was tall, perhaps six-three, and hairy. He’d tanned nude for years, and now his body had a leathery quality to it. Damian thought that Stan was too proud of his muscular physique, but Stan’s extreme confidence and huge erection kept Damian in the mood to be submissive. “This can’t be happening,” Raymond said as Stan sank his dick into Damian. Even though Damian got fucked by Stan every day, there was always novelty when a new person watched them. The humiliation felt so good he was nearly delirious, but why couldn’t his asshole ever be given a day off? He used to get them, but he hadn’t had his ass to himself in more than a month. As Damian began to grunt and moan, he wondered if Raymond was a “wise target.” So many men had seen Stan’s website that a number of the interviewees knew they were there to be videotaped fucking Damian. “Take his mouth, Raymond,” Stan said, his hands on his hips as he thrust in and out slowly. Damian could hear hurried unzipping and stripping. It wasn’t another thirty seconds before Raymond pushed his cock between Damian’s lips. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing and the movement of his tongue over Raymond’s cock, all the while keeping his ass arched to best accept his master’s dick. He felt the tight pull of pleasure in his gut, but at the same time he thought to himself, Damian, you have to stop this life sooner or later.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The girl lies on her back, as if the words have passed completely over her. In the light, Sylvia can now see that there are bugs, small green grubby things, among the tangled blond hair. Sylvia can smell the urine. It’s dried in ugly patches on her thighs. She is never like this with her parents. With them, she’s quiet, almost sullen. It’s only when they leave that she gets unhinged this way. Sylvia thinks that she should say something, but it feels somehow like a betrayal. “You have to try,” Sylvia says. • • • Sylvia sits on the edge of the tub, pulling her fingers through the girl’s hair, freeing bits of detritus. Where has she gotten this filthy? How has she managed to get herself into such a mess? The girl fidgets in the water, reaching for her bath toys, moving away when Sylvia’s hands snag on tangles. She has already been still for longer than she likes, and Sylvia can feel the energy coiling inside her like a snake about to strike. “Where did you get all these things?” “My closet,” she says, the first words she has spoken all day. “I keep them in my closet.” “Why?” The girl shrugs and the bugs writhe as they drown. Sylvia rinses her fingers in the water and goes back to soaping the girl’s hair. The bathroom is the same plush velvet as the bedroom. There’s an insulated, womblike quality to the acoustics. The light is comforting in its haziness. “Why do you live with us now?” the girl asks. Sylvia considers her answer to this question. She could give the kind of gummy non-answer that children chew on for years before realizing there’s nothing to it, or she could say the truth of it, but that might involve having to answer more questions, worse questions. “Well,” Sylvia starts. “I broke up with my boyfriend, and I needed a place to stay, so your parents are letting me stay here.” “Why?” “Why what?” “Why do you break up?” The girl turns to look at her, her eyes wide and blue. “Oh, that’s a boring story,” Sylvia says. “Nobody wants to hear that story.” “I do,” the girl says. “I want to hear.” “Well,” Sylvia says, scooping up handfuls of water and letting them drizzle into the girl’s hair. “He was not well. He was sick. And I was sick. And we weren’t very good together.” “You’re sick?” the girl asks. Oh, yes, Sylvia almost says. I’m fucking sick. “Just a little bit—I’m getting better.” “What’s wrong?” “Hard to say,” Sylvia says. More water drizzling down the girl’s face, across her cheeks. There’s shampoo in her eyes, and it must burn, but she does not look away from Sylvia. How does she explain it? To this child? To herself? To Hammond—oh, Hammond.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Among the work’s gallery of vivid, contradictory, richly entertaining figures, this emotionally inert man comes to be the most powerful. Complacently fat, eager to seem athletically adept but actually a nonswimmer clumsy in a panicky way, this naked gent encourages his young son to serve as his live-in masseur. Kingly in reverse, as in photographic negative, the millionaire father offers no less potent an attraction for his own hiddenness, his nocturnal schedule. Loving best his Labrador retriever and Persian cat, the dad demonstrates a strange fussiness, like that pet-loving terrorist villain from Ian Fleming. The young narrator’s unmet affection and banked rage seem the fossil fuel driving his verbal acuity, his sometimes cringing wish to please, his dead-eye erotic aim. Here the boy traces such rage’s lineage as his father beats him: He tugged my pants down and pushed me forward into the glossy spread. The belt fell again and again, much too long and much too harshly to my mind, which had suddenly turned strangely epicurean. The solace of the condemned is scorn, especially scorn of an aesthetic stripe. In that moment the vital energies retreated out of my body into a small, hard gland of bitter objectivity, a gland that would secrete its poison through me for the rest of my life. At last my mother, conveniently tardy, rushed in and asked for mercy … Notice how the rhetorical phrase “to my mind” is dropped direct into the belt’s line of fire: “The belt fell again and again … to my mind.” Even “aesthetic stripe” seems to have absorbed a stinging lateral blow. The scale of humiliation here is recorded in the depth of withdrawal from any serious connection to others—a lifelong habit, we are warned. What’s left is a grazing, categorizing brilliance that has the avidity of love, the heat of erotic pursuit, but the camouflaging surface awareness of literary parody. This child’s cerebral engine has a breathless, stalking, sexual energy. A skilled seducer must never admit to understanding the word “no.” This vision has much in common with Proust’s self-invented mission. Edmund White shares with Proust an uncanny ability to let us guess what he was reading as he composed the book: now a work of marveling natural history, now a social novel; they all leave a tincture on the absorbent young mind guiding us here through an account of its twelfth to fifteenth years. The novel’s spurned young man can celebrate but one true sensory tie with his detached dad. Surrounded by Wall Street flow charts, the father might always seem shut behind a locked door after midnight; but the pair’s beloved late-Romantic music reaches, includes, and ultimately moves them both. This provokes a telling passage about the missing person. That father stands, silent colossus, at the center of all those circuitous visitations with eroticized parental substitutes, the manic rounds that constitute the clockwise movement of this book:

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Until I was seven my parents, my sister and I lived in a Tudor-style house at the end of a lane in the city where my father remained after the divorce. Our house and three others formed a wooded, almost rural enclave set down in the midst of an old, poor section of the city. I could never quite situate our enclave in the world outside; I remember my astonishment the day I roamed through the hollow behind our place, climbed up the far hill, pushed aside branches—and stared out at a major four-lane thoroughfare I’d been driven down countless times but had never suspected ran so close to our property. Certainly not behind it, of all things. To me the city lay entirely in front of our gates in a dirty, busy antechamber. I consulted with my sister. She was four years older, could read, went to school and knew everything. “Sure, dumbbell,” she said. “Of course it’s behind the house. Where’d you think it was?” She screwed her fingertip into her temple and said, “Duh.” She began to chant a colorless litany of “Dumbbells.” I stopped my ears with my hands and ran, crying, back into the house. My sister had friends she’d met at Miss Laughton’s School for Girls who came home to play with her some afternoons. They all belonged to a club my sister had started. She was the captain. Her success as a leader could be attributed to the methodical way she worked out her ideas: her approach lent an adult, step-by-step orderliness to projects that otherwise might have seemed wild and incomprehensible. One afternoon she ordered each of her team members to steal a belt from her father that night and bring it with her tomorrow. Of course every girl must be clever in stealing and hiding the belt; if caught, she must be even more resourceful in denying the real reason for filching it. The next afternoon the girls gathered in the hollow and presented their booty to my sister, who lashed each girl with her own father’s belt. In one case her zeal left welts, which led to parental questions and eventually exposure of the whole drama. My sister, at that time a tall, taut platinum blonde who didn’t like grown-ups, answered my mother’s furious questions with indignant yeses and noes, lowered eyes and a set jaw. She was afraid of my mother, the interrogation alarmed her, but not for a moment did she feel guilty or question what she had done. She was the queen of her tribe of girls.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Here the boy traces such rage’s lineage as his father beats him: He tugged my pants down and pushed me forward into the glossy spread. The belt fell again and again, much too long and much too harshly to my mind, which had suddenly turned strangely epicurean. The solace of the condemned is scorn, especially scorn of an aesthetic stripe. In that moment the vital energies retreated out of my body into a small, hard gland of bitter objectivity, a gland that would secrete its poison through me for the rest of my life. At last my mother, conveniently tardy, rushed in and asked for mercy … Notice how the rhetorical phrase “to my mind” is dropped direct into the belt’s line of fire: “The belt fell again and again … to my mind.” Even “aesthetic stripe” seems to have absorbed a stinging lateral blow. The scale of humiliation here is recorded in the depth of withdrawal from any serious connection to others—a lifelong habit, we are warned. What’s left is a grazing, categorizing brilliance that has the avidity of love, the heat of erotic pursuit, but the camouflaging surface awareness of literary parody. This child’s cerebral engine has a breathless, stalking, sexual energy. A skilled seducer must never admit to understanding the word “no.” This vision has much in common with Proust’s self-invented mission. Edmund White shares with Proust an uncanny ability to let us guess what he was reading as he composed the book: now a work of marveling natural history, now a social novel; they all leave a tincture on the absorbent young mind guiding us here through an account of its twelfth to fifteenth years. The novel’s spurned young man can celebrate but one true sensory tie with his detached dad. Surrounded by Wall Street flow charts, the father might always seem shut behind a locked door after midnight; but the pair’s beloved late-Romantic music reaches, includes, and ultimately moves them both. This provokes a telling passage about the missing person. That father stands, silent colossus, at the center of all those circuitous visitations with eroticized parental substitutes, the manic rounds that constitute the clockwise movement of this book: I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Farnland gripped Charles’s elbow and one of his hips, putting him into position as if he were a small boy. Charles absorbed the dry hardness of the touch and let the humiliation settle into the pit of his stomach. “Are the rigors of second position too much for you?” Farnland asked. “Do you need a moment to prepare?” Charles was close enough to see the hateful moisture at the corners of the man’s eyes. There was a flicker of true sincerity in his voice, as if he truly believed that Charles found second position difficult. “Sorry,” Charles said. “Don’t be. It’s fine. We all make mistakes,” he said with as much patience as scorn. “We’ll take it from the top, if that’s okay with you.” “That would be wonderful,” Charles said through a tense jaw. “From the beginning, then, Magnus,” Farnland said, nodding to the slim pianist. The music started up again, and Charles sighed. He assumed a slouched, grumpy first. He could hear his knee click. The cartilage felt hot, like a delicate, burning fiber trapped under the bone. But when Farnland’s eyes came in search of him, his body had already slipped into the stream of the combination and was, for a moment, beyond reproach. “Dismal, dismal,” he said. Charles shared his barre with Mats and Alek. Mats was light-skinned with blond and brown curls. He had a boyish face, but his body was all mean, tight lines. He could jump to Jupiter, yet his quads were humble. Alek was self-conscious about his chipped front tooth and tried to conceal it by talking as little as possible, which made him seem shy or nice. Alek was a ferocious, expressive dancer with the kind of timing that made his dancing look totally effortless. “Long night,” Mats said. “The longest,” Charles droned, drawing his body up. His knee popped as he slid his foot forward and then flexed. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It wasn’t pain in the true sense of the word. It just burned, like a low, simmering flame. And just on the one side. He could see through to the end of the pain, its temporary nature. And this was a comfort. It hurt only on certain movements. Certain configurations of tension. For example, reversing the position, sliding the leg back and flexing the other way, was totally without discomfort. He logged this information, storing it for when he would need to compensate. His body was a long tally of adjustments and allocations. He could feel, though, his feet coming to life. The muscles warming as they stretched. Charles had once seen an X-ray of his foot. He had let the back of an ax drop down carelessly, and his grandfather had needed to drive him to the emergency room. The doctor said that it wasn’t broken, just bruised very badly. She showed Charles the film of his foot and said that he was lucky.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  But Kevin’s body as he crouched and jumped over the wake, that could be seen. When at last he became tired he waited till we went past our house and then released the rope and slowly sank ten paces from our dock. That night he came to my bed again, but I irritated him by trying to kiss him. “I don’t go for that,” he said brusquely, though later, when we stood together in the maid’s half-bathroom washing up, he looked at me with an expression that could have been weariness or tenderness, I couldn’t tell. In the morning he went swimming with his father. I watched the two of them joking with each other. Kevin gave his father a hand and pulled him up on the deck. They were obviously friends, and I felt all the more rebuffed. That afternoon Peter, Kevin and I went fishing in the little outboard. The weather was hot, muggy, clouded over, and we waited in vain for a bite. We’d dropped anchor in a marsh where hollow reeds surrounded us and scratched the metal sides of the boat. I was sweating freely. Sweat stung my right eye. A mosquito spoke in my ear. The smell of gasoline from the engine (tilted up out of the shallow water) refused to lift and float away. The boys were threatening each other with dead worms out of the bait jar and Peter’s calls and pounding feet had scared off every fish in the lake. When I asked them to sit still, they gave each other that same smirk and started mocking me, repeating my words, their voices sliding up and down the scale, “You could be more considerate.” After a while the joke wore thin and they moved on to something else. Somehow—but at what precise moment?—I had shown I was a sissy; I replayed a moment here, a moment there of the past days, in an attempt to locate the exact instant when I’d betrayed myself. We motored back over the glassy, steaming lake; everything was colorless and hot and drained of immediacy. In such a listless, enfeebled world the whine of the motor seemed particularly cruel, like a scar on the void. I went for a walk by myself. I plodded up and down the hills on the narrow road that passed the backs of cottages, which turned their faces to the lake. An old car full of black maids sputtered past. It was Wednesday evening; tomorrow was their day off.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki snapped her cell closed and wedged it back into the very small gap between her flesh and her jean pocket. She was on Redwood already. During the conversation she had hung the paper bag with the cake box in it from her wrist; now she could feel the pie shifting around dangerously. She threw the bag away and put both hands under the bottom of the box to steady it. At the door she pressed down the bell with the back of her wrist. A young black girl answered with a dishrag in her hand, with poor English, giving her the information that Mrs Kipps was in the ‘leebry’. Kiki didn’t have a chance to ask if this was a good time, or to offer up the pie and then withdraw – she was led at once down the hallway and to an open door. The girl ushered her through into a white room lined with walnut bookshelves from floor to ceiling. A shiny black piano rested against the only bare wall. On the floor, on top of a sparse cowhide rug, hundreds of books were arranged in rows like dominos, their pages to the floor, their spines facing up. Sitting among them was Mrs Kipps, perched on the edge of a white calico Victorian armchair. She was bent forward, looking at the floor with her head in her hands.  On Beauty ‘Hello, Carlene?’ Carlene Kipps looked up at Kiki, and smiled, slightly. ‘I’m sorry – is this a bad time?’ ‘Not at all, my dear. It’s a slow time. I think I’ve bitten off rather more than I can chew. Please sit down, Mrs Belsey.’ There being no other chair, Kiki took a seat on the piano stool. She wondered what had happened to first names. ‘Alphabetizing,’ murmured Mrs Kipps. ‘I thought it would take a few hours. It’s a surprise for Monty. He likes his books in order. But I’m been in here since eight this morning and I’m not past C!’ ‘Oh, wow.’ Kiki picked up a book and pointlessly turned it over in her hands. ‘I have to say, we’ve never alphabetized. Sounds like a lot of hard work.’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘Carlene, I wanted to give this to you as a way —’ ‘Now, can you see any B’s or C’s over there?’ Kiki put her pie down beside her on the stool and bent over. ‘Oh-oh. Anderson – there’s an Anderson here.’ ‘Oh, dear Lord. Perhaps we should stop for a while. We’ll have a cup of tea,’ she said, as if Kiki had been by her side all morning. ‘Well, that’s just perfect, because I brought some pie. It’s humble pie – but it tastes great.’ But Carlene Kipps did not smile. It was clear that she had been offended and couldn’t now pretend otherwise. ‘There’s no need for any such thing, I’m sure. I should not have assumed – ’

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Two fat maids were climbing the hill, stopping every few steps to catch their breath. One, a shiny, blue-black fat woman wearing a flowered turban and holding a purple umbrella with a white plastic handle, was scowling and talking fast but obviously to humorous effect, for her companion couldn’t stop laughing. The bells of the Catholic school behind the dripping trees across the street marked the quarter hour, the half hour. More and more cars were passing me. I studied every driver—had my friend overslept? The milkman. The bread truck. Damn hillbilly. A bus went by, carrying just one passenger. A quarter to seven. He wasn’t coming. When I saw him the next evening on the square he waved at me and came over to talk. From his relaxed manner I instantaneously saw that he’d duped me and I was powerless. To whom could I report him? Like a heroin addict or a Communist, I was outside the law—outside it but with him, this man. We sat side by side on the same bench. A bad muffler exploded in a volley and the cooing starlings perched on the fountain figure’s arm flew up and away leaving behind only the metal dove. I took off my tie, rolled it up and slipped it inside my pocket. Because I didn’t complain about being betrayed, my friend said, “See those men yonder?” “Yes.” “I could git you one for eight bucks.” He let that sink in; yes, I thought, I could take someone to one of those little fleabag hotels. “Which one do you want?” he said. I handed him the money and said, “The blond.” THREE Until I was seven my parents, my sister and I lived in a Tudor-style house at the end of a lane in the city where my father remained after the divorce. Our house and three others formed a wooded, almost rural enclave set down in the midst of an old, poor section of the city. I could never quite situate our enclave in the world outside; I remember my astonishment the day I roamed through the hollow behind our place, climbed up the far hill, pushed aside branches—and stared out at a major four-lane thoroughfare I’d been driven down countless times but had never suspected ran so close to our property. Certainly not behind it, of all things. To me the city lay entirely in front of our gates in a dirty, busy antechamber. I consulted with my sister. She was four years older, could read, went to school and knew everything. “Sure, dumbbell,” she said. “Of course it’s behind the house. Where’d you think it was?” She screwed her fingertip into her temple and said, “Duh.” She began to chant a colorless litany of “Dumbbells.” I stopped my ears with my hands and ran, crying, back into the house.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  1. the evil love—see Canto xvii.2. The Greek sculptor Polycletus (ca. 452-412 B.C.) is lauded by a number of classical writers known in the Middle Ages, and his art is extolled by Italian poets prior to Dante.3. The Annunciation (see Luke i). Note that the first example of the virtue opposed to the vice punished on the seven terraces (here, humility as opposed to pride) is, in each case, an episode drawn from the life of the Virgin Mary.4. For David dancing before the Ark, see 2 Sam. vi.5. This version of the popular Trajan story is apparently derived from the Fiore di Filosofi, which used to be erroneously attributed to Brunetto Latini. The incident is again alluded to in Par. xx. The ethical bearings of the legend that Pope Gregory’s intercession brought about Trajan’s recall from Hell, so that the Emperor might have a respite for repentance, are discussed in Par. xx (see notes). The reference is to the metal (gold-bronze) eagle, the outspread wings of which might seem to be fluttering in the wind.C A N T O X IThe humbled souls approach, with a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer upon their lips, the petition for protection against temptation being uttered for the sake of those they have left behind, whether on earth or, perhaps, in the Antepurgatory, since souls inside the gate are beyond its reach; which loving offices of prayer the living should surely reciprocate for those who are now purging themselves. In answer to Virgil’s inquiry, one of the souls directs the pilgrims to turn to the right, circling the mount with the sun. It is the Sienese Omberto, whose insolence had made him little better than a brigand, and had involved all his race in ruin. As the Poet bends down to hearken, another soul, painfully turning beneath his burden, gazes upon Dante who recognizes him as the miniature painter, Oderisi, now willing to admit the superior excellence of his rival Franco, and fully sensible of the empty and transitory nature of human glory. Cimabue’s school of painting is superseded by Giotto’s; the older poetic school of Guittone, or Guido, of Arezzo and his companions has been superseded by that of Guido Guinicelli, to which Guido Cavalcanti and Dante himself belong; and who knows whether the founder of yet another school that shall relegate them all to obscurity, may not already be born! Worldly reputation is always of the same empty quality, though the momentary object to which it attaches itself changes, one empty reputation differing from another only in name, and all of them swallowed up in the course of years, what matter whether few or many! One of the heroes of Montaperti and victims of Colle de Valdelsa, who is pacing before them, is already all but forgotten on the very scene of his triumphs and defeats. What are his reputation and his pride to him now, where the only act of his life that avails him is his self-humiliation in begging ransom for his friend, in the market place of Siena? an act which Dante himself shall learn better to appreciate in the days of his own anguish of humiliation.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I thought we was friends , man!’ ‘So did I!’ cried Zora. ‘ Stop crying – you ain’t gonna get out of this by crying,’ he warned heatedly, and yet Zora could hear concern in his voice. She dared to hope that this still might end well. She reached out a hand to him, but he took a step back. ‘Speak to me,’ he demanded. ‘What is this? You got some problem with my girl?’ Upon hearing this formulation, a snotty clump of tears flew spectacularly from Zora’s nose. ‘Your girl!’ ‘Have you got some problem with her?’ Zora wiped her face on the neck of her dress. ‘No,’ she snapped indignantly. ‘I haven’t got a problem with her. She’s not worth having a problem with.’ Carl opened his eyes wide, shocked by this answer. He pressed a hand to his forehead, trying to figure it out. ‘Now, what the fuck does that mean, man?’ ‘Nothing. God! You totally deserve each other. You’re both trash.’ Carl’s eyes grew cold. He brought his face right up to hers, in an awful inversion of what Zora had spent six months hoping for. ‘You know what?’ he said, and Zora prepared to hear his judgement on what he saw. ‘You’re a fucking bitch .’ Zora turned her back to him and began her difficult journey down the porch steps, minus her coat and purse, minus her pride and with a good deal of trouble. These shoes took stairs in only one direction. At last she made it to the street. She wanted to go home now desperately; the humiliation was beginning to outweigh the rage. She was experiencing the first inklings of a shame she sensed would live with her for a long, long time. She needed to get home and hide under something heavy. Just then Jerome appeared on the porch. ‘Zoor? You OK?’  on beauty and being wrong ‘Jay, go back in – I’m fine – please go back in.’ As she said this Carl ran down the stairs and confronted her again. He was not willing to leave her with this last, ugly image of himself; it still, somehow, mattered to him what she thought of him. ‘ I’m just trying to understand why you would act so crazy ,’ he said earnestly, coming close to her again and searching for an answer in her face; Zora almost fell into his arms. From where Jerome was standing, however, it appeared that Zora was cringing in fear. He rushed down the steps to put himself between his sister and Carl. ‘Hey, buddy,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘back off, OK?’ The front door opened once more. It was Victoria Kipps. ‘Great!’ shouted Zora, throwing her head back and spotting the little audience on the balcony who were watching these events. ‘Let’s sell tickets!’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi had indeed seen that booty, but suddenly Carl was not the person with whom he wanted to discuss it. He had never known Carl well, but, in the way of a teenage crush, he had thought a great deal of him. Just shows what happens when you mature. Levi had obviously matured a hell of a lot since last summer – he’d sensed that about himself and now saw it was true. Feckless brothers like Carl just didn’t impress him any more. Levi Belsey had moved on to the next level. It was strange to think of his previous self. And it was so strange to stand next to this ex-Carl, this played-out fool, this shell of a brother in whom all that was beautiful and thrilling and true had utterly evaporated. Howard was preparing to nip out for a bagel from the cafeteria. He rose from his desk – but he had a visitor. She smashed the door open and smashed it closed. She didn’t come far into the room. She stood with her back pressed against the door. ‘Could you sit down, please?’ she said, looking not at him but to the ceiling, as if addressing a prayer upwards. ‘Can you sit down and listen and not say anything? I want to say something and then I want to go and that’s it.’ Howard folded his coat in half and sat down with it on his lap. ‘You don’t treat people like that, right?’ she said, still talking to the ceiling. ‘You don’t do that to me twice . First you make me look like a fool at that dinner and then – you don’t leave someone in a hotel by themselves – you don’t act like a fucking child – and make someone feel that they’re not worth anything. You don’t do that.’  On Beauty She brought her gaze down at last. Her head was wobbling wildly on her neck. Howard looked to his feet. ‘I know you think,’ she said, each word tear-inflected, making her hard to understand, ‘that you . . . know me. You don’t know me. This,’ she said and touched her face, her breasts, her hips, ‘that’s what you know. But you don’t know me . And you were the one who wanted this – that’s all anybody ever . . .’ She touched the same three places. ‘And so that’s what I . . .’ She wiped her eyes with the hem of her polo neck. Howard looked up. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I want the e-mails I sent you destroyed. And I’m dropping out of your class, so you don’t have to worry about that .’ ‘You don’t need – ’ ‘You don’t have any idea what I need. You don’t even know what you need. Anyway. Pointless.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Voilà! Paper! But what atrocious paper! Talk about the history of the world through toilets—this toilet resembles nothing so much as an oubliette, and the paper seems to have dead bedbugs embedded in it. I lock the door, heave open the tiny window, toss Bennett’s bloody T-shirt out into the courtyard (thinking momentarily about sympathetic magic and all those tribal customs mentioned in The Golden Bough… will some evil sorcerer find Bennett’s T-shirt drenched with my blood and use it to cast a spell on both of us?). Then I sit down on the pot and begin devising a sort of sanitary napkin for myself with layers of toilet paper. The absurdities our bodies subject us to! Other than being doubled over with diarrhea in some stinking public toilet, I know of nothing more ignominious than getting your period when you have no Tampax. The odd thing is that I didn’t always feel this way about menstruation. I actually looked forward to my first period, longed for it, wanted it, prayed for it. I used to pore over words like “period” and “menstruation” in the dictionary. I used to recite a little prayer which went: please let me get my period today. Or, because I was afraid someone would hear me, I said: P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. I used to chant this on the toilet seat, wiping myself again and again and hoping to find at least a tiny spot of blood. But nothing. Randy had her period (or “got unwell,” as my liberated mother and grandmother said) and so did all the girls in my seventh-grade class. And my eighth-grade class. What big bosoms and C-cup Maidenform bras and curly pubic tendrils! What stirring discussions of Kotex and Modess, and (for the very, very daring) Tampax! But I had nothing to contribute. At thirteen I had only a “training bra” (training for what?) I didn’t fill, a few sparse brownish-red curls (not even blonde, for all that I was a natural blonde), and information about sex gleaned from all-night marathons with Randy and her best friend, Rita. So the prayers on the pot continued. P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. And then, when I was thirteen and a half (ancient compared to Randy’s ten and a half), I finally “got it” on the Ile de France in Mid-Atlantic, as we returned en famille from that disastrously expensive (though tax-deductible) European jaunt.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Here the boy traces such rage’s lineage as his father beats him: He tugged my pants down and pushed me forward into the glossy spread. The belt fell again and again, much too long and much too harshly to my mind, which had suddenly turned strangely epicurean. The solace of the condemned is scorn, especially scorn of an aesthetic stripe. In that moment the vital energies retreated out of my body into a small, hard gland of bitter objectivity, a gland that would secrete its poison through me for the rest of my life. At last my mother, conveniently tardy, rushed in and asked for mercy … Notice how the rhetorical phrase “to my mind” is dropped direct into the belt’s line of fire: “The belt fell again and again … to my mind.” Even “aesthetic stripe” seems to have absorbed a stinging lateral blow. The scale of humiliation here is recorded in the depth of withdrawal from any serious connection to others—a lifelong habit, we are warned. What’s left is a grazing, categorizing brilliance that has the avidity of love, the heat of erotic pursuit, but the camouflaging surface awareness of literary parody. This child’s cerebral engine has a breathless, stalking, sexual energy. A skilled seducer must never admit to understanding the word “no.” This vision has much in common with Proust’s self-invented mission. Edmund White shares with Proust an uncanny ability to let us guess what he was reading as he composed the book: now a work of marveling natural history, now a social novel; they all leave a tincture on the absorbent young mind guiding us here through an account of its twelfth to fifteenth years. The novel’s spurned young man can celebrate but one true sensory tie with his detached dad. Surrounded by Wall Street flow charts, the father might always seem shut behind a locked door after midnight; but the pair’s beloved late-Romantic music reaches, includes, and ultimately moves them both. This provokes a telling passage about the missing person. That father stands, silent colossus, at the center of all those circuitous visitations with eroticized parental substitutes, the manic rounds that constitute the clockwise movement of this book: I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  An advertisement in a lewd magazine landed me, one brave day, in the office of a Mlle Edith who began by offering me to choose a kindred soul from a collection of rather formal photographs in a rather soiled album (“Regardez-moi cette belle brune!”). When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out my criminal craving, she looked as if about to show me the door; however, after asking me what price I was prepared to disburse, she condescended to put me in touch with a person qui pourrait arranger la chose. Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provençal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess’ torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded son argent. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, lui, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to Marie—for that was her stellar name—who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora turned her back to him and began her difficult journey down the porch steps, minus her coat and purse, minus her pride and with a good deal of trouble. These shoes took stairs in only one direction. At last she made it to the street. She wanted to go home now desperately; the humiliation was beginning to outweigh the rage. She was experiencing the first inklings of a shame she sensed would live with her for a long, long time. She needed to get home and hide under something heavy. Just then Jerome appeared on the porch. ‘Zoor? You OK?’  on beauty and being wrong ‘Jay, go back in – I’m fine – please go back in.’ As she said this Carl ran down the stairs and confronted her again. He was not willing to leave her with this last, ugly image of himself; it still, somehow, mattered to him what she thought of him. ‘ I’m just trying to understand why you would act so crazy ,’ he said earnestly, coming close to her again and searching for an answer in her face; Zora almost fell into his arms. From where Jerome was standing, however, it appeared that Zora was cringing in fear. He rushed down the steps to put himself between his sister and Carl. ‘Hey, buddy,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘back off, OK?’ The front door opened once more. It was Victoria Kipps. ‘Great!’ shouted Zora, throwing her head back and spotting the little audience on the balcony who were watching these events. ‘Let’s sell tickets!’ Victoria closed the door behind her and skipped down the stairs with the style of a woman well practised at walking in impossible heels. ‘What are you on ?’ she asked Zora as she reached the ground, and seemed more curious than angry. Zora rolled her eyes. Victoria turned instead to Jerome. ‘Jay? What’s this about?’ Jerome shook his head at the floor. Victoria approached Zora again. ‘Have you got something to say to me?’ Usually Zora feared confrontation with her peers, but Victoria Kipps’s composed radiance standing right opposite her own snot-faced breakdown was simply too maddening. ‘I’ve got NOTHING to say to you! Nothing!’ she yelled, and began the march down the street. At once she stumbled on her heel and Jerome steadied her, getting her by the elbow. ‘She jealous – that’s her problem,’ taunted Carl. ‘Just jealous ’cos you finer than her. And she can’t stand that.’ Zora spun back round. ‘Actually, I look for a little more from my partners than just a nice ass . For some reason I thought you did too, but, my mistake.’ ‘Pardon me?’ said Victoria.  On Beauty Zora hobbled a little way further along the road, accompanied by her brother, but Carl followed. ‘You don’t know anything about her. You’re just uppity about everybody .’ Zora stopped once more. ‘Oh, I know about her. I know she’s an airhead. I know she’s a slut .’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora had shamed him in front of his girl, in front of a whole party. This was no longer the charming Carl Thomas of Wellington’s Black Music Library. This was the Carl who had sat out on the front porches of Roxbury apartments on steamy summer days. This was the Carl who could play the Dozens good as anybody. Zora had never been spoken to like this in her life. ‘I – I – I’ ‘Are you my girlfriend now?’ Zora began to weep wretchedly. ‘And what the fuck has your article got to do with . . . Am I meant to be grateful ?’ ‘All I was trying to do was help you. That was all I wanted to do. I just wanted to help .’ ‘Well,’ said Carl, putting his hands on his hips, reminding Zora, absurdly, of Kiki, ‘apparently you wanted to do a little more than help me. Apparently you expected some payback. Apparently I had to sleep with yo’ skank ass as well.’ ‘ Fuck you!’ ‘ That’s what it was all about,’ said Carl and whistled satirically, but the hurt was clear to read in his face, and this hurt grew deeper as he stumbled over further realizations, one after the other. ‘Man, oh, man . Is that why you helped me? I guess I can’t write at all – is  On Beauty that it? You were just making me look an idiot in that class. Sonnets! You been making a fool of me since the beginning. Is that it ? You pick me up off the streets and when I don’t do what you want, you turn on me? Damn! I thought we was friends , man!’ ‘So did I!’ cried Zora. ‘ Stop crying – you ain’t gonna get out of this by crying,’ he warned heatedly, and yet Zora could hear concern in his voice. She dared to hope that this still might end well. She reached out a hand to him, but he took a step back. ‘Speak to me,’ he demanded. ‘What is this? You got some problem with my girl?’ Upon hearing this formulation, a snotty clump of tears flew spectacularly from Zora’s nose. ‘Your girl!’ ‘Have you got some problem with her?’ Zora wiped her face on the neck of her dress. ‘No,’ she snapped indignantly. ‘I haven’t got a problem with her. She’s not worth having a problem with.’ Carl opened his eyes wide, shocked by this answer. He pressed a hand to his forehead, trying to figure it out. ‘Now, what the fuck does that mean, man?’ ‘Nothing. God! You totally deserve each other. You’re both trash.’ Carl’s eyes grew cold. He brought his face right up to hers, in an awful inversion of what Zora had spent six months hoping for. ‘You know what?’ he said, and Zora prepared to hear his judgement on what he saw. ‘You’re a fucking bitch .’

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

  It’s illegal to take genetic information from someone without his consent (it violates the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act), but the case was won largely on emotional grounds. The two plaintiffs were awarded about $250,000 each to compensate them for feeling humiliated and bullied, plus a remarkable $1.75 million in punitive damages for “emotional distress and mental anguish.” The large award was not for the plaintiffs’ actual emotional suffering but their potential emotional suffering in the future. After all, their personal health information could be used against them at any time for the rest of their lives. This fear of the future was easy for jurors to simulate and therefore empathize with. In a chronic pain case, it’s harder: how do you see the invisible? There are no injuries to look at, and nothing to help your brain create the simulation, so empathy suffers and consequently so does compensation. 6 5 The legal system has difficulty dealing with mental anguish for purely practical reasons. How do you measure it objectively if emotions have no essences or fingerprints? Also, physical harm like a broken leg is usually more economically predictable than emotional harm, which is far more variable. And how do you distinguish everyday emotional pain from lasting harm? 6 6 Perhaps the most important question here is: Whose suffering counts as harm? Who deserves our empathy and therefore the full protection of the law? If you negligently or intentionally break my arm, you owe me. But if you negligently or intentionally break my heart, you don’t, even if we were close for a long time, regulating each other’s body budgets, and the breakup will put me through a physical process that can be as excruciating as withdrawal from an addictive drug. You can’t sue someone for heartbreak, no matter how much you might want to (or how much they deserve it). The law is about creating and enforcing social reality. Empathic claims about pain are fundamentally claims about whose rights matter . . . and whose humanity matters. 6 7 … As you’ve seen, the law embodies the classical view of emotion and the view of human nature from which it derives. This essentialist story is a folktale that is not respected by the brain and its connection to the body. Therefore, based on today’s scientific view of the brain, I’m going to go out on a limb with some recommendations for jurors, judges, and the legal system in general. I am not a legal scholar, and I realize that the concerns of science are not the same as those of the law. I realize also that it’s one thing to speculate about basic dilemmas of humanity in the pages of a book but quite another to establish legal precedent on them. But it’s important to try to build bridges between disciplines.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fear of Flying was Erica Jong’s first novel, but not her first book. She was a Barnard graduate, with a master’s degree in eighteenth-century English literature, working toward a PhD at Columbia, and had already published two books of poetry to gracious reviews. The novel made her an instant celebrity. She was cast upon the kind of endless book tour that overtakes an author when a publisher is caught short by a book’s success: more than a year of hastily scheduled panels, readings at colleges and bookstores, bookings on late-night TV, where she had to fend off the sexism of the men who wondered why a nice girl like her was writing so blatantly about sex; she had to endure the confrontations and the castigations of the women who blamed her for contributing to the disintegration of the American family. To each of these people, Erica calmly and simply made her case for women being sexual, emotional, intelligent, sentient, existent—she used her book tour to make a case for the woman as human being. In return, she was sent sculptures of phalluses and lewd drawings (one that I’ve seen is a picture of a hairy penis that says, “Erica Jong, Meet Eric, a Dong”). She walked through the streets of her native Manhattan, needing to answer for herself on every corner. She had to listen to screeds from men who blamed her for their now loudly miserable wives; lascivious catcalls and gestures; the kind of notoriety that makes it hard to find a small corner in this, the world’s largest city, to hide. But this was also a time when her mail landed at her back door at 11 a.m. with a thud and she could not stop herself from running to read it: heaps of envelopes that, yes, had some lascivious stuff in them, but, more than that, contained piles of long letters, sometimes addressed to her, but sometimes addressed to the narrator of Fear of Flying, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing. She read letters from women who wanted advice; who wanted to know how to live; who wanted to know if they should stay married to their husbands, if they should run off with their husbands’ best friends, if they should go figure out how to be by themselves. They wanted to know if romantic love would ever sustain them, if marriage could ever really work. They wanted to know how to be free. They wanted her to know that they were liberated not just by her book, but by Isadora’s existence, which is to say Erica Jong’s.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The words devastated Susan. On the spot, she knew she’d never forget them. But something about that incident steeled Susan’s spine. From the day Frank began dating her, he sensed an undergirding of strength in Susan. This girl, he thought, can handle anything. As high school drew to a close, Frank needed to decide on a future. He wanted to be a fighter pilot—a perfect way to combine flying and defense of his country. World War II had ended nearly a year earlier, but already tensions were building with the Soviet Union. No less an expert in looming tyranny than Winston Churchill now warned that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. Frank believed him. After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style. Borman fell in love with West Point. The rules, the order, the discipline—it all seemed designed to tune out distraction and allow a man to get on with what really mattered. As a kid, he’d already been different from his peers—he went after the things that were important to him, as if he were on a mission. At West Point, nothing mattered but the mission. He pledged himself to the academy’s motto—Duty, Honor, Country. It seemed to Borman that a person who believed in anything less wouldn’t get where he needed to go. All the while, Borman and Susan continued dating, if only by U.S. mail. She was still in Tucson, and they were separated by more than two thousand miles. West Point did not allow furloughs for plebes, even for holidays. Fearing he’d receive a breakup letter from Susan, Borman struck first, sending a letter to Susan saying they needed to cool their relationship. It only made sense, in light of their distance, his commitment to West Point, and the focus he’d need to make his new