Joy

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 Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  But let us dig deeper in this idea, and note that the reference to the organism is dominated by one sector of the body: the old interior world of the viscera that are located in the abdomen, thorax, and thick of the skin, along with the attendant chemical processes. The contents of feelings that dominate our conscious mind correspond largely to the ongoing actions of viscera, for example, the degree of contraction or relaxation of the smooth muscles that form the walls of tubular organs such as the trachea, bronchi, and gut, as well as countless blood vessels in the skin and visceral cavities. Equally prominent among the contents is the state of the mucosae—think of your throat, dry, moist, or just plain sore, or of your esophagus or stomach when you eat too much or are famished. The typical content of our feelings is governed by the degree to which the operations of the viscera listed above are smooth and uncomplicated or else labored and erratic. To make matters more complex, all of these varied organ states are the result of the action of chemical molecules—circulating in the blood or arising in nerve terminals distributed throughout the viscera—for example, cortisol, serotonin, dopamine, endogenous opioids, oxytocin. Some of these potions and elixirs are so powerful that their results are instantaneous. Last, the degree of tension or relaxation of the voluntary muscles (which, as noted, are part of the newer interior world of the body frame) also contributes to the content of feelings. Examples include the patterns of muscular activation of the face. They are so closely associated with certain emotional states that their deployment in our faces can rapidly conjure up feelings such as joy and surprise. We do not need to look in the mirror to know that we are experiencing such states. In sum, feelings are experiences of certain aspects of the state of life within an organism. Those experiences are not mere decoration. They accomplish something extraordinary: a moment-to-moment report on the state of life in the interior of an organism. It is tempting to translate the notion of a report into pages of an online file that can be swiped, one at a time, telling us about one part or another of the body. But digitized pages, neat, lifeless, and indifferent, are not acceptable metaphors for feelings, given the valence component we just discussed. Feelings provide important information about the state of life, but feelings are not mere “information” in the strict computational sense. Basic feelings are not abstractions. They are experiences of life based on multidimensional representations of configurations of the life process. As noted, feelings can be intellectualized. We can translate feelings into ideas and words that describe the original physiology.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  It does not matter if the image pertains to animate or inanimate objects, to features of objects—colors, shapes, the timbres of sounds—to actions, abstractions, or judgments on any of the above. A predictable consequence of processing many images that flow in our minds is an emotive response followed by its respective feeling. Thus provoked, emotional feelings are not quite about listening to the background music of life. Emotional feelings are about hearing occasional songs and sometimes full-regalia opera arias. The pieces are still executed by the same ensembles, in the same hall—the body—and against the same background: life. But given the triggers, the mind is now largely tuned to the world of our ongoing thoughts—rather than the world of the body—as we react to those thoughts and feel the reaction. From instance to instance, the musical execution varies because the execution of emotive responses and the experience of the respective feeling also vary, at least as much as the execution of a famous musical piece at the hands of different performers. But the score being played is still unmistakably the same. Human emotions are recognizable pieces of a standard repertoire. A substantial portion of human glory and human tragedy depends on affect in spite of its modest, nonhuman genealogy. Layered Feelings The emotive responses to images even apply to the images called feelings themselves. The state of being in pain, of feeling pain, for example, can become enriched by a new layer of processing—a secondary feeling, as it were—prompted by varied thoughts with which we react to the basic situation. The depth of this layered feeling state is probably a hallmark of human minds. It is the sort of process likely to undergird what we call suffering. Animals with complex brains similar to ours, as is the case with higher mammals, may well have layered feeling states as well. Traditionally, extreme human exceptionalism has denied feelings to animals, but the science of feeling has gradually shown the opposite. This is not to say that human feelings are not more complex and layered and elaborate than those of animals. How could they not be? But as I see it, the distinction in humans has to do with the web of associations that feeling states establish with all sorts of ideas and especially with the interpretations we can make of our present moment and of our anticipated future. Curiously, layered feelings support the intellectualization of feelings to which I referred earlier. The wealth of objects, events, and ideas conjured up by ongoing feelings enriches the process of creating an intellectual description of the prompting situation. Great poetry depends on layered feelings. The definitive exploration of layered feelings was the life’s work of a novelist and philosopher by the name of Marcel Proust. 9 CONSCIOUSNESS About Consciousness In normal circumstances, when we are awake and alert, without any fuss or deliberation, the images that flow in the mind have a perspective—ours.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Whether consoling or seducing, in activities that tended to involve two individuals or a group gathering for a communal event—a birth, a death, the arrival of food, the celebration of an idea, religious or otherwise, playing merrily, or marching off to tribal wars—music contributed its multipronged homeostatic effects, early and most probably often, beginning with layer upon layer of feelings and ending in ideas.14 Music’s universality and remarkable endurance seem to come from this uncanny ability to blend with every mood and circumstance, anywhere on earth, in love and in war, involving single individuals, small groups, or large groups suddenly made cohesive by the power of music. Music serves all masters as quietly as an old-world butler or as loudly as a heavy metal band. Dance was closely linked to music, and its movements accomplished expressions of comparable sentiments—compassion, desire, the exulting joys of seduction accomplished, of love, of aggression, and of war. The case for the homeostatic function of the visual arts—which begin with cave paintings—and for the tradition of oral storytelling in poetry, theater, and political exhortation, is not difficult to make. These manifestations often referred to the management of life—food sources and the hunt, for example, the organization of the group, wars, alliances, loves, betrayals, envies, jealousies, and, quite often, the violent resolution of the problems faced by the participants. Paintings, and far later texts, provided signposts and pauses for reflection, warning, play, and enjoyment. They provided attempts at clarifications for what must have been confusing confrontations with reality. They helped sort out and organize knowledge. They provided meaning. — Philosophical inquiry and science developed from the same homeostatic cloth. The questions that philosophy and science aimed at answering were prompted by a large range of feelings. Suffering was prominent, no doubt, but so was the perturbation and worry caused by chronic puzzlement over the enigmas of reality—once again, the vagaries and irregularities of climate, floods, and earthquakes, the movement of the stars, the life cycles that could be observed in plants and animals and in other humans, and the odd combination of benevolent and destructive behaviors that describes the actions of so many humans personally. The destructive feelings, whose result has so often been war, have played a major role in science and technology. Repeatedly in history, war efforts have been made possible or collapsed by the success or failure of the technology and sciences that permitted the development of weapons. There were other feelings, too, not least the pleasant feelings that resulted from the very process of attempting to solve the enigmas of the cosmos and the anticipation of the rewards that their solution would bring. Precisely the same sorts of problems and the same kind of homeostatic need would lead different humans at different times and places to formulate religious or scientific explanations for their plight. The ultimate purpose was assuaging the pain, reducing the need. The form and efficiency of the response is another issue.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  When you hear a musical sound that you describe as delightful, the feeling of delight is the result of a rapid transformation of the state of your organism. We call that transformation emotive. It consists of a collection of actions that change the background homeostasis. The actions included in the emotive response include the release of specific chemical molecules in certain sites of the central nervous system or their transport, by neural pathways, to varied regions of the nervous system and of the body. Certain body sites—for instance, the endocrine glands—are brought into play and produce molecules capable of changing body functions on their own. The upshot of all this bustle is a collection of changes in the geometries of viscera—the caliber of blood vessels and tubular organs, for example, the distension of muscles, the change of respiratory and cardiac rhythms. As a result, in the case of delight, visceral operations are harmonized, by which I mean that the viscera act with no impediment or difficulty and the harmonized state of the body proper is duly signaled to the parts of the nervous system charged with making images of the old interior; metabolism is changed so that the ratio between energy demand and production is reconciled; the operation of the nervous system itself is modified so that our image production is made easier and abundant and our imagination becomes more fluid; positive images are favored over negative ones; one’s mental guard is lowered even as, interestingly, our immune responses are possibly made stronger. It is the ensemble of these actions, as it becomes represented in the mind, that makes way for the pleasant feeling state that one describes as delight and encompasses a minimal amount of stress and considerable relaxation.6 Negative emotions are associated with distinct physiological states, all of them problematic from the perspective of health and future well-being.7 The feelings newly provoked by emotive responses literally ride, physiologically speaking, on top of the wave of spontaneous, homeostatic responses, already traveling along in their natural flow. The process behind emotive responses is a far cry from the relative immediacy and transparency of the process behind spontaneous feelings. Feelings may be more or less prominent in our minds. Minds engaged in a variety of analyses, imaginings, narratives, and decisions pay more or less attention to a particular object, depending on how relevant it may be at the moment. Not every item merits attention, and this is true of feelings as well. Where Do Emotive Responses Come From?The answer to this question is clear. Emotive responses originate in specific brain systems—sometimes in a specific region—responsible for commanding the varied components of the response: the chemical molecules that must be secreted, the visceral changes that must be accomplished, the movements of face, limbs, or whole body that are part of a particular emotion, be it fear, anger, or joy.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The typical content of our feelings is governed by the degree to which the operations of the viscera listed above are smooth and uncomplicated or else labored and erratic. To make matters more complex, all of these varied organ states are the result of the action of chemical molecules—circulating in the blood or arising in nerve terminals distributed throughout the viscera—for example, cortisol, serotonin, dopamine, endogenous opioids, oxytocin. Some of these potions and elixirs are so powerful that their results are instantaneous. Last, the degree of tension or relaxation of the voluntary muscles (which, as noted, are part of the newer interior world of the body frame) also contributes to the content of feelings. Examples include the patterns of muscular activation of the face. They are so closely associated with certain emotional states that their deployment in our faces can rapidly conjure up feelings such as joy and surprise. We do not need to look in the mirror to know that we are experiencing such states. In sum, feelings are experiences of certain aspects of the state of life within an organism. Those experiences are not mere decoration. They accomplish something extraordinary: a moment-to-moment report on the state of life in the interior of an organism. It is tempting to translate the notion of a report into pages of an online file that can be swiped, one at a time, telling us about one part or another of the body. But digitized pages, neat, lifeless, and indifferent, are not acceptable metaphors for feelings, given the valence component we just discussed. Feelings provide important information about the state of life, but feelings are not mere “information” in the strict computational sense. Basic feelings are not abstractions. They are experiences of life based on multidimensional representations of configurations of the life process. As noted, feelings can be intellectualized. We can translate feelings into ideas and words that describe the original physiology. It is possible, and not infrequent, to refer to a particular feeling without necessarily experiencing that feeling or simply experiencing a paler version of the original. 2 — When one explains what a thing is, it helps to be clear about what a thing is not. So that we can be clear about what basic feelings are not, let me say that if I now decide to go down to the beach—which means that I have to take about one hundred steps down a stair before I walk on the sand—feelings are not primarily about the design of the movements I will make with my limbs, or about the movements of my eyes, head, and neck, all of which are also being carried out by my body, under brain control, and about whose operations my brain is also being informed.

• From Between Us

  When the (white middle-class) American goal may be to raise a child who is secure enough to become independent, the Japanese goal is to raise a child who becomes sensitive enough to take perspective. If pride and happiness are foregrounded in many American and European contexts, then amae and omoiyari are socializing emotions in Japan. Raising a Calm (or an Emotional) Child Nso mothers living in farming communities in Cameroon told psychologist Heidi Keller and her team that “a good child is one who is always calm.” All the mothers had very young children, three to nineteen months of age. These infants were supposed to be calm and inexpressive, so as to enable the mother to pursue her activities and to facilitate other people’s caring for them when their mothers were not around. “We do not cry in Mbah” (the village), the mothers told Keller. And in fact, they did everything to quiet their infants down. One strategy was nursing their infants. As one mother told Keller: If the child is crying at times and you breastfeed him, he will stop crying. Because when a child is not crying it enables you to do your activities . . . I gave him the breast and he stopped crying and started sleeping. Nso mothers nursed to soothe babies who were crying or to prevent babies from crying. If nursing did not work, Nso mothers showed their babies disapproval, calling them “a bad child” or exclaiming “terrible,” and telling them to stop crying. A good and healthy kid is a calm kid, a kid that “stays put.” In the process, Nso babies were prepared to adjust to circumstances. Contrast this to the German mothers in Keller’s research. All of them coming from urban, middle-class families, and having infants of the same age as the Nso mothers. They were seen to stimulate and maintain positive emotionality in their children. One German mother, interacting with her three-month-old infant, speaks to him: You have to smile, little man! Yes, you should smile, Eyeyeye. Come on. Uah. Yes, you are doing great. Do it again. Yes, you are doing great. Like Nso mother, German mothers acted to achieve their cultural ideal for a child. One mother explains this ideal to Keller and her team: To smile a lot with the mother boosts the child’s trust in his environment; a child needs care and attention and I read that infants laugh most during their first year. . . . Well, we laugh very often with her. I think laughing is healthy.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Desire and lust, caring and nurturing, attachment and love, operate in a social context. The same applies to most instances of joy and sadness, fear and panic, anger; or of compassion, admiration and awe, envy and jealousy and contempt. The powerful sociality that was an essential support of the intellect of Homo sapiens and was so critical in the emergence of cultures is likely to have originated in the machinery of drives, motivations, and emotions, where it evolved from simpler neural processes of simpler creatures. Even further back in time, it evolved from an army of chemical molecules, some of which were present in unicellular organisms. The point to be made here is that sociality, a collection of behavioral strategies indispensable for the creation of cultural responses, is part of the tool kit of homeostasis. Sociality enters the human cultural mind by the hand of affect. 10 — The behavioral and neural aspects of drives and motivations have been especially well studied by Jaak Panksepp and Kent Berridge in mammals. Anticipation and desire, which Panksepp subsumes under the label of “seeking” and Berridge prefers to call “wanting,” are prominent examples. So is lust, both in its plain sex-related variety and in romantic love. The care and nurturing of progeny is another powerful drive complemented, on the side of those who are nurtured and cared for, by bonds of attachment and love, the sorts of bonds whose interruptions lead to panic and grief. Play is prominent in mammals and birds and is central to human life. Play anchors the creative imagination of children, adolescents, and adults and is a critical ingredient of the inventions that hallmark cultures. 11 — In conclusion, most images that enter our minds are entitled to an emotive response, strong or weak. The origin of the image does not matter. Any sensory process can constitute a trigger, from taste and olfaction to vision, and it does not really matter whether the image is being freshly minted in perception or recalled from the stores of memory. It does not matter if the image pertains to animate or inanimate objects, to features of objects—colors, shapes, the timbres of sounds—to actions, abstractions, or judgments on any of the above. A predictable consequence of processing many images that flow in our minds is an emotive response followed by its respective feeling. Thus provoked, emotional feelings are not quite about listening to the background music of life. Emotional feelings are about hearing occasional songs and sometimes full-regalia opera arias. The pieces are still executed by the same ensembles, in the same hall—the body—and against the same background: life.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Father read aloud from Dickens, and I was in seventh heaven, since I was sitting on Father’s chair, close to Peter. I went downstairs at quarter to eleven. When I went back up at eleven-thirty, Peter was already waiting for me on the stairs. We talked until quarter to one. Whenever I leave the room, for example after a meal, and Peter has a chance and no one else can hear, he says, “Bye, Anne, see you later.” Oh, I’m so happy! I wonder if he’s going to fall in love with me after all? In any case, he’s a nice boy, and you have no idea how good it is to talk to him! Mrs. van D. thinks it’s all right for me to talk to Peter, but today she asked me teasingly, “Can I trust you two up there?” “Of course,” I protested. “I take that as an insult!” Morning, noon and night, I look forward to seeing Peter. Yours, Anne M. Frank PS. Before I forget, last night everything was blanketed in snow. Now it’s thawed and there’s almost nothing left. MONDAY, MARCH 6, 1944 Dearest Kitty, Ever since Peter told me about his parents, I’ve felt a certain sense of responsibthty toward him-don’t you think that’s strange? It’s as though their quarrels were just as much my business as his, and yet I don’t dare bring it up anymore, because I’m afraid it makes him uncomfortable. I wouldn’t want to intrude, not for all the money in the world. I can tell by Peter’s face that he ponders things just as deeply as I do. Last night I was annoyed when Mrs. van D. scoffed, “The thinker!” Peter flushed and looked embarrassed, and I nearly blew my top. Why don’t these people keep their mouths shut? You can’t imagine what it’s like to have to stand on the sidelines and see how lonely he is, without being able to do anything. I can imagine, as if I were in his place, how despondent he must sometimes feel at the quarrels. And about love. Poor Peter, he needs to be loved so much! It sounded so cold when he said he didn’t need any friends. Oh, he’s so wrong! I don’t think he means it. He clings to his masculinity, his solitude and his feigned indifference so he can maintain his role, so he’ll never, ever have to show his feelings. Poor Peter, how long can he keep it up? Won’t he explode from this superhuman effort? Oh, Peter, if only I could help you, if only you would let me! Together we could banish our loneliness, yours and mine! I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking, but not saying much. I’m happy when I see him, and happier still if the sun shines when we’re together. I washed my hair yesterday, and because I knew he was next door, I was very rambunctious.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Those objects were consistently associated in evolution with positive or negative life states—dangers and threats or well-being and opportunities, in brief, the states that underlie pleasure or pain. We humans, along with the creatures from which we descend biologically, inhabit a universe in which objects and events, animate as well as inanimate, are not affectively neutral. On the contrary, as a consequence of its structure and action, any object or event is naturally favorable or unfavorable to the life of the individual experiencer. Objects and events influence homeostasis positively or negatively and, as a result, yield positive or negative feelings. Just as naturally, the separate features of objects and events—their sounds, shapes, colors, textures, motions, time structure, and so forth—become associated, by learning, with the positive or negative emotions/feelings linked to the whole object/event. This is, I believe, how the acoustic features of certain sounds come to be described as “pleasant” or “unpleasant.” The characteristics of a sound, which are a part of an object/event, acquire the affective significance that the whole event had for the individual. That systematic bond, between the isolated feature and the affective valence, lives on, independently of the original association that gave rise to it. This is why we end up saying that the sound of a cello is beautiful and warm: the acoustic characteristics of the particular sound were once part of the experience of pleasantness caused by an entirely different object. The high-pitched sound from a trumpet or violin may be experienced as disagreeable or frightening for the same sort of reason. We draw on long-established associations—many of which preceded the appearance of humans and are now part of our standard neural equipment—in order to classify musical sounds in affective terms. Humans were able to explore such associations as they constructed sound narratives and laid down all sorts of rules for the combination of sounds. 13 By the time humans were making flutes, they had probably been putting to good use the very first musical instrument—the human voice—and perhaps the second instrument ever: the human chest, a natural cavity suitable for drumming. As for the third instrument, it was probably an actual, manufactured hollow drum. Whether consoling or seducing, in activities that tended to involve two individuals or a group gathering for a communal event—a birth, a death, the arrival of food, the celebration of an idea, religious or otherwise, playing merrily, or marching off to tribal wars—music contributed its multipronged homeostatic effects, early and most probably often, beginning with layer upon layer of feelings and ending in ideas. 14 Music’s universality and remarkable endurance seem to come from this uncanny ability to blend with every mood and circumstance, anywhere on earth, in love and in war, involving single individuals, small groups, or large groups suddenly made cohesive by the power of music.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The nuclei do their job by increasing the probability that certain behaviors do occur and those behaviors tend to cluster together. But the result is not rigid. There are shades and variations, and only the essence of the pattern holds. Evolution has gradually built this apparatus. Most aspects of homeostasis that relate to social behavior depend on this set of subcortical structures. The triggering of emotive responses occurs automatically and non-consciously, without the intervention of our will. We often end up learning that an emotion is happening not as the triggering situation unfolds but because the processing of the situation causes feelings; that is, it causes conscious mental experiences of the emotional event. After the feeling begins we may (or may not) realize why we are feeling a certain way. There is very little that escapes the scrutiny of these specific brain regions. The sound of a flute, the orange tint in a sunset, the texture of fine wool, all produce positive emotive responses and the corresponding pleasant feelings. So does the picture of a summerhouse that was yours when you were growing up or the voice of the friend you miss. The sight or the aroma of a dish you especially enjoy triggers your appetite, even if you are not hungry, and a seductive photograph triggers lust. Encountering a crying child, you are motivated to hug her and protect her. Crude as it may seem, the same deeply ingrained biological drives will be engaged by the nice dog with plaintive eyes, spaced like a baby’s. In brief, an endless number of stimuli will produce joy or sadness or apprehension, while certain stories or scenes will evoke compassion or awe; we emote when we listen to the warm and rich sound of a cello, independent of the melody being played, and to a high-pitched, rough sound, the felt outcome being agreeable in the former and disagreeable in the latter. Likewise, we emote positively or negatively when we see colors of certain hues, when we see certain shapes, volumes, and textures, and when we taste certain substances or smell certain odors. Some sensory images evoke weak reactions, others strong ones, in keeping with the specific stimulus and its participation in the history of a particular individual. In normal situations, numerous mental contents evoke some emotive response, strong or weak, and thus provoke some feeling, strong or weak. The “provocation” of emotive responses to countless image components or to entire narratives is one of the most central and incessant aspects of our mental lives. 9 — When the emotive stimulus is recalled from memory rather than actually present in perception, it still produces emotions, abundantly so.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  6 1 The fortunate thing is that (1) our moral sense pushes us to benevolence and (2.) benevolenc e is wha t works most for our happiness. ( 1) is a central doctrine of Hutcheson. He is thoroughl y modern in this rega rd. "All the actions which are counted as amiable a n y where ... always appear as Benevolent, or flowing from the Love of others, and Study o f their Hap piness." An d the "Actions our moral Sense would most recomm end to our Election, as the most perfectl y Virtuous" are "such as appear to h ave the most universal unlimited Tendency to the greatest and most extensive Happiness of all the rational Agents, to wh o m our influence can exte n d " . 62 Hutcheson even attempts to bring the classical four virt ues into line with this modern hegemony o f benev olen ce. Thus justice is redefined as "a co nstant st udy t o promote the most universal happiness in our power, by doing all go od offices as we h ave o pportuni ty which interfere with no more extensive inte rest of the system". 63 As to (2.), Hutcheson is a convinced believer i n the perfectly in terlocking univer se , which God has designed f o r the mutual good and happiness of its inhabitants. Things work togeth er for the best. How can any one look upon this World as under the D irection of an evil Nature, o r eve n question a perfectly good Providence? How clearly does the Order of our Nature p o int out to us our true Happiness and Per fection, and le ad us naturally as the several Powers of the Earth, the Su n, and Air, bring P lants to their Growth, and the Perfection of their Kinds? ... We may see, that Attention to the most universal Interest of all sensitive Natures, is the Per fection of each individual of Mankind: ... Nay , how much of this do we actually see in the World? What generous Sy mpathy, C ompassion, and Congratulation with each other ? 64 C o nsequently, t here is no clash of interests. Each person serves himself best b y se rvi n g the who le: "His constant pursuit of publick Good is the most pr o b able way of pro moting his own Happiness".

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  During the ceremony I kept looking at her, thinking how beautiful she was, that we would be together at last. Later in our hotel I was so aroused I could hardly keep my pants on. But we undressed each other slowly, very tenderly, taking all the time we needed to fully enjoy every moment. Our sex that night was the best I’ve ever had. Why? I’d have to say it was the celebration, our deep feelings for one another—and being apart for months didn’t hurt either! Notice how both long-term longing and short-term anticipation work together as erotic intensifiers. Who wouldn’t feel strong anticipation under such circumstances? But years before he ever met his fiancee, Frank already had a penchant for anticipation, a fact that is obvious in his second favorite encounter, remembered from more than ten years earlier. A very different kind of encounter, casual rather than romantic, it still builds energy from anticipation: I knew a girl who liked to have sex a lot and was totally uninhibited and multiorgasmic. We’d meet at the oddest times and weirdest places. The one that stands out most happened on a warm summer evening when we were sitting on a golf course smoking a joint. Suddenly she stood up, stripped off her clothes, and took off running down a fairway. She was giggling and shaking her ample breasts at me in the moonlight. I tried to catch her but she raced ahead, taunting me that I could have her if I could catch her. Well, I bolted off after her like a man possessed. When I finally caught her—which wasn’t easy—we tumbled to the grass and made love with overwhelming passion. Even subtler forms of flirting draw much of their power from the dynamics of anticipation. Flirting only works when there is an awareness of distance—a gap—between flirter and flirtee. Erotic fascination is activated by the possibility that the gap can be bridged. The more prolonged and intense the flirtation, the greater the anticipation and the more powerful the desire. TEASING AND ANTICIPATIONBoth longing and anticipation work their magic in the time and space before sexual contact. Once sex begins, anticipation usually recedes as attention focuses on the pleasures of the moment. Teases are the exceptions because they bring anticipation into an encounter, even after all barriers to contact have been overcome. Skillful sensualists learn to touch in ways that build rather than reduce anticipation. Lucky recipients like Beatrice, age fifty-four, sing their praises: My husband has a tendency to go directly for what he wants, even if it’s me. I’m glad that he still wants me after all these years, but I wish he would take his time. For some reason, one morning he decided to do just that. Without a word, he began stroking my back and then my butt and legs. I was in heaven and really getting juicy.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The eventual invention of writing was the crowning entry into the toolbox of creative intelligence, an intelligence capable of being moved by feeling to respond to homeostatic challenges and possibilities. Fourth, a critical instrument of the cultural mind resides with a largely unsung function: play, the desire to engage in seemingly useless operations that includes the moving about of actual pieces of the world, real or in toy form; the moving of our own bodies in that world, as in dancing or playing an instrument; the moving of images in the mind, real or invented. Imagination is a close partner of this endeavor, of course, but imagination does not fully capture the spontaneity, the range and reach of PLAY, to use the capitalized form that Jaak Panksepp prefers when he talks about this function. Think of play when you think about what can be done with the infinity of sounds, colors, shapes, or with pieces in Erector or Legos sets or computer games; think of play when you think of the infinitely possible combinations of word meanings and sounds; think of play as you plan an experiment or ponder different designs for whatever it is that you are planning to do. Fifth, the ability, especially developed in humans, to work cooperatively with others to achieve a discernible, shared goal. Cooperativity relies on another well-developed human ability: joint attention, a phenomenon to which Michael Tomasello has devoted pioneering studies. 18 Play and cooperation are, in and of themselves, independently of the results of the respective activities, homeostatically favorable activities. They reward the “players/cooperators” with a slew of pleasurable feelings. Sixth, cultural responses begin in mental representations but come into being by the grace of movement. Movement is deeply embedded in the cultural process. It is from emotion-related movements happening in the interior of our organisms that we construct the feelings that motivate cultural interventions. Cultural interventions often arise from emotion-related movements—of the hands, quite prominently, of the vocal apparatus, of the facial musculature (a critical enabler of communication), or of the whole body. Last, the march from life’s beginnings to the doors of human cultural development and cultural transmission was only possible due to another homeostasis-driven development: the genetic machinery that standardized the regulation of life inside cells and permitted the transmission of life to new generations. — The rise of human cultures should be credited to both conscious feeling and creative intelligence. Negative and positive feelings needed to be present in early humans, or the upper tier of the cultural enterprise such as the arts, religious belief and philosophical inquiry, moral systems and justice, science, would have lacked a prime mover. Unless the process behind what became pain was experienced, it would have been a mere body state, a pattern of operations in the clockwork of our organisms. The same would apply to well-being or joy or fear or sadness.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  This network appears to play a disproportionate role in the process of assembling narratives. 6 Image processing also allows the brain to abstract images and uncover the schematic structure underlying a visual or sound image, or, for that matter, the integrated images of movements that describe a feeling state. In the course of a narrative, for example, a related visual or auditory image can be placed instead of the most predictable one, thus giving rise to a visual or auditory metaphor, a means to symbolize objects or events, in visual or auditory terms. In other words, to begin, the original images are important in and of themselves and as the grounding of our mental life. However, their manipulation can yield novel derivations. The incessant language translation of any image that cruises in our minds is possibly the most spectacular mode of enrichment. Technically, the images that serve as vehicles for the language tracks travel in parallel to the original images being translated. They are added images, of course, translated derivations of the originals. The process is especially delightful—or maddening—for those of us with a multilingual background: we end up with multiple and parallel verbal tracks and the mix and match of words can be great fun or exasperating. Just like the codes of cells that yielded tissues and organs, and the nucleotide codes that yielded proteins, the sounds of an alphabet that can be heard and represented in tactile or visual fashion compose the words in our minds and the words in speech and signing. Given a certain set of rules for the combination of sounds into words and for the arrangement of words according to the specific set of grammatical rules, the entire scope of our minds can be described without end. A Note on Memory Most everything available in our newly minted mental images is open to internal recording, whether one likes it or not. The fidelity of the recording depends on how well we attended to the images in the first place, which in turn depends on how much emotion and feeling were generated by their traversal in the stream of our mind. Many images stay on record, and substantial portions of the record can be played back, that is, recalled from the files and reconstructed, more or less accurately. Sometimes the recollection of the old material is so refined that it even competes with the new material now being generated. — Memory is present in single-celled organisms, where it results from chemical changes. There, the fundamental use of memory is the same as in complex organisms: to help recognize another living organism or situation and either approach it or avoid it.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The Arts, Philosophical Inquiry, and the Sciences The arts, philosophical inquiry, and the sciences make use of an especially broad range of feelings and homeostatic states. How can we imagine the birth of the arts and not picture the reasoning of one individual working on the resolution of a problem posed by a feeling—the artist’s own or someone else’s? That is how I conceive of the development of music and dance, painting, and eventually poetry, the theater, and cinema. All of these art forms were also tied to intense sociality because motivating feelings often came from the group and the effect of the arts transcended the individual. Beyond the satisfaction of individual affective needs in the original participants, the arts played important roles in the structure and coherence of groups, in multiple settings, from religious ceremonies to the preparation for war. Music is a powerful inducer of feelings, and humans gravitate toward certain instrumental sounds, modes, keys, and compositions that produce rewarding affective states. 12 Music making provided feelings for multiple occasions and purposes, feelings that could effectively cancel suffering and offer consolation, personal and of others. The feelings generated by music were probably also used for seduction and for pure playful and personal contentment. Humans certainly built flutes, with five holes, no less, by as early as about fifty thousand years ago. Why would they have bothered to do so if they had not found a rewarding use for the effort? Why would they have engaged in the time- consuming effort of perfecting these newly fashioned tools, rejecting some and accepting others after testing their effects? In those early days of music making, they would have been discovering that certain kinds of sounds—instrumental and vocal—produced predictably agreeable or disagreeable effects. In other words, the emotive response caused by a wind sound—vocal or fluted—and the ensuing feeling would have been a welcome discovery of soothing or seductive effects; the rough, raspy sound of sticks and stones rubbed together would not. Moreover, as sounds were added together, they could prolong the pleasantness and produce other layers of effect, for example, mimic objects and events in an appropriate sequence and begin to tell a story. The specific emotivity tied to sounds is comparable to the emotivity found for colors, shapes, or surface textures. The physical nature of such stimuli constitutes an emblematic signal of the goodness or badness of the whole objects that typically exhibit such physical conponents.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "That the big dog in raising the latch did not in the least know that the latch closed the gate, that the raising of the same opened it, but that he merely repeated the automatic blow with his snout which had once had such happy consequences, transpires from the following: the gate leading to the barn is fastened with a latch precisely like the one on the garden-gate, only placed a little higher, still easily within the dog's reach. Here, too, occasionally the little dog is confined, and when he barks the big one makes every possible effort to open the gate, hut it has never occurred to him to push the latch up. The brute cannot draw conclusions, that is, he cannot think."[354] In the human child, however, these ruptures of contiguous association are very soon made; far off cases of sign-using arise when we make a sign now; and soon language is launched. The child in each case makes the discovery for himself. No one can help him except by furnishing him with the conditions. But as he is constituted, the conditions will sooner or later shoot together into the result.[355] The exceedingly interesting account which Dr, Rowe gives of the education of his various blind-deaf mutes illustrates this point admirably. He began to teach Laura Bridgman by gumming raised letters on various familiar articles. The child was taught by mere contiguity to pick out a certain number of particular articles when made to feel the letters. But this was merely a collection of particular signs, out of the mass of which the general purpose of signification had not yet been extracted by the child's mind. Dr. Howe compares his situation at this moment to that of one lowering a line to the bottom of the deep sea in which Laura's soul lay, and waiting until she should spontaneously take hold of it and be raised into the light. The moment came, 'accompanied by a radiant hash of intelligence and glow of joy'; she seemed suddenly to become aware of the general purpose imbedded in the different details of all these signs, and from that moment her education went on with extreme rapidity. Another of the great capacities in which man has been said to differ fundamentally from the animal is that of possessing self-consciousness or reflective knowledge of himself as a thinker. But this capacity also flows from our criterion, for (without going into the matter very deeply) we may say that the brute never reflects on himself as a thinker, because he has never clearly dissociated, in the full concrete act of thought, the element of the thing thought of and the operation by which he thinks it. They remain always fused, conglomerated—just as the interjectional vocal sign of the brute almost invariably merges in his mind with the thing signified, and is not independently attended to in se.[356]

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I sat up again after about five minutes, but before long he took my head in his hands and put it back next to his. Oh, it was so wonderful. I could hardly talk, my pleasure was too intense; he caressed my cheek and arm, a bit clumsily, and played with my hair. Most of the time our heads were touching. I can’t tell you, Kitty, the feeling that ran through me. I was too happy for words, and I think he was too. At nine-thirty we stood up. Peter put on his tennis shoes so he wouldn’t make much noise on his nightly round of the building, and I was standing next to him. How I suddenly made the right movement, I don’t know, but before we went downstairs, he gave me a. kiss, through my hair, half on my left cheek and half on my ear. I tore downstairs without looking back, and I long so much for today. Sunday morning, just before eleven. Yours, Anne M. Frank MONDAY, APRIL 17, 1944 Dearest Kitty, Do you think Father and Mother would approve of a girl my age sitting on a divan and kissing a seventeen-anda-half-year-old boy? I doubt they would, but I have to trust my own judgment in this matter. It’s so peaceful and safe, lying in his arms and dreaming, it’s so thrilling to feel his cheek against mine, it’s so wonderful to know there’s someone waiting for me. But, and there is a but, will Peter want to leave it at that? I haven’t forgotten his promise, but. . . he is a boy! I know I’m starting at a very young age. Not even fifteen and already so independent -- that’s a little hard for other people to understand. I’m pretty sure Margot would never kiss a boy unless there was some talk of an engagement or marriage. Neither Peter nor I has any such plans. I’m also sure that Mother never touched a man before she met Father. What would my girlfriends or Jacque say if they knew I’d lain in Peter’s arms with my heart against his chest, my head on his shoulder and his head and face against mine! Oh, Anne, how terribly shocking! But seriously, I don’t think it’s at all shocking; we’re cooped up here, cut off from the world, anxious and fearful, especially lately. Why should we stay apart when we love each other? Why shouldn’t we kiss each other in times like these? Why should we wait until we’ve reached a suitable age? Why should we ask anybody’s permission? I’ve decided to look out for my own interests. He’d never want to hurt me or make me unhappy. Why shouldn’t I do what my heart tells me and makes both of us happy? Yet I have a feeling, Kitty, that you can sense my doubt. It must be my honesty rising in revolt against all this sneaking around.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  When I was twelve and a half, I learned some more from Jacque, who wasn’t as ignorant as I was. My own intuition told me what a man and a woman do when they’re together; it seemed like a crazy idea at first, but when Jacque confirmed it, I was proud of myself for having figured it out! It was also Jacque who told me that children didn’t come out of their mother’s tummies. As she put it, “Where the ingredients go in is where the finished product comes out!” Jacque and I found out about the hymen, and quite a few other details, from a book on sex education. I also knew that you could keep from having children, but how that worked inside your body remained a mystery. When I came here, Father told me about prostitutes, etc., but all in all there are still unanswered questions. If mothers don’t tell their children everything, they hear it in bits and pieces, and that can’t be right. Even though it’s Saturday, I’m not bored! That’s because I’ve been up in the attic with Peter. I sat there dreaming with my eyes closed, and it was wonderful. Yours, Anne M. Frank SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 1944 Dearest Kitty, Yesterday was a very important day for me. After lunch everything was as usual. At five I put on the potatoes, and Mother gave me some blood sausage to take to Peter. I didn’t want to at first, but I finally went. He wouldn’t accept the sausage, and I had the dreadful feel- ing it was still because of that argument we’d had about distrust. Suddenly I couldn’t bear it a moment longer and my eyes filled with tears. Without another word, I returned the platter to Mother and went to the bathroom to have a good cry. Afterward I decided to talk things out with Peter. Before dinner the four of us were helping him with a crossword puzzle, so I couldn’t say anything. But as we were sitting down to eat, I whispered to him, “Are you going to practice your shorthand tonight, Peter?” “No,” was his reply. “I’d like to talk to you later on.” He agreed. After the dishes were done, I went to his room and asked if he’d refused the sausage because of our last quarrel. Luckily, that wasn’t the reason; he just thought it was bad manners to seem so eager. It had been very hot downstairs and my face was as red as a lobster. So after taking down some water for Margot, I went back up to get a little fresh air. For the sake of appearances, I first went and stood beside the van Daans’ window before going to Peter’s room. He was standing on the left side of the open window, so I went over to the right side.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I lie in bed at night, after ending my prayers with the words “Ich Janke air fur all das Cute una Liebe una Schone,”* [*Thank you, God, for all that is good and dear and beautiful.] and I’m filled with joy. I think of going into hiding, my health and my whole being as das Cute; Peter’s love (which is still so new and fragile and which neither of us dares to say aloud), the future, happiness and love as das Liebe; the world, nature and the tremendous beauty of everything, all that splendor, as das Schone. At such moments I don’t think about all the misery, but about the beauty that still remains. This is where Mother and I differ greatly. Her advice in the face of melancholy is: “Think about all the suffering in the world and be thankful you’re not part of it.” My advice is: “Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.” I don’t think Mother’s advice can be right, because what are you supposed to do if you become part of the suffering? You’d be completely lost. On the contrary, beauty remains, even in misfortune. If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance. A person who’s happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery! Yours, Anne M. Frank WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 1944 Margot and I have been writing each other notes, just for fun, of course. Anne: It’s strange, but I can only remember the day after what has happened the night before. For example, I suddenly remembered that Mr. Dussel was snoring loudly last night. (It’s now quarter to three on Wednesday af- ternoon and Mr. Dussel is snoring again, which is why it flashed through my mind, of course.) When I had to use the potty, I deliberately made more noise to get the snoring to stop. Margot: Which is better, the snoring or the gasping for air? Anne: The snoring’s better, because it stops when I make noise, without waking the person in question. What I didn’t write to Margot, but what I’ll confess to you, dear Kitty, is that I’ve been dreaming of Peter a great deal. The night before last I dreamed I was skating right here in our living room with that little boy from the Apollo ice-skating rink; he was with his sister, the girl with the spindly legs who always wore the same blue dress. I introduced myself, overdoing it a bit, and asked him his name. It was Peter. In my dream I wondered just how many Peters I actually knew! Then I dreamed we were standing in Peter’s room, facing each other beside the stairs.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  write an essay entitled ‘Quack, Quack, Quack,’ said Mistress Chatterback.’” The class roared. I had to laugh too, though I’d nearly exhausted my ingenuity on the topic of chatterboxes. It was time to come up with something else, j something original. My friend Sanne, who’s good at poetry, offered to help me write the essay from beginning to end in verse. I jumped for joy. Keesing was trying to play a joke on me with this ridiculous subject, but I’d make sure the joke was on him. I finished my poem, and it was beautiful! It was about a mother duck and a father swan with three baby ducklings who were bitten to death by the father because they quacked too much. Luckily, Keesing took the joke the right way. He read the poem to the class, adding his own comments, and to several other classes as well. Since then I’ve been allowed to talk and haven’t been assigned any extra homework. On the contrary, Keesing’s always i making jokes these days. Yours, Anne WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24, 1942 Dearest Kitty, It’s sweltering. Everyone is huffing and puffing, and in this heat I have to walk everywhere. Only now do I realize how pleasant a streetcar is, but we Jews are no longer allowed to make use of this luxury; our own two feet are good enough for us. Yesterday at lunchtime I had an appointment with the dentist on Jan Luykenstraat. It’s a long way from our school on Stadstimmertuinen. That afternoon I nearly fell asleep at my desk. Fortunately, people automatically offer you something to drink. The dental assistant is really kind. The only mode of transportation left to us is the ferry. The ferryman at Josef Israelkade took us across when we asked him to. It’s not the fault of the Dutch that we Jews are having such a bad time. I wish I didn’t have to go to school. My bike was stolen during Easter vacation, and Father gave Mother’s bike to some Christian friends for safekeeping. Thank goodness summer vacation is almost here; one more week and our torment will be over. Something unexpected happened yesterday morning. As I was passing the bicycle racks, I heard my name being called. I turned around and there was the