Love

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 Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  As you interact with one person after another, they gently nudge you to attend to these others more closely and forge connections when possible. They shape your motives and behaviors in subtle ways, yet ultimately, their actions serve to strengthen your relationships and knit you in closer to the social fabric of life. In the sections that follow, I’ll shine the spotlight on each of these three main characters in turn, to help you see how each forges and supports those life-giving moments of positivity resonance for which your body thirsts. Love on the Brain When you and another truly connect, love reverberates between you. In the very moment that you experience positivity resonance, your brain syncs up with the other person’s brain. Within each moment of love, you and the other are on the same wavelength. As your respective brain waves mirror one another, each of you—moment by moment—changes the other’s mind. At least this is what I’ve been telling you. How do you know it really happens? You can’t see this brain synchrony surface in real time after all. What you’d need is some way to peer inside two people’s heads while they chatted so that you could tell whether their respective brain activity really does march along in time together. This would tell you whether they really “click.” Only with this sort of X-ray vision could you decide whether love is better described as a solo act—an emotion contained within the boundaries of the person feeling it—or a duet or ensemble, performed by a duo or group. That sort of X-ray vision sounds like science fiction. Yet turning science fiction into science fact is what scientists and engineers love most. Breakthrough work by neuroscientist Uri Hasson, of Princeton University, has done just that. He and his team have found ways to measure multiple brains connecting through conversation. The obstacles they faced to do this were large. First, brain scanners are loud machines—no place to carry on actual conversations. Second, they’re also extraordinarily expensive, both to buy and to use. Almost all brain imaging studies thus scan just one person’s brain at a time. Yet with clever engineering and clever experimental logistics, Hasson’s team cleared both obstacles. They created a custom optic microphone that canceled out the noise of the scanner without distorting the delicate brain signals his team sought to capture. The logistics feat was to mimic a natural conversation by pulling it apart in time. Suppose, for a moment, you were stranded at the airport last week. Your plane to Miami was delayed for hours. Bored with your reading and web-browsing, you got to talking to another stranded passenger, a lively young college student on her way home for break. You’d been chatting back and forth for a while, every so often, meeting eyes and sharing smiles.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Neural coupling, then—really understanding someone else—becomes all the more likely when you share the same emotion. Even more so than ordinary communication, a micro-moment of love is a single act, performed by two brains. Shared emotions, brain synchrony, and mutual understanding emerge together. And mutual understanding is just steps away from mutual care. Once two people understand each other—really “get” each other in any given moment—the benevolent concerns and actions of mutual care can flow forth unimpeded. As you move through your day, quite naturally you move in and out of different scenes. Each scene, of course, has its own script. For perhaps most of your day, you’re pretty much caught up in your own thoughts and plans, oblivious to the presence or feelings of anyone nearby. Your brain, in such moments, is doing its own thing. But in those rarer moments when you truly connect with someone else over positivity—by sharing a smile, a laugh, a common passion, or an engaging story—you become attuned, with genuine care and concern for the other. You empathize with what they’re going through, as your two brains sync up and act as one, as a unified team. Neural coupling like this is a biological manifestation of oneness. Laboratory studies have already shown that when positive emotions course through you, your awareness expands from your habitual focus on “me” to a more generous focus on “we.” When you’re feeling bad—afraid, anxious, or angry— even your best friend can seem pretty remote or separate from you. The same goes for when you’re feeling nothing in particular. Not so, when you’re feeling good. Under the influence of positive emotions, your sense of self actually expands to include others to greater degrees. Your best friend, in these lighthearted moments, simply seems like a bigger part of you. Hasson’s work suggests that when you share your positive emotions with others, when you experience positivity resonance together with this sense of expansion, it’s also deeply physical, evident in your brain. The emotional understanding of true empathy recruits coinciding brain activity in both you and the person of your focus. Another telling brain imaging study, this one conducted by scientists in Taipei, Taiwan, illustrates self-other overlap at the neuronal level. Imagine for a moment being a participant in this study. While you are in the fMRI brain scanner, the researchers show you a number of short, animated scenes and ask you to picture yourself in these scenes. Some of these scenes depict painful events, like dropping something heavy on your toe or getting your fingers pinched in a closing door.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I’d give up the stage in a flash.’ I tried to pull her to me again, but she knocked my hand away. ‘You would have to give up the stage,’ she said seriously, ‘and so would I, if there was talk about us, if people thought we were — like that.’ But what were we like? I still didn’t know. When I pressed her, however, she grew fretful. ‘We’re not like anything! We’re just - ourselves.’ ‘But if we’re just ourselves, why do we have to hide it?’ ‘Because no one would know the difference between us and - women like that!’ I laughed. ‘Is there a difference?’ I asked again. She continued grave and cross. ‘I have told you,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what’s wrong or right, or good ...’ ‘I know that this ain’t wrong, what we do. Only that the world says it is.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s the same thing,’ she said. Then she fell back upon her pillow and closed her eyes, and turned her face away. I was sorry that I had teased her - but also, I am ashamed to say, rather warmed by her distress. I touched her cheek, and moved a little closer to her; then I took my hand from her face and passed it, hesitantly, down her night-dress, over her breasts and belly. She moved away, and I slowed - but did not stop - my searching fingers; and soon, as if despite itself, I felt her body slacken in assent. I moved lower, and seized the hem of her shift and drew it high - then did the same with my own, and gently slid my hips over hers. We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell - you couldn’t have passed so much as the blade of a knife between us. I said, ‘Oh Kitty, how can this be wrong?’ But she did not answer, only moved her lips to mine at last, and when I felt the tug of her kiss I let my weight fall heavily upon her, and gave a sigh. I might have been Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. It was true, I suppose, what she said - that I didn’t understand her. Always, always, it came down to the same thing: that however much we had to hide our love, however guardedly we had to take our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing that was - as she herself admitted - so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anyone who cared for me would be anything but happy for me, if only they knew.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Rowdy asked. He knows that my brain is fragile. If those Andruss brothers had punched a hole in the aquarium of my skull, I might have flooded out the entire powwow. “My brain is fine,” I said. “But my balls are dying.” “I’m going to kill those bastards,” Rowdy said. Of course, Rowdy didn’t kill them, but we hid near the Andruss brothers’ camp until three in the morning. They staggered back and passed out in their tent. Then Rowdy snuck in, shaved off their eyebrows, and cut off their braids. That’s about the worst thing you can do to an Indian guy. It had taken them years to grow their hair. And Rowdy cut that away in five seconds. I loved Rowdy for doing that. I felt guilty for loving him for that. But revenge also feels pretty good. The Andruss brothers never did figure out who cut their eyebrows and hair. Rowdy started a rumor that it was a bunch of Makah Indians from the coast who did it. “You can’t trust them whale hunters,” Rowdy said. “They’ll do anything.” But before you think Rowdy is only good for revenge, and kicking the shit out of minivans, raindrops, and people, let me tell you something sweet about him: he loves comic books. But not the cool superhero ones like Daredevil or X-Men. No, he reads the goofy old ones, like Richie Rich and Archie and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Kid stuff. He keeps them hidden in a hole in the wall of his bedroom closet. Almost every day, I’ll head over to his house and we’ll read those comics together. Rowdy isn’t a fast reader, but he’s persistent. And he’ll just laugh and laugh at the dumb jokes, no matter how many times he’s read the same comic. I like the sound of Rowdy’s laughter. I don’t hear it very often, but it’s always sort of this avalanche of ha-ha and ho-ho and hee-hee. I like to make him laugh. He loves my cartoons. He’s a big, goofy dreamer, too, just like me. He likes to pretend he lives inside the comic books. I guess a fake life inside a cartoon is a lot better than his real life. So I draw cartoons to make him happy, to give him other worlds to live inside. I draw his dreams. And he only talks about his dreams with me. And I only talk about my dreams with him. I tell him about my fears. I think Rowdy might be the most important person in my life. Maybe more important than my family. Can your best friend be more important than your family? I think so. I mean, after all, I spend a lot more time with Rowdy than I do with anyone else. Let’s do the math.

• From Less (2017)

  Less, still dazzled by the spotlight, starts up the stairs and becomes ensnared, as he always does, in the thorns of a neighbor’s rosebush; carefully he removes each spur from his shimmering gray suit. He passes the bougainvillea, which, like some bothersome talkative lady at a party, briefly obstructs his path. He pushes it aside, showering himself with dried purple bracts. Somewhere, someone is practicing piano over and over; they cannot get the left hand right. A window undulates with a watery television radiance. And then I see the familiar blond glow of his hair appearing from the flowers, the halo of Arthur Less. Look at him tripping at the same broken step as always, pausing to look down in surprise. Look at him turning to take the last few steps toward the one who awaits him. His face tilted upward toward home. Look at him, look at him. How could I not love him? My father asked me once why I was so lazy, why I did not want the world. He asked me what I wanted, and though I did not answer then, because I did not know, and followed old conventions even to the altar, I know it now. It is long past time to answer the question—and I see you, old Arthur, old love, looking up to that silhouette on your porch—what do I want? After choosing the path people wanted, the man who would do, the easy way out of things—your eyes wide in surprise as you see me—after holding it all in my hands and refusing it, what do I want from life? And I say: “Less!” About the Author Andrew Sean Greer is the author of five works of fiction, including the bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the O. Henry Prize for short fiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. He lives in San Francisco and Tuscany. andrewgreer.com twitter.com/agreer facebook.com/LessANovel Also by Andrew Sean Greer The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells The Story of a Marriage The Confessions of Max Tivoli The Path of Minor Planets How It Was for Me Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters. Sign Up Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  With this ritual I contrived to never be without his molecular makeup near me at all times. Whenever I looked at that condom, and I looked a lot, I felt the rush of his beauty. I’ve always been a sucker for symbolism; this dangling rubber provided me with the opaque evidence of what was, and will be again. I clung to his DNA until given the next deposit—as if my subconscious took refuge in the theoretical knowledge that there was a possibility at all times of re-creating his essence. Those condoms comforted me, reminding me of the fourth dimension, the dimension beyond bills, anxiety, self-loathing, and desire, the dimension where bliss reigns, and I am its babbling slave. #200 Always before, I doubt. Always after, I don’t. Two hundred entries into my bowels, two hundred times I doubt and then believe. What’s it going to take? Two hundred and one. FOREPLAY Knock . . . knock . . . knock. When I open the front door, he is always slow to enter. He is in no rush; A-Man knows where he’s going. And where he’s coming, too. He steps inside, I lock the door, and we are sealed inside together. I feel the warmth rising already. Then the hug, the holding. The full-body holding that starts the coming, his and mine. Strong, enveloping, possessive. I start moaning and I feel his cock pushing at me. He grabs my hips and presses them into, onto, his cock. It’s hard to break the hug, but we must get to the bedroom; it’s imperative. If we don’t make it there, tchotchkes always get smashed. The bedroom is our padded cell, where insanity can be unleashed without excessive material damage. Sometimes he just turns me around, facing forward, his cock pressed up against my ass, and keeping the contact, leads me to the bedroom as we synchronize our walk so as not to break position. But before the first step, I find my speaking voice, and ask if he wants any food, if he’s hungry. He always declines, but I always ask. We are very polite with each other. Once we’re in the bedroom, the hug is often revisited. Those first hugs establish Loveland, but now it’s time to leave that invisible place and travel to Lustland, where things are visible and tangible and so unreal. Now he’s totally hard, his pants aren’t fitting right at all. He backs away from me and slowly, carefully, deliberately takes off all his clothes, keeping his eyes on me the whole time. I just watch and wait. He’ll let me know what he wants. He always does. Sometimes he’ll speak softly and say, “Get on the bed—on your knees—now pull up your dress.” Then he eats me out, from behind.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now I can see why’ - which made Alice blush, and look to the floor in confusion. With my father she was kind. ‘Well, well, Miss Butler,’ he said when he took her hand, nodding at her skirts, ‘this is rather a change, ain’t it, from your usual gear?’ She smiled and said it was; and when he added, with a wink, ‘And something of an improvement, too - if you don’t mind a gentleman saying so’, she laughed and said that, since gentlemen were usually of that opinion, she was quite used to it, and did not mind a bit. All in all she made herself so pleasant, and answered their questions about herself, and the music hall, so sweetly and cleverly, that no one - not even Alice, or spiteful Rhoda - could dislike her; and I - watching her gaze from the windows at Whitstable Bay, or incline her head to catch a story of my father’s, or compliment my mother on some ornament or picture (she admired the shawl, above the fireplace!) - I fell in love with her, all over again. And my love was all the warmer, of course, since I had that special, secret knowledge about Tricky, and the contract, and the extra four months. She had come for tea, and presently we all sat down to it - Kitty marvelling, as we did so, at the table. It was set for a real oyster-supper, with a linen cloth, and a little spirit-lamp with a plate of butter on it, waiting to be melted. On either side of this there were platters of bread, and quartered lemons, and vinegar and pepper castors - two or three of each. Beside every plate there was a fork, a spoon, a napkin, and the all-important oyster-knife; and in the middle of the table there was the oyster-barrel itself, a white cloth bound about its top-most hoop, and its lid loosened by a finger’s width - ‘Just enough,’ as my father would say, ‘to let the oysters stretch a little’; but not enough to let them open their shells and sicken. We were rather cramped around the table, for there were eight of us in all, and we had had to bring up extra chairs from the restaurant below. Kitty and I sat close, our elbows almost touching, our shoes side by side beneath the table. When Mother cried, ‘Do move along a bit, Nancy, and give Miss Butler some room!’, Kitty said that she was quite all right, Mrs Astley, really; and I shifted a quarter of an inch to my right, but kept my foot pressed against hers, and felt her leg, all hot, against my own.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I want to mainline him. Only his penetration of my ass excavates my fear and restores my faith, the faith he created. When an experience of love arrives that demotes all others to impostors, it brings, inside the joy, a haunting fear. How could this delight have been showered upon me, a mortal woman with the usual sins, unhealed wounds, desperate anger, and fierce desire? “Why me?” says my voice of disbelief. “Why not me?” says a small, faint voice not my own, echoing up from my gut. Then I found the best evidence of all—the one that actually worked, that relieved the withdrawal symptoms and gave me solace. He had a game, the postcoital fling-the-condom-into-the-wastebasket- by-the-bed game. Not surprisingly, his aim was amazingly accurate. After he left, I would resituate the condom so that it dangled over the top edge of the basket, the pocket of cum weighing it down, the rim secured by the still sticky K-Y. And I would leave this trophy there where I could easily see it, until the next time he called and said, “It’s Time.” Time to shave my pussy, time to turn off the phone, time to make way for new DNA, time for time to end. With this ritual I contrived to never be without his molecular makeup near me at all times. Whenever I looked at that condom, and I looked a lot, I felt the rush of his beauty. I’ve always been a sucker for symbolism; this dangling rubber provided me with the opaque evidence of what was, and will be again. I clung to his DNA until given the next deposit—as if my subconscious took refuge in the theoretical knowledge that there was a possibility at all times of re-creating his essence. Those condoms comforted me, reminding me of the fourth dimension, the dimension beyond bills, anxiety, self-loathing, and desire, the dimension where bliss reigns, and I am its babbling slave. #200 Always before, I doubt. Always after, I don’t. Two hundred entries into my bowels, two hundred times I doubt and then believe. What’s it going to take? Two hundred and one. FOREPLAY Knock . . . knock . . . knock. When I open the front door, he is always slow to enter. He is in no rush; A-Man knows where he’s going. And where he’s coming, too. He steps inside, I lock the door, and we are sealed inside together. I feel the warmth rising already. Then the hug, the holding. The full-body holding that starts the coming, his and mine. Strong, enveloping, possessive. I start moaning and I feel his cock pushing at me. He grabs my hips and presses them into, onto, his cock. It’s hard to break the hug, but we must get to the bedroom; it’s imperative. If we don’t make it there, tchotchkes always get smashed.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was six when my mother bought her. We were living on the basement level of an apartment complex called Barbary Knoll. My mother had just left my father for the last time. We barely had enough money to live, but my mother had to have that horse. I knew instinctively, even as a child, that it was Lady who saved my mother’s life. Lady who made it possible for her not only to walk away from my father, but also to keep going. Horses were my mother’s religion. It was with them she’d wanted to be on all those Sundays as a child, when she’d been made to put on dresses to go to mass. The stories she told me about horses were a counterpoint to the other stories she’d told me about her Catholic upbringing. She did anything she could to ride them. She raked stalls and polished tack, hauled hay and spread straw, any kind of odd job that came her way, so that she would be allowed to hang out at whatever stable happened to be nearest and ride someone’s horse. Images of her past cowgirl life came to me from time to time, captured in freeze-frame moments, as clear and concise to me as if I’d read them in a book. The overnight backcountry rides she’d done in New Mexico with her father. The daredevil rodeo tricks she’d practiced and performed with her girlfriends. At sixteen she got her own horse, a palomino named Pal, whom she rode in horse shows and rodeos in Colorado. She still had the ribbons when she died. I packed them in a box that was now in Lisa’s basement in Portland. A yellow third for barrel racing, a pink fifth for walk, trot, canter; green for showmanship and participation; and a single blue ribbon for riding her horse through all of the gaits smoothly over a course lined with mud pits and tight corners, laughing clowns and blaring horns, while she balanced an egg on a silver spoon in her outstretched hand for longer than anyone else could or did. In the stable where Lady first lived when she became ours, my mother did the same work she’d done as a kid, cleaning stalls and spreading hay, hauling things to and fro in a wheelbarrow. Often, she brought Karen, Leif, and me with her. We played in the barn while she did her chores. Afterwards, we watched her ride Lady around and around the ring, each of us getting a turn when she was done. By the time we moved to our land in northern Minnesota, we had a second horse, a mixed-breed gelding named Roger, whom my mother had bought because I’d fallen in love with him and his owner was willing to let him go for next to nothing. We hauled them both up north in a borrowed trailer. Their pasture was a quarter of our forty acres.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He and I had even discussed the idea of a three-way with her—we always reminisced fondly about the magic of our times with the redhead and wondered if it could be reproduced with someone else. But he said he was not sure that I would like her body. Proportion is important to me in matters of beauty, and though she was slim, she had no tits and a wide ass. Good enough for him, obviously, but perhaps not for me. A curious assessment, but probably correct. As time went on, however, this woman became increasingly abstract. A-Man was fucking me so often and so well that she was easily dismissed, often forgotten. That he is free to fuck whomever he likes and yet repeatedly calls me, comes to me, fucks me, seems a greater proof of love and desire on a daily basis than a commitment of monogamy would be—especially if it was made only to prevent insecurities from rising to the surface . Is his love as deep as mine? I don’t care if it is as superficial as mine is deep as long as he, and his rock-hard desire, show up at my back door several times a week. Sodomy ignites a gratitude of great scope. I suspect that until he shattered the control panel of my being—my mental acuity and my physical power—I had never really loved before. How do you know it’s love, real love? When you meet the one with whom you are not afraid to die. The one who takes away that constant gnawing fear of death and gives one air to breathe. Not afraid to die, this is the feeling he generates when he fucks my ass. Pussy penetration does not delve this far into my psyche; does not break the barrier; does not stop the fear. Did the love or the sodomy come first? Love grows from lust. This I know. Besides, I don’t trust love. I’ve heard it declared too often. But I trust lust completely. K-Y “What’s your afternoon like?” It begins. He has an appointment at six, will be over at three. It is now two. One hour. The courtesan takes over. I turn on the bath, all hot, and let it fill. I check the condom stash and refill it, always having plenty, at least five, more is better, a feeling of bounty, of possibility, like popcorn. I check the K-Y tubes, pushing the insides to the opening end and then rinsing them off under the tap, sticky from last time. The heat rises as I wash those tubes. I use my pink nail brush to wash just under the ridge on the cap where his thumb pushes it open. Dirt always collects there; it’s how I know that tube was used. I adore washing those tubes smooth.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  I again draw from the ancient wisdom of LKM in this chapter. As does LKM, I gently encourage you to stretch open your heart wider than you ever thought possible. I first invite you to experiment with extending warmth and goodwill to everyone you know and then to stretch that positive vibe even further to encompass everyone you don’t know. Once you set your sights, mind, and heart on these larger aims, you’ll find countless ways to forge tender, loving connections with everyone, without a single exception. These are not just idle wishes, empty intentions, or a futile form of magical thinking. In wishing people on the other side of the planet to be happy and peaceful, you need not believe that your wishes somehow metaphysically travel the world to change the course of their day. The point is to change your day, by conditioning your heart to be soft, open, and caring toward each new person you encounter, regardless of how remote the prior connection between you may have been. This chapter features both formal and informal practices to help you extend the reach of your love, even in the face of uncertainty or ambiguity. Redefining love as those micro-moments of positivity resonance you can share with nearly anyone breaks open extraordinary opportunities. To be sure, extraordinary opportunities pose extraordinary challenges, not only to see the chances for loving connection but also to be ready for them. Micro-moments, by definition, are fleeting. If you blink—or slip into self-absorption—you miss out. Even so, merely seeing opportunities to connect, without being prepared to act, can make you lonelier. To build community and escape painful isolation, you need to teach your heart to be ready. Hone your skills for capitalizing on those life-giving micro-moments so that, as the river of fresh opportunities for love flows toward you, you’ll be poised to jump in. Try This Meditation Practice: Loving All Retreat to a place in which you can sit undisturbed. Ground yourself by placing your feet flat on the floor, and adjust your posture until your body feels both alert and open. Lengthen your spine and lift up your rib cage. Since emotional states are deeply embodied, seek out the posture that feels attuned to expanding love. Start, once again, by drawing a few slow and deep breaths, resting your awareness on each one as it moves through your lungs and through your body. Next, bring your awareness to your intention for this session. Articulate this intention silently to yourself. Perhaps it’s to awaken yourself to the vast sea of possibilities for love, or to find joy in connecting with all the people you’ll encounter today. As you practice, remember to lightly bring your awareness to your heart region.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was clad in her coat and hat, and had her satchel over her arm; but she was gazing at me as if - well, I had had too many admiring glances come my way, in the years since I had first walked before Kitty Butler in a party-gown and not known why it was she flushed to look at me, not to know why it was that Florence, studying me in my moleskins and my crop, flushed now. But, like Kitty, her desire seemed almost as painful to her as it was pleasant. When she caught my eye, she lowered her head and walked into the house; and all that she would say was: ‘Why, what a shine you have put upon the glass!’ And while it was glorious to know that - at last, and all unwittingly! — I had made her look at me and want me; while I had felt, for the second that her gaze had met mine, the leaping of my own new passion, and an answering passion in her; and while that passion had left me giddy, and aching, and hot, it was as much with nervousness as with lust that I trembled and grew weak. Anyway, when I met her later her eyes were dim and she kept them turned from me; and I thought, again, Why would she ever care for me, while she still grieved for somebody like Lilian? And so we went on, and the year grew colder. When Christmas came I spent it not at Quilter Street, but at Freemantle House, where Florence had organised a dinner for her girls and needed extra hands to baste the goose and wash the dishes. At New Year we drank a toast to 1895, and. another to ‘absent friends’ - she meant Lilian, of course; I’d never told her about all the friends that I had lost. In January there was Ralph’s birthday to celebrate. It fell, in the most uncanny fashion, on the same day as Diana’s; and as I smiled to see him opening his gifts, I remembered the bust of Antinous, and wondered if it was still casting its frigid glances over the warm transactions at Felicity Place, and whether Diana ever looked at it and remembered me. But by now I had grown so at home in Bethnal Green that I could barely believe I had ever lived anywhere else, or imagine a time when Quilter Street routines were not my own. I had become used to the neighbours’ racket, and to the clamour of the street.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Once you actually forge a connection with someone else to create a shared moment of positivity resonance, the doors of perception widen further, in unique ways. First and foremost, you come to view one another as part of a unified whole—a single “us” rather than two separate “me’s.” And compared to other positive emotions, love stretches your circle of concern to include others to a greater degree. Love carries its characteristic care and concern for others, a warmth and genuine interest that inspire you to extend your trust and compassion to them. In fact, a recent attempt to pinpoint the most essential feature of love—a feature that spans all varieties of love, from romantic to parental to platonic—identifies such care and concern, expressed abstractly as your “investment in the well-being of another, for his or her own sake,” as an essential, always-present fingerprint of love. Love’s characteristic care and concern drive you to attend more closely to other people’s needs and help you vigilantly take in and evaluate incoming information so that you can protect them from harm. Love also leaves you with more positive automatic reactions to the persons with whom you’ve shared micro-moments of positivity resonance the next time you meet, an implicit goodwill that paves the way for future experiences of positivity resonance with them. Indeed, studies show that as you learn to cultivate micro-moments of love more readily, your everyday interactions with friends and coworkers become more lighthearted and enjoyable. Simply put, love changes your mind. Doing If, like me, you are a product of Western culture, odds are you tend to see the mind and body as rather separate. “Thinking” seems like one thing, and “doing” quite another. Yet this sharp distinction is only an illusion. New science makes clear that each is cut from the same cloth. Knowing then that love alters your mind’s modus operandi, swinging open your doors of perception wider, allowing you to recognize your unity with others, care for them, and capitalize on your combined strengths, should make it easier to understand how love alters your gestures and actions. For just as neuroscientific studies show that positive emotions open your perceptual awareness, kinematic studies by my collaborator Melissa Gross show that they also open your torso, literally expanding the (rib) cage in which your heart sits. When your mind and body are infused with good feelings, those feelings lift and expand your chest, a subtle nonverbal gesture that makes you more inviting to others, more open for connection. Genuine good feelings also open up your face, as your lips stretch up and open into a smile, raising your cheeks to create (or deepen) the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  But their duration is best measured in seconds or minutes, not months or years. Love is the ephemeral and precious openness you feel well up in your chest, not a rock-solid ring made of precious metal on your left hand. The love I speak of here is also far from exclusive. It’s not just that unique feeling you reserve for your spouse or your romantic partner. It even extends beyond your warm feelings for your children, parents, or close friends. Love can reach so much further than we typically allow. In fact, no one—young or old, passionate or reserved, single or married—need be excluded. It is love, after all, that energizes that unspoken bond of sameness you sense between you and the person by chance seated next to you on the plane, to whom you’ve opened up and listened attentively, in that moment when you glance at each other and really see each other, with true respect and appreciation. I’m reminded here of the lyrics that Louis Armstrong’s gravelly voice made famous in the late 1960s in “What a Wonderful World”: “I see friends shaking hands . . . sayin’ ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin . . . ‘I love you.’ ” Perhaps counterintuitively, love is far more ubiquitous than you ever thought possible for the simple fact that love is connection. It’s that poignant stretching of your heart that you feel when you gaze into a newborn’s eyes for the first time or share a farewell hug with a dear friend. It’s even the fondness and sense of shared purpose you might unexpectedly feel with a group of strangers who’ve come together to marvel at a hatching of sea turtles or cheer at a football game. The new take on love that I want to share with you is this: Love blossoms virtually anytime two or more people—even strangers—connect over a shared positive emotion, be it mild or strong. To put it in a nutshell, love is the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. My shorthand for this trio is positivity resonance . Within those moments of interpersonal connection that are characterized by this amplifying symphony—of shared positive emotions, biobehavioral synchrony, and mutual care—life-giving positivity resonates between and among people. This back-and-forth reverberation of positive energy sustains itself—and can even grow stronger—until the momentary connection wanes, which is of course inevitable, because that’s how emotions work.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Let Thy works praise Thee, that we may love Thee; and let us love Thee, that Thy works may praise Thee, which from time have beginning and ending, rising and setting, growth and decay, form and privation. They have then their succession of morning and evening, part secretly, part apparently; for they were made of nothing, by Thee, not of Thee; not of any matter not Thine, or that was before, but of matter concreated (that is, at the same time created by Thee), because to its state without form, Thou without any interval of time didst give form. For seeing the matter of heaven and earth is one thing, and the form another, Thou madest the matter of merely nothing, but the form of the world out of the matter without form: yet both together, so that the form should follow the matter, without any interval of delay.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Indeed, it seemed everyone wanted Maria to sleep with Napoleon except Maria. They chided her: What would happen if the emperor, spurned by Maria, turned against Poland as well? It would be Maria’s fault! And so trembling Maria, pushed into the carriage by her insistent husband, visited Napoleon in his suite at Warsaw Castle. The first night he talked with her for four hours and nothing more. The second night she became “the unwilling victim of his passion,” she wrote a decade later in her memoirs, which sounds alarmingly like rape.11 But tenderness must have come afterward, for he awakened a sexuality in Maria that she had never known with a sick and aging husband. The old count had set in motion a love affair that he could not halt. Maria fell in love with Napoleon, and her gratitude to her husband dried up when he forced her into another man’s arms. They separated and eventually divorced. Maria fell deeply in love with Napoleon and for the three years of their torrid love affair followed him around Europe on campaign. But when she became pregnant with his child, Napoleon—who had always believed he was sterile—realized he could sire a prince and heir. He divorced the barren Josephine, dumped the heartbroken Maria, and married an eighteen-year-old Austrian princess. Maria’s sacrifice on behalf of her beloved nation was as doomed as her love affair with the emperor had been. Even as Napoleon was promising her he would restore Poland, he had instructed his ambassador to Russia to tell the czar, “His Majesty was prepared to see the words Poland and Polish people disappear from all current political transactions,” and “would agree that the kingdom of Poland would never be restored.”12 Doubly betrayed by Napoleon, Maria did not hesitate to visit him in his disgrace and exile on the island of Elba. Bringing their five-year-old son and all her jewels to help him with his financial difficulties, she arrived prepared to stay as his companion. But Napoleon, fearing that scandal would prevent his wife, Empress Maria Louisa, and their son from joining him, sent Maria packing after only three days. Maria and all of Europe knew that the empress was having an affair with a handsome equerry in Vienna and would never trade in her lavish lifestyle for exile on a rock. Not wishing to disillusion Napoleon, Maria kept her peace and boarded the ship, never to see him again. Long-Suffering AcceptanceNot every husband jumped for joy when the king ogled his wife. In 1716, the new mistress of Philippe d’Orléans, regent of France, bore an inconvenient accessory—a loving and jealous husband. While Marie-Madeleine de Parabère reveled in the expensive jewels the regent gave her and ached to wear them, she needed to come up with an explanation for her husband as to how she had obtained them.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Pay attention to any shifting sensations in your body and face. These physical aspects of your experience matter more than the particular phrasings you choose. Now, gently call forth the image of a whole swath of people. This might be all the people in your part of town or your region of the country. To do this, you might visualize the view you’d have flying low over your stretch of earth. Although you can’t see individual people, you’re aware that they are there, underneath nearly every rooftop, carrying out the activities of their day, perhaps eating, resting, working, worshipping, or simply moving from one place to another. Expand your awareness to encompass this whole community. Know that it includes people you know quite well, those you know just a bit, as well as those you don’t know at all. You can be sure that each and every one, like you, has at one time or another yearned for something more in their life, for happiness, for connection, and for an abiding sense of peace. Let your awareness of this fundamental similarity between you and all others infuse the space between your heart and each of theirs. You share the same wishes, the same earth. You breathe the same air. With your various connections to all these people in mind, silently say to yourself the following ancient phrases, or your own versions of them, offering these wishes from your heart: May you all feel safe and protected. May you all feel happy and peaceful. May you all feel healthy and strong. May you all live with ease. Offer each wish in time with the rise and fall of each of the slow and full breaths that you take. Let your goodwill toward all those in your neighborhood, town, or region infuse and soften your heart. When you are ready, gently expand the scope of your focus further still. You might choose to visualize your entire country or continent, offering your goodwill to everyone residing there, recognizing again that this includes people you know personally as well as an immense sea of those you do not know. Silently repeat the phrases with this now larger expanse of people held gently within your awareness. Another way to experiment with loving all is to divide the sum of all people into two mutually exclusive and encompassing categories. No need to bring in heavy analytic thinking here. Simply call up any division that makes sense to you, such as “all children” paired with “all adults” or “all girls and women” paired with “all boys and men” or “all those who suffer” paired with “all those currently free of suffering.”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  For although we find no time before it, for wisdom was created before all things; not that Wisdom which is altogether equal and coeternal unto Thee, our God, His Father, and by Whom all things were created, and in Whom, as the Beginning, Thou createdst heaven and earth; but that wisdom which is created, that is, the intellectual nature, which by contemplating the light, is light. For this, though created, is also called wisdom. But what difference there is betwixt the Light which enlighteneth, and which is enlightened, so much is there betwixt the Wisdom that createth, and that created; as betwixt the Righteousness which justifieth, and the righteousness which is made by justification. For we also are called Thy righteousness; for so saith a certain servant of Thine, That we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Therefore since a certain created wisdom was created before all things, the rational and intellectual mind of that chaste city of Thine, our mother which is above, and is free and eternal in the heavens (in what heavens, if not in those that praise Thee, the Heaven of heavens? Because this is also the Heaven of heavens for the Lord);—though we find no time before it (because that which hath been created before all things, precedeth also the creature of time), yet is the Eternity of the Creator Himself before it, from Whom, being created, it took the beginning, not indeed of time (for time itself was not yet), but of its creation. Hence it is so of Thee, our God, as to be altogether other than Thou, and not the Self-same: because though we find time neither before it, nor even in it (it being meet ever to behold Thy face, nor is ever drawn away from it, wherefore it is not varied by any change), yet is there in it a liability to change, whence it would wax dark, and chill, but that by a strong affection cleaving unto Thee, like perpetual noon, it shineth and gloweth from Thee. O house most lightsome and delightsome! I have loved thy beauty, and the place of the habitation of the glory of my Lord, thy builder and possessor. Let my wayfaring sigh after thee, and I say to Him that made thee, let Him take possession of me also in thee, seeing He hath made me likewise. I have gone astray like a lost sheep: yet upon the shoulders of my Shepherd, thy builder, hope I to be brought back to thee.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Adopting this loving observers’ perspective on yourself can offer an “appreciative jolt” that allows you to see—and truly feel—how it is that you add value to those around you. From this perspective, you can better discern your good qualities. Of course, you still have your own unique set of less-than-good qualities as well. If your mind gets pulled toward those, gently invite yourself to table those shortcomings for now. You can always examine them later. This is a rare moment to spotlight the good in you and you don’t want to miss it. Another way to bypass your obstacles to self-love is to visualize yourself together with any or all of these individuals and to speak the phrases of LKM as “we”: May we feel safe. May we feel happy. May we feel healthy. May we live with ease. You can think here of the good qualities that you and this other person (or persons) share, and visualize the good wishes that emanate from your heart as surrounding and infusing the two (or more) of you. You might find that thinking of yourself together with these cherished others provides a more comfortable stepping stone on the path leading you to direct love toward yourself. Even if you have a hard time populating the circle with people who you know appreciate you, you can populate it with any or all of the people around the globe who have—or have ever—practiced the ancient technique of LKM. After all, each one of these people—whether an aging widow in Thailand, a thirtysomething prisoner in Texas, or His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself—has practiced extending the wishes of loving-kindness to all people, because all people yearn for and deserve to feel safe, happy, and healthy, and to live with ease. Perhaps it can help you to visualize yourself as tucked into the masses of humanity for which others have extended their earnest expressions of love. Loving-Kindness for Yourself

• From Less (2017)

  Arthur Less did not publish until he was in his thirties. By then, he had lived with the famous poet Robert Brownburn for years in a small house—a shack, they always called it—halfway up a steep residential stairway in San Francisco. The Vulcan Steps, they’re called, curving from Levant Street at the top, down between Monterey pines, ferns, ivy, and bottlebrush trees, to a brick landing with a view east to downtown. Bougainvillea bloomed on their porch like a discarded prom dress. The “shack” was only four rooms, one of them expressly Robert’s, but they painted the walls white and hung up paintings Robert had gotten from friends (one of them of an almost-identifiable Less, nude, on a rock), and planted a seedling trumpet vine below the bedroom window. It took five years for Less to take Robert’s advice and write. Just labored short stories at first. And then, almost at the end of their lives together, a novel. Kalipso: a retelling of the Calypso myth from The Odyssey, with a World War II soldier washed ashore in the South Pacific and brought back to life by a local man who falls in love with him and must help him find a way back to his world, and to his wife back home. “Arthur, this book,” Robert said, taking off his glasses for effect. “It’s an honor to be in love with you.” It was a moderate success; none other than Richard Champion deigned to review it in the pages of the New York Times. Robert read it first and then passed it to Less, smiling, his glasses on his forehead for his poet’s second pair of eyes; he said it was a good review. But every author can taste the poison another has slipped into the punch, and Champion ended by calling the author himself “a magniloquent spoony.” Less stared at those words like a child taking a test. Magniloquent sounded like praise (but was not). But a spoony? What the hell was a spoony? “It’s like a code,” Less said. “Is he sending messages to the enemy?” He was. “Arthur,” Robert said, holding his hand, “he’s just calling you a faggot.”