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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When did you begin to think that you might learn to - to love me?’ Now she did turn, and smiled. ‘I remember a hundred little times,’ she said. ‘I remember how you made my dressing-room so nice and neat; I remember your blushes as I kissed you good-night. I remember how you opened an oyster for me at your father’s table - but then, I think I loved you then, already. Indeed, I’m ashamed to say, that it must have been that moment, at the Canterbury Palace, when I first smelled the oyster-liquor on your fingers, that I began to think of you as - as I shouldn’t have.’ ‘Oh!’ ‘And I’m even more ashamed to say,’ she went on in a slightly different tone, ‘that it wasn’t until last night - when I saw you larking with that boy, and was so jealous - that I learned how much, how much ...’ ‘Oh, Kitty...’ I swallowed. ‘I’m glad you learned it, at last.’ She looked away, then came to me and took my fag, and gave me one brisk kiss. ‘So am I.’ After that she bent to rub with a cloth at the leather of her boots, and I found myself yawning: I was weary, and rather sick from the champagne and the excitements of the night. I said, ‘Must we really get up?’ and Kitty nodded. ‘We must - for it’s almost eleven, and Walter will be here soon. Had you forgotten?’ It was a Sunday, and Walter was coming, as usual, to take us driving. I had not forgotten - but had had no time and no desire, yet, to think of ordinary things. Now, at the mention of Walter’s name, I grew thoughtful. It would be rather hard on him, now that this had happened. As if Kitty knew what I was thinking, she said, ‘You will be sensible with Walter, won’t you, Nan?’ Then she repeated what she had said the night before upon the bridge: ‘You won’t let on, will you, to anyone? You will be careful - won’t you?’ I silently cursed her for being so prudent; but took her hand and kissed it. ‘I have been being careful since the first minute I saw you. I am the Queen of Carefulness. I shall go on being careful for ever, if you like - so long as I might be a bit reckless, sometimes, when we are quite alone.’ Her smile, when she gave it, was a little distracted. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘things have not changed, so very much.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  A policeman had appeared in the doorway, obviously troubled about the abandoned car. That was the first time I saw the great house of Nessim with its statues and palm loggias, its Courbets and Bonnards — and so on. It was both beautiful and horrible. Justine hurried up the great staircase, pausing only to transfer her olivepit from the pocket of her coat to a Chinese vase, calling all the time to Nessim. We went from room to room, fracturing the silences. He answered at last from the great studio on the roof and racing to him like a gun-dog she metaphorically dropped me at his feet and stood back, wagging her tail. She had achieved me. Nessim was sitting on the top of a ladder reading, and he came slowly down to us, looking first at one and then at the other. His shyness could not get any purchase of my shabbiness, damp hair, tin of olives, and for my part I could offer no explanation of my presence, since I did not know for what purpose I had been brought here. I took pity on him and offered him an olive; and sitting down together we finished the tin, while Justine foraged for drinks, talking, if I remember, of Orvieto where neither of us had been. It is such a solace to think back to that first meeting. Never have I been closer to them both — closer, I mean, to their marriage; they seemed to me then to be the magnificent two-headed animal a marriage could be. Watching the benign warmth of the light in his eye I realized, as I recalled all the scandalous rumours about Justine, that whatever she had done had been done in a sense for him — even what was evil or harmful in the eyes of the world. Her love was like a skin in which he lay sewn like the infant Heracles; and her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him. The world has no use for this sort of paradox I know; but it seemed to me then that Nessim knew and accepted her in a way impossible to explain to someone for whom love is still entangled with the qualities of possessiveness. Once, much later, he told me: ‘What was I to do? Justine was too strong for me in too many ways. I could only out-love her — that was my long suit. I went ahead of her — I anticipated every lapse; she found me already there, at every point where she fell down, ready to help her to her feet and show that it did not matter. After all she compromised the least part of me — my reputation.’

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

  Ordinary positive emotions don’t resonate like this at all. They are not mirrored back to you. Although the warmth of any positive emotion stretches your mind and spurs you to grow in ways that leave you more resourceful and resilient than before, only love creates such a deep interpersonal resonance. That’s because within micro-moments of love, your own positivity, your own warmth and openness, evoke—and is simultaneously evoked by—the warmth and openness emanating from the other person. This shared positivity gets further amplified by the synchronized changes in biochemistry that course through your bodies and the attention you each show the other—the smiles, the leaning in, your verbal and nonverbal expressions of care and concern for each other. These are powerful, energizing moments. Your body was designed to harness this power—to live off it. Your ability to understand and empathize with others depends mightily on having a steady diet of positivity resonance, as do your potentials for wisdom, spirituality, and health. Odds are, if you were raised in a Western culture, you think of emotions as largely private events. You locate them within a person’s boundaries, confined within their mind and skin. When conversing about emotions, your use of singular possessive adjectives betrays this point of view: You refer to “my anxiety,” “his anger,” or “her interest.” Following this logic, love would seem to belong to the person who feels it. Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people—within interpersonal transactions—and thereby belongs to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily. The biology of love, as you’ll see in chapter 3, concurs. Love alters the unseen activity within your body and brain in ways that trigger parallel changes within another person’s body and brain. More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections. It extends beyond personal boundaries to characterize the vibe that pulsates between and among people. It can even energize whole social networks or inspire a crowd to get up and dance.

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

  Consider, too, whether you might benefit from making your self-reflections more formal, by using the positivity tracking tools I’ve made available on the website that accompanies this book, at www.PositivityResonance.com. In any case, be ready to see changes. Your potential for love is virtually unbounded. I see at least two reasons for this. First, positive emotions are ubiquitous. Despite the hardwired human habit of scanning current circumstances for sources of danger and negativity, positive emotions are what most people feel most frequently. This tendency toward positivity reflects the reassuring fact that most moments are indeed benign. Right in this moment, for instance, as you are reading this sentence, I suspect that you’re sitting fairly comfortably and that no one is inserting pins into your eyes. So what’s not to like about the present moment? Relax and enjoy it. Look around and you’ll come to realize that you can increase your ratio of positive to negative emotions even further by becoming more attuned to the sources of positive emotion in your midst, be they a welcomed sense of safety, a shimmer of beauty, or a small gesture of kindness. The second reason your potential for love is nearly limitless is that social interactions are also ubiquitous. Like bees and ants, we humans are ultrasocial creatures. Your life is embedded within increasingly vast networks of relationships, social ties, and broader communities. Just count up the number of people you see or communicate with on any given day. Your tally includes not only family and friends after all but also team members and other work associates, neighbors, and acquaintances, the employees and fellow customers at any business you happen to visit, and more. Love can infuse and nourish all of these connections—even whole networks of people—just as it infuses and nourishes your own body and mind. At the heart of love is a feeling—a feeling with both physical as well as mental components. Physically, your whole body feels relaxed, with a warmth and openness in your chest, as if your heart were stretching open to let in or embrace another being. This is the feeling that makes you want to move in closer, to listen and observe more carefully. Mentally, you yearn for good fortune for others. You wish them well with great sincerity. You also wish to show how much you care, to enact tenderness and concern. We’ve all experienced love like this at one time or another. It’s that warm and tender feeling you have when you first hold a newborn, or greet a cherished friend after many months, or even years, apart. Some of this tenderness, along with its associated impulse to show care and concern, is even released when you come across a kitten, puppy, or other baby animal. Think here of a time when some small creature drew a slow “Awwww . . .” out of you. If you’re like many people, you recognize this tender feeling rolling through you mostly when you’re with loved ones.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But they who by Thy Spirit see these things, Thou seest in them. Therefore when they see that these things are good, Thou seest that they are good; and whatsoever things for Thy sake please, Thou pleasest in them, and what through Thy Spirit please us, they please Thee in us. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man, which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no one, but the Spirit of God. Now we (saith he) have received, not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. And I am admonished, “Truly the things of God knoweth no one, but the Spirit of God: how then do we also know, what things are given us of God?” Answer is made me; “because the things which we know by His Spirit, even these no one knoweth, but the Spirit of God. For as it is rightly said unto those that were to speak by the Spirit of God, it is not ye that speak: so is it rightly said to them that know through the Spirit of God, ‘It is not ye that know.’ And no less then is it rightly said to those that see through the Spirit of God, ‘It is not ye that see’; so whatsoever through the Spirit of God they see to be good, it is not they, but God that sees that it is good.” It is one thing then for a man to think that to be ill which is good, as the forenamed do; another, that that which is good, a man should see that it is good (as Thy creatures be pleasing unto many, because they be good, whom yet Thou pleasest not in them, when they prefer to enjoy them, to Thee); and another, that when a man sees a thing that it is good, God should in him see that it is good, so, namely, that He should be loved in that which He made, Who cannot be loved, but by the Holy Ghost which He hath given. Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Which is given unto us: by Whom we see that whatsoever in any degree is, is good. For from Him it is, who Himself Is not in degree, but what He Is, Is.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Knowing how much she loved Nessim and loving him so much myself, I could not contemplate this thought without terror. She lay beside me, breathing lightly, and staring at the cherub-haunted ceiling with her great eyes. I said: ‘It can come to nothing, this love-affair between a poor schoolteacher and an Alexandrian society woman. How bitter it would be to have it all end in a conventional scandal which would leave us alone together and give you the task of deciding how to dispose of me.’ Justine hated to hear the truth spoken. She turned upon one elbow and lowering those magnificent troubled eyes to mine she stared at me for a long moment. ‘There is no choice in this matter’ she said in that hoarse voice I had come to love so much. ‘You talk as if there was a choice. We are not strong or evil enough to exercise choice. All this is part of an experiment arranged by something else, the city perhaps, or another part of ourselves. How do I know?’ I remember her sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker’s, being fitted for a shark-skin costume, and saying: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?’ Now she yawned and lit a cigarette; and sitting up in bed clasped her slim ankles with her hands; reciting slowly, wryly, those marvellous lines of the old Greek poet about a love-affair long since past — they are lost in English. And hearing her speak his lines, touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness, I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city — its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs — and knew her for a true child of Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint. And with what feeling she reached the passage where the old man throws aside the ancient love-letter which had so moved him and exclaims: ‘I go sadly out on to the balcony; anything to change this train of thought, even if only to see some little movement in the city I love, in its streets and shops!’ Herself pushing open the shutters to stand on the dark balcony above a city of coloured lights: feeling the evening wind stir from the confines of Asia: her body for an instant forgotten. * * * * *

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Well, it flooded mine, anyway. Now is all there was, all I had—and I knew it. The aphoristic obituary was especially comforting. My testimony would serve if he died, if I died, or—worst of all—if he flaked on me. He had the biggest, hardest, and most gentle cock I ever knew. He was the one who fucked me in the ass, missionary-style, before he fucked my pussy. He was the one who looked beautiful to me when we fucked, the others all looked like men with contorted faces—best not to look. He didn’t grunt, or groan, or squeak during sex. He beamed and glowed, eyes wide open, shaking his head, saying, “Wow! Wow!” and then he’d fuck me some more. He was the thirty-third man, and the only one I really liked to fuck. The others were just men and I allowed it. Resentfully. Most men fuck in and out, in and out, in and out, on and on. But he fucked like he was actually going somewhere. And he was. He was the only one who took time to be friends with my cat. The others regarded my little fur ball as a hindrance, an obstacle, even a threat. They just didn’t get it: love me, love my pussy. He was my blood. He was the one who never got real. He was the one I never conquered. He was one I had the most fun with. He had the only cock I worshiped. He was the one with whom I couldn’t tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure. With the others my pleasure was the only pleasure. He was the guy who could fuck for three hours . . . and still not come. He was the one who showed me real physical joy. The others just made me come. With him I came to . . . the Kingdom. He was sweet-sweet-sweet. He was the one who oozed love. Through his fingertips, his movement, his skin, and his cock. He gave me nothing outside of bed. In bed he gave me everything that I, as a woman, could ever desire. He fucked like a rolling ocean. I didn’t have those powerful but so brief and geographically specific outward climaxes with him, it was the building of an inward tidal wave that flooded my body, my brain, and then spilled into my soul. He never, unlike the others, asked me to be “his”—but I was. He was the one who treated me like his—in bed. All the others treated me like theirs out of bed, but in bed I could smell their fear. With him sex was about transcendence, with the others power. He swooped in and out of my pussy, my ass, my life. Others smothered, wishing, foolishly, to colonize what they coveted. Fucking him was like breathing in wide open space.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He was the one with whom I couldn’t tell whose pleasure gave me more pleasure. With the others my pleasure was the only pleasure. He was the guy who could fuck for three hours . . . and still not come. He was the one who showed me real physical joy. The others just made me come. With him I came to . . . the Kingdom. He was sweet-sweet-sweet. He was the one who oozed love. Through his fingertips, his movement, his skin, and his cock. He gave me nothing outside of bed. In bed he gave me everything that I, as a woman, could ever desire . He fucked like a rolling ocean. I didn’t have those powerful but so brief and geographically specific outward climaxes with him, it was the building of an inward tidal wave that flooded my body, my brain, and then spilled into my soul. He never, unlike the others, asked me to be “his”—but I was. He was the one who treated me like his—in bed. All the others treated me like theirs out of bed, but in bed I could smell their fear. With him sex was about transcendence, with the others power. He swooped in and out of my pussy, my ass, my life. Others smothered, wishing, foolishly, to colonize what they coveted. Fucking him was like breathing in wide open space. If I never loved again I would die having known a big, big love. There was always that moment when he fucked me when all my thoughts ceased and turned to God: I was entering His territory. He didn’t please me. He possessed me. He, you see, was the one I really loved. Having now imagined its demise, I mustered the courage to proceed with the affair. #121 After, I say, “Maybe it’s not even sex. Something else. Beyond sex.” Did I have a regular battle-to-the-end clitoral orgasm? No. Had I even thought about it? No. Only a fool would hold on to what she knows while being shown some land of release beyond orgasm. The land of harmony, of deep harmony with another human being. Family. He is my family. THE UNWRITTEN RULES We are not domestic. We stay in the desire, in the bedroom—and out of the kitchen, the laundry, the office, and any other room that would threaten to bring in reality. We have, on a few occasions, when famished after sex, cooked dinner—well, actually he cooked it, but then we ate it in the bathtub with candles, floating a large metal bowl filled with tender rare meat between us. Both of us in the deep end, of course. We’ve never been to a movie and don’t plan on going to one, ever. Why would we? We are the movie: the porn that can never be—visually astounding, spontaneously inventive, genitally graphic, and viscerally soul-searing. It isn’t predictable with A-Man.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He is over, and we are silent. He fucks my mouth and my pussy both, long and hard. Then, in my newly virgin ass, slow, deep, one plunge to the hilt. When all in, with my ass suctioning about his cylinder, he finally speaks. “Welcome home.” “Welcome home,” I echo, sucking him in. Later, tired, jet-lagged, overwhelmed, I start to cry—though nothing is particularly wrong. He looks at me weeping and tells me how wonderful my life is and then places my clenched little hand over his crotch, saying, “And I’ve got this big cock here for you—you can hold it if you like.” I break from my self-pity and grab in his shorts, finding his cock in the folds, the gearshift that drives my life. I look up to his face in the shadows and see his eyes are glistening. Then a drop runs slowly down his cheek . . . and another. Astonished, I ask why he is crying. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. Almost 250 ass-fucks got us here, into the essence of unspoken sweetness. THE BOX A beautiful, tall, round, hand-painted Chinese lacquered box. Black and gold. Shiny. A pussycat with long white whiskers on the lid. The collection. The collection of the collection. The condoms. Used. Filled. Hundreds. Latex, sealed with K-Y. Evidence. My mortality. His immortality. DNA. The X and the Y. The Code. Forever. My homage. My altar. My treasure. His life. PARADISE I have learned a few things, by now, about Paradise. Paradise is not that thing in the nebulous, far-off future, in another place, or another world, or another galaxy. It is not a state of mind, or a place in the mind. Nor is it the exquisite sexual pleasure of pulsing blood and moaning desire. Paradise is not achieved only after great suffering. There may well be great suffering before or after Paradise, but it is not the requirement for entry. Wounded ego and rampant narcissism demand suffering. Paradise is just there, here, if you really want it. I am sitting on the threshold. Perhaps this is the final paradox of God’s paradoxical machinations: my ass is my very own back door to heaven. The Pearly Gates are closer than you think. Sacred and profane united in one hole. Paradise is free. A gift. A state of grace. A dance of time and space. It resides inside the ego and outside the ego, a place of pure harmony, another body riding your ass like it was the last fuck on earth. Paradise is an experience that in real time may last only seconds. But in those immeasurable fragments, time stops, and only when time stops does death die and Paradise is entered.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And that, if things don’t turn out as you might, quite, wish them, you won’t be too proud to come home to those that love you -’ Here his voice failed utterly, and he shuddered; and I could only nod against his neck and say, ‘I will, I will; I promise you, I will.’ But oh! hard-hearted daughter that I was, when he had left me my tears dried at once, and I felt the return of all my gladness of the night before. I hugged myself in pleasure, and danced a jig around the parlour - but delicately, on tiptoe, so that they wouldn’t hear me in the dining-room below. Then quickly, before I should be missed, I ran to the post office and sent Kitty a card at the Palace - a picture of a Whitstable oyster-smack, upon whose sail I inked ‘To London’, and on the deck of which I drew two girls with bags and trunks and outsize, smiling faces. ‘I can come!!!’ I wrote upon the back, and added that she must do without her dresser for a few nights while I made all ready ... and I finished it ‘Fondly’, and signed it, ‘Your Nan’. I had to be glad only in snatches that day, for the scene that I had passed with Father, after breakfast, had to be undergone again with Mother - who hugged me to her, and cried that they must be fools to let me go; and Davy - who said, quite absurdly, that I was too little to go to London, and would be run down by a tram in Trafalgar Square the minute I set foot in it; and Alice - who said nothing at all when she heard the news, but ran from the kitchen in tears, and could not be persuaded to take up her duties in the Parlour until lunch-time. Only my cousins seemed happy for me - and they were more jealous than happy, calling me a lucky cat, and swearing that I would make my fortune in the city, and forget them all; or else that I would be ruined utterly, and come sneaking back to them in disgrace. That week passed quickly. I spent my evenings in calling on friends and family, and bidding them farewell; and in washing and patching and packing my dresses, and sorting out which little items to take with me, which to leave behind. I visited the Palace only once, and that was in the company of my parents, who came to reassure themselves that Miss Butler was still sensible and good, and to ask for further particulars of the shadowy Walter Bliss. I had Kitty to myself for no more than a minute, while Father chatted with Tony and Tricky, after the show. I had feared all week that I had imagined the words that she had spoken to me on Sunday evening, or misunderstood them entirely.

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

  It lassos the fuller dynamic system in which love and other positive emotions operate. Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive this intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. Yet when I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity. Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love, which I provide in chapter 2 . Love—like all the other positive emotions—follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build : Those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life. The love you crave lies within momentary experiences of connection. Other concepts that go by the word love in our shared cultural vocabulary—the all-consuming desire, the exclusive bonds, the commitments to loyalty, the unconditional trust—are best viewed as key players within the larger positivity system that surrounds love. Each in fact grows stronger as your moments of love accumulate: When you’ve truly connected with someone else, your trust in that person expands, your relationship and loyalty deepen, and you want to spend more good times together. But that’s only half the story. The causal arrow also runs in the other direction: Each of these players within the larger positivity system—the desire, bonds, commitments, and trust—also triggers subsequent moments of loving connection. Put simply, it’s far easier to connect with another person, when your desire, bond, commitment, or trust is present and strong. So these players are both cause and consequence of loving connections. This is what sustains the complex and dynamic positivity system that forges your often inexplicable ties to family, friends, and community. Love energizes this whole system and sets it into motion. There’s a lot going on here. It’s no wonder that love puzzles us. Adding to the confusion, the word love is commonly affixed to different parts of the system. So when you tell someone that you love him, you may well be invoking a range of different, albeit closely related concepts. You might, for instance, mean to say that you crave the time you two spend together. Alternatively, you could mean to say that you trust that person and intend to be loyal yourself. Or perhaps professing your love to another serves as a way to elevate that particular relationship as an especially important one in your life, a way to invite or secure that person within your innermost circle. And perhaps most often, your declaration of “I love you” is meant to convey “all of the above.”

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  We slept, and I was only woken by the dry click of Hamid’s key turning in the lock and by his usual evening performance. For a pious man, whose little prayer mat lay rolled and ready to hand on the kitchen balcony, he was extraordinarily superstitious. He was as Pombal said, ‘djinn-ridden’, and there seemed to be a djinn in every corner of the flat. How tired I had become of hearing his muttered ‘Destoor, destoor’, as he poured slops down the kitchen sink — for here dwelt a powerful djinn and its pardon had to be invoked. The bathroom too was haunted by them, and I could always tell when Hamid used the outside lavatory (which he had been forbidden to do) because whenever he sat on the water-closet a hoarse involuntary invocation escaped his lips (‘Permission O ye blessed ones!’) which neutralized the djinn which might otherwise have dragged him down into the sewage system. Now I heard him shuffling round the kitchen in his old felt slippers like a boa-constrictor muttering softly. I woke Justine from a troubled doze and explored her mouth and eyes and fine hair with the anguished curiosity which for me has always been the largest part of sensuality. ‘We must be going’ I said. ‘Pombal will be coming back from the Consulate in a little while.’ I recall the furtive languor with which we dressed and silent as accomplices made our way down the gloomy staircase into the street. We did not dare to link arms, but our hands kept meeting involuntarily as we walked, as if they had not shaken off the spell of the afternoon and could not bear to be separated. We parted speechlessly too, in the little square with its dying trees burnt to the colour of coffee by the sun; parted with only one look — as if we wished to take up emplacements in each other’s mind forever. It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; I walked about in it aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, amazed to find how much that had been familiar was changed. I felt in some curious way deafened and remember nothing more except that much later I ran into Pursewarden and Pombal in a bar, and that the former recited some lines from the old poet’s famous ‘The City’ which struck me with a new force — as if the poetry had been newly minted: though I knew them well. And when Pombal said: ‘You are abstracted this evening. What is the matter?’ I felt like answering him in the words of the dying Amr:* ‘I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.’ PART II

• 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.