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 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  A Prince had come into her sleeping chamber. A Prince had lowered his lips to her. But it was only Alexi kissing her, wasn't it? Alexi kissing her here? But when she opened her eyes on that ancient bed and looked at the one who now broke her spell, she saw some bland and innocent countenance! It was not her Crown Prince. It was not Alexi. It was some pristine soul liken to her own who now stood back from her in astonishment. Brave he was, yes, brave, and without complexity! She cried out. "No!" But Alexi's hand was over her mouth. "Beauty, what is it?" "Don't kiss me!" she whispered. But when she saw the pain in his face, she opened her mouth and felt his lips sealed over it. His tongue filled her. She pressed her hips against him. "Ah, it is you, only you..." she whispered. "And what did you think it was? Were you dreaming?" "It seemed for a moment all this was a dream," she confessed. But the stone was too real, his touch too real. "And why should it be a dream? Is it such a nightmare?" She shook her head. "You love it, all of it, you love it," she whispered in his ear. She saw his eyes linger languidly on her and then drift away. "And it seemed a dream because all the past, the real past, has lost its luster!" But what was she saying? That in these few days she had not once longed for her homeland, she had not once longed for what her youth had been and the sleep of a hundred years had given her no wisdom? "I love it. I loathe it," Alexi said. "I am humiliated by it, and recreated by it. And yielding means to feel all those things at once and yet to be of one mind and one spirit." "Yes," she sighed, as though she had falsely accused him. "Wicked pain, wicked pleasure." And he gave her his smile of approbation. "We'll be together soon again..." "Yes..." "...be sure of it. And until then, my darling, my love, belong to everyone." THE VILLAGE THE NEXT few days passed as quickly for Beauty as those before them. No one discovered that she and Alexi had been together. The following night the Prince told her she had gained his mother's approval. She would now be trained by him as his little maid, to sweep his quarters, to keep his wine cup always filled, and to perform all those duties that Alexi performed for her Highness. And from then on Beauty would sleep in the Prince's quarters. She found herself envied by everyone, and it was the Prince and the Prince alone who prescribed her daily punishments. Each morning she was given to Lady Juliana for the Bridle Path.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Brian’s room—one of six in that sprawling pied à terre—shared one wall with the boiler. That was the only heating facility. One wall was perpetually hot as blazes; the other was colder than a witch’s tit (Brian’s expression). You regulated the temperature only by opening the window (which faced on a kind of cement ravine one floor below sidewalk level) and letting the cold air in. Since the wind blasted in from the river, it was sufficiently frigid to counteract the heat of the boiler—but not our heat. It was in this romantic setting that we first enjoyed each other. We squeaked the springs of the secondhand bed which Brian, with trembling anticipation, had bought two weeks earlier from a Puerto Rican junk dealer on Columbus Avenue. In the end, of course, I had to seduce him. I’m sure that from Eden onward it has never been any different. Afterward I cried and felt guilty and Brian comforted me as men have probably comforted the virgins who seduced them throughout the centuries. We lay there in the candlelight (in his romanticism or perhaps innate sense of symbolism, Brian lit a taper on the night table before we undressed each other) and listened to the whining of alley cats in the cement well beyond the soot-blackened window. Sometimes one of the cats would leap on an overfull can of garbage and knock an empty beer can to the ground, and the sound of the hollow tin on the pavement would echo through the room. In the beginning our romance was fine and spiritual and adolescent. (In later times we were to sound more like the dialogue from a Strindberg play.) We used to read poetry to each other in bed, discuss the difference between life and art, ponder whether or not Yeats would have become a great poet if Maud Gonne had, in fact, married him. Spring found us taking a Shakespeare course together as I suppose all young lovers should. One brilliant but slightly chilly day in April we read The Winter’s Tale aloud to each other sitting on a bench in Riverside Park. When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! The doxy over the dale— Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year, For the red blood peers in the winter’s pale… The lark that tirra-lyra chants— With heigh! With heigh! The thrush and the jay— Are the summer songs for me and my aunts, While we lie tumbling in the hay. Brian was busy playing Florizel to my Perdita (“These your unusual weeds to each part of you/Do give a life—no shepherdess, but Flora/Peering in April’s front…”) when a whole tribe of urchins—black and Puerto Rican kids about eight or nine years old—were attracted by our reading and distributed themselves on the bench and the grass near us, seemingly entranced by our performance.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  there would make all the difference. Other men’s wives taught me how to be with mine. I remember one who’d get me to come over, hog-tie her with my belt, tell her all kinds of nasti ness and fuck her like the war was gonna start up again to morrow. Jesus. Ninety-four years old and I still don’t understand women. Don’t know what they want but to feel like they’re beautiful and to have you think their cooking’s good. My Eve, she was about as capable in the kitchen as she was in the master bed. Never did tell me till after her fiftieth year that she’d been dreaming of me taking her up the behind. Just imagine, my wife of thirty years, telling me she wanted it all along. And there I was like some kind of idiot greasing up my cock and sticking it this way and that way, and what with all the Vaseline it kept sliding into her cunt and she’s saying Like this honey, like she’d thought about it so long she’d know where I was supposed to put it to get the damn thing in. It didn’t seem that different to me, kinda like stroking it with your left hand instead of your right—the feeling is there, but you don’t quite know what you’re up to anymore. And it was kinda funny seeing Eve, all fifty-two years of her, bunched up on her knees, face pressed against a pillow. Laughter ain’t al ways a good addition to sex so I was keeping myself quiet. And she kept saying Is it good for you, honey, is it good? And I think I said Yes, yes, so many times it might well have been the best I’d ever had. But it wasn’t. It was Eve and it was al ways Eve and that’s what I thought was good. Men fantasize about a lot of shit—this playmate and that actress—but over and over I’d be inside her thinking This is my wife. My wife. This, right here, is my wife. She’d suck my cock and she’d be my wife. She’d ride high up on me, cross bouncing on her bo som, and she’d be my wife. She knew I had wronged her, knew I was weak, and all those years didn’t say word one

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One drop of rare honey, however, that Thursday did hold in its acorn cup. Haze was to drive her to the camp in the early morning. Upon sundry sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled out of bed and leaned out of the window. Under the poplars, the car was already athrob. On the sidewalk, Louise stood shading her eyes with her hand, as if the little traveler were already riding into the low morning sun. The gesture proved to be premature. “Hurry up!” shouted Haze. My Lolita, who was half in and about to slam the car door, wind down the glass, wave to Louise and the poplars (whom and which she was never to see again), interrupted the motion of fate: she looked up—and dashed back into the house (Haze furiously calling after her). A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! The next instant I heard her—alive, unraped—clatter downstairs. The motion of fate was resumed. The blond leg was pulled in, the car door was slammed—was re-slammed—and driver Haze at the violent wheel, rubber-red lips writhing in angry, inaudible speech, swung my darling away, while unnoticed by them or Louise, old Miss Opposite, an invalid, feebly but rhythmically waved from her vined veranda. 16The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita—full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I held her. I marched into her tumbled room, threw open the door of the closet and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her. There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert’s huge engorged heart. A poignant chaos was ’welling within me—but I had to drop those things and hurriedly regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid’s velvety voice calling me softly from the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping my automatic thanks with a kindly “you’re welcome,” good Louise left an unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking hand.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I wouldn't listen. "The Queen still found me amusing. She told me I was more beautiful than any other slave sent to her. She had me bound to the wall in her chambers night and day so that she might watch me. But more truly, it was so that I might watch her and desire her. "Well, at first, I did not look at her. But by and by I grew to studying her. I learned every detail of her, her cruel eyes, and her heavy black hair, her white breasts and her long legs, and the way that she lay abed or walked about, or ate her food so daintily. Of course, she had me paddled regularly. And a strange thing commenced to happen. The paddlings were the only things that broke the boredom of this time, aside from watching her. So that watching her and being paddled became of interest to me." "O, she is devilish!" Beauty gasped. She could understand all this perfectly. "Of course she is, and infinitely sure of her own beauty. "Well, all this while, she went about the business of the Court, coming and going. I was often alone with nothing to do but struggle, and curse behind the gag. Then she would return, a vision of soft tresses and red lips. My heart started to pound when she was undressed. I loved the moment when her mantle was released from its folds and I saw her hair. Then, when she was naked and stepping into her bath, I was beside myself. "All this was secret. I did my best to display nothing of it. I quieted my passion. But I am a man, so in a matter of days my passion commenced to build, to show itself. The Queen laughed at this. She tormented me. Then she would tell me how much less I would suffer if I were over her lap obediently accepting her paddle. This is the Queen's favorite sport, the simple spanking over the lap, as you learned painfully enough tonight. She loves the intimacy of it. All her slaves are her children." Beauty puzzled over this, but she didn't want to interrupt Alexi, who went on. "As I told you, she would have me paddled. And always in a most uncomfortable and cold manner. She would send for Felix, whom I then despised..." "You don't now?" Beauty asked. But then with a flush she remembered the scene she had witnessed on the stairway, Felix suckling the Prince so tenderly. "I don't despise him now at all," Prince Alexi answered. "He is, of all the Pages, one of the more interesting. One comes to treasure that here. But in those days, I despised him as much as I did the Queen. "She would give the order for me to be spanked.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  That is the response to Ideal Lovers. Attuned to what is missing inside you, to the fantasy that will stir you, they reflect your ideal—and you do the rest, projecting on to them your deepest desires and yearnings. Casanova and Madame de Pom- padour did not merely seduce their targets into a sexual affair, they made them fall in love. The key to following the path of the Ideal Lover is the ability to ob- serve. Ignore your targets' words and conscious behavior; focus on the tone of their voice, a blush here, a look there—those signs that betray what their words won't say. Often the ideal is expressed in contradiction. King Louis XV seemed to care only about chasing deer and young girls, but that in fact covered up his disappointment in himself; he yearned to have his no- bler qualities flattered. Never has there been a better moment than now to play the Ideal Lover. That is because we live in a world in which everything must seem elevated and well-intentioned. Power is the most taboo topic of all: al- though it is the reality we deal with every day in our struggles with people, there is nothing noble, self-sacrificing, or spiritual about it. Ideal Lovers make you feel nobler, make the sensual and sexual seem spiritual and aes- thetic. Like all seducers, they play with power, but they disguise their ma- nipulations behind the facade of an ideal. Few people see through them and their seductions last longer. Some ideals resemble Jungian archetypes—they go back a long way in our culture, and their hold is almost unconscious. One such dream is that of the chivalrous knight. In the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages, a troubadour/knight would find a lady, almost always a married one, The Ideal Lover • 37 and would serve as her vassal. He would go through terrible trials on her behalf, undertake dangerous pilgrimages in her name, suffer awful tortures to prove his love. (This could include bodily mutilation, such as tearing off of fingernails, the cutting of an ear, etc.) He would also write poems and sing beautiful songs to her, for no troubadour could succeed without some kind of aesthetic or spiritual quality to impress his lady. The key to the ar- chetype is a sense of absolute devotion. A man who will not let matters of warfare, glory, or money intrude into the fantasy of courtship has limitless power. The troubadour role is an ideal because people who do not put themselves and their own interests first are truly rare. For a woman to at- tract the intense attention of such a man is immensely appealing to her vanity. In eighteenth-century Osaka, a man named Nisan took the courtesan Dewa out walking, first taking care to sprinkle the clover bushes along the path with water, which looked like morning dew. Dewa was greatly moved by this beautiful sight.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “I am drenched,” she declared at the top of her voice. “Are you glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?” An invisible hag’s claw slammed down an upper-floor window. In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee: “Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic to-night.” It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability—a most singular case, I presume—of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest. 15The brakes were relined, the waterpipes unclogged, the valves ground, and a number of other repairs and improvements were paid for by not very mechanically-minded but prudent papa Humbert, so that the late Mrs. Humbert’s car was in respectable shape when ready to undertake a new journey. We had promised Beardsley School, good old Beardsley School, that we would be back as soon as my Hollywood engagement came to an end (inventive Humbert was to be, I hinted, chief consultant in the production of a film dealing with “existentialism,” still a hot thing at the time). Actually I was toying with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border—I was braver now than last year—and there deciding what to do with my little concubine who was now sixty inches tall and weighed ninety pounds. We had dug out our tour books and maps. She had traced our route with immense zest. Was it thanks to those theatricals that she had now outgrown her juvenile jaded airs and was so adorably keen to explore rich reality? I experienced the queer lightness of dreams that pale but warm Sunday morning when we abandoned Professor Chem’s puzzled house and sped along Main Street toward the four-lane highway. My Love’s striped, black-and-white, cotton frock, jaunty blue cap, white socks and brown moccasins were not quite in keeping with the large beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver chainlet, which gemmed her throat: a spring rain gift from me. We passed the New Hotel, and she laughed. “A penny for your thoughts,” I said and she stretched out her palm at once, but at that moment I had to apply the brakes rather abruptly at a red light. As we pulled up, another car came to a gliding stop alongside, and a very striking looking, athletically lean young woman (where had I seen her?) with a high complexion and shoulder-length brilliant bronze hair, greeted Lo with a ringing “Hi!”—and then, addressing me, effusively, edusively (placed!), stressing certain words, said: “What a shame it was to tear Dolly away from the play—you should have heard the author raving about her after that rehearsal—” “Green light, you dope,” said Lo under her breath, and simultaneously, waving in bright adieu a bangled arm, Joan of Arc (in a performance we saw at the local theatre) violently outdistanced us to swerve into Campus Avenue. “Who was it exactly? Vermont or Rumpelmeyer?”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I had no intention of torturing my darling. Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was ( my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D .—and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds … but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pécbé radieux , had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita. “Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “I had studied for months for the PSAT.” Reva read the story in its entirety. It took at least half an hour. I knew she was just trying to fill the air, take up the time until she could go and leave me forever. That’s what it felt like at least. I can’t say it didn’t hurt me that she held herself at such a distance. But to confront her about it would have been cruel. I had no right to make any demands. I sensed she didn’t really want to hear about my experiences in “rehab” or whatever it was she imagined I’d been through. I watched her mouth move, every little wrinkle in the skin of her lips, the vague dimple on her left cheek, the moon-shaped sadness of her eyes. “‘A black shred of bok choy had dried and attached itself to the rim of the garbage can,’” she read. I nodded along, hoping to make her feel at ease. When she was done, she sighed, and pulled a piece of gum from her purse. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it, how certain cultures can be so cold?” “It’s heartbreaking, yes,” I said. “I really identify with the Chinese kid,” Reva said, rolling the magazine back up. I reached across her folded legs, tugged at the magazine in her tense clutch, like a tug-of-war. I didn’t want her to leave. The white glare off the overhead light gleamed across her collarbones. She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears. This would be the last time I’d see her in person. “I love you,” I said. “I love you, too.” • • • PING XI’S VIDEOS and paintings went up at Ducat in late August. The show was called “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman.” He or Natasha FedExed me tear-outs of the reviews. No note. The images from the show were not what I’d remembered imagining from my days with Ping Xi in my bedroom. I had expected a series of all sloppily painted nudes. Instead, Ping Xi had painted me in the style of Utamaro woodblock prints, wearing neon kimonos printed with tropical flowers and lipstick kisses and Coca-Cola and Pennzoil and Chanel and Absolut Vodka logos. In each piece, my head was huge. In a few portraits, Ping Xi had collaged my actual hair. In Artforum, Ronald Jones called me a “bloated nymph with dead man eyes.” Phyllis Braff condemned the show as “a product of Oedipal lust” in the New York Times. ArtReview called the work “predictably disappointing.” Otherwise, the reviews were positive. The videos described were of me talking into the camera, seeming to narrate some personal stories—I cry in one—but Ping Xi had dubbed everything over. Instead of my voice, you heard long, angry voice mails Ping Xi’s mother had left him in Cantonese. No subtitles. • • •

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pécbé radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita. “Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.” Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi? “You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you will give us [us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is that what you mean?” “No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect). “You’re crazy,” she said, her features working. “Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhaps—well, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted to say but did not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your ... trousseau.” “No kidding?” asked Dolly. I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check for three thousand six hundred more. Gingerly, uncertainly, she received mon petit cadeau; and then her forehead became a beautiful pink. “You mean,” she said, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving us four thousand bucks?” I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist. “I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming?

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  It was flattering to hear that he was enchanted by more than her beauty, yet also flattering to know that he was not immune to her physical charms. One day an idea occurred to Madame Sabatier as to who the writer might be: a young poet who had frequented her salon for several years, Charles Baudelaire. He seemed shy, in fact had hardly spoken to her, but she had read some of his poetry, and although the poems in the letters were more polished, the style was similar. At her apartment Baudelaire would al- ways sit politely in a corner, but now that she thought of it, he would smile at her strangely, nervously. It was the look of a young man in love. Now when he visited she watched him carefully, and the more she watched, the surer she was that he was the writer, but she never confirmed her intuition, because she did not want to confront him—he might be shy, but he was a man, and at some point he would have to come to her. And she felt certain that he would. Then, suddenly the letters stopped coming—and Madame Sabatier could not understand why, since the last one had been even more adoring than all of the others before. Several years went by, in which she often thought of her anonymous admirer's letters, but they were never renewed. In 1857, however, Baude- laire published a book of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, and Madame Sabatier recognized several of the verses—they were the ones he had written for her. Now they were out in the open for everyone to see. A little while later the poet sent her a gift: a specially bound copy of the book, and a letter, this time signed with his name. Yes, he wrote, he was the anonymous writer—would she forgive him for being so mysterious in the past? Furthermore, his feelings for her were as strong as ever: "You didn't think for a moment that I could have forgotten you? . . . You to me are more than a cherished image conjured up in dream, you're my superstition . . . my constant companion, my secret! Farewell, dear Madame. I kiss your hands with profound devotion." This letter had a stronger effect on Madame Sabatier than the others had. Perhaps it was his childlike sincerity, and the fact that he had finally written to her directly; perhaps it was that he loved her but asked nothing of her, unlike all the other men she knew who at some point had always turned out to want something. Whatever it was, she had an uncontrollable desire to see him. The next day she invited him to her apartment, alone. The rumor spread everywhere. It was even told to the queen [Guinevere], who was seated at dinner. She nearly killed herself when she heard the perfidious rumor of Lancelot's death.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  He never felt she had loved him enough. Almost all the women he had affairs with bore a physical resemblance to her; somehow he would make up for her lack of love for him by sheer volume. When Juliette met him, she could not have known all this, but she must have sensed two things: he was extremely disappointed in his wife, and he had never really grown up. His emotional outbursts and his need for attention made him more a little boy than a man. She would gain ascendancy over him for the rest of his life by supplying the one thing he had never had: complete, un- conditional mother-love. Juliette never judged Hugo, or criticized him for his naughty ways. She lavished him with attention; visiting her was like returning to the womb. In her presence, in fact, he was more a little boy than ever. How could he refuse her a favor or ever leave her? And when she finally threatened to leave him, he was reduced to the state of a wailing infant crying for his mother. In the end she had total power over him. Unconditional love is rare and hard to find, yet it is what we all crave, since we either experienced it once or wish we had. You do not have to go as far as Juliette Drouet; the mere hint of devoted attention, of accepting your lovers for who they are, of meeting their needs, will place them in an infantile position. A sense of dependency may frighten them a little, and they may feel an undercurrent of ambivalence, a need to assert themselves periodically, as Hugo did through his affairs. But their ties to you will be strong and they will keep coming back for more, bound by the illusion that they are recapturing the mother-love they had seemingly lost forever, or never had. 2. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Professor Mut, a school- master at a college for young men in a small German town, began to de- Effect a Regression • 341 velop a keen hatred of his students. Mut was in his late fifties, and had worked at the same school for many years. He taught Greek and Latin and was a distinguished classical scholar. He had always felt a need to impose discipline, but now it was getting ugly: the students were simply not inter- ested in Homer anymore. They listened to bad music and only liked mod- ern literature. Although they were rebellious, Mut considered them soft and undisciplined. He wanted to teach them a lesson and make their lives miserable; his usual way of dealing with their bouts of rowdiness was sheer bullying, and most often it worked. One day a student Mut loathed—a haughty, well-dressed young man named Lohmann—stood up in class and said, "I can't go on working in this room, Professor.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  She does not want to be recognized for what she is, but rather to be allowed to be potent and effective. She offers the truth of herself—or, rather, of the passions that become directed toward her. And what she gives back is one's self and an hour of grace in her presence. Love revives 300 • The Art of Seduction Asian woman) while enveloping his past and indeed their whole experience in titillating bits of history. As Bouriscout later explained, "Pei Pu screwed me in the head. ... I was having relations and in my thoughts, my dreams, I was light-years away from what was true." Bouriscout thought he was having an exotic adventure, an enduring fantasy of his. Less consciously, he had an outlet for his repressed homo- sexuality. Pei Pu embodied his fantasy, giving it flesh, by working first on his mind. The mind has two currents: it wants to believe in things that are pleasant to believe in, yet it has a self-protective need to be suspicious of people. If you start off too theatrical, trying too hard to create a fantasy, you will feed that suspicious side of the mind, and once fed, the doubts will not go away. Instead, you must start slowly, building trust, while perhaps letting people see a little touch of something strange or exciting about you to tease their interest. Then you build up your story, like any piece of fic- tion. You have established a foundation of trust—now the fantasies and dreams you envelop them in are suddenly believable. Remember: people want to believe in the extraordinary; with a little groundwork, a little mental foreplay, they will fall for your illusion. If any- thing, err on the side of reality: use real props (like the child Pei Pu showed Bouriscout) and add the fantastical touches in your words, or an occasional gesture that gives you a slight unreality. Once you sense that they are hooked, you can deepen the spell, go further and further into the fantasy. At that point they will have gone so far into their own minds that you will no longer have to bother with verisimilitude. Wish Fulfillment I n 1762, Catherine, wife of Czar Peter III, staged a coup against her inef- fectual husband and proclaimed herself empress of Russia. Over the next few years Catherine ruled alone, but kept a series of lovers. The Russians called these men the vremienchiki, "the men of the moment," and in 1774 the man of the moment was Gregory Potemkin, a thirty-five-year-old lieu- tenant, ten years younger than Catherine, and a most unlikely candidate for the role. Potemkin was coarse and not at all handsome (he had lost an eye in an accident). But he knew how to make Catherine laugh, and he wor- shiped her so intensely that she eventually succumbed. He quickly became the love of her life.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  This form of enter- ing another's spirit is perhaps the most effective kind, because it makes peo- ple feel better about themselves. In your presence, they live the life of the person they had wanted to be—a great lover, a romantic hero, whatever it is. Discover those crushed ideals and mirror them, bringing them back to life by reflecting them back to your target. Few can resist such a lure. Symbol: The Hunter's Mirror. The lark is a sa- vory bird, but difficult to catch. In the field, the hunter places a mirror on a stand. The lark lands in front of the glass, steps back and forth, entranced by its own moving image and by the imitative mating dance it sees per- formed before its eyes. Hypnotized, the bird loses all sense of its surroundings, until the hunter's net traps it against the mirror. surely pardon his offence. " • When he heard these words, the old man burst out laughing and said: "For a long time I have jested with all types of men, but no one has ever had the patience or the wit to enter into my humors as you have done. Now, therefore, I pardon you, and ask you in truth to cat and drink with me, and to he my companion as long as I live. " • Then the old man ordered his attendants to serve all the dishes which they had consumed in fancy, and when he and my brother had eaten their fill they repaired to the drinking chamber, where beautiful young women sang and made music. The old Barmecide gave Shakashik a robe of honor and made him his constant companion. —"THE TALE OF SHAKASHIK, THE BARBER'S SIXTH BROTHER," TALES FROM THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, TRANSLATED BY N.J. DAWOOD Enter Their Spirit • 227 Reversal I n 1897 in Berlin, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose reputation would later circle the world, met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Russian-born writer and beauty who was notorious for having broken Nietzsche's heart. She was the darling of Berlin intellectuals, and although Rilke was twenty-two and she was thirty-six, he fell head over heels in love with her. He flooded her with love letters, which showed that he had read all her books and knew her tastes intimately. The two became friends. Soon she was editing his poetry, and he hung on her every word. Salomé was flattered by Rilke's mirroring of her spirit, enchanted by the intense attention he paid her and the spiritual communion they began to develop. She became his lover.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  occasion heard them extol write poetry and flee the marriage that her father was trying to arrange for the Christian faith and the her. Renée was obsessed with death; she also felt there was something service of God, she asked wrong with her, experiencing moments of intense self-loathing. In 1900, one of them for his opinion on the best and easiest way Renée met Natalie at the theater. Something about the American's kind for a person to "serve eyes melted Renée's normal reserve, and she began sending poems to Na-God," as they put it. He talie, who responded with poems of her own. They soon became friends. answered her by saying that the ones who served Renée confessed that she had had an intense friendship with another God best were those who woman, but that it remained platonic—the thought of physical involve-put the greatest distance ment repulsed her. Natalie told her about the ancient Greek poet Sappho, between themselves and who celebrated love between women as the only love that is innocent and earthly goods, as happened in the case of people who pure. One night Renée, inspired by their discussions, invited Natalie to her had gone to live in the apartment, which she had transformed into a kind of chapel. The room remoter parts of the was filled with candles and with white lilies, the flowers she associated with Sahara. • She said no more about it to anyone, Natalie. That night the two women became lovers. They soon moved in but next morning, being a together, but when Renée realized that Natalie could not be faithful to her, very simple-natured her love turned into hatred. She broke off the relationship, moved out, and creature of fourteen or thereabouts, Alibech set out vowed to never see her again. all alone, in secret, and Over the next few months Natalie sent her letters and poems, and made her way toward the showed up at her new home—all to no avail. Renée would have nothing to desert, prompted by nothing more logical than a do with her. One evening at the opera, though, Natalie sat down beside strong adolescent impulse. her and gave her a poem she had written in her honor. She expressed her A few days later, regrets for the past, and also a simple request: the two women should go on exhausted from fatigue and a pilgrimage to the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho's home. Only there hunger, she arrived in the heart of the wilderness, could they purify themselves and their relationship. Renée could not resist. Use Spiritual Lures • 36 3 On the island they retraced the poetess's steps, imagining they were trans- where, catching sight of a ported back into the pagan, innocent days of ancient Greece. For Renée, small hut in the distance, she stumbled toward it,

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  his oath. And albeit his Italy had little experience in war, and its military was somewhat torment seemed to him no chaotic. The generals somehow lost track of D'Annunzio—who, in any less than that of Purgatory, 328 • The Art of Seduction yet was his love so great case, had decided to leave his cavalry division and form units of his own. and his hope so strong, (He was an artist, after all, and could not be subjected to army discipline.) sure as he felt of the Calling himself Commandante, he overcame his habitual seasickness and di-ceaseless continuance of the love he had thus painfully rected a series of daring raids, leading groups of motorboats in the middle won, that he preserved his of the night into Austrian harbors and firing torpedoes at anchored ships. patience and rose from He also learned how to fly, and began to lead dangerous sorties. In August beside her without having of 1915, he flew over the city of Trieste, then in enemy hands, and dropped done anything contrary to her expressed wish. • The Italian flags and thousands of pamphlets containing a message of hope, writ-lady was, I think, more ten in his inimitable style: "The end of your martyrdom is at hand! The astonished than pleased by dawn of your joy is imminent. From the heights of heaven, on the wings of such virtue; and giving no heed to the honor, patience, Italy, I throw you this pledge, this message from my heart." He flew at alti-and faithfulness her lover tudes unheard of at the time, and through thick enemy fire. The Austrians had shown in the keeping put a price on his head. of his oath, she forthwith suspected that his love was On a mission in 1916, D'Annunzio fell against his machine gun, per-not so great as she had manently injuring one eye and seriously damaging the other. Told his fly-thought, or else that he had ing days were over, he convalesced in his home in Venice. At the time, the found her less pleasing than he had expected. • most beautiful and fashionable woman in Italy was generally considered to She therefore resolved, be the Countess Morosini, former mistress of the German Kaiser. Her before keeping her promise, palace was on the Grand Canal, opposite the home of D'Annunzio. Now to make a further trial of she found herself besieged by letters and poems from the writer-soldier, the love he bore her; and to this end she begged him to mixing details of his flying exploits with declarations of his love. In the talk to a girl in her service, middle of air raids on Venice, he would cross the canal, barely able to see who was younger than out of one eye, to deliver his latest poem. D'Annunzio was much beneath herself and very beautiful, bidding him make love Morosini's station, a mere writer, but his willingness to brave anything on speeches to her, so that

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In the 1870s, Queen Victoria found herself wooed by Benjamin Disraeli, her own prime minister. Disraeli's words were flattering and his manner insinuating; he also sent her flowers, valentines, gifts—but not just any flowers or gifts, the kind that most men would send. The flowers were primroses, symbols of their simple yet beautiful friendship. From then on, whenever Victoria saw a primrose she thought of Disraeli. Or he would Pay Attention to Detail • 275 write on a valentine that he, "no longer in the sunset, but the twilight of his existence, must encounter a life of anxiety and toil; but this, too, has its romance, when he remembers that he labors for the most gracious of beings!" Or he might send her a little box, with no inscription, but with a heart transfixed by an arrow on one side and the word "Fideliter," or "Faithfully," on the other. Victoria fell in love with Disraeli. A gift has immense seductive power, but the object itself is less important than the gesture, and the subtle thought or emotion that it communicates. Perhaps the choice relates to something from the target's past, or symbolizes something between you, or merely represents the lengths you will go to to please. It was not the money Disraeli spent that impressed Victoria, but the time he took to find the appropriate thing or make the appropriate gesture. Expensive gifts have no sentiment attached; they may temporarily excite their recipient but they are quickly forgotten, as a child forgets a new toy. The object that reflects its giver's attentiveness has a lingering sentimental power, which resurfaces every time its owner sees it. In 1919, the Italian writer and war hero Gabriele D'Annunzio managed to put together a band of followers and take over the town of Fiume, on the Adriatic coast (now part of Slovenia). They established their own government there, which lasted for over a year. D'Annunzio initiated a series of public spectacles that were to be immensely influential on politicians elsewhere. He would address the public from a balcony overlooking the town's main square, which would be full of colorful banners, flags, pagan religious symbols, and, at night, torches. The speeches would be followed by processions. Although D'Annunzio was not at all a Fascist, what he did in Fiume crucially affected Benito Mussolini, who borrowed his Roman salutes, his use of symbols, his mode of public address. Spectacles like these have been used since then by governments everywhere, even democratic ones. Their overall impression may be grand, but it is the orchestrated details that make them work—the number of senses they appeal to, the variety of emotions they stir. You are aiming to distract people, and nothing is more distracting than a wealth of detail—fireworks, flags, music, uniforms, marching soldiers, the feel of the crowd packed together. It becomes difficult to think straight, particularly if the symbols and details stir up patriotic emotions.

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

  One day, we acquired a small baby, Cupcake. Every night for the first week, all by herself in a strange pen, Cupcake sounded like she was crying. I’d carry her around in my sweater pocket, all warm and cozy, which made her chirp with happiness. Whenever I approached the cage, the other pigs would squeal and run away, but little Cupcake would sit still as if waiting for me to pick her up, and then immediately crawl into the crook of my neck for a nuzzle. In those moments, it was very hard to resist the belief that she loved me. For many months, Cupcake was my late-night companion. She would nestle in my lap, purring, as I worked at my desk. Everyone in our house suspected that Cupcake was actually a puppy trapped in a guinea pig’s body. And yet, as a scientist, I knew that my perceptions did not necessarily reveal what little Cupcake was actually feeling. In this chapter, we’ll systematically explore what animals are capable of feeling, based on their brain circuitry and on experimental research. We’ll have to set aside our fond feelings for our pets, as well as the essentialist theory of human nature, to look carefully at the evidence. Scientists pretty much agree that many of the earth’s animals, from insects to worms to humans, share the same basic nervous system plan. They even agree, more or less, that animal brains were built according to the same general blueprint. But as anyone who has renovated a house has learned, the devil is in the details when translating a blueprint into reality. When it comes to comparing brains of different species, even if they have the same networks of regions, microscopic differences in wiring are sometimes as important as these large-scale similarities. 3 The theory of constructed emotion prompts us to ask whether animals have three necessary ingredients for making emotion. The first ingredient is interoception: do animals have the neural equipment to create interoceptive sensations and experience them as affect? The second is emotion concepts: can animals learn purely mental concepts like “Fear” and “Happiness,” and if so, can they predict with these concepts to categorize their sensations and make emotions like ours? Finally, there’s social reality: can animals share emotion concepts with each other so they are passed down to the next generation? To see what animals are capable of feeling, we’ll focus primarily on monkeys and great apes because they’re our closest evolutionary cousins.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Similarly, the initial tennis coaching I had inflicted on Lolita—prior to the revelations that came to her through the great Californian’s lessons—remained in my mind as oppressive and distressful memories—not only because she had been so hopelessly and irritatingly irritated by every suggestion of mine—but because the precious symmetry of the court instead of reflecting the harmonies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the clumsiness and lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught. Now things were different, and on that particular day, in the pure air of Champion, Colorado, on that admirable court at the foot of steep stone stairs leading up to Champion Hotel where we had spent the night, I felt I could rest from the nightmare of unknown betrayals within the innocence of her style, of her soul, of her essential grace. She was hitting hard and flat, with her usual effortless sweep, feeding me deep skimming balls—all so rhythmically coordinated and overt as to reduce my footwork to, practically, a swinging stroll—crack players will understand what I mean. My rather heavily cut serve that I had been taught by my father who had learned it from Decugis or Borman, old friends of his and great champions, would have seriously troubled my Lo, had I really tried to trouble her. But who would upset such a lucid dear? Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen? An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us. Two people in tennis shorts, a red-haired fellow only about eight years my junior, with sunburnt bright pink shins, and an indolent dark girl with a moody mouth and hard eyes, about two years Lolita’s senior, appeared from nowhere. As is common with dutiful tyros, their rackets were sheathed and framed, and they carried them not as if they were the natural and comfortable extensions of certain specialized muscles, but hammers or blunderbusses or wimbles, or my own dreadful cumbersome sins. Rather unceremoniously seating themselves near my precious coat, on a bench adjacent to the court, they fell to admiring very vocally a rally of some fifty exchanges that Lo innocently helped me to foster and uphold—until there occurred a syncope in the series causing her to gasp as her overhead smash went out of court, whereupon she melted into winsome merriment, my golden pet.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  • I watched him closely. • invited her to join him in Acapulco, where he was vacationing. The "I'm serious," he said. Davises, their mutual friends, could come along as chaperones. That would "That's my view and feeling. Just the elementary be wonderful, she said, but her mother would never agree. Don't worry Use Physical Lures • 399 about that, Flynn replied; and the following day he showed up at their physical female. Nothing house with a beautiful gift for Blanca, a ring with her birthstone. Melting more than that. When you get hold of that—h ang on under his charming smile, Blanca's mother agreed to his plan. Later that to it, for a short while." day, Blanca found herself on a plane to Acapulco. It was all like a dream. — E A R L CONRAD, The Davises, under orders from Blanca's mother, tried not to let her ERROL FLYNN: A MEMOIR out of their sight, so Flynn put her on a raft and they drifted out into the ocean, far from the shore. His flattering words filled her ears, and she let him hold her hand and kiss her cheek. That night they danced together, A sweet disorder in the and when the evening was over he escorted her to her room and serenaded dress \ Kindles in clothes a her with a song as they finally parted. It was the end of a perfect day. In the wantonness: \ A lawn about the shoulders thrown middle of the night, she woke up to hear him calling her name, from her \ Into a fine distraction: \ hotel-room balcony. How had he gotten there? His room was a floor An erring lace, which here above; he must have somehow jumped or swung down, a dangerous ma- and there \ Enthralls the neuver. She approached, not at all afraid, but curious. He pulled her gently crimson stomacher: \ A cuff neglectful, and thereby \ into his arms and kissed her. Her body convulsed; overwhelmed with new Ribbands to flow sensations, totally at sea, she began to cry—out of happiness, she said. confusedly: \ A winning Flynn comforted her with a kiss and returned to his room above, in the wave (deserving note) \ In the tempestuous petticoat: \ same inexplicable way he had arrived. Now Blanca was hopelessly in love A careless shoestring, in with him and would do anything he asked of her. A few weeks later, in whose tie \ I see a wild fact, she followed him to Hollywood, where she went on to become a suc- civility: \ Do more bewitch me, than when art \ Is too cessful actress, known as Linda Christian. precise in every part. In 1942, an eighteen-year-old girl named Nora Eddington had a tem- —ROBERT HERRICK,"DELIGHT porary job selling cigarettes at the Los Angeles County courthouse. The IN DISORDER," QUOTED IN place was a madhouse at the time, teeming with tabloid journalists: two PETER WASHINGTON, ED., EROTIC POEMS