Pride

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.

Page 58 of 174 · 20 per page

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Much younger.’ ‘That would probably explain it,’ she said. She lost her smile and replaced it with a thoughtful scowl. ‘Why you can’t say I like the tomato .’ Howard frowned. What game was this? He took out his pocket  On Beauty of tobacco. ‘I – like – the – tomato,’ he said slowly and pulled the Rizlas from the bag. ‘May I?’ ‘I don’t care. Don’t you want to know what that means?’ ‘Not terribly. I’ve got other things on my mind.’ ‘It’s a Wellington thing – it’s a student thing,’ said Victoria rapidly, coming up on her elbows. ‘It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is ‘‘The tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture’’, and Jane Colman’s class is ‘‘To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory’’ – she’s such a silly bitch that woman – and Professor Gilman’s class is ‘‘The tomato is structured like an aubergine’’, and Professor Kellas’s class is basically ‘‘There is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself ’’, and Erskine Jegede’s class is ‘‘The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul’’. And so on. So you say, ‘What class have you got coming up?’ and the person says ‘Tomatoes –.’ Or whatever.’ Howard sighed. He licked one side of his Rizla. ‘Hilarious.’ ‘But your class – your class is a cult classic. I love your class. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato . That’s why so few people take it – I mean, no offence, it’s a compliment. They can’t handle the rigour of never saying I like the tomato . Because that’s the worst thing you could ever do in your class, right? Because the tomato’s not there to be liked . That’s what I love about your class. It’s properly intellectual. The tomato is just totally revealed as this phoney construction that can’t lead you to some higher truth – nobody’s pretending the tomato will save your life. Or make you happy. Or teach you how to live or ennoble you or be a great example of the human spirit . Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth . They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people, for totally selfish reasons of their own, have attached cultural – I should say nutritional – weight to.’ She chuckled sadly. ‘It’s like what you’re always saying: let’s interrogate these terms. What’s so beautiful about this tomato? Who decided on its worth? I find that really challenging – I wanted to tell you before;  on beauty and being wrong I’m glad I’ve told you. Everybody’s so scared of you they don’t say anything and I always think Look, he’s just a guy, professors are just people – maybe he’d like to hear that we appreciate this class , you know? Anyway.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  1. A paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. vi. 9-13; Luke xi. 2-4).—The first works are the heavens and the angels. For circumscribed see Canto xxv.2. Omberto, Count of Santafiora, in the Sienese Maremma, was a member of the Aldobrandeschi family for which see Canto vi, note 12. He was put to death at Campagnatico in 1259 by the Sienese, who had long been at warfare with the family and were anxious to be rid of their authority. The mode of Omberto’s death is variously given.3. Oderisi (of Gubbio in Umbria), an illuminator and miniature painter. He appears to have been at Rome in 1295, for the purpose (so says Vasari) of illuminating some MSS. in the Papal Library for Boniface VIII. According to the same authority, the work on that occasion was shared by Franco of Bologna.4. A reputation does not survive the generation in which it was built up, unless a gross and unenlightened age happens to follow.5. The works of the Florentine painter Cimabue (ca. 1240-ca. 1302) are instinct with genius, and mark a considerable advance on the stiff Byzantine school; but it was reserved for his pupil, Giotto (1266-1336), to draw his inspiration at the fount of Nature herself, and to become the father of modern painting.—Giotto is said to have been a friend of Dante’s, and the well-known Bargello portrait of the poet is doubtfully attributed to him.6. The interpretation of these verses given in the Argument is not the one usually adopted; the view generally held being that the two Guidos are Guido Guinicelli (see Canto xxvi) and Guido Cavalcanti (see Inf. x, note 8), and that Dante himself is the poet destined to eclipse the latter. Against this more obvious interpretation, it may be urged that it would be out of keeping with the general tone of the passage: and specifically with xii. Moreover, there is no indication in Dante’s works of his regarding Guido Guinicelli as a superseded worthy, or distinguishing between the schools of these two Guidos; although he repeatedly contrasts the school of Guido (or Guittone) of Arezzo with the new school of which he regarded Guido Guinicelli as the chief, and Guido Cavalcanti and himself as disciples (xxvi; see, further, xxiv and xxvi: De vulg. El. i. 13; ii. 6). On the other hand, it may be advanced in favour of the more popular theory, that, whatever Dante may say in other passages, Guido Cavalcanti and the other Florentines actually did write poetry superior to that of Guido Guinicelli; that a pupil may surpass his teacher and yet regard him with affection and admiration; that Dante would probably have used the form Guittone in this passage, so as to make his meaning clear; and that the prophecy may well refer to our poet himself, who, though in the circle of the Proud, is probably as conscious of his literary greatness now as he was in Limbo (see Inf. iv).

• From On Beauty (2005)

  After the children come four generations of the Simmondses’ maternal line. These are placed in triumphant, deliberate sequence: Kiki’s great-great-grandmother, a house-slave; great-grandmother, a maid; and then her grandmother, a nurse. It was nurse Lily who inherited this whole house from a benevolent white doctor with whom she had worked closely for twenty years, back in Florida. An inheritance on this scale changes everything for a poor family in America: it makes them middle class. And  Langham is a fine middle-class house, larger even than it looks on the outside, with a small pool out back, unheated and missing many of its white tiles, like a British smile. Indeed much of the house is now a little shabby – but this is part of its grandeur. There is nothing nouveau riche about it. The house is ennobled by the work it has done for this family. The rental of the house paid for Kiki’s mother’s education (a legal clerk, she died this spring past) and for Kiki’s own. For years it was the Simmondses’ nest egg and vacation home; they would come up each September from Florida to see the Color. Once her children had grown and after her minister husband had died, Howard’s mother-in-law, Claudia Simmonds, moved into the house permanently and lived happily as landlady to cycles of students who rented the spare rooms. Throughout these years Howard coveted the house. Claudia, acutely aware of this covetousness, determined to pervert its course. She knew well that the place was perfect for Howard: large, lovely and within spitting distance of a half-decent American university that might consider hiring him. It gave Mrs Simmonds joy, or so Howard believed, to make him wait all those years. She tripped happily into her seventies without any serious health problems. Meanwhile, Howard shunted his young family around various second-rate seats of learning: six years in upstate New York,  On Beauty eleven in London, one in the suburbs of Paris. It was only ten years ago that Claudia had finally relented, leaving the property in favour of a retirement community in Florida. It was around this time that the gallery photograph of Kiki herself, a hospital administrator and final inheritor of  Langham Drive, was taken. In the photo she is all teeth and hair, receiving a state award for out-reach services to the local community. A rogue white arm clinches what was, back then, an extremely neat waist in tight denim; this arm, cut off at the elbow, is Howard’s. When people get married, there is often a battle to see which family – the husband’s or the wife’s – will prevail. Howard has lost that battle, happily. The Belseys – petty, cheap and cruel – are not a family anyone would fight to retain.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘You know . . . It’s like I would , ’cept I got all this shit to do . . . I might as well just stay and do it . . . and then it’ll be done.’ ‘Oh,’ said Zora. ‘Oh, OK.’ ‘No, I mean, another time’d be cool – but I’m having trouble concentrating – I keep on getting a lot of noise from outside. People hollering for an hour. You happen to know what’s going on out there?’ Zora stood, went to the window and opened the blind. ‘Some kind of Haitian protest thing,’ she said, pulling open the sash. ‘Oh, you can’t see it from this angle. They’re in the square handing out leaflets. It’s a big deal, lots of people. I guess there’s a march later.’ ‘I can’t see them, but I can hear them, man, they loud . What’s their beef anyway?’ ‘Minimum wage, getting shit on by everybody all the time – a lot of stuff, I guess.’ Zora closed the window and sat down. She leaned into Carl’s body to look at his computer. He covered the screen with his hands. ‘Aw, man – don’t be doing that – I ain’t even spellchecked it, man.’ Zora peeled his fingers from the monitor. ‘ Crossroads . . . The Tracy Chapman album?’ ‘No,’ said Carl, ‘the motif.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Zora in a teasing voice. ‘Pardon me. The motif .’ ‘You think I can’t know a word ’cos you know it, is that  on beauty and being wrong it?’ demanded Carl, and immediately regretted it. You couldn’t get angry with middle-class people like that – they got upset too quickly. ‘No – I – I mean, no, Carl, I didn’t mean it like that.’ ‘Oh, man . . . I know you didn’t. Calm down, there.’ He patted her hand softly. He couldn’t know about the electric whoosh that went through her body when he did that. Now she looked at him funny. ‘Why’re you looking at me weird like that?’ ‘No, I was just . . . I’m so proud of you.’ Carl laughed. ‘Seriously. You’re an amazing person. Look at what you’ve achieved, what you’re achieving every day. That’s so my whole point. You deserve to be at this university. You’re about fifteen times as brilliant and hard-working as most of these over-privileged assholes.’ ‘Man, shut up.’ ‘Well, it’s true.’ ‘What’s true is that I wouldn’t be doing none of this if I hadn’t met you. So there you go, if you’re gonna start getting all Oprah about the situation.’ ‘Now, you shut up,’ said Zora beaming. ‘Let’s both shut the hell up,’ suggested Carl, and touched his keyboard. His screen, which had gone to sleep in the last few seconds, came back to life. He tried to retrace the thread of his last half-written sentence. ‘I got fifty more signatures on the petition – they’re in my bag. Do you want to see them?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I just think it’s inappropriate for a student to feel victimized in this way, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to anybody else.’ So now all the cards were laid out. Jack took a moment to examine them. Twenty years of playing this game left him in no doubt that Zora Belsey had a full hand. Just for the hell of it, he played his own. ‘And have you expressed these feelings to your father?’ ‘Not yet. But I know he will support me in whatever I choose to do.’ So it was time, after all, to stand up and walk slowly around the  On Beauty table, and then to perch on the front of it, folding one long leg over the other. Jack did this. ‘I want to thank you for coming here this morning, Zora, and for speaking so honestly and eloquently about your feelings in this matter.’ ‘Thank you!’ said Zora, colour rising proud in her face. ‘And I want you to understand that I take what you say very seriously indeed – you’re a great asset to this institution, as I think you know.’ ‘I want to be . . . I try to be.’ ‘Zora, I want you to leave this with me. I don’t think, at the present time, that we need to think about the advisory board. I think we can straighten this thing out on a human scale that we can all comprehend and appreciate.’ ‘Are you going to – ’ ‘Let me speak to Professor Malcolm about your concerns,’ said Jack, succeeding at last at winning that little contest. ‘And the moment I feel we’re making a progression, I’ll have you in here and we’ll settle things to everybody’s satisfaction. Is that answering your concerns?’ Zora stood up and held her bag to her chest. ‘Thank you so much.’ ‘I saw that you got into Professor Pilman’s class – now that is wonderful. And what else will you be – ?’ ‘I’m doing a Plato course and Jamie Penfruck’s Adorno half-course and I’m definitely going to Monty Kipps’s lectures. I read his piece Sunday in the Herald about taking the ‘‘liberal’’ out of the Liberal Arts . . . you know, so it’s like now they’re trying to tell us that conservatives are an endangered species – like they need protecting on campuses or something.’ Here Zora took the time to roll her eyes and shake her head and sigh all at the same time. ‘Apparently everybody gets special treatment – blacks, gays, liberals, women – everybody except poor white males. It’s too crazy. But I definitely want to hear what he’s got to say. Know thy enemy. That’s my motto.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fiction, because it was public, led me to impersonate a male novelist. So I returned to New York City in 1969 with a book of poems and part of a novel. I went back to Columbia University again, but this time not to the Ph.D. program in eighteenth-century English literature but to the School of the Arts, where I could study the making of poems with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. I refined and refined my first book of poems, which eventually found a publisher in Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fruits & Vegetables was published in spring 1971—salad days for women’s writing. Anne Sexton’s and Sylvia Plath’s poetry had flung open the doors of women’s poetic fury. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer had awakened the sleeping beast of women’s anger. (Because of Germaine Greer, we all wanted to taste our own menstrual blood.) The successes of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman, Such Good Friends by Lois Gould and Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman had revealed a deep hunger for novels about women’s experiences. Suddenly, women’s lives—and women’s books—were news. Fruits & Vegetables was certainly the beneficiary of this fascination. Not only had I joined the company of published authors, which was supposed to solve all my problems—or so authors of first books believe—but I was the right gender for those times. Publishing a book of poems may be like throwing a rose petal down the Grand Canyon, but in 1971, women were hot. Besides, I had long blond hair, wore the miniskirts and boots that were then (and now) in fashion. Despite my terror of flying, I would go anywhere to read my poems. In 1971, everyone wanted to know what women felt, how women wrote, what women thought. My previously invisible gender was now the rage. Even then I suspected that if being a woman could go into style, it could also go out of style, but no one wanted to hear that then. The Second Wave of the feminist movement unleashed a torrent of books by and about women. Of course not everyone was happy about this. Male authors resented their incipient loss of entitlement. I suspect that when Paul Theroux called my heroine a “mammoth pudenda” in the New Statesman , he was reacting to his fear of lost privilege rather than to my novel. And there were many like him. But other male authors recognized the women’s revolution as important. Louis Untermeyer, John Updike and Henry Miller—who were to become the earliest champions of my work—understood that women’s voices would change the nature of literature forever.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We sat down to steak and the story of their lives. They’d decided to be reasonable, Marty said, instead of getting divorced like three-quarters of their friends. They’d decided to give each other plenty of freedom. They’d done a lot of “group things,” as he put it, on Ibiza, where they’d spent the month of July. Poor bastard, he didn’t look very happy. He was repeating some swinging sexual catechism like a bar mitzvah boy. Adrian was grinning. Converts already. He could just take it from there. “How about you?” Judy asked. “We’re not married,” I said. “We don’t believe in it. He’s Jean-Paul Sartre and I’m Simone de Beauvoir.” Judy and Marty looked at each other. They’d heard those names somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. “We’re famous,” I said snidely. “Actually, he’s R. D. Laing and I’m Mary Barnes.” Adrian laughed, but I could see I’d lost Judy and Marty. Pure self-protection. I felt a showdown coming on, and I had to throw my intellectual weight around. It was all I had left. “Right,” said Adrian. “Why don’t we just swap for starters?” Marty looked crestfallen. It wasn’t very complimentary to me, but the truth was I didn’t much want him either. “Be my guests,” I said to Adrian. I wanted to see him hoist on his own petard—whatever the hell that means. (I never have been sure.) “I think I’ll sit this one out. If you want me to, I’ll watch.” I had decided to outdo Adrian at his own game. Cool. Uninvolved. All that crap. Marty then leapt up to protest his virility. “I think we should swap or nothing,” he stammered. “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but I’m just not in the mood.” I was about to add, “Besides I may have clap…” but I decided not to ruin it for Adrian. Let him do his thing. I was tough. I could take it. “Don’t you think we should reach a group decision?” Judy said. Boy, was she ever the ex-girl scout! “I’ve already made my decision,” I said. I was awfully proud of myself. I knew what I wanted and I wasn’t going to back down. I was saying no and liking it. Even Adrian was proud of me. I could tell by the way he was grinning. Character building, that’s what he was doing. He’d always been interested in saving me from myself. “Well,” I said, “shall we watch you or just sit near the swimming hole and talk? I’m amenable to either.” “The swimming hole,” Marty said desperately. “I hope that’s not a pun,” I said. I waved cheerily to Adrian and Judy as they climbed into the Volkswagen camper and drew the curtains.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  And this is an important college year for Jay. I mean . . . you just have to look at her to see she’s a fire sign,’ said Kiki, resorting to a system of values that never seemed to let her down. ‘And Jerome – Jerome’s a water sign. He’s a Scorpio, like me. And that’s pretty much his character.’ Kiki asked Carlene her daughter’s sign and was pleased to find her guess was correct. Carlene Kipps looked perplexed at the astrological turn to the conversation. ‘She might burn him up,’ she considered, trying to decode what Kiki had just told her. ‘And he would put out her fire . . . He’d hold her back – yes, yes, I believe that’s right.’ But Kiki bridled at this. ‘I don’t know about that . . . actually, I know all mothers say this, but my baby’s very brilliant – if anything, it’s always a question of keeping up with him, intellectually speaking. He’s a live wire – I know Howie would say that Jerome’s probably the brightest of the three of them – I mean Zora works hard, God knows, but Jerome – ’ ‘You mistake what I’m saying. I saw when he was with us. He was so focused on my daughter, he almost couldn’t let her live. I suppose you call it obsession. When he has an idea, your son, he holds it very tight. My husband is like that – I recognize it. Jerome’s a very absolute young man.’ Kiki smiled. This was what she had liked about the woman. She put things well: insightfully, honestly. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. All or nothing. All of my children are a little like that, to tell you the truth. They set their mind to something, and my God , they don’t let go. That’s their father’s influence. Pig-headed as hell .’ ‘And men become very absolute about pretty girls, don’t they?’ continued Carlene, inching along her own thread now, which was obscure to Kiki. ‘And if they can’t possess them, they get angry and bitter instead. It occupies them too much. I was never one of those women. I’m glad I wasn’t. I used to mind, but now I see how it left Monty free for other interests.’ What could one say to this? Kiki felt in her purse for her lip-balm.  On Beauty ‘That’s a strange way to think about it,’ she said. ‘Is it? I’ve always felt that. I’m sure that’s wrong. I’ve never been a feminist.

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

  By the time a child is a toddler, the conversational pattern matters as much as the words themselves for building emotion concepts. My husband and I never used “baby talk” with our daughter but spoke to her in fully formed, adult sentences from the time she was born, pausing afterward to let her “respond” in whatever way she could. People around us in the supermarket thought we were crazy, but we did wind up with an emotionally intelligent teenager who actually talks to adults. (And she can torture me with three-decimal precision. I’m so proud.) 21 Do your children have screaming fits or throw tantrums? You can help them master their emotions and calm down by using social reality to your advantage. When my daughter, Sophia, was two and in her tantrum phase, telling her to calm down had no effect, of course. So we invented a concept called the “Cranky Fairy.” Whenever Sophia launched into a tantrum (or if we were lucky, slightly beforehand), we’d explain to her, “Oh no, the Cranky Fairy is visiting. She’s making you feel cranky. Let’s try to make the Cranky Fairy go away.” Then we directed her to a particular chair—a fuzzy red one with a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street—as her special place for calming down. (No, it didn’t have little fuzzy red manacles.) At first we carried her to the chair, and sometimes she’d pitch a fit and kick the chair over, but eventually she would walk to it unasked and sit until her unpleasant feelings subsided. Sometimes she’d even announce that the Cranky Fairy was on her way. These practices might sound silly, but they have tangible effects. By inventing and sharing the concepts “Cranky Fairy” and “Elmo Chair” with Sophia, we created tools to help her calm herself. To her, these concepts were as real as money, art, power, and other constructions of social reality are to us. In general, children with richer conceptual systems for emotion are poised for greater academic success. In one study conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, schoolchildren were taught to broaden their knowledge and use of emotion words for twenty to thirty minutes per week. The results were improved social behavior and academic performance. Classrooms that employed this educational model were also better organized and were rated by blind observers as having better instructional support for students. 22 In contrast, if you don’t talk to a child about his sensations in emotional terms, you can actually hamper his developing conceptual system. After four years of life, children in higher-income homes have seen or heard four million more words than their low-income counterparts, and they have better vocabulary and reading comprehension. Children with the fewest material advantages therefore lag in the social world.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The class enthusiastically agreed with this judgement, and a whole crazy conversation began, which took up most of the hour, about his poem , as if his poem were something real like a statue or a country. During this Carl looked down at his poem every now then and felt a sensation he’d never experienced in a classroom before: pride. He had written his sonnet out sloppily, as he wrote his raps, with a  the anatomy lesson pencil, on scrap paper crumpled and stained. Now he felt this medium was not quite good enough for this new way of writing his message. He resolved to type the damn thing out sometime if he could get access to a keyboard. Just as they were packing up to leave, Mrs Malcolm said, ‘Are you serious about this class, Carl?’ Carl looked around himself cautiously. This was a strange question to ask in front of everybody. ‘I mean, do you want to stay in this class? Even if it gets difficult?’ So that was the deal: they thought he was stupid. These early stages were fine, but he wouldn’t be able to manage the next stage, whatever it was. Why’d they even ask him, then? ‘Difficult how?’ he asked edgily. ‘I mean, if other people wanted you not to be in this class. Would you fight to be in it? Or would you let me fight for you to be in it? Or your fellow poets here?’ Carl glowered. ‘I don’t like to be where I’m not welcome.’ Claire shook her head and waved her hands to disperse that thought. ‘I’m not making myself clear. Carl, you want to be in this class, right?’ Carl was very close to saying that he truly did not give a fuck, but at the last moment he understood that Claire’s eager face wanted something quite different from him. ‘Sure. It’s interesting, you know. I feel like I’m . . . you know . . . learning.’ ‘Oh, I’m so glad ,’ she said and practically smiled her face off. Then she stopped smiling and looked businesslike. ‘Good,’ she said firmly. ‘That’s decided. Good. Then you’re going to stay in this class. Anybody who needs this class ,’ she said fervently, and looked from Chantelle to a young woman called Bronwyn who worked at the Wellington Savings Bank, and then to a mathematician boy called Wong from BU, ‘is staying in this class. OK, we’re done here. Zora, can you stay behind?’ The class filed out, everybody a little curious and jealous of Zora’s special dispensation. Carl, as he left, punched her gently on  On Beauty the shoulder with his fist. Sunshine broke out over Zora. Claire remembered, recognized and pitied the feeling (for it seemed, to her, a long shot on Zora’s part). She smiled to think of herself at the same age. ‘Zora – you know about the faculty meeting?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She put her hand on his cheek. ‘OK, baby, I’m out. See you next week if I don’t see you later. You take care.’ ‘Bye, LaShonda.’ Levi leaned on a rack of Madame Butterfly recordings and watched LaShonda go. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Er . . . Levi – sorry to . . .’ said Tom from Folk Music. ‘I just heard that you were . . . is there . . . like a meeting? I just heard you were trying to organize some kind of . . .’ Tom was cool. Levi disagreed with him in matters of music in every possible way two young men can disagree, but he could also see that Tom was cool in a lot of other ways. Cool about this crazy war, cool about not letting customers stress him out – plus he was easy to be around. ‘Yo, my man Tom – how’s it hanging,’ said Levi and tried to knock fists with Tom, always a mistake. ‘For real – we’re having a meeting. I’m heading there now. This Christmas Day thing is bullshit.’ ‘Good, it’s total bullshit,’ said Tom, pushing his thick blond bangs back off his face. ‘It’s cool that you’re taking . . . you know . . . a stand and everything.’  On Beauty But sometimes Levi found Tom a little too fretfully deferential, like right now – always anxious to award Levi a prize that Levi didn’t even know he was in the running for. It was immediately noticeable that only the white kids had showed up for the meeting. Gloria and Gina, the two Hispanic girls, were absent, as was Jamal, the brother who worked in World Music, and Khaled, a Jordanian, who worked in the music DVD section. It was just Tom, Candy and a short, freckly guy Levi didn’t know too well called Mike Cloughessy who worked in Pop on the third floor. ‘Where is everybody?’ asked Levi. ‘Gina said she was coming but . . .’ explained Candy. ‘She has a supervisor up her ass, following her around, so.’ ‘But she said she was coming?’ Candy shrugged. Then she looked at him hopefully, as did the others. It was the same weird sense he had in his prep school: that unless he spoke no one else would. He was being gifted with an authority, and it was something complex and unspoken to do with being the black guy – deeper than that he could not penetrate. ‘I’m just like, there’s gotta be a line that we don’t cross – where we don’t go. And working on Christmas Day is that line, man.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Opening the menu, Nabokov noticed therein the succinct stipulation “Gentiles Only.” He called over the waitress and asked her what the management would do if there appeared at the door that very moment a bearded and berobed man, leading a mule bearing his pregnant wife, all of them dusty and tired from a long journey. “What ... what are you talking about?” the waitress stammered. “I am talking about Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Nabokov, as he pointed to the phrase in question, rose from the table, and led his party from the restaurant. “My son was very proud of me,” said Nabokov. In Pale Fire, Kinbote and Shade discuss prejudice at length (note to line 470; pp. 216–218). Reader! Bruder!: German; “brother.” An echo of the last line of Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857): “— Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable, —monfrère!” (“Hypocrite reader —my fellow man—my brother.”). See oh Baudelaire!. the Gazette’s ... Dr. Braddock and his group: see here. Gazette was not italicized in the 1958 edition; the error has been corrected. portrait ... as a ... brute: an obvious play on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In searching for a title for his manuscript, the narrator of Despair considers “Portrait of the Artist in a Mirror,” but rejects it as “too jejune, too à la mode” (p. 201). For Joyce, see outspoken book: Ulysses. Brute Force: the actual title of a movie released by Universal Pictures in 1947, directed by Jules Dassin, and starring Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford, and Yvonne De Carlo. Possessed was released in 1947 by Warner Brothers, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, and Raymond Massey. The titles gloss H.H.’s circumstances, and Brute Force—a prison film, which Nabokov thought he had seen—is thematically apt. Omen Faustum: Latin; Lucky Omen, or Lucky Strike cigarettes (pointed out to me by the philologist and Latinist, Professor F. Colson Robinson), a companion to “Dromes”; related to dies faustus, “a day of favorable omen,” or, specifically, “a day on which Roman religious law permitted secular activities.” 58 Inchkeith Ave.: obsolete for “inchworm” (or Looper), the last thing that should be used for the name of an avenue, since inchworms (the larvae of certain moths) destroy shade trees. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. Fifty-eight inches was Lolita’s height at the outset of the novel (see four feet ten). Dark Age: the author is Quilty; see Dark Age. Dark Age was not italicized in the 1958 edition. The misprint has been corrected. Wine, wine ... for roses: see Reader! Bruder!. Quilty is toying with lines from the sixth stanza of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát (1879), by Omar Khayyám (d. 1123?), Persian poet and mathematician: And David’s lips are locked; but in divine High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Not that passion is easy or without conflict. But death seems an excessive punishment. Q. Women seem much freer today than they were in 1973. Why do you think Isadora’s dilemmas still have relevance? A. We are still in the midst of an unfinished revolution. Outwardly women seem to have more freedom but it is still difficult to combine love and work, still difficult to find happiness with the opposite sex, still difficult to find emotional freedom. Isadora poses questions that women still pose to themselves. Women still feel that they need a man to verify their identity. Many things have changed in society but women are still conflicted about achieving fulfillment. Q. What do people ask you most about Fear of Flying? A. People always ask how I got the guts to write such an intimate book. I don’t really know the answer. I was driven to write it. I wanted to document all the things that go on in a woman’s mind. I wanted to get the female psyche down on paper. And I must have achieved this because the most frequent comment I get about the book is: You read my mind. Q. What is the harshest criticism you have received? A. The harshest criticism has always been that Isadora is self-absorbed. I think our culture says that women who wonder about their own fulfillment aren’t doing what women should do—which is take care of everyone else. We don’t seem to criticize male protagonists for probing their own psyches. But women are held to a different standard. We are supposed to be caregivers both emotionally and psychically. It’s very hard to break out of that mindset. But how can women become important writers if they are thought to be unfeminine when they look into the female mind? Q. Whose praise meant the most to you and why? A. The most meaningful praise came from John Updike and Henry Miller, who both recognized, in very different ways, that I was trying to do something new for women in fiction. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Isadora struggles to be her own woman in a man’s world. How do you think things have changed for women since the 1960s and how are they the same? Isadora says relationships are always unequal, that the ones who love us most we love the least and vice versa. Do you agree? 2. How was Isadora shaped by her mother and sisters? Do you think her mother’s advice to eschew the ordinary has caused her pain or happiness? 3. The book ends on an ambiguous note. What do you think happens when Bennett walks in on Isadora? Why? Is the ending affirmative or a comeuppance? Is the bathtub scene a rebirth as some have said? 4. What is it about Isadora’s voice that provokes empathy? 5. One of the most quoted lines from this novel is “Men and women—women and men—it will never work.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We inspected further: a collection of European hotel picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort, where with a hot wave of pride I discovered a colored photo of my father’s Mirana, its striped awnings, its flag flying above the retouched palm trees. “So what?” said Lo, squinting at the bronzed owner of an expensive car who had followed us into the Hobby House. Relics of the cotton era. A forest in Arkansas and, on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my long thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood. Bourbon Street (in a town named New Orleans) whose sidewalks, said the tour book, “may [I liked the “may”] feature entertainment by pickaninnies who will [I liked the “will” even better] tap-dance for pennies” (what fun), while “its numerous small and intimate night clubs are thronged with visitors” (naughty). Collections of frontier lore. Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing. The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it. A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies. Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south- eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, “too prehistoric for words” (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with youngelephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot. Moreover, we inspected: Little Iceberg Lake, somewhere in Colorado, and the snow banks, and the cushionets of tiny alpine flowers, and more snow; down which Lo in red-peaked cap tried to slide, and squealed, and was snowballed by some youngsters, and retaliated in kind comme on dit. Skeletons of burned aspens, patches of spired blue flowers. The various items of a scenic drive. Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of Bear Creeks, Soda Springs, Painted Canyons.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Large sections of Carl’s personality had been constructed on the founding principle that classrooms were not for Carl. ‘But the grammar of it,’ Claire had explained, ‘is hard-wired in your brain. You’re almost thinking in sonnets already. You don’t need to know it to do it – but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it.’ This is the kind of announcement which cannot help but make  On Beauty you feel a little taller the next day when you’re in the Nike store asking your customer if they want to try the same sneaker in a size . ‘You’ll write me a sonnet, won’t you?’ Claire had asked Carl sweetly. In the second class she asked him, ‘How about that sonnet, Carl?’ He said, ‘It’s cooking. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.’ Of course he flirted with her; he always did that with teachers, he’d done it all through high school. And Mrs Malcolm flirted right back. In high school Carl had slept with his geography teacher – that was a bad scene. When he looked back on it, he considered that incident the beginning of when things began going very wrong between him and classrooms. But with Claire you got just the right amount of flirting. It wasn’t . . . inappropriate – that was the word. Claire had that special teacher thing he hadn’t felt since he was a really small boy, back in the days before his teachers started worrying that he was going to mug them or rape them: she wanted him to do well . Even though there was nowhere this could go, academically speaking. He wasn’t really a student and she wasn’t really his teacher, and anyway Carl and classrooms did not mix. And yet. She wanted him to do well . And he wanted to do well for her. So in this, the fourth session, he went and brought her a sonnet. Just as she said. Fourteen lines with ten syllables (or beats, as Carl could not help but think of them) a line. It wasn’t such a fabulous sonnet. But everybody in the class made a big fuss like he’d just split the atom. Zora said, ‘I think that’s the only truly funny sonnet I’ve ever read.’ Carl was wary. He was still not sure that this whole Wellington thing wasn’t a kind of sick joke being played on him. ‘You mean it’s stupid funny?’ Everybody in the class cried Noooo! Then she, Zora, said, ‘No, no, no – it’s alive . I mean, the form hasn’t restricted you – it always restricts me. I don’t know how you managed that.’

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The parade moves out ragged and wobbly, someone immediately starts crying, a pony wanders out of line and looks for some grass to chew. The main street is crowded with bystanders and parked automobiles. It is never clear what this parade is for, except to dress the children up and show them off, get the men to come in from the fields for a while. As the parade pulls itself slowly down the street, the mothers stand with wry, proud faces and folded arms while fathers stand smoking, lifting the one-finger farmer’s salute as their sons go by. Wendell and I steer carefully and watch our mothers as they move along the sidewalk, following. Tall, lanky frames and watermelon stomachs, the gray eyes and beautiful hands of the Patterson side of the family. Our dolls are behaving perfectly, staring straight ahead, slumped forward in their baskets. My sash has come untied and Wendell’s underpants are showing. We don’t care, they won’t bother fixing us now; we’re in the parade and they have to stay on the sidewalk. The street is brilliant in the sun, and the children move in slow motion, dresses, cowboy hats, tap shoes, the long yellow teeth of the mean ponies. At the count of four, one of our sisters loses control, throws her baton high in the air and stops, one hand out to catch it when it comes back down. For a long, gleaming moment it hangs there, a silver hyphen against the hot sky. Over the hectic heads of the children and the smooth blue-and-white blur of crepe-papered spokes and handlebar streamers, above the squinting smiles and upturned eyes, a silver baton rises miraculously, lingers for a moment against the sun, and then drops back down, into the waiting hand. Back at the bar, someone has hold of me and I’m on the dance floor. Wendell’s standing just inside the door. I’m going backward swiftly, in a fast two-step, there’s an arm slung across my shoulder. It’s good old Ted, trying to make a girl feel welcome. The bar is as dark as a pocket and my eyes haven’t adjusted yet. Ted runs me into a couple of people and I tell him his arm weighs a ton. He grins but doesn’t move it. He has long legs and a drinking problem. Two ex-wives follow him everywhere, stirring up trouble. When the song finally ends, I untangle from Ted and look for Wendell. She’s got us a table back by the wall, beneath the bored head of a deer. As I pass the bar several guys in turn swivel their stools around and catch me. Blue-jeaned legs are parted, I’m pulled in, pressed against a chest, clamped. Hello, hello. I bum a cigarette from the first one and blow smoke in the face of the second when his hand crawls like a bull snake up the back of my shirt.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi had obviously matured a hell of a lot since last summer – he’d sensed that about himself and now saw it was true. Feckless brothers like Carl just didn’t impress him any more. Levi Belsey had moved on to the next level. It was strange to think of his previous self. And it was so strange to stand next to this ex-Carl, this played-out fool, this shell of a brother in whom all that was beautiful and thrilling and true had utterly evaporated. Howard was preparing to nip out for a bagel from the cafeteria. He rose from his desk – but he had a visitor. She smashed the door open and smashed it closed. She didn’t come far into the room. She stood with her back pressed against the door. ‘Could you sit down, please?’ she said, looking not at him but to the ceiling, as if addressing a prayer upwards. ‘Can you sit down and listen and not say anything? I want to say something and then I want to go and that’s it.’ Howard folded his coat in half and sat down with it on his lap. ‘You don’t treat people like that, right?’ she said, still talking to the ceiling. ‘You don’t do that to me twice . First you make me look like a fool at that dinner and then – you don’t leave someone in a hotel by themselves – you don’t act like a fucking child – and make someone feel that they’re not worth anything. You don’t do that.’  On Beauty She brought her gaze down at last. Her head was wobbling wildly on her neck. Howard looked to his feet. ‘I know you think,’ she said, each word tear-inflected, making her hard to understand, ‘that you . . . know me. You don’t know me. This,’ she said and touched her face, her breasts, her hips, ‘that’s what you know. But you don’t know me . And you were the one who wanted this – that’s all anybody ever . . .’ She touched the same three places. ‘And so that’s what I . . .’ She wiped her eyes with the hem of her polo neck. Howard looked up. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I want the e-mails I sent you destroyed. And I’m dropping out of your class, so you don’t have to worry about that .’ ‘You don’t need – ’ ‘You don’t have any idea what I need. You don’t even know what you need. Anyway. Pointless.’ She put her hand to the door handle.

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

  If you tell me that you’re proud of your child’s accomplishments in school, and “Pride” is a population of diverse instances with no consistent fingerprint, how can I know which “Pride” you mean? (This question doesn’t arise in the classical view, where pride has a distinct essence; you simply broadcast pride and I recognize it.) You and I communicate emotion, in the face of huge variability, by way of the brain’s predictive machinery. Your emotions are guided by your predictions. And as I observe you, the emotions I perceive are guided by my predictions. Emotional communication happens, therefore, when you and I predict and categorize in synchrony. 4 6 Scientists and bartenders know that people synchronize in various ways when they communicate, especially if they like or trust each other. I nod, then you nod. You touch my arm and a moment later I touch yours. Our nonverbal behaviors coordinate. There’s also biological synchrony; a mother’s and child’s heart rates will synchronize if they are securely bonded, and the same can happen to anyone during an engaging conversation. The mechanism is still a mystery. I suspect it’s because their breathing synchronizes as they unconsciously observe each other’s chests rising and falling. When I was a training therapist, I learned to intentionally synchronize my breathing with my clients’ to prepare them for hypnosis. 4 7 We likewise synchronize our concepts for emotion. My emotions are guided by my predictions. And as you observe me, the emotions you perceive are guided by your predictions. The sound of my voice and the motions of my body, as they are perceived by your brain, either confirm your predictions or become prediction error for you. Suppose you tell me, “My son got the lead in the school play. I’m so proud.” Your words and actions launch a population of predictions in my brain, helping to coordinate a shared concept of “Pride” between us in the moment. My brain computes probabilities based on past experience and winnows down its predictions to a winning instance, perhaps leading me to say, “Congratulations.” Then the process repeats in the other direction as you perceive me. We’ll be more in sync if we share a cultural background or other past experiences, and if we agree that certain facial configurations, body movements, vocal acoustics, and other cues have certain meanings in certain contexts. Little by little, we co-construct an emotional experience that we both identify with the word “proud.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  as he said, into the common treasury. Then he care- fully enquired how the residue of his companions did, and to him it was declared that the most valiant were murdered and slain in divers manners, but very bravely; whereupon he persuaded them to remit all their affairs a certain season, leaving the highways in peace, and to seek for other fellows to be in their places, that by the exercise of new lads the terror of their martial band might be brought again to the old number; and he assured them that such as were unwilling might be compelled by menaces and threatenings, and such as were willing might be encouraged forward with reward: further, he said that there were some which (seeing the profit which they had) would for- sake their base and servile estate and rather be con- tented to live like tyrants amongst them. Moreover, he declared that for his part he had spoken with a certain tall man, a valiant companion, but of young age, stout in body, and courageous in fight, whom he had advised and at last fully persuaded to exercise his idle hands, dull with long slothfulness, to his greater profit, and, while he might, to receive the bliss of better fortune, and not to hold out his sturdy arms to beg for a penny, but rather to take as much gold and silver as he would. Then every one con- sented that he that seemed so worthy to be their companion should be one of their company, and that they would search for others to make up the residue of the number : whereupon he went out, and by and by returning again brought in a tall young man, as he promised, to whom none of the residue might be compared, for he was higher than they by the head, and of more bigness in body, though the down of his beard had but now begun to spread over his cheeks ; but he was poorly apparelled with rags of divers U 305 LUCIUS APULEIUS male consarcinatis semiamictum, inter quos pectus et venter crustata crassitie reluctabant. Sic introgressus * Havete” inquit “ Fortissimo deo Marti clientes, mihique iam fidi commilitones, et virum magnanimae vivacitatis volentem volentes accipite, libentius vulnera corpore excipientem quam aurum manu suscipientem, ipsaque morte, quam for- midant alii, meliorem. Nec me putetis egenum vel abiectum, neve de pannulis istis virtutes meas aesti- metis: nam praefui validissimae manui totamque prorsus devastavi Macedoniam. Ego sum praedo famosus, Haemus ille Thracius, cuius totae pro- vinciae nomen horrescunt, patre Therone aeque la- trone inclito prognatus, humano sanguine nutritus interque ipsos manipulos factionis educatus, heres et aemulus virtutis paternae. Sed omnem pristinam sociorum fortium multitudinem magnasque illas opes exiguo temporis amisi spatio: nam procuratorem principis ducenaria perfunctum, dehinc fortuna tris- tiore decussum, praetereuntem deo! irato fueram aggressus. Sed rei noscendae carpo ordinem.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When Stokely talks about black power, he is WH ITE RAC ISM OR WORLD COMMUN ITY? 753 simply translating into the black idiom what the English said hundreds of years ago and have always proclaimed as their guiding principle, black power translated means the self -de termination of people. It means that, nothing more and noth ing less. But it is astounding, and it says a great deal about Christendom, that whereas black power, the conjunction of the word 'black' with the word 'power', frightens everybody, no one in Christendom appears seriously to be frightened by the operation and the nature of white power. Stokely may make terrifying speeches (though they are not terrifying to me, I must say) and Stokely may be, though I don't believe it, a racist in reverse, but in fact he's not nearly as dangerous as the people who now rule South Africa, he's not nearly as dangerous as many of the people who govern my own poor country. He's only insisting that he is present only once on this earth as a man, not as a creation of the Ch ristian con science, not as a fantasy in the Christian mind, not as an object of missionary charity, not as something to be manipulated or defined by others, but as a man himself , on this earth, under the sky, on the same lonely journey we all must make, alone. He (I am using him as an example ) by insisting on the sa credness of his soul, by demanding his soul's salvation, is closer to the He brew prophet than, let us say arbitrarily, an other eminent Christian, the Governor of Alabama. And in the same way it is perfectly possible twenty years from now that the Christian Church , if indeed it lasts that long, will be appalled by some of the things some of the sons of the late Martin Luther King may have to say.