Realization

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 Middlesex (2002)

  mother'sbelly.The sonogram didn't exist at thetime;thespoon was thenextbest thing. Desdemona crouched. Thekitchengrew silent. The otherwomenbit their lower lips, watching, waiting.Forthefirst minute, thespoon didn't move atall. Desdemona's handshook and, afterlongseconds had passed, Aunt Lina steadiedit.Thespoon twirled; Ikicked; mymother cried out. Andthen,slowly, moved by a windno one felt,in that unearthly Ouija-board way,thesilver spoonbegantomove, to swing, atfirst inasmall circlebuteachor- bitgrowing gradually moreelliptical untilthe pathflattened intoa straightline pointing from oven tobanquette. North tosouth,in other words. Desdemona cried,"Kotos!" Andtheroom eruptedwith shoutsof"Kotos,koms" Thatnight,myfather said, "Twenty-threein arowmeans she's boundforafall.Thistime, she'swrong. Trustme." "Idon'tmindifit'saboy," mymothersaid."Ireally don't.As longasit'shealthy,tenfingers,tentoes." "What'sthis c it.'That'smydaughteryou'retalking about." Iwasborn a weekafterNewYear's,on January 8, 1960.In thewait- ingroom,suppliedonlywithpink-ribbonedcigars,myfathercried out,"Bingo!"Iwasa girl.Nineteenincheslong.Sevenpoundsfour ounces. That same January 8, my grandfathersufferedthefirstofhisthir- teenstrokes.Awakenedby myparents rushingoff to thehospital, he'dgotten out ofbed andgone downstairstomakehimselfacupof coffee. Anhour later, Desdemona foundhimlyingonthekitchen floor.Though his mental faculties remainedintact,thatmorning, as I let outmy firstcry at Women's Hospital,mypapou lost the ability to speak.Accordingto Desdemona, my grandfathercollapsed rightaf- teroverturning his coffee cup to read hisfortuneinthe grounds. When heheardthe news ofmy sex, UnclePete refusedto accept any congratulations.There was no magicinvolved. "Besides," hejoked, "Milt didallthe work." Desdemona becamegrim. HerAmerican- born sonhadbeen proven right and, withthis fresh defeat, theold country, inwhich she still tried to live despiteits being fourthousand miles andthirty-eight years away, receded one more notch. Myar- rival marked the end of her baby-guessing and the startofherhus- 17 band'slong decline.Thoughthe silkworm boxreappeared nowand then,the spoonwasnolongeramongitstreasures. Iwasextracted,spanked,and hosed off, in thatorder.They wrapped meinablanketandputmeon display amongsixother in- fants, four boys, twogirls,allofthem,unlikeme,correcdy tagged. Thiscan'tbetruebut Irememberit:sparksslowly filling a dark screen. Someonehadswitchedonmyeyes. 18 mflTCHmflHinG henthis storygoesout intotheworld, Imay becomedie most famous hermaphrodite inhistory.There havebeen othersbe- foreme.Alexina Barbinattended agirls'boarding schoolin Francebefore becomingAbel.Sheleftbehind anautobiography, whichMichel Foucaultdiscoveredinthearchivesof theFrenchDe- partment ofPublicHygiene.(Hermemoirs, whichendshortly before hersuicide,makeunsatisfactoryreading,anditwasafter fin- ishing themyearsagothatIfirstgot theidea towritemyown.)Gott- lieb Gottlich, bornin 1798, livedasMarieRosineuntiltheage of thirty- three. Oneday abdominal painssentMarie tothedoctor. The physician checkedfora herniaandfound undescended testiclesin- stead. Fromthenon, Mariedonned men'sclodies,tookthenameof Gottlieb, andmadea fortune traveling around Europe, exhibiting himself tomedical men. As far as thedoctors are concerned, I'mevenbetter thanGottlieb. Tothe extentthat fetal hormonesaffect brainchemistry andhistol- ogy, I've got a male brain. ButI wasraisedasa girl. Ifyou were go- ing todevise an experiment to measurethe relative influences of nature versusnurture, you couldn't come up with anything better than mylife.During my timeat theClinic nearly threedecades ago, Dr. Luce ranme through a barrageof tests.I was giventheBenton Visual Retention Test and the Bender Visual -MotorGestaltTest. My verbal IQ was measured, and lotsof other things, too.Luce even an- 19

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He’s relieved when she makes a slight conversational detour away from his own story. She’s suggested, in the way that naive cis people do, with a hint of self-congratulation at their own broad-mindedness, that it seems like trans people are starting to be everywhere, that maybe gender doesn’t matter that much. In his reply, he can’t help but let loose an old defensiveness on this topic. “I think it’s the opposite,” he says too sharply. “The whole reason transsexuals transition is because gender matters so incredibly much.” “Does it matter to you like that still?” she asks. “Yeah,” he admits. “This fatherhood thing is proving that I think it'll always matter to me.” “So even though you detransitioned, you still consider yourself transgender?” Her question isn’t cruel; it’s fact-gathering. She has recognized an important data point. “T don’t think it’s something you outgrow.” She peers at him, squinting a little in the sunlight. “Why did you detransition, then?” He scoops up a handful of sand, feels it run through his fingers. “Do you want the cold facts or the abstract reason?” “The cold facts.” “Two things happened that were related. I convinced myself that I couldn’t protect and satisfy the girl I loved, also a trans woman, while being trans myself. The other thing that happened was that I got beaten on the street and no one helped me. It was the last straw. Living as a trans woman just seemed too fucking hard after that.” “In New York?” “Brooklyn. But not what that makes it sound like. It was a rich white guy who did it. In Williamsburg. He wore khakis. His getaway car was an Audi SUV.” Katrina gave him a once-over, as though looking for wounds or evidence, as if he were saying it had just happened. “So you got sick of being trans?” “T got sick of living as trans. I got to a point where I thought I didn’t need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.” Ames could run through this routine without even thinking about it. How many times had he tried to explain his detransition to other trans women? Tried to assuage the sense of betrayal that their wariness obviously communicated? In Ames’s formulation, trans women knew what trans women were, they knew how to be, but they didn’t know how to do. All the intra-trans fights online, all the arguments with cis people: All of it was just to define what it meant to be a trans woman; to say what she was. But when you're a trans woman, there’s almost nothing out there on how to actually live. In his last year of living as a woman—the year in which Ames stopped being so angry with how cis people treated trans people and

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  It is Monday when she approaches him again, by calling him into her office. The weekend of silence has been agony. She doesn’t sit behind her desk. Instead, she closes the door, and perches in a chair beside him. “Ames, I thought about it all and—” Katrina begins, but the solemnness of the moment, the sense of portent, is broken, because a strand of her hair has slipped and gotten to her lip gloss. “Ugh,” she says. “This is what I get for freshening my makeup before you came in. Backfire!” She’s visibly nervous, and picks the hair free and tucks it behind her ear. “Anyway, what I was going to say is that I told my mom.” “You told her everything?” “Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t tell my friends, and I couldn’t be alone with it anymore.” Ames nods. Then, in a way that even the pregnancy test or the conversation with Reese had not, the pregnancy becomes real to him. It is no longer their secret. It is no longer just theirs or with the people with whom he had shared it. It was one step further to being public. A known fact. Collective knowledge. He had fathered a child. “My mom is someone who I know for sure is on my side, even if I was really afraid of her judgment,” Katrina says. “I was expecting her to tell me to run away from you. I guess I even wanted that. Someone to make you the villain so I didn’t have to. But you know what? She wasn’t even that judgy. Who knew? Turns out Mom has some wisdom about mothering.” Ames hadn’t even considered that Katrina might tell her mother. Because he had gone so long without telling his own mother anything, he had forgotten such an act was possible, much less permissible. But of course Katrina had told her mother. Several times in the past, he had been on the couch, just out of view of her phone’s camera, when she chatted on video with her mother. And he had heard, firsthand, the conversation between two women on such familiar terms with each other’s lives that they spoke in near code: nicknames, allusions, inside jokes.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The first year of transition, Amy discovered, was about learning how much you've lied to yourself. How unreliable your own self- assessments were and how little the sense of self from your past could be put to good use in transition. The awful part was watching what therapy called “your coping mechanisms” flame out. There was a moment in which you could catch a glimpse of how scared you’d been and the degree of pain in which you'd been living as a boy, before that pain and fear actually hit you and shredded you. The same way in which 1950s films captured men in early atomic bomb tests watching the flash and mushroom cloud rise, marveling at the Shiva-esque destruction for just a split second before the shockwave and heat sent their searing bodies flying backward, along with the camera recording those bodies, and after which nothing could be seen, only felt. And then you developed new coping mechanisms, new language, new walls to keep yourself safe. The problem with the poppers was that they made Amy too dumb to keep all that cognitive machinery going. It all ground to a halt, and instead of the new lies, she fell into direct contact with a raw fact: She was a girl in love with a girl. It was overwhelming. It was all she had ever hoped for. To say that Amy had never before had sex as a woman was the kind of thing that trans activists would take issue with. Feel free to peruse the Tumblr-Twitter industrial complex for all the ways that “trans women have always been women”—even before they transitioned. But for Amy it was the first time she saw herself fucking as a woman without laying a psychic veil over whatever sexual scene was occurring; the first time it just was rather than something that, with effort, she could manage to see. It was the first time she had been present as the woman she so obviously had been all along, a woman who required no effort to be present, and who connected directly with Reese. So often when she had sex, she allocated the majority of her mental capacity to managing her own impression of herself as she fucked, with a secondary concern being her partner’s impression of her. This allocation left little mental energy for actually desiring her partner, much less vocalizing or displaying that desire. Which, she knew, did not make her a good lover. It made her a bad lover, and this was, in fact, her impression of her own sexual prowess: disappointing, tepid, with occasional flashes of mediocrity.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  That date ring a bell?” “Yeah, it’s the day Alaska died.” Technically, she died three hours into January 11, but it was still, to us anyway, Monday night, January 10. “Yeah, but something else, Pudge. January 9. Alaska’s mom took her to the zoo.” “Wait. No. How do you know that?” “She told us at Barn Night. Remember?” Of course I didn’t remember. If I could remember numbers, I wouldn’t be struggling toward a C-plus in precalc. “Holy shit,” I said as the Colonel walked in. “What?” the Colonel asked. “January 9, 1997,” I told him. “Alaska liked the bears. Her mom liked the monkeys.” The Colonel looked at me blankly for a moment and then took his backpack off and slung it across the room in a single motion. “Holy shit,” he said. “WHY THE HELL DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT!” Within a minute, the Colonel had the best solution either of us would ever come up with. “Okay. She’s sleeping. Jake calls, and she talks to him, and she’s doodling, and she looks at her white flower, and ‘Oh God my mom liked white flowers and put them in my hair when I was little,’ and then she flips out. She comes back into her room and starts screaming at us that she forgot—forgot about her mom, of course—so she takes the flowers, drives off campus, on her way to—what?” He looked at me. “What? Her mom’s grave?” And I said, “Yeah, probably. Yeah. So she gets into the car, and she just wants to get to her mom’s grave, but there’s this jackknifed truck and the cops there, and she’s drunk and pissed off and she’s in a hurry, so she thinks she can squeeze past the cop car, and she’s not even thinking straight, but she has to get to her mom, and she thinks she can get past it somehow and POOF. ” Takumi nods slowly, thinking, and then says, “Or, she gets into the car with the flowers. But she’s already missed the anniversary. She’s probably thinking that she screwed things up with her mom again—first she doesn’t call 911, and now she can’t even remember the freaking anniversary. And she’s furious and she hates herself, and she decides, ‘That’s it, I’m doing it,’ and she sees the cop car and there’s her chance and she just floors it.” The Colonel reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapping it upside down against the COFFEE TABLE . “Well,” he said. “That clears things up nicely.” one hundred eighteen days after SO WE GAVE UP. I’d finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We’d failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me.

• From The Lover (1984)

  The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I’ve already written, more or less—I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I’m doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I’m talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it. Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. I knew it the same as other people, but, strangely, in advance. Just as the space existed in me for desire. At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. Even my mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me—with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, I’ve never asked. But I believe I’ve heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they’re going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book. And I knew I was right, that one day it would slow down and take its normal course. The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later, at nineteen. And I’ve kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It’s got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It’s scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste. So, I’m fifteen and a half. It’s on a ferry crossing the Mekong River. The image lasts all the way across. I’m fifteen and a half, there are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we’re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal.

• From The Lover (1984)

  How I came by it I’ve forgotten. I can’t think who could have given it to me. It must have been my mother who bought it for me because I asked her. The one thing certain is that it was another markdown, another final reduction. But why was it bought? No woman, no girl wore a man’s fedora in that colony then. No native woman, either. What must have happened is: I try it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper’s glass, and see that there, beneath the man’s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it’s deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they’re right for me. I wear them all the time too, go overywhere in these shoes, this hat, out of doors, in all weathers, on every occasion. And to town. I found a photograph of my son when he was twenty. He’s in California with his friends, Erika and Elizabeth Lennard. He’s thin, so thin you’d think he was a white Ugandan too. His smile strikes me as arrogant, derisive. He’s trying to assume the warped image of a young drifter. That’s how he likes to see himself, poor, with that poor boy’s look, that attitude of someone young and thin. It’s this photograph that comes closest to the one never taken of the girl on the ferry.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  The challenge called for a response, but a lesson in the algebra of prediction would not be enthusiastically received. Instead, I used chalk to mark a target on the floor. I asked every officer in the room to turn his back to the target and throw two coins at it in immediate succession, without looking. We measured the distances from the target and wrote the two results of each contestant on the blackboard. Then we rewrote the results in order, from the best to the worst performance on the first try. It was apparent that most (but not all) of those who had done best the first time deteriorated on their second try, and those who had done poorly on the first attempt generally improved. I pointed out to the instructors that what they saw on the board coincided with what we had heard about the performance of aerobatic maneuvers on successive attempts: poor performance was typically followed by improvement and good performance by deterioration, without any help from either praise or punishment. The discovery I made on that day was that the flight instructors were trapped in an unfortunate contingency: because they punished cadets when performance was poor, they were mostly rewarded by a subsequent improvement, even if punishment was actually ineffective. Furthermore, the instructors were not alone in that predicament. I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty. Talent and Luck A few years ago, John Brockman, who edits the online magazine Edge, asked a number of scientists to report their “favorite equation.” These were my offerings: success = talent + luck great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck The unsurprising idea that luck often contributes to success has surprising consequences when we apply it to the first two days of a high-level golf tournament. To keep things simple, assume that on both days the average score of the competitors was at par 72. We focus on a player who did very well on the first day, closing with a score of 66. What can we learn from that excellent score? An immediate inference is that the golfer is more talented than the average participant in the tournament. The formula for success suggests that another inference is equally justified: the golfer who did so well on day 1

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “You know I took ole Avery to court for his hearing and was down there with y’all for those three days. And I, uh, well, I want you to know that I was listening.” He removed his hand from my shoulder and looked past me, as if staring at something behind me. “You know, I—uh, well, I appreciate what you’re doing, I really do. It was kind of difficult for me to be in that courtroom to hear what y’all was talking about. I came up in foster care, you know. I came up in foster care, too.” His face softened. “Man, I didn’t think anybody had it as bad as me. They moved me around like I wasn’t wanted nowhere. I had it pretty rough. But listening to what you was saying about Avery made me realize that there were other people who had it as bad as I did. I guess even worse. I mean, it brought back a lot of memories, sitting in that courtroom.” He reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration that had formed on his brow. I noticed for the first time that he had a Confederate flag tattooed on his arm. “You know, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s good what you’re doing. I got so angry coming up that there were plenty of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry. I made it to eighteen, joined the military, and you know, I’ve been okay. But sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.” I smiled. He continued: “That expert doctor you put up said that some of the damage that’s done to kids in these abusive homes is permanent; that kind of made me worry. You think that’s true?” “Oh, I think we can always do better,” I told him. “The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.” We were both speaking softly to one another. Another officer walked by and stared at us. I went on: “You know, I really appreciate you saying to me what you just said. It means a lot, I really mean that. Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point.” He looked at me and smiled. “You kept talking about mitigation in that court. I said to myself, ‘What the hell is wrong with him? Why does he keep talking about “mitigation” like that?’ When I got home I looked it up. I wasn’t sure what you meant at first, but now I do.” I laughed. “Sometimes I get going in court, and I’m not sure I know what I’m saying, either.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He armed himself and his sons and they sat in the dark store night after night, waiting for their co-citizens-who, knowing they were armed, did not appear. And then, one morning, after the long night, the Reverend D. decided that this was no way for a man or a woman or a child to live. He may, of course, by this time, have been forced to change his mind again, but he was the first person to make the concept of nonviolence real to me: for it entered, then, precisely, the realm of individual and, above all, private choice and I saw, for the first time, how difficult a choice it could be . To Be Baptized I told Jesus it would be all right If He changed my name. -TRADITIONAL ALL OF the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the .l"\... lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. Malcolm, yet more concretely than Frantz Fanon-since Malcolm operated in the Afro-American idiom, and referred to the Afro-American situation-made the nature of this lie, and its implications, relevant and articulate to the people whom he served. He made increasingly articulate the ways in which this lie, given the history and the power of the Western nations, had become a global problem, men acing the lives of millions. "Vile as I am," states one of the characters in Dostoevski's The Idiot, "I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity, without any moral basis for conduct, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity fr om en joying what is brought; so it has been already." Indeed. And so it is now. Dostoevski's personage was speaking of the im pending proliferation of railways, and the then prevalent op timism (which was perfectly natural) as to the uplifting effect this conquest of distance would have on the life of man. But Dostoevski saw that the rise of this power would "coldly ex clude a considerable part of humanity."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. (It was also in France, thcrdi:>rc, that I began to read the Bible again.) My quarrel with the English language had been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to sec the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the lan guage; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to usc it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test. In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelm ingly hostile place; and Shakespeare, who was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to sec-espe cially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French-is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is lan guage which controls an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the French experience, and also something of the French expectations-which were certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French.) Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King's English. An immense experience had fi:>rgcd this language, it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a people's survival, and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also the authority of Shakespeare.

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

  Personally, I’d like to add the Greek word stenahoria to English, which refers to a feeling of doom, hopelessness, suffocation, and constriction. I can think of a few romantic relationships where this emotion concept would have come in handy. 4 1 Other languages commonly have emotion words whose associated concepts have no equivalent in English. For example, Russian has two distinct concepts for what Americans call “Anger.” German has three distinct “An gers” and Mandarin has five. If you were to learn any of these languages, you’d need to acquire these new emotion concepts to construct perceptions and experiences with them. You’ll develop these concepts faster if you live with native speakers of the new language. The new concepts are affected by the older ones from your primary language. Native speakers of English who learn Russian, for example, must learn to distinguish between anger at a person, called serdit’sia, and anger for more abstract reasons such as the political situation, known as zlit’sia. The latter concept is more similar to the English concept of “Anger,” but Russian speakers use the former more frequently; as a result, English speakers use serdit’sia more frequently as well and wind up misapplying it. This is not an error in a biological sense, since neither concept has a biological fingerprint, but in a cultural sense. 4 2 New emotion concepts from a second language can also modify those of your primary language. A research scientist in my lab, Alexandra Touroutoglou, came from Greece to learn neuroscience. As she became more proficient at speaking English, her Greek and English emotion concepts began to blend. For example, Greek has two concepts for “Guilt,” one for minor infractions and another for serious transgressions. English covers both situations with the single word “guilty.” When Alex would speak with her sister who was still in Greece, Alex would use the “major” guilt word ( enohi ) when describing, say, that she ate too much pie at our lab’s beach party. To her sister, Alex came across as overly dramatic. In this case, Alex constructed her dessert experience using the English concept for guilt. 4 3 I hope by now you appreciate the drama that is going on here. Emotion words are not about emotional facts in the world that are stored like static files in your brain. They reflect the varied emotional meanings you construct from mere physical signals in the world using your emotion knowledge. You acquired that knowledge, in part, from the collective knowledge contained in the brains of those who cared for you, talked to you, and helped you to create your social world. Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world. … Once your conceptual system is established in your brain, you need not explicitly recall or speak an emotion word to construct an instance of an emotion.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The parodic references to R. L. Stevenson suggest that Nabokov had in mind Henry Jekyll’s painfully earnest discovery of the “truth” that “man is not only one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines.” The “serial selves” of Pale Fire “outstrip” Stevenson and a good many other writers, and rather than undermining Humbert’s guilt, the Double parody in Lolita locks Humbert within that prison of mirrors where the “real self” and its masks blend into one another, the refracted outlines of good and evil becoming terrifyingly confused. Humbert’s search for the whereabouts and identity of Detective Trapp (Quilty) invites the reader to wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve this mystery, a process which both parallels and parodies the Poe “tale of ratiocination.” When Humbert finds Lolita and presses her for her abductor’s name, She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well it was—” And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago. Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. (p2.c29.1.) Even here Humbert withholds Quilty’s identity, though the “astute reader” may recognize that “Waterproof” is a clue which leads back to an early scene at the lake, in which Charlotte had said that Humbert’s watch was waterproof and Jean Farlow had alluded to Quilty’s Uncle Ivor (by his first name only), and then had almost mentioned Clare Quilty by name: Ivor “told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears—” But she is interrupted and the chapter ends. This teasing exercise in ratiocination—“peace” indeed!—is the detective trap, another parody of the reader’s assumptions and expectations, as though even the most astute reader could ever fully discover the identity of Quilty, Humbert, or of himself.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  On the train home I carried on reading Valmouth. It was an old grey and white Penguin Classic that James had lent me, the pages stiff and foxed, with a faint smell of lost time. Wet-bottomed wine glasses had left mauve rings over the sketch of the author by Augustus John and the price, 3/6, which appeared in a red square on the cover. Nonetheless, I was enjoined to take especial care of the book, which also contained Prancing Nigger and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. James had a mania for Firbank, and it was only out of his love for me that he had let me take away this apparently undistinguished old paperback, which bore on its flyleaf the absurd signature ‘O. de V. Green’. James held the average Firbank-lover in contempt, and professed a very serious attitude towards his favourite writer. I had long deferred reading him in the childishly stubborn way that one resists all keen and repeated recommendations, and had imagined him until now to be a supremely frivolous and silly author. I was surprised to find how difficult, witty and relentless he was. The characters were flighty and extravagant in the extreme, but the novel itself was evidently as tough as nails. I knew I would not begin to grasp it fully until a second or third reading, but what was clear so far was that the inhabitants of the balmy resort of Valmouth found the climate so kind that they lived to an immense age. Lady Parvula de Panzoust (a name I knew already from James’s reapplication of it to a member of the Corry) was hoping to establish some rapport with the virile young David Tooke, a farm boy, and was seeking the help of Mrs Yajñavalkya, a black masseuse, to set up a meeting. ‘He’s awfully choice,’ Mrs Yaj assured the centenarian grande dame. Much of the talk was a kind of highly inflected nonsense, but it gave the unnerving impression that on deeper acquaintance it would all turn out to be packed with fleeting and covert meaning. Mrs Yaj herself spoke in a wonderful black pidgin, prinked out with more exotic turns of phrase. ‘O Allah la Ilaha!’ she reassured the anxious Lady Parvula. ‘Shall I tell you vot de Yajñavalkya device is? Vot it has been dis thousand and thousand ob year? It is bjopti. Bjopti! And vot does bjopti mean? It means discretion. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sh!’ It was such a long ‘Sh!’ that I found myself quietly vocalising it to see what its effect would be. ‘Quiet, Damian,’ the woman opposite me said to her little boy. ‘Gentleman’s trying to read.’

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Interpretation. The Duke de Lauzun was one of the greatest seducers in history, and his slow and steady seduction of the Grande Mademoiselle was his masterpiece. His method was simple: indirection. Sensing her interest in him in that first conversation, he decided to beguile her with friendship. first become acquainted with her and her whole mental state. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE SEDUCER'S DIARY, TRANSLATED BY HOWARD V. HONG AND EDNA H. HONG No sooner had he spoken than the bullocks, driven from their mountain pastures, were on their way to the beach, as Jove had directed; they were making for the sands where the daughter [Europa] of the great king used to play with the young girls of Tyre, who were her com- panions. • . . . Aban- doning the dignity of his scepter, the father and ruler of the gods, whose hand wields the flaming three- forked bolt, whose nod shakes the universe, adopted the guise of a bull; and, mingling with the other bullocks, joined in the lowing and ambled in the tender grass, a fair sight to sec. His hide was white as untrodden snow, snow not yet melted by the rainy South wind. The muscles stood out on his neck, and deep folds of skin hung along his flanks. His horns were small, it is true, but so beautifully made that you would swear they were the work of an artist, more polished and shining than any jewel. There was no menace in the set of his head or in his eyes; he looked completely placid. • Agenor's daughter [Europa] was filled with admiration for one so handsome and so friendly. But, gentle though he seemed, she was afraid at first to touch him; then she went closer, and held out flowers to his shining lips. The lover was delighted Create a False Sense of Security—Approach Indirectly • 181 He would become her most devoted friend. At first this was charming; a man was taking the time to talk to her, of poetry, history, the deeds of war—her favorite subjects. She slowly began to confide in him. Then, al- most without her realizing it, her feelings shifted: the consummate ladies' man was only interested in friendship? He was not attracted to her as a woman? Such thoughts made her aware that she had fallen in love with him. This, in part, was what eventually made her turn down the match with the king's brother—a decision cleverly and indirectly provoked by Lauzun himself, when he stopped visiting her. And how could he be after money or position, or sex, when he had never made any kind of move?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In addition to enveloping eggs, a cervix that filters or favors sperm, and vaginal contractions that may expel the sperm of one man while boosting that of another, women’s orgasms provoke changes in vaginal acidity. These changes appear to assist the sperm cells of the lucky guy who provoked the orgasm. The environment at the cervical opening tends to be highly acidic and thus hostile to sperm cells. The alkaline pH of semen protects the spermatozoa in this environment for a while, but the protection is short-lived; most of the sperm cells are viable within the vagina for only a few hours, so these changes in acidity alter the vaginal environment in ways that can favor sperm that arrive with the female’s orgasm. The benefits may run both ways. Recent research suggests women who do not use condoms are less likely to suffer from depression than either women who do use condoms or who are not sexually active. Psychologist Gordon Gallup’s initial survey of 293 women (data congruent with those from another survey still to be published that included 700 women) found that women can develop a “chemical dependency” on the boost they get from the testosterone, estrogen, prostaglandins, and other hormones contained in semen. These chemicals enter the woman’s bloodstream through the vaginal wall.30 If it’s true that multiple mating was common in human evolution, the apparent mismatch between the relatively quick male orgasmic response and the so-called “delayed” female response makes sense (note how the female response is “delayed” only if the male’s is assumed to be “right on time”). The male’s quick orgasm lessens the chances of being interrupted by predators or other males (survival of the quickest!), while the female and her child would benefit by exercising some preconscious control over which spermatozoa would be most likely to fertilize her ovum. Prolactin and the other hormones released at orgasm appear to trigger very different responses in men and women. While a man is likely to require a prolonged refractory (or recovery) period immediately after an orgasm (and maybe a sandwich and a beer as well), thus getting him out of the way of other males, many women are willing and able to continue sexual activity well beyond a “starter orgasm.” It’s worth repeating that primate species with orgasmic females tend to be promiscuous. Given the great variability of mating behavior—even just among the apes—this is highly significant. While monogamous gibbons have rarely been seen copulating, so infrequent and silent is their intercourse, female chimps and bonobos go wild regularly and shamelessly. Females often mate with every male they can find, copulating far more than is necessary for reproduction. Goodall reported seeing one female at Gombe who mated fifty times in a single day.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  As it turns out, women aren’t the only female primates making a lot of noise in the throes of passion. British primatologist Stuart Semple found that, “In a wide variety of species, females vocalize just before, during or immediately after they mate. These vocalizations,” Semple says, “are particularly common among the primates and evidence is now accumulating that by calling, a female incites males in her group….”4 Precisely. There’s a good reason the sound of a woman enjoying a sexual encounter entices a heterosexual man. Her “copulation call” is a potential invitation to come hither, thus provoking sperm competition. Semple recorded more than 550 copulation calls from seven different female baboons and analyzed their acoustic structure. He found that these complex vocalizations contained information related both to the female’s reproductive state (the vocalizations were more complex when females were closer to ovulation) and to the status of the male “inspiring” any given vocalization (calls were longer and contained more distinct sonic units during matings with higher-ranked males). Thus, in these baboons at least, listening males could presumably gain information as to their likelihood of impregnating a calling female, as well as some sense of the rank of the male they’d find with her if they approached. Meredith Small agrees that the copulation calls of female primates are easily identifiable: “Even the uninitiated can identify female non-human primate orgasm, or sexual pleasure. Females,” Small tells us, “make noises not heard in any other context but mating.”5 Female lion-tailed macaques use copulation calls to invite male attention even when not ovulating. Small reports that among these primates, ovulating females most often directed their invitations at males outside their own troop, thus bringing new blood into the mating mix.6 Female copulatory vocalization is highly associated with promiscuous mating, but not with monogamy. Alan Dixson has noted that the females of promiscuous primate species emit more complex mating calls than females of monogamous and polygynous species.7 Complexity aside, Gauri Pradhan and his colleagues conducted a survey of copulation calls in a variety of primates and found that “variation in females’ promiscuity predicts their tendency to use copulation calls in conjunction with mating.” Their data show that higher levels of promiscuity predict more frequent copulation calls.8 William J. Hamilton and Patricia C. Arrowood analyzed the copulatory vocalizations of various primates, including three human couples going at it.9 They noticed that “female sounds gradually intensified as orgasm approached and at orgasm assumed a rapid, regular (equal note lengths and inter-note intervals) rhythm absent in the males’ calls at orgasm.” Still, the authors can’t help sounding a tad let down when they note, “Neither sex [of human]…showed the complexity of note structure characteristic of baboon copulatory vocalizations.” But that’s probably a good thing, because elsewhere in their article we learn that female baboons’ copulation calls are clearly audible to even human ears from three hundred meters away.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I had never counted, of course? She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible—and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary—fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood. I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketchy tap—one of her acquired gestures. She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I had been a good father, she guessed—granting me that . Proceed, Dolly Schiller. Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he was practically an old friend? That he had visited with his uncle in Ramsdale?—oh, years ago—and spoken at Mother’s club, and had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by her bare arm onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten and furious with him? Did I know he had seen me and her at the inn where he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two years later? Did I know—It had been horrid of her to sidetrack me into believing that Clare was an old female, maybe a relative of his or a sometime lifemate—and oh, what a close shave it had been when the Wace Journal carried his picture. The Briceland Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Its importance is telescoped by Humbert’s conclusion: “ This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty. ” In form, of course, this bravura set piece is not a play; but, as a summary parodic commentary on the main action, it does function in the manner of an Elizabethan play-within-the-play, and its “staging” underscores once more the game-element central to the book. Simultaneous with these games is a fully novelistic process that shows Humbert traveling much further than the 27,000 miles he and Lolita literally traverse. Foolish John Ray describes Humbert’s as “ a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis ” and, amazingly enough, he turns out to be right. The reader sees Humbert move beyond his obsessional passion to a not altogether straightforward declaration of genuine love ( here ) and, finally, to a realization of the loss suffered not by him but by Lolita ( here ). It is expressed on the next to the last page in a long and eloquent passage that, for the first time in the novel, is in no way undercut by parody or qualified by irony. Midway through this “ last mirage of wonder and hopelessness ,” the reader is invoked again, because Humbert’s moral apotheosis, so uniquely straightforward, constitutes the end game and Nabokov’s final trompe-l’oeil . If the reader has long since decided that there is no “moral reality” in the novel, and in his sophisticated way has accepted that, he may well miss this unexpected move in the farthest corner of the board and lose the game after all. It is the last time the reader will be addressed directly, for the game is about over, as is the novel.