Remorse

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Who of the two will experience greater regret over the episode? The results are not surprising: 88% of respondents said Mr. Brown, 12% said Mr. Smith. Regret is not the same as blame. Other participants were asked this question about the same incident: Who will be criticized most severely by others? The results: Mr. Brown 23%, Mr. Smith 77%. Regret and blame are both evoked by a comparison to a norm, but the relevant norms are different. The emotions experienced by Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith are dominated by what they usually do about hitchhikers. Taking a hitchhiker is an abnormal event for Mr. Brown, and most people therefore expect him to experience more intense regret. A judgmental observer, however, will compare both men to conventional norms of reasonable behavior and is likely to blame Mr. Smith for habitually taking unreasonable risks. We are tempted to say that Mr. Smith deserved his fate and that Mr. Brown was unlucky. But Mr. Brown is the one who is more likely to be kicking himself, because he acted out of character in this one instance. Decision makers know that they are prone to regret, and the anticipation of that painful emotion plays a part in many decisions. Intuitions about regret are remarkably uniform and compelling, as the next example illustrates. Paul owns shares in company A. During the past year he considered switching to stock in company B, but he decided against it. He now learns that he would have been better off by $1,200 if he had switched to the stock of company B. George owned shares in company B. During the past year he switched to stock in company A. He now learns that he would have been better off by $1,200 if he had kept his stock in company B. Who feels greater regret? The results are clear-cut: 8% of respondents say Paul, 92% say George. This is curious, because the situations of the two investors are objectively

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  evaluation. In their between-subjects experiment, each participant saw only one scenario and assigned a dollar value to it. They found, as you surely guessed, that the victim was awarded a much larger sum if he was shot in a store he rarely visited than if he was shot in his regular store. Poignancy (a close cousin of regret) is a counterfactual feeling, which is evoked because the thought “if only he had shopped at his regular store...” comes readily to mind. The familiar System 1 mechanisms of substitution and intensity matching translate the strength of the emotional reaction to the story onto a monetary scale, creating a large difference in dollar awards. The comparison of the two experiments reveals a sharp contrast. Almost everyone who sees both scenarios together (within-subject) endorses the principle that poignancy is not a legitimate consideration. Unfortunately, the principle becomes relevant only when the two scenarios are seen together, and this is not how life usually works. We normally experience life in the between- subjects mode, in which contrasting alternatives that might change your mind are absent, and of course WYSIATI. As a consequence, the beliefs that you endorse when you reflect about morality do not necessarily govern your emotional reactions, and the moral intuitions that come to your mind in different situations are not internally consistent. The discrepancy between single and joint evaluation of the burglary scenario belongs to a broad family of reversals of judgment and choice. The first preference reversals were discovered in the early 1970s, and many reversals of other kinds were reported over the years. Challenging Economics Preference reversals have an important place in the history of the conversation between psychologists and economists. The reversals that attracted attention were reported by Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovic, two psychologists who had done their graduate work at the University of Michigan at the same time as Amos. They conducted an experiment on preferences between bets, which I show in a slightly simplified version. You are offered a choice between two bets, which are to be played on a roulette wheel with 36 sectors. Bet A: 11/36 to win $160, 25/36 to lose $15 Bet B: 35/36 to win $40, 1/36 to lose $10

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Even in hungover remorse, she’s not quite having it, and looks up at him from under a curtain of hair. “I feel awful, but I don’t know if comparing our crimes is a road you want to go down.” “Well, what then? What’s next?” She winces. “Coffee and breakfast. Then we strategize. We’ve got a day before we meet with them again.” “T meant about us. Not just about work. What are we going to do about us?” He puts his hand over where he guesses hers is under the covers and gets a wrist. “Do you still want me to explain everything? That was the plan last night. I want to show you I can let you in.” She grimaces, then says, “More water.” He takes his hand off her wrist to hand her another bottle. She drinks half of it in a go, then wipes her mouth. “Yeah, we'll do that too. But not until after food and caffeine.” They sit at Oak Street Beach after breakfast. The wind has changed direction since the previous evening, a warmer summerish breeze from the south that has pacified the previous night’s chop. The air smells totally different. Katrina is caught in the stupor of her hangover. The time strikes him as good as any to tell her about transition. She regards him flatly, emotions ironed out of her affect by the weight of her headache. He tells her about cross-dressing as a kid. About trying to make it a part-time thing. About how his parents hadn’t spoken to him for a year when he finally went on hormones. How meek he had felt as a trans woman. The exhaustion of knowing you're vulnerable. Of seeing bizarre and nonsensical creatures on television and realizing that they were your reflection, as seen through the fun-house mirror of the world’s impressions of trans women. He tells her of the courage it took him, every day, just to go to the corner store—the preparations just to leave the house: put on your makeup, keep your shoulders back, walk with an imaginary book on your head, your hips under your spine but still swaying, and keep that emotional armor tight and polished. The cold stab of fear that hit when something tiny happened—say, a teenage boy follows you home from the store, and says appreciatively, “Hey, baby, where were you made?” A weird compliment of a catcall that hints how close the boy has come to the edge of figuring something true—but if you speak, he'll hear the real answer in the timbre of your voice. And then you fear the boy will get ashamed and then violent. This recitation of facts and memories, though they seem to captivate Katrina, has so far been totally unsatisfactory to Ames; he’s barely begun to skirt the contradiction of knowing he’s trans, yet having detransitioned. It’s like trying to explain one’s childhood in a matter of minutes. Everything sounds cliché. Everything gets boiled down to types.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. November 12, 1956 Notes In this eBook edition of The Annotated Lolita, you will find two types of hyperlinks. The first type is embedded into the number at the beginning of each chapter: these links allow you to move back and forth between the text and the notes. Notes specifically about a part of the text are linked to that part of the text. The second type of link, indicated by a “see” reference, allows you to move from one note to a related note. All page references to other Nabokov books are to the Vintage paperback editions. FOREWORD two titles: the term “white widowed male” occurs in the case histories of psychiatric works, while the entire subtitle parodies the titillating confessional novel, such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), and the expectations of the reader who hopes Lolita will provide the pleasures of pornography (see Duk Duk). Although Nabokov could hardly have realized it at the time of writing, there is no small irony in the fact that the timidity of American publishers resulted in the novel’s being first brought out by the Olympia Press, publishers of The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe and other “eighteenth-century sexcapades” (to use Clare Quilty’s description of Sade’s Justine, ou, Les Infortunes de la vertu [... The Misfortunes of Virtue]). preambulates: to make a preamble, introduce. “Humbert Humbert”: in his Playboy interview (1964), Nabokov said, “The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. Lends itself also to a number of puns.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I wondered, would my mother have been better off if I had stolen all her pills, as Reva had stolen all of mine? Reva was lucky to be plagued only by the image of her mother’s burning body. “Individual pans.” At least her mother’s body was ruined. It didn’t exist anymore. My dead mother was lying in a coffin, a shriveled skeleton. I still felt like she was up to something down there, bitter and suffering as the flesh on her body withered and sank away from her bones. Did she blame me? We buried her in a carnation pink Thierry Mugler suit. Her hair was perfect. Her lipstick was perfect, blood red, Christian Dior 999. If I unearthed her now, would the lipstick have faded? Either way, she’d be a stiff husk, like the sloughed-off exoskeleton of a huge insect. That was what my mother was. What if I’d flushed away all those prescriptions before I went back to school, poured all her alcohol down the sink? Did she secretly want me to do that? Would that have made her happy for once? Or would it have pushed her further away? “My own daughter!” I sensed a bit of remorse in me. It smelled like pennies in the room, I thought. The air tasted like when you test a battery with your tongue. Cold and electric. “I’m not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.” Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I was having a stroke. I wanted Xanax. I wanted Klonopin. Reva had even taken my empty bottle of chewable peppermint melatonin. How could she? In my mind, I made a list of pills I wanted to take and then I imagined taking them. I cupped my hand and plucked the invisible pills out of my palm. I swallowed them one by one. It didn’t work. I started sweating. I went back to the kitchen and drank water from the tap, then stuck my head in the freezer and found a bottle of Jose Cuervo wrapped in a crinkly white plastic bag. I was glad it wasn’t a human head. I drank the tequila and glared at Reva’s Polaroid picture. Then I remembered that I had a set of keys to her apartment. • • • I HADN’T BEEN TO the Upper West Side in several years, not since the last time I’d been over to Reva’s. It felt safe in that part of town, sobering. The buildings were heavier. The streets were wider. Nothing there had really changed since I’d graduated from Columbia. Westside Market. Riverside Park. 1020. The West End. Cheap pizza by the slice. Maybe that’s why Reva loved it, I thought. Cheap binges. Bulimia was pricey if you had fine taste. I always thought it was pathetic that Reva had chosen to stay in the area after graduation, but passing through it in the cab, in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. 32 There was the day, during our first trip—our first circle of paradise—when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn—to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on—a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face ... that look I cannot exactly describe ... an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration—and every limit presupposes something beyond it—hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her.

• From Querelle (1953)

  He was hungry. He had been in hiding for three days, and he lived in fear of the crime he had committed. Sleeping - and waking, horrors filled his mind. He was afraid of rats, but he seriously considered catching one and eating it raw. Having sobered up almost instantly, the uselessness of the murder had become clear to him. He even felt some tenderness toward Theo, thinking of him. He remembered how kind Thea had been at first, remembered the carafes of white wine they had enjoyed together. He asked for his forgiveness. Remorse gnawed at him, made him feel hungrier still. Then he thought of his parents. Surely the newspapers and the police had informed them about his deed. What would they do? They, too, were working folk. The father was a mason. What would he think of his son killing another mason in a fit of amorous rage? And the kids he had gone to school with? Gil slept on the stone floor. He didn't pay any attention to his clothes-shirt, undershirt, pants-and they seemed to slip off him of their own accord, as if they wanted to leave Gil who crouched in the dark, passing a 153 I QUERELLE light finger-mechanically, voluptuously, but with no feelings of an erotic nature-almost caressing that sensitive excrescence of flesh he thought of as a light pink in color, and which once before had given him the sense of being a man, making it impossible for Thea to mount him. Having remained there so faithfully, his hemorrhoids reminded him of the scene, anp their presence strengthened his sense of being. HI guess they've buried Thea by now. I'm sure the guys took the day off. They all chipped in for a wreath." He curled up again, staying in a comer, clutching his knees in his arms. Now and again he got up and walked, but always slowly, fearfully, as if mysteriously anchored to the wall like Baron Franck, by a complicated network of chains fastened to his neck, his wrists, his waist, his ankles, and to the stones of the wall. Carefully he dragged along this load of invisible metal, being surprised in spite of himself that it was so easy to get out of his clothes, neither shirt nor trousers being held up by the shackles. Another reason for moving slowly was his fear of the ghost he might so easily raise by too heavy a footfall : it would rise and spread like a sail, given the slightest breath of wind.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Then smiling said: “I am Manfred, 7 grandson of Empress Constance; wherefore I pray thee, that when thou returnest, thou go to my fair daughter, parent of the glory of Sicily and of Aragon, and tell her sooth, if other tale be told. After I had my body pierced by two mortal stabs, I gave me up weeping to him who willingly doth pardon. Horrible were my transgressions; but infinite goodness hath such wide arms that it accepteth all that turn to it. If Cosenza’s Pastor, who to chase of me was set by Clement, then had well read that page in God, the bones of my body would yet be at the bridgehead near Benevento, under the guard of the heavy cairn. Now the rain washes them, and the wind stirs them, beyond the Realm, hard by the Verde, whither he translated them with tapers quenched. By curse of theirs man is not so lost, that eternal love may not return, so long as hope retaineth aught of green. True is it, that he who dies in contumacy of Holy Church, even though at the last he repent, needs must stay outside this bank thirty fold for all the time that he hath lived in his presumption, if such decree be not shortened by holy prayers. Look now, if thou canst make me glad, by revealing to my good Constance how thou hast seen me, and also this ban: for here, through those yonder, much advancement comes.” 1. evening is the last of the four divisions of the day, from 3 to 6 P.M. (cf. Conv. iii. 6; iv. 23). When it is 3 P.M. in Italy, it is 6 P.M. at Jerusalem and 6 A.M. in Purgatory. 2. This tradition is recorded by Virgil’s biographers, Donatus and Suetonius. The body was transferred by order of Augustus (cf. Canto vii). 3. Be satisfied that it is, without asking the reason why. “Demonstration is two-fold: the one demonstrates by means of the cause, and is called propter quid ... the other by means of the effect, and is called the demonstration quia” (Thomas Aquinas). 4. Had human reason been capable of penetrating these mysteries, there would have been no need for the revelation of the Word of God. 5. Lerici and Turbia are at the eastern and western extremities of Liguria, respectively. 6. The mountain was on their right, and the sun on their left. 7. This is Manfred (ca. 1231-1266), grandson of the Emperor Henry VI and of his wife Constance (for whom see Par. iii), and natural son of the Emperor Frederick II. Manfred’s wife, Beatrice of Savoy, bore him a daughter who (in 1262) married Peter III of Aragon (for whom and for whose sons see Canto vii; cf. also Par. xix). Manfred became King of Sicily in 1258, usurping the rights of his nephew Conradin. The Popes naturally opposed him, as a Ghibelline, and excommunicated him; and in 1265, Charles of Anjou came to Italy with a large army, on the invitation of Clement IV, and was crowned as counter King of Sicily. On February 26, 1266, Manfred was defeated by Charles at Benevento (some thirty miles north-east of Naples), and slain. He was buried near the battlefield, beneath a huge cairn (each soldier of the army contributing a stone); but his body was disinterred by order of the Pope, and deposited on the banks of the Verde (now the Garigliano, cf. Par. viii), outside the boundaries of the Kingdom of Naples and of the Church States, and with the rites usual at the burial of those who died excommunicated.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  before a federal law and all its stinging stars “Oh, grand stuff!” … Because you took advantage of a sin when I was helpless moulting moist and tender hoping for the best dreaming of marriage in a mountain state aye of a litter of Lolitas… “Didn’t get that.” Because you took advantage of my inner essential innocence because you cheated me— “A little repetitious, what? Where was I?” Because you cheated me of my redemption because you took her at the age when lads play with erector sets “Getting smutty, eh?” a little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die “Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I am concerned.” He folded and handed it back to me. I asked him if he had anything serious to say before dying. The automatic was again ready for use on the person. He looked at it and heaved a big sigh.

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

  In the Boston Marathon Bombing case, if Tsarnaev felt remorse for his deeds, what would it have looked like? Would he have openly cried? Begged his victims for forgiveness? Expounded on the error of his ways? Perhaps, if he were following American stereotypes for expressing remorse, or if this were a trial in a Hollywood movie. But Tsarnaev is a young man of Muslim faith from Chechnya. He lived in the United States and had close American friends, but Tsarnaev had also (by his defense team’s account) spent a lot of time with his older, Chechen brother. Chechen culture expects men to be stoic in the face of adversity. If they lose a battle, they should bravely accept defeat, a mindset known as the “Chechen wolf.” So if Tsarnaev felt remorse, he might well have remained stony-faced.35 Tsarnaev did reportedly become tearful for a moment when his aunt took the stand to plead for his life. Chechnya has a culture of honor, where it is painful to shame your family. If Tsarnaev saw a loved one publicly shamed, say, an aunt begging on his behalf, a few tears would be consistent with Chechen cultural norms for honor.36 We—and jurors—can only guess when constructing a perception to explain Tsarnaev’s impassive stance. Using our Western cultural concepts of remorse, we perceived him as coolly indifferent or full of bravado, rather than stoic. So it’s possible that our guesswork, in this case, produced a cultural misunderstanding in the courtroom, ultimately leading to his death sentence. Or maybe he really is remorseless.37 As it turns out, Tsarnaev actually did convey remorse for his actions in a letter of apology he wrote in 2013, just a few months after the bombing, two years before he went to trial. Jurors never saw the letter, however. It was sealed as confidential under the U.S. Government’s Special Administrative Measures, citing an “international security issue,” and excluded as evidence from the trial.38 On June 25, 2015, Tsarnaev finally spoke at his sentencing hearing. He confessed to the bombing and stated that he understood the impact of his crime. “I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken,” he apologized quietly and calmly, “for the suffering that I’ve caused you, for the damage that I’ve done. Irreparable damage.” The range of responses from victims and the press covering the trial was predictably variable. Some were stunned. Some were upset. Some were outraged. Some accepted his apology. And many just could not decide whether it was sincere. We can never know whether Tsarnaev experienced remorse for his terrible actions, nor if his letter could have affected his sentence. But one thing is certain: At a death penalty proceeding, a defendant’s remorse is a critical feature that jurors must rely on, according to the law, to make a decision between imprisonment and death. And those perceptions of remorse, like all perceptions of emotion, are not detected but constructed.39

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Harry, in awe, opened the main gate of the tank enclosure, and Friggley shuffled down the road. Then, in a sudden flurry, more drama. The Pearloiner leapt out from a bush with a cackle and tried to snatch away several of Friggley’s clitorises and hide them in her freezing jar. A small tussle ensued, which Friggley easily won by clasping the Pearloiner in several of its wank-strong arms. “Don’t let her go!” said Rhumpa. She seized the precious clitty jar, remounted Friggley, and the curious trio lurched toward Lila’s office. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] The Pearloiner Says She’s Sorry [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] The Pearloiner was sitting on the couch, staring forward remorsefully. She’d been crying. The icy jar of clits was on a side table, shedding a soft gray mist. Zilka and Cheyenne stood on the open pussyrug, stripped down to their bras. Friggley was tied by the balls outside. “It was a misguided passion,” the Pearloiner was saying. “There are better things to collect. I see that now. I’m truly sorry for my compulsive thieving.” She fished in the jar, finding the plastic bags with Zilka’s and Cheyenne’s clits in them. “Thank you, Madame Pearloiner,” said Lila. “Zilka and Cheyenne will fix your hair and dress you for the Sherry Cobbler and Farewell Handjob Festival. As a first step, we must forgive.” The two lovely almost-naked women washed and blow-dried the Pearloiner’s hair and dressed her in a white shirt and a flattering navy-blue linen jacket. They left her naked down below. “Now, Madame, you know what you must do,” said Lila. She put the clitorises in the Pearloiner’s open palms. “Cup their pussies and reinstate their joys. Only you can give back what you took away.” The Pearloiner cupped the women’s crotches and jiggled her hands rapidly, saying, “By the power and the authority of the federal Transportation Security Administration, Eastern Region, HQ, I hereby give you back your clits and humbly ask your forgiveness for being so greedy to possess them.” “Oh, ooochie,” moaned Zilka, feeling her tender stem re-connecting. Moments after, Cheyenne’s clitoris went live. Her face cleared, and she beamed. “Finally!” she said. “Now down on the pussyrug, you two,” said Lila. “You must fix the repairs in place by gently grinding your gorgeous twats against each other.” Zilka and Cheyenne scissored themselves together and humped and ground, clit to blissfully reanimated clit. “Sealing it with a crimson pussy kiss,” said the Pearloiner, visibly moved. Lila opened a drawer and pulled out a large smooth wooden dildo, which she handed to the Pearloiner. “Madame, put this handmade Dendro wherever you would like it to go,” she said. The Pearloiner threw her strong tanned legs open and steered the dildo deep into her fur. She shook her head. “It’s good, but it’s not what I need,” she said. “I need live dick.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. November 12, 1956 NotesIn this eBook edition of The Annotated Lolita, you will find two types of hyperlinks. The first type is embedded into the number at the beginning of each chapter: these links allow you to move back and forth between the text and the notes. Notes specifically about a part of the text are linked to that part of the text. The second type of link, indicated by a “see” reference, allows you to move from one note to a related note. All page references to other Nabokov books are to the Vintage paperback editions. [image file=image_rsrc4YW.jpg] FOREWORDtwo titles: the term “white widowed male” occurs in the case histories of psychiatric works, while the entire subtitle parodies the titillating confessional novel, such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), and the expectations of the reader who hopes Lolita will provide the pleasures of pornography (see Duk Duk). Although Nabokov could hardly have realized it at the time of writing, there is no small irony in the fact that the timidity of American publishers resulted in the novel’s being first brought out by the Olympia Press, publishers of The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe and other “eighteenth-century sexcapades” (to use Clare Quilty’s description of Sade’s Justine, ou, Les Infortunes de la vertu [… The Misfortunes of Virtue]). preambulates: to make a preamble, introduce.

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

  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to death. Tsarnaev received a trial by jury, a right guaranteed to all Americans by the U.S. Constitution. According to the BBC, who reported on the sentencing, “Only two of the jurors believed Tsarnaev has felt remorse. The other 10, like many in Massachusetts, think he has no regrets.” Jurors formed these opinions of Tsarnaev’s remorse by observing him closely during the trial, where he reportedly sat “stone-faced” throughout most of the proceedings. Slate.com noted that Tsarnaev’s defense attorney “did not—or could not—present evidence [that] Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has felt any of the remorse that the prosecution says he is devoid of.”33 Trial by jury is considered the gold standard for fairness in a criminal case. Jurors are instructed to make decisions based only on the evidence presented. In a predicting brain, however, this is an impossible task. The jurors perceive every defendant, plaintiff, witness, judge, attorney, courtroom, and iota of evidence through the lens of their own conceptual system, which makes the idea of the impartial juror an implausible fiction. In effect, a jury is a dozen subjective perceptions that are supposed to yield one fair and objective truth. The idea that jurors can somehow detect remorse in a defendant, from his facial configurations or bodily movements or words, is steeped in the classical view, which assumes that emotions are universally expressed and recognized. The legal system assumes that remorse, like anger and other emotions, has a single, universal essence with a detectable fingerprint. However, remorse is an emotion category composed of many diverse instances, each one made for a specific situation. A defendant’s construction of remorse depends on his concept for “Remorse,” culled from his prior experiences within his culture, which exists as cascades of predictions that guide his expression and his experience. On the other side of the courtroom, a juror’s perception of remorse is a mental inference—a guess based on cascades of predictions in her brain that make sense of the defendant’s facial movements, body posture, and voice. For that juror’s perceptions to be “accurate,” she and the defendant must categorize with similar concepts. This kind of synchrony, with one person feeling remorse and the other perceiving it, even without words ever being spoken, is more likely to occur when two people have similar backgrounds, age, sex, or ethnicity.34

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  The tenderest caresses followed this confession. In such a frame of mind as she was now in, Elinor had no difficulty in obtaining from her whatever promise she required; and at her request, Marianne engaged never to speak of the affair to any one with the least appearance of bitterness; to meet Lucy without betraying the smallest increase of dislike to her; and even to see Edward himself, if chance should bring them together, without any diminution of her usual cordiality. These were great concessions; but where Marianne felt that she had injured, no reparation could be too much for her to make. She performed her promise of being discreet, to admiration.—She attended to all that Mrs. Jennings had to say upon the subject, with an unchanging complexion, dissented from her in nothing, and was heard three times to say, “Yes, ma’am.”—She listened to her praise of Lucy with only moving from one chair to another, and when Mrs. Jennings talked of Edward’s affection, it cost her only a spasm in her throat.—Such advances towards heroism in her sister, made Elinor feel equal to any thing herself. The next morning brought a farther trial of it, in a visit from their brother, who came with a most serious aspect to talk over the dreadful affair, and bring them news of his wife. “You have heard, I suppose,” said he with great solemnity, as soon as he was seated, “of the very shocking discovery that took place under our roof yesterday.” They all looked their assent; it seemed too awful a moment for speech. “Your sister,” he continued, “has suffered dreadfully. Mrs. Ferrars too—in short it has been a scene of such complicated distress—but I will hope that the storm may be weathered without our being any of us quite overcome. Poor Fanny! she was in hysterics all yesterday. But I would not alarm you too much. Donavan says there is nothing materially to be apprehended; her constitution is a good one, and her resolution equal to any thing. She has borne it all, with the fortitude of an angel! She says she never shall think well of anybody again; and one cannot wonder at it, after being so deceived!—meeting with such ingratitude, where so much kindness had been shown, so much confidence had been placed! It was quite out of the benevolence of her heart, that she had asked these young women to her house; merely because she thought they deserved some attention, were harmless, well-behaved girls, and would be pleasant companions; for otherwise we both wished very much to have invited you and Marianne to be with us, while your kind friend there, was attending her daughter. And now to be so rewarded! ‘I wish, with all my heart,’ says poor Fanny in her affectionate way, ‘that we had asked your sisters instead of them.’” Here he stopped to be thanked; which being done, he went on.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity, to some faint tenderness, even to a pattern of remorse daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger. Never had I thought that the rather ridiculous, though rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club, her mannerisms of elocution, her harsh, cold, contemptuous attitude toward an adorable, downy-armed child of twelve, could turn into such a touching, helpless creature as soon as I laid my hands upon her which happened on the threshold of Lolita’s room whither she tremulously backed repeating “no, no, please no.” The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration—a radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with wonder, I recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my expensive, always tailor- fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself. We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother. This was the white stomach within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934. This carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and touch, acquired at certain lamplit moments in the poster bed the tinge, if not the texture, of Lolita’s curls. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that biologically this was the nearest I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte had been as desirable a schoolgirl as her daughter was, and as Lolita’s daughter would be some day. I had my wife unearth from under a collection of shoes (Mr. Haze had a passion for them, it appears) a thirty-year-old album, so that I might see how Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen. So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naïvely lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests. I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her long-toed feet, I immolated myself … But it was all of no avail. Both doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution. In a street of Wace, on its outskirts … Oh, I am quite sure it was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or five loud young people of several sexes—but I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car. A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages specializing in “stage-automobile” operations, but I never could discover the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray.

• From Querelle (1953)

  He was hungry. He had been in hiding for three days, and he lived in fear of the crime he had committed. Sleeping - and waking, horrors filled his mind. He was afraid of rats, but he seriously considered catching one and eating it raw. Having sobered up almost instantly, the uselessness of the murder had become clear to him. He even felt some tenderness toward Theo, thinking of him. He remembered how kind Thea had been at first, remembered the carafes of white wine they had enjoyed together. He asked for his forgiveness. Remorse gnawed at him, made him feel hungrier still. Then he thought of his parents. Surely the newspapers and the police had informed them about his deed. What would they do? They, too, were working folk. The father was a mason. What would he think of his son killing another mason in a fit of amorous rage? And the kids he had gone to school with? Gil slept on the stone floor. He didn't pay any attention to his clothes-shirt, undershirt, pants-and they seemed to slip off him of their own accord, as if they wanted to leave Gil who crouched in the dark, passing a 153 I QUERELLE light finger-mechanically, voluptuously, but with no feelings of an erotic nature-almost caressing that sensitive excrescence of flesh he thought of as a light pink in color, and which once before had given him the sense of being a man, making it impossible for Thea to mount him. Having remained there so faithfully, his hemorrhoids reminded him of the scene, anp their presence strengthened his sense of being. HI guess they've buried Thea by now. I'm sure the guys took the day off. They all chipped in for a wreath." He curled up again, staying in a comer, clutching his knees in his arms. Now and again he got up and walked, but always slowly, fearfully, as if mysteriously anchored to the wall like Baron Franck, by a complicated network of chains fastened to his neck, his wrists, his waist, his ankles, and to the stones of the wall. Carefully he dragged along this load of invisible metal, being surprised in spite of himself that it was so easy to get out of his clothes, neither shirt nor trousers being held up by the shackles. Another reason for moving slowly was his fear of the ghost he might so easily raise by too heavy a footfall : it would rise and spread like a sail, given the slightest breath of wind.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The mistake made by Alexey Alexandrovitch in that, when preparing for seeing his wife, he had overlooked the possibility that her repentance might be sincere, and he might forgive her, and she might not die—this mistake was two months after his return from Moscow brought home to him in all its significance. But the mistake made by him had arisen not simply from his having overlooked that contingency, but also from the fact that until that day of his interview with his dying wife, he had not known his own heart. At his sick wife’s bedside he had for the first time in his life given way to that feeling of sympathetic suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of others, and hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful weakness. And pity for her, and remorse for having desired her death, and most of all, the joy of forgiveness, made him at once conscious, not simply of the relief of his own sufferings, but of a spiritual peace he had never experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing that was the source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insoluble while he was judging, blaming, and hating, had become clear and simple when he forgave and loved. He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and her remorse. He forgave Vronsky, and pitied him, especially after reports reached him of his despairing action. He felt more for his son than before. And he blamed himself now for having taken too little interest in him. But for the little newborn baby he felt a quite peculiar sentiment, not of pity, only, but of tenderness. At first, from a feeling of compassion alone, he had been interested in the delicate little creature, who was not his child, and who was cast on one side during her mother’s illness, and would certainly have died if he had not troubled about her, and he did not himself observe how fond he became of her. He would go into the nursery several times a day, and sit there for a long while, so that the nurses, who were at first afraid of him, got quite used to his presence. Sometimes for half an hour at a stretch he would sit silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy, wrinkled face of the sleeping baby, watching the movements of the frowning brows, and the fat little hands, with clenched fingers, that rubbed the little eyes and nose. At such moments particularly, Alexey Alexandrovitch had a sense of perfect peace and inward harmony, and saw nothing extraordinary in his position, nothing that ought to be changed.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  In spite of these words and this smile, which so frightened Varya, when the inflammation was over and he began to recover, he felt that he was completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he had, as it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt before. He could now think calmly of Alexey Alexandrovitch. He recognized all his magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself humiliated by it. Besides, he got back again into the beaten track of his life. He saw the possibility of looking men in the face again without shame, and he could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing he could not pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling with it, was the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her forever. That now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was bound to renounce her, and never in future to stand between her with her repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart; but he could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he had so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm. Serpuhovskoy had planned his appointment at Tashkend, and Vronsky agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But the nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he was making to what he thought his duty. His wound had healed, and he was driving about making preparations for his departure for Tashkend. “To see her once and then to bury myself, to die,” he thought, and as he was paying farewell visits, he uttered this thought to Betsy. Charged with this commission, Betsy had gone to Anna, and brought him back a negative reply. “So much the better,” thought Vronsky, when he received the news. “It was a weakness, which would have shattered what strength I have left.” Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced that she had heard through Oblonsky as a positive fact that Alexey Alexandrovitch had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky could see Anna. Without even troubling himself to see Betsy out of his flat, forgetting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where her husband was, Vronsky drove straight to the Karenins’. He ran up the stairs seeing no one and nothing, and with a rapid step, almost breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering, without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck with kisses.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Left alone, after putting his manuscripts together in the new portfolio bought by her, he washed his hands at the new washstand with the elegant fittings, that had all made their appearance with her. Levin smiled at his own thoughts, and shook his head disapprovingly at those thoughts; a feeling akin to remorse fretted him. There was something shameful, effeminate, Capuan, as he called it to himself, in his present mode of life. “It’s not right to go on like this,” he thought. “It’ll soon be three months, and I’m doing next to nothing. Today, almost for the first time, I set to work seriously, and what happened? I did nothing but begin and throw it aside. Even my ordinary pursuits I have almost given up. On the land I scarcely walk or drive about at all to look after things. Either I am loath to leave her, or I see she’s dull alone. And I used to think that, before marriage, life was nothing much, somehow didn’t count, but that after marriage, life began in earnest. And here almost three months have passed, and I have spent my time so idly and unprofitably. No, this won’t do; I must begin. Of course, it’s not her fault. She’s not to blame in any way. I ought myself to be firmer, to maintain my masculine independence of action; or else I shall get into such ways, and she’ll get used to them too.... Of course she’s not to blame,” he told himself. But it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction. And it vaguely came into Levin’s mind that she herself was not to blame (she could not be to blame for anything), but what was to blame was her education, too superficial and frivolous. (“That fool Tcharsky: she wanted, I know, to stop him, but didn’t know how to.”) “Yes, apart from her interest in the house (that she has), apart from dress and _broderie anglaise_, she has no serious interests. No interest in her work, in the estate, in the peasants, nor in music, though she’s rather good at it, nor in reading. She does nothing, and is perfectly satisfied.” Levin, in his heart, censured this, and did not as yet understand that she was preparing for that period of activity which was to come for her when she would at once be the wife of her husband and mistress of the house, and would bear, and nurse, and bring up children. He knew not that she was instinctively aware of this, and preparing herself for this time of terrible toil, did not reproach herself for the moments of carelessness and happiness in her love that she enjoyed now while gaily building her nest for the future. Chapter 16