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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His brother found him a job leading ski tours of eager coeds to Switzerland, where he was last heard yodeling on his way to his death as he missed a turn and sailed off into a crevasse. The college I went to was near Eton and I often visited the Scotts. One day I discovered Rachel laughing and sobbing. Finally overcome by curiosity, she’d broken open the casket where DeQuincey kept his pastoral letters from Father Burke. They were all love letters, hysterical avowals of pornographic desire, some of it clearly referring to actual nights of passion they’d spent together. “To think Burke kept urging me to stay with Quince,” she said. “I was their cover.” She kept sifting through the letters, and her horrible silent chuckle resumed. Tim, older now and in first grade, looked in, but when he saw his mother talking to herself he frowned and clattered up the stairs to his room. As I left the headmaster’s office that day I noticed the wind was now sharp with snow needles. Evening was coming on rapidly. It had been implicit in the dim day all along, just as the snow had been. In the gray light the snow could be felt but not seen; suddenly lamps along the walkway snapped on and their halos were grained by a million, million lights. The return to the music building wasn’t lustful or fearful but ceremonial. I felt as though I were a dancer not up to his role but inspired by the expectation everywhere in the darkness around me. Or I felt like someone in history, a queen on her way to the scaffold determined to suppress her usual quips, to give the spectators the high deeds they wanted to see. Mr. Beattie was stoned. His smile was unfocused and perpetual. He started telling me a long story I couldn’t follow, something about something someone had once said to him somewhere, but then he noticed we’d drifted into the listening booth. He didn’t turn on the light. The darkness was illumined by light reflected up through the windows off the snowdrifts outside. He put on a record. He sat in an armchair, lit another marijuana cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. When he offered me a drag I smiled with what I hoped passed for affection and shook my head. A moment later I was kneeling on the floor beside him. I opened his fly and pulled out his large and already erect penis. “Here,” he said, “let me make it better for you,” and he undid his belt and dropped his trousers to his knees. I’d been right; his thighs were very powerful. He took my right hand and guided it to his testicles in the loose, floppy bag. I gathered I was supposed to roll them around.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  31At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto—even if that “purity” (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned, old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of “normal child” had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C. and its fascinating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlighted era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place—even bearing in mind the crude behavior of American schoolchildren—I still was under the impression that whatever went on among those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the “latency” period of girlhood. Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred—and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret! Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita—the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people. And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes “Otto Otto” and “Mesmer Mesmer” and “Lambert Lambert,” but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best. When I started, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul. In mid-composition, however, I realized that I could not parade living Lolita. I still may use parts of this memoir in hermetic sessions, but publication is to be deferred. For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I am opposed to capital punishment; this attitude will be, I trust, shared by the sentencing judge. Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges. But even so, Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years. The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive. Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Bit feminist, you know. She wasn’t nice to me, son. She was unhinged . . .’ A few tears, here. Wiping them sloppily with the sleeve of his cardigan. ‘But I stopped the service – last year I stopped it. Your Kiki did it for me. It’s in me little book. You ain’t paying for it. There’s no . . . no . . . bugger, WHAT IS THE NAME OF IT? Debit . . . my mind goes . . . debit . . .’ ‘ Direct debit ,’ supplied Howard, raising his own voice and hating himself now. ‘It’s not the bloody money, is it, Dad? It’s about a standard of care.’ ‘I care for meself !’ And then, under his breath, ‘ I bloody have to . . .’ So how long was that? Eight minutes? Harry on the edge of his seat, pleading, and always pleading with the wrong words. Howard already incensed, looking at the rose in the ceiling. A stranger could come in now and think them both completely insane. And neither man would be able to give an account of why what had just happened had happened, or at least no account that would be shorter than sitting down with the stranger and taking them through an oral history – with slides – of the past fifty-seven years, day by day. They didn’t mean it to be like this. But it was like this. Both had other intentions. Howard had knocked on the door eight minutes ago filled with hope, his heart loosened by music, his mind stunned and opened by the appalling proximity of death. He was a big malleable ball of potential change, waiting on the doorstep. Eight minutes ago. But once inside, everything was the same as it had always been. He didn’t mean to be so aggressive, or to raise his voice or to pick fights. He meant to be kind and tolerant. Equally, four years ago, Harry surely hadn’t meant to tell his only son that you couldn’t expect black people to develop mentally like white people do. He had meant to say: I love you, I love my grandchildren, please stay another day. ‘Here you are,’ sang Carol, and put two unappetizing milky teas before the Belseys. ‘No, I won’t stay. I’ll be going.’ Harold wiped yet another tear away. ‘Carol, don’t go! This is my son. Howard, I’ve told you about him.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ said Carol, but she did not look charmed and now Howard regretted having spoken so loudly. ‘Dr Howard Belsey.’ ‘Doctor!’ cried Carol, without smiling. She crossed her arms across her chest, waiting to be impressed. ‘No, no . . . not medical,’ clarified Harold and looked defeated. ‘He didn’t have the patience for medical.’

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  I still was eager downwards and bent, when my Leader touched me on the side, saying: “Speak thou; this is a Latian.” And I, who had my answer ready then, began without delay to speak: “O soul, that there below art hidden! thy Romagna is not, and never was, without war in the hearts of her tyrants; but openly just now I there left none. Ravenna stands, as it has stood for many years: the Eagle of Polenta4 broods over it, so that he covers Cervia with his pinions. The city, which made erewhile the long probation, and sanguinary heap of the Frenchmen, finds itself again under the Green Clutches.5 The old Mastiff of Verrucchio and the young,6 who of Montagna made evil governance, there, where they are wont, ply their teeth. The cities of Lamone and Santerno guide the Lioncel of the white lair, who changes faction from the summer to the winter;7 and that city whose flank the Savio bathes, as it lies between the plain and mount, so lives it between tyranny and freedom.8 Now I pray thee, tell us who thou art; be not more hard than one has been to thee, so may thy name on earth maintain its front.” After the flame had roared awhile as usual, it moved the sharp point to and fro, and then gave forth this breath: “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee. I was a man of arms; and then became a Cordelier,9 hoping, thus girt, to make amends; and certainly my hope Were come in full, but for the Great Priest, may ill befall him! who brought me back to my first sins; and how and why, I wish thee to hear from me. Whilst I was the form of bones and pulp, which my mother gave me, my deeds were not those of the lion, but of the fox. All wiles and covert ways I knew; and used the art of them so well, that to the ends of the earth the sound went forth. When I saw myself come to that period of my age at which everyone should lower sails and gather in his ropes, that which before had pleased me, grieved me then; and with repentance and confession I became a monk; ah woe alas! and it would have availed me. The Prince of the new Pharisees10—waging war near to the Lateran, and not with Saracens or Jews; for every enemy of his was Christian, and none had been to conquer Acre, nor been a merchant in the Soldan’s land— regarded not the Highest Office nor Holy Orders in himself, nor in me that Cord which used to make those whom it girded leaner.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone. 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. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French Gray …

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The headmaster, as it turned out, botched everything. He did bring in the narcs, who did give me a brochure about heroin; I was basalt with indignation. Mr. Beattie was fired, but he was allowed to hang around until well into the next semester. Since Beattie couldn’t say we’d had sex, at a faculty meeting he accused me and DeQuincey of being lovers. Good old Quince stood by me, though he was badly shaken; the accusation had been just accurate enough to scare him. At last Beattie left us; I didn’t see him again until three years later, when I was in college and he was playing drums in a two-bit band at a fraternity dance. His eyes locked with mine. I felt I should tell him how much I repented what I’d done to him. I’d used and discarded him—just as my dad had mistreated Alice, the Addressograph operator. Oh, there are lots of stories I could tell. Dr. O’Reilly, who of course turned out to be a speed freak, had a breakdown one day and had to be hauled off to a clinic for several years. My friend Howie, true to his prediction, died before he was twenty. I saw him when he was very ill in the hospital. He was yellow and bloated from nephritis. I had to hold a mirror for him while he trimmed his own hair: “Don’t want to leave my last haircut to these hacks,” he said gallantly, a trace of the old Nazi dandy having reemerged in extremity. At the funeral Howie’s father turned out to be a young middle-level executive for a big corporation. The funeral was held at the McCabe Funeral Home (I pronounced it “macabre”). I was a pallbearer. There was a Hammond organ toothlessly mouthing hymns as though the music were bread soaked in milk. Our handsome, oafish chaplain gave the sermon. He’d never spoken for two seconds to Howie, who in any event had been a militant atheist. Oh, and the chaplain was found soon afterward in another master’s wife’s bed and he was not only dismissed from Eton but also defrocked. His brother found him a job leading ski tours of eager coeds to Switzerland, where he was last heard yodeling on his way to his death as he missed a turn and sailed off into a crevasse.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  So did many of our fathers with Guittone, shouting in turn and praising him alone; but truth has prevailed at length with most persons. Now if thou hast such ample privilege, that ’tis permitted thee to go to the cloister wherein Christ is abbot of the college, do me there the saying of a Pater Noster so far as is needful to us of this world, where power to sin is no more ours.” Then perchance to give place to another following close, he vanished through the flames, like a fish going through the water to the bottom. A little forward I drew me towards the one he had pointed out, and said that my desire was preparing a grateful place for his name. Willingly he began to say: “So doth your courteous request please me that I cannot, nor will I, hide me from you. I am Arnault that weep and go a-singing; in thought I see my past madness, and I see with joy the day which I await before me. Now I pray you, by that Goodness which guideth you to the summit of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain.” Then he hid him in the fire which refines them.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He looked longingly at the closed door as though he hoped someone would open it and end this eternal interview. “And are you quite sure you haven’t become an addict yourself?” he asked. “Shall I have the Narcotics people bring you some of their interesting literature on addiction? I’m sure they have some splendid brochures, they should, our tax dollars, you know …” And he went on mumbling to himself until I was able to slip out. No one was worthy of me. I had twenty minutes to kill before my rendezvous with Beattie, an interval I resented, so habituated had I already become to the tight scheduling of the great man, the man of the world. The headmaster, as it turned out, botched everything. He did bring in the narcs, who did give me a brochure about heroin; I was basalt with indignation. Mr. Beattie was fired, but he was allowed to hang around until well into the next semester. Since Beattie couldn’t say we’d had sex, at a faculty meeting he accused me and DeQuincey of being lovers. Good old Quince stood by me, though he was badly shaken; the accusation had been just accurate enough to scare him. At last Beattie left us; I didn’t see him again until three years later, when I was in college and he was playing drums in a two-bit band at a fraternity dance. His eyes locked with mine. I felt I should tell him how much I repented what I’d done to him. I’d used and discarded him—just as my dad had mistreated Alice, the Addressograph operator. Oh, there are lots of stories I could tell. Dr. O’Reilly, who of course turned out to be a speed freak, had a breakdown one day and had to be hauled off to a clinic for several years. My friend Howie, true to his prediction, died before he was twenty. I saw him when he was very ill in the hospital. He was yellow and bloated from nephritis. I had to hold a mirror for him while he trimmed his own hair: “Don’t want to leave my last haircut to these hacks,” he said gallantly, a trace of the old Nazi dandy having reemerged in extremity. At the funeral Howie’s father turned out to be a young middle-level executive for a big corporation. The funeral was held at the McCabe Funeral Home (I pronounced it “macabre”). I was a pallbearer. There was a Hammond organ toothlessly mouthing hymns as though the music were bread soaked in milk. Our handsome, oafish chaplain gave the sermon. He’d never spoken for two seconds to Howie, who in any event had been a militant atheist. Oh, and the chaplain was found soon afterward in another master’s wife’s bed and he was not only dismissed from Eton but also defrocked.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Let that suffice thee, and spurn the earth with thy heels, turn thine eyes to the lure which the eternal King spinneth round with the mighty spheres.” Like the falcon, that first gazes at his feet, then turns at the call, and spreads his wings with desire of the repast which draws him there, such I became; and, far as the rock is cleft to give passage to him who mounts, such I went, up to where the circling is begun. When I was in the open, on the fifth circle, I saw people about it who wept, lying on the ground all turned downwards. “Adhæsit pavimento anima mea,”5 I heard them say with such deep sighs that hardly were the words understood. “O chosen of God, whose sufferings both justice and hope make less hard, direct us towards the high ascents.” If ye come secure from lying prostrate, and desire to find the way most quickly, let your right hands be ever to the outside.”6 Thus prayed the poet, and thus a little in front of us was answer made; wherefore I noted what else was concealed in the words,7 and turned mine eyes then to my Lord; whereat he gave assent with glad sign to what the look of my desire was craving. When I could do with me according to my own mind, I drew forward above that creature whose words before made me take note, saying: “Spirit, in whom weeping matures that without which one cannot turn to God, stay a while for me thy greater care. Who thou wast, and why ye have your backs turned upward, tell me, and if thou wouldst that I obtain aught for thee yonder, whence living I set forth.” And he8 to me: “Wherefore heaven turneth our backs to itself shalt thou know; but first, scias quod ego fui successor Petri. Between Sestri and Chiaveri flows down a fair river, and from its name the title of my race takes origin. One month, and little more, I learned how the great mantle weighs on him who keeps it from the mire, so that all other burdens seem feathers. My conversion, ah me! was late; but when I was made Pastor of Rome, so I discovered the life which is false. I saw that there the heart was not at rest, nor could one mount higher in that life; wherefore love of this was kindled within me. Up to that moment, I was a soul wretched and parted from God, wholly avaricious; now, as thou seest, here am I punished for it. What avarice works, here is declared in the purgation of the down-turned souls, and no more bitter penalty hath the mount. Even as our eye, fixed on earthly things, did not lift itself on high, so here justice hath sunk it to earth. As avarice quenched our love for every good, wherefore our works were lost, so justice here doth hold us fast,

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The void of the street, revealing nothing of my wife’s departure except a rhinestone button that she had dropped in the mud after preserving it for three unnecessary years in a broken box, may have spared me a bloody nose. But no matter. I had my little revenge in due time. A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs. Maximovich née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945; the couple had somehow got over to California and had been used there, for an excellent salary, in a year-long experiment conducted by a distinguished American ethnologist. The experiment dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours. My informant, a doctor, swore he had seen with his own eyes obese Valechka and her colonel, by then gray-haired and also quite corpulent, diligently crawling about the well-swept floors of a brightly lit set of rooms (fruit in one, water in another, mats in a third and so on) in the company of several other hired quadrupeds, selected from indigent and helpless groups. I tried to find the results of these tests in the Review of Anthropology; but they appear not to have been published yet. These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate. I hope they will be illustrated with good photographs when they do get printed, although it is not very likely that a prison library will harbor such erudite works. The one to which I am restricted these days, despite my lawyer’s favors, is a good example of the inane eclecticism governing the selection of books in prison libraries. They have the Bible, of course, and Dickens (an ancient set, N. Y., G. W. Dillingham, Publisher, MDCCCLXXXVII); and the Children’s Encyclopedia (with some nice photographs of sunshine-haired Girl Scouts in shorts), and A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie; but they also have such coruscating trifles as A Vagabond in Italy by Percy Elphinstone, author of Venice Revisited, Boston, 1868, and a comparatively recent (1946) Who’s Who in the Limelight—actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love. I transcribe most of the page:

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  What remained of it in my mind were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheatre of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its extreme edges—a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried shuttle smear of a pencil’s rubber end, and with parts of numbers obliterated or reconstructed in a child’s hand, presented a tangle of barbed wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state—one adjacent to the state Beardsley was in. I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and, mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone. 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.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  such stood I. And she said: “Since through hearing thou art grieving, lift up thy beard and more grief shalt thou receive by looking.” With less resistance is uprooted the sturdy oak, whether by wind of ours, or that which blows from Iarbas’ land,6 Than at her command I lifted up my chin; and when by the beard she asked for my face, well I knew the venom of the argument. And when my face was stretched forth, my sight perceived those primal creatures7 resting from their strewing, and mine eyes, as yet hardly steadfast, saw Beatrice turned towards the beast, which is one sole person in two natures. Under her veil and beyond the stream, to me she seemed to surpass more her ancient self, than she surpassed the others here when she was with us. The nettle of repentance here so did sting me, that of all other things, that which turned me most to love of it became most hateful to me so much remorse gnawed at my heart that I fell vanquished, and what I then became, she knoweth who gave me the cause. Then when my heart restored to me the sense of outward things, the lady whom I had found alone I saw above me; and she said: “Hold me! Hold me!” She had drawn me into the river up to my neck, and, pulling me after her, went along over the water light as a shuttle. When I was nigh unto the blessed bank “Asperges me”8 so sweetly I heard that I cannot remember it much less describe it. The fair lady opened her arms, clasped my head, and dipped me where I must needs swallow of the water; then drew me forth, and led me bathed within the dance of the four fair ones, and each did cover me with her arm. “Here we are nymphs and in heaven are stars;9 ere Beatrice descended to the world we were ordained to her for her handmaids.10 We will lead thee to her eyes; but the three on the other side who deeper gaze, will sharpen thine eyes to the joyous light that is within.” Thus singing they began; and then did lead me with them up to the breast of the griffin, where Beatrice stood turned towards us. They said: “Look that thou spare not thine eyes; we have placed thee before the emeralds11 whence Love once drew his shafts at thee.”12 A thousand desires hotter than flame held mine eyes bound to the shining eyes, which remained ever fixed upon the griffin. As the sun in a mirror, not otherwise the twofold beast was beaming within them, now with the attributes of one, now of the other nature. Think, reader, if I marvelled within me when I saw the thing itself remain motionless, and in its image it was changing.13 While my soul, filled with wonderment and glad, was tasting of that food which, satisfying of itself, causes thirst of itself,14

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

  In November 2008, Cinelli convinced the parole board that he was no longer a criminal with darkness in his soul. The board unanimously voted to free him. It didn’t take long for Cinelli to embark on a new series of robberies and fatally shoot a police officer. Cinelli was later killed during a shootout with the police. The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, saw five of the seven members of the parole board resign. He seemed to think that they lacked the ability to detect authentic remorse. 4 0 It’s possible that Cinelli was putting on an act. It’s also possible that Cinelli authentically felt remorse in the moment while he was testifying, but once he was out of prison, his old model of the world resurfaced, with his old predictions, creating his old self, and his remorse evaporated. Since there is no objective criterion for feelings of remorse, we will never know for sure. There is likewise no objective criterion for anger, sadness, fear, or any other emotion relevant to a trial. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy once said that juries must “know the heart and mind of the offender” in order for a defendant to have a fair trial. Emotions, however, have no consistent fingerprints in facial movements, body posture and gestures, or voice. Jurors and other perceivers make educated guesses about what those movements and sounds mean in emotional terms, but there is no objective accuracy. At best, we can measure whether jurors agree with one another in the emotions they perceive, but when the defendant and the jurors have different backgrounds, beliefs, or expectations, agreement is a poor substitute for accuracy. If a defendant’s demeanor cannot reveal emotion, then the legal system is left to grapple with a difficult question: under what circumstances can a trial be completely fair? 4 1 … When jurors or judges see smugness in a defendant’s smile, or when they hear a witness’s quavering voice as fear, they are making a mental inference, employing their emotion concepts to guess that the action (smiling or quavering) was caused by a particular state of mind. Mental inference, you’ll remember, is how your brain gives meaning to other people’s actions through a cascade of predictions ( chapter 6 ). 4 2 Mental inference is so pervasive and automatic, at least in cultures of the West, that we’re usually unaware of doing it. We believe that our senses provide an accurate and objective representation of the world, as if we had X- ray vision for deciphering another person’s behavior to discover his intent (“I can see right through you”).

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

  Your insula might be larger or more highly connected than mine without any discernable effect on your behavior when compared to my behavior. Even if we examine many brains and find a statistically significant difference in insula size between people who are more or less aggressive, that doesn’t mean that a larger insula causes aggression, let alone murder. (Plus, even if a larger insula did cause aggression, how big does it need to be to produce a killer?) In rare cases, a tumor can press against the brain and cause severe personality changes, but in general, it is not scientifically justified to try a brain region for murder. 3 1 Perhaps the most surprising thing about Albertani’s case is that the expert witnesses and the judge thought that the brain was an “extenuating explanation” for Albertani’s murderous behavior. All behavior stems from the brain. No human actions, thoughts, or feelings exist apart from firing neurons. The wrong way to use neuroscience in court is to argue that a biological explanation automatically releases someone from responsibility. You are your brain. 3 2 The law often looks for simple, single causes, so it’s tempting to blame a brain aberration for criminal behavior. But behavior in real life is anything but simple. It’s a culmination of multiple factors, including predictions from your brain, prediction error from your five senses plus interoceptive sensation, and a complex cascade involving billions of prediction loops. And that’s just the story inside a single person. Your brain is also surrounded by other brains in other bodies. Whenever you speak or act, you influence the predictions of others around you, who in turn influence your predictions right back. A whole culture collectively plays a role in the concepts you build and the predictions you make, and therefore in your behavior. People can argue over how large a role culture plays, but the fact of its role is not debatable. Bottom line: Sometimes a biological problem can interfere with your brain’s ability to choose your actions with intent. Maybe you grow a brain tumor, or some neurons begin to die in just the wrong places. But mere variability in the brain—in its structure, function, chemistry, or genetics—is not an extenuating circumstance for a crime. Variation is the norm. … 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.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It had been stupid and perverse to greet such passionate spontaneity with complaints about the weather and the hour. She felt it to be a kind of test, and now she saw she had failed it. It was exactly the kind of offer Howard and the kids would have thought absurd, sentimental and impractical – it was an offer she should have taken up. She spent the late afternoon in a snappy sulk, testy with her family and uninterested in the peace lunch (one of many of the past few weeks) that Howard had cooked for her. After the meal she put on her hat and gloves and walked back round to Redwood Avenue. Clotilde  On Beauty answered the door and said that Mrs Kipps had just left for the Amherst house and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. In a bit of a panic Kiki jogged as best she could to the bus stop; gave up on the bus, walked to the crossroads and managed to hail a cab. At the station she found Carlene buying a hot chocolate and preparing to board the train. ‘Kiki!’ ‘I want to come – I’d love to – if you’ll still have me.’ Carlene put one gloved hand to Kiki’s hot cheek in a manner that unexpectedly made her want to weep. ‘You’ll stay over. We’ll eat in town and spend all tomorrow in the house. You’re such a funny woman. What a thing to do!’ They were just walking arm in arm up the platform when they heard Carlene’s name cried out several times: ‘Mum! Hey, Mum!’ ‘Vee! Michael! But this is . . . hello, my darlings! Monty!’ ‘Carlene, what on earth are you doing here? Come here, let me kiss you, you silly old thing – what about this! So you’re feeling better, then.’ Here Carlene nodded like a happy child. ‘Hello,’ said Monty to Kiki, frowning as he did so, and shaking her hand briefly before turning back to his wife. ‘We had a New York nightmare – the incompetent running that church – it’s either incompetence or criminality – anyway, we’re back early, and very pleased about it – not a chance Michael’s getting married in that place, I can tell you that – not a chance – but what are you – ’ ‘I was heading up to Eleanor’s house,’ said Carlene, beaming, accepting hugs on either side from her two children, one of whom, Victoria, was looking over at Kiki like a jealous lover. Another young girl, plainly dressed, with a blue polo neck and pearls at her throat, held Michael’s spare arm. His fianceé, Kiki assumed. ‘Kiki, I think we shall have to postpone our trip.’ ‘The man claimed to know nothing – nothing – of the last four letters we sent him about the school in Trinidad. He’d washed his hands of it! Shame he didn’t tell anyone at our end.’ ‘And his accounts were so dodgy.

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

  3 5 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. 3 6 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. 3 7 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. 3 8 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. 3 9 At the other end of the spectrum, a show of remorse can mean absolutely nothing. Take the case of Dominic Cinelli, a violent criminal with a thirty-year history of armed robberies, assaults, and prison escapes. Cinelli was serving three consecutive life sentences when he appeared before the Massachusetts Parole Board in 2008. A parole board is made up of psychologists, corrections officers, and other knowledgeable professionals who decide whether an inmate will serve beyond his minimum sentence or be released. They witness a virtual parade of remorse, some genuinely experi enced and some faked, and their profound responsibility to the public rests on their ability to tell the difference.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  31At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant’s drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. 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.

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

  At the other end of the spectrum, a show of remorse can mean absolutely nothing. Take the case of Dominic Cinelli, a violent criminal with a thirty-year history of armed robberies, assaults, and prison escapes. Cinelli was serving three consecutive life sentences when he appeared before the Massachusetts Parole Board in 2008. A parole board is made up of psychologists, corrections officers, and other knowledgeable professionals who decide whether an inmate will serve beyond his minimum sentence or be released. They witness a virtual parade of remorse, some genuinely experienced and some faked, and their profound responsibility to the public rests on their ability to tell the difference. In November 2008, Cinelli convinced the parole board that he was no longer a criminal with darkness in his soul. The board unanimously voted to free him. It didn’t take long for Cinelli to embark on a new series of robberies and fatally shoot a police officer. Cinelli was later killed during a shootout with the police. The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, saw five of the seven members of the parole board resign. He seemed to think that they lacked the ability to detect authentic remorse.40 It’s possible that Cinelli was putting on an act. It’s also possible that Cinelli authentically felt remorse in the moment while he was testifying, but once he was out of prison, his old model of the world resurfaced, with his old predictions, creating his old self, and his remorse evaporated. Since there is no objective criterion for feelings of remorse, we will never know for sure. There is likewise no objective criterion for anger, sadness, fear, or any other emotion relevant to a trial. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy once said that juries must “know the heart and mind of the offender” in order for a defendant to have a fair trial. Emotions, however, have no consistent fingerprints in facial movements, body posture and gestures, or voice. Jurors and other perceivers make educated guesses about what those movements and sounds mean in emotional terms, but there is no objective accuracy. At best, we can measure whether jurors agree with one another in the emotions they perceive, but when the defendant and the jurors have different backgrounds, beliefs, or expectations, agreement is a poor substitute for accuracy. If a defendant’s demeanor cannot reveal emotion, then the legal system is left to grapple with a difficult question: under what circumstances can a trial be completely fair?41 … When jurors or judges see smugness in a defendant’s smile, or when they hear a witness’s quavering voice as fear, they are making a mental inference, employing their emotion concepts to guess that the action (smiling or quavering) was caused by a particular state of mind. Mental inference, you’ll remember, is how your brain gives meaning to other people’s actions through a cascade of predictions (chapter 6).42