Sadness

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 On Beauty (2005)

  Because my mum doesn’t – didn’t – make friends with just anybody,’ said Victoria, her voice catching at this change of tense. ‘She was particular about people. She was hard to get to know. I’ve been thinking that maybe I didn’t get to know her very well . . .’ ‘I’m sure that’s not – ’ ‘No, shush,’ said Victoria drunkenly and let some tears slip down her face untended, ‘that’s not the point – what I was saying is, she didn’t suffer fools, you know? They had to be special in some way. They had to be real people . Not like you and me. Real, special. So Kiki must be special. Would you say,’ said Victoria, ‘that she was special?’ Howard dropped his fag in Victoria’s empty glass. Breasts or no breasts, it was time to leave.  on beauty and being wrong ‘I’d say . . . that she has enabled my existence in the form that it has taken. And that form is special to us, yes.’ Victoria shook her head ruefully and reached out a hand, which she now placed on his knee. ‘There you are, see? You can never just say . . . I like the tomato .’ ‘I thought we were talking about my wife, not a vegetable.’ Victoria tapped a correcting finger against his trousers. ‘Fruit, actually.’ Howard nodded. ‘Fruit.’ ‘Come on, Dr, give me some more.’ Howard held his glass up and away. ‘You’ve had enough.’ ‘Give me some more!’ She did it. She jumped off the bed and into his lap. His erection was blatant, but first she coolly drank the rest of his wine, pressing down on him as Lolita did on Humbert, as if he were just a chair she happened to sit on. No doubt she had read Lolita . And then her arm went round the back of his neck and Lolita turned into a temptress (maybe she had learned from Mrs Robinson too), lasciviously sucking his ear, and then from temptress she moved to affectionate high-school girlfriend, sweetly kissing the corner of his mouth. But what kind of sweetheart was this? He had barely started to return her kiss when she commenced groaning in a disconcertingly enthusiastic manner, and this was followed by a strange fluting business with her tongue, catching Howard off guard. He kept trying to regulate the kiss, to return it back to what he knew of kissing, but she was determined to flicker her tongue in the top of his mouth while keeping a zealous and frankly uncomfortable grip on his balls. Now she began to unbutton his shirt slowly, as if accompanying music were playing, and seemed disappointed not to find a pornographic rug of hair here. She rubbed it conceptually, as if the hair were indeed there, tugging at what little Howard possessed while – could it be? – purring.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We had no money to live on, really. My fellowship to graduate school, a small trust fund I couldn’t touch for several years, and a few rapidly falling stocks my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Brian had dropped out of graduate school in a fit of fury with the establishment, but now he found himself having to take a job. Our life changed radically. We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl into the bourgeois box. Our idyll was over. The long walks, the studying together, the lazy afternoons in bed—all these belonged to a golden age that had passed. Brian now spent his days (and most of his nights) toiling away in a small market-research firm where he sweated over the computers, anxiously awaiting their answers to such earthshaking questions as whether or not women who have had two years of college will buy more detergent than women who have graduated from college. He threw himself into market research with the same manic passion that he had for medieval history or anything else. He had to know everything; he had to work harder than anybody else, including his boss—who sold the business for several million dollars in cash not long after Brian checked into the psycho ward. The whole operation was later shown to be a fraud. But by that time, Brian’s boss was living in an old castle in Switzerland with a new young wife and Brian had been “certified.” For all his brilliance, Brian didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) what a con man his boss was. He often used to sit watching the computers until twelve o’clock at night. Meanwhile I sweated in the stacks of Butler Library writing a ridiculous thesis on dirty words in English poetry (or, as my uptight thesis adviser had titled it: “Sexual Slang in English Poetry of the Mid-eighteenth Century”). Even then I was a pedantic pornographer.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  His lazy actions and the brief words moved my lips to smile a little; then I began: “Belacqua, it grieves me not11 for thee now; but tell me, why art thou seated here? dost thou await escort, or hast thou but resumed thy wonted habit?” And he: “Brother, what avails it to ascend? For God’s winged angel that sits at the gate, would not let me pass to the torments. First must the heavens revolve around me outside it, so long as they did during my life, because I delayed my healing sighs to the end: unless before, a prayer aids me, which may rise up from a heart that lives in grace: what profits another that in heaven is not heard?” And already the poet was mounting before me, and saying: “Come on now, thou seest the meridian is touched by the sun, and Night already with her foot covers from Ganges’ banks to Morocco.”12 1. “Plato asserted that there were divers souls with distinct organs in one and the same body” (Thomas Aquinas). On the Aristotelian doctrine of the three kinds of soul—vegetative, animal, and rational, see Canto xxv.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Merry Christmas,” Reva said in a voice mail. “I’m here at the hospital, but I’m coming back to town for the office party tomorrow. Ken will be there, of course. . . .” I deleted her message and went back to sleep. • • • CHRISTMAS DAY, around nightfall, I woke up on the sofa in a restless fog. Unable to sleep or use my hands to work the remote or open the bottle of temazepam, I went out to get my fix of coffee. Downstairs, the doorman sat reading the paper on his little stool. “Merry Christmas,” he yawned, turning the page, barely looking up at me. The sidewalks were piled high with snow. A foot-wide pathway had been shoveled from the entrance of my building to the bodega. My slippers were brown suede with shearling on the inside, and the salt on the ground stained them with white crusts. I kept my head down, away from the biting air and the joy of the holiday. I didn’t want to be reminded of Christmases past. No associations, no heartstrings snagged on a tree in a window, no memories. Since it had turned cold, I’d lived in flannel pajamas, the big down-filled ski jacket. Sometimes I even slept in that jacket because I kept the temperature inside the apartment so low. The Egyptian on duty gave me my coffees for free that night because the ATM had run out of cash. Stacks of old, unsold newspapers were piled up against a broken window next to the fridge of milk and sodas. I read the headlines slowly, my eyes blurring and crossing as I stared. The new president was going to be hard on terrorists. A Harlem teenager had thrown her newborn baby down a sewage drain. A mine caved in somewhere in South America. A local councilman was caught having gay sex with an illegal immigrant. Someone who used to be fat was now extremely thin. Mariah Carey gave Christmas gifts to orphans in the Dominican Republic. A survivor of the Titanic died in a car crash. I had a vague notion that Reva was coming over that night. She probably wanted to pretend to want to cheer me up. “I’ll pay you back for a pack of Parliaments,” I told the Egyptian. “Plus a Klondike bar. And these M&M’s.” I pointed to the peanut kind. He nodded okay. I looked down through the sliding glass cover of the freezer where all the ice cream and popsicles were kept. There was stuff frozen solid at the bottom that had been there for years, embedded in the white fuzz of ice. A glacial world. I stared at the mountains of ice crystals and spaced out for a minute imagining that I was down there, climbing the ice,

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. “Savez-vous qu’à dix ans ma petite était folle de vous?” said a woman I talked to at a tea in Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis courts, a dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated seductively but also to be nobly held—all this, chance denied me—chance and a change to smaller characters on the pale beloved writer’s part. My fancy was both Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning, late in September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and bilious janitor with whom I was on execrable terms started to complain that a man who had seen Rita home recently had been “sick like a dog” on the front steps. In the process of listening to him and tipping him, and then listening to a revised and politer version of the incident, I had the impression that one of the two letters which that blessed mail brought was from Rita’s mother, a crazy little woman, whom we had once visited on Cape Cod and who kept writing me to my various addresses, saying how wonderfully well matched her daughter and I were, and how wonderful it would be if we married; the other letter which I opened and scanned rapidly in the elevator was from John Farlow.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She had had all the usual conversations with friends and with herself; she had measured a nameless, faceless woman in a hotel room next to what she knew of herself; she had weighed one stupid night against a lifetime of love and felt the difference in her heart. If you’d told Kiki a year ago, Your husband will screw somebody else, you will forgive him, you will stay , she wouldn’t have believed it. You can’t say how these things will feel, or how you will respond, until they happen to you. Kiki had drawn upon reserves of forgiveness that she didn’t even know she had. But for Jerome, friendless and brooding, it was clear that one week with Victoria Kipps, nine months ago, had expanded in his mind until it now took up all the space in his life. Where Kiki had felt her way instinctively through her problem, Jerome had written his out, words and words and words. Not for the first time, Kiki felt grateful she was not an intellectual. From here she could see the strangely melancholic format of Jerome’s text, italics and ellipses everywhere. Slanted sails blowing about on perforated seas. ‘Remember that thing . . .’ Kiki said absently, rubbing his exposed  On Beauty ankle with her own shin. ‘ Writing about music is like dancing about architecture . Who said that again?’ Jerome crossed his eyes like Howard and looked away. Kiki hunkered down to Jerome’s eye level. She put two fingers to his chin and drew his face to hers. ‘You OK, baby?’ ‘Mom, please.’ Kiki cupped Jerome’s face in her hands. She stared at him, seeking a refracted image of the girl who had caused all this misery, but Jerome had not given his mother any details when it happened and he wasn’t going to give her any now. It was a matter of an impossible translation – his mother wanted to know about a girl, but it wasn’t about a girl or, rather, it wasn’t about just the girl. Jerome had fallen in love with a family. He felt he couldn’t tell his own family this fact; it was easier for them to believe that last year was Jerome’s ‘romantic fuck-up’ or – more pleasing to the Belsey mentality – his ‘flirtation with Christianity’. How could he explain how pleasurable it had truly been to give himself up to the Kippses?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Mid-twentieth century ideas concerning child-parent relationship have been considerably tainted by the scholastic rigmarole and standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket, but I hope I am addressing myself to unbiased readers. Once when Avis’s father had honked outside to signal papa had come to take his pet home, I felt obliged to invite him into the parlor, and he sat down for a minute, and while we conversed, Avis, a heavy, unattractive, affectionate child, drew up to him and eventually perched plumply on his knee. Now, I do not remember if I have mentioned that Lolita always had an absolutely enchanting smile for strangers, a tender furry slitting of the eyes, a dreamy sweet radiance of all her features which did not mean a thing of course, but was so beautiful, so endearing that one found it hard to reduce such sweetness to but a magic gene automatically lighting up her face in atavistic token of some ancient rite of welcome—hospitable prostitution, the coarse reader may say. Well, there she stood while Mr. Byrd twirled his hat and talked, and—yes, look how stupid of me, I have left out the main characteristic of the famous Lolita smile, namely: while the tender, nectared, dimpled brightness played, it was never directed at the stranger in the room but hung in its own remote flowered void, so to speak, or wandered with myopic softness over chance objects—and this is what was happening now: while fat Avis sidled up to her papa, Lolita gently beamed at a fruit knife that she fingered on the edge of the table, whereon she leaned, many miles away from me. Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father’s neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita’s smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone—to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. And I have a neat pendant to that little scene—also in a Beardsley setting. Lolita, who had been reading near the fire, stretched herself, and then inquired, her elbow up, with a grunt: “Where is she buried anyway?” “Who?” “Oh, you know, my murdered mummy.” “And you know where her grave is,” I said controlling myself, whereupon I named the cemetery—just outside Ramsdale, between the railway tracks and Lakeview Hill. “Moreover,” I added, “the tragedy of such an accident is somewhat cheapened by the epithet you saw fit to apply to it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  This happens repeatedly. The bed is hollowed out like a log canoe. She likes the warmth and hardness of his back. She would like to put her arms around him. She would like to forget the whole scene, pretend it never happened. When they make love, they’re together for a while. But he won’t. He snatches her hand from his pajama fly. He pushes her away. She rolls back. He moves to his outer edge. “That’s no solution,” he says. Listen to the rain falling. Out in the street there are occasional shouts from students coming home drunk. Wet cobblestones. Paris can be so wet. After the movie tonight, they went to Notre Dame. They were packed in between wet wool coats and wet fur coats. Midnight Mass. Umbrella points dripping into their shoes. They couldn’t move backward or forward. A mob of people stuck there, clogging the aisles. Paix dans le monde, said a high, electronically amplified voice. There is nothing worse than the smell of wet fur. He’s home in Washington Heights. His father has died. He feels nothing. It’s funny that he feels nothing. When people die you are not supposed to feel nothing. I told you I felt nothing, why do you keep asking? Because I have to know you. You never lost anyone. You never had anyone die. Is that why you hate me? We were on relief. You were on Central Park West when we were on relief. Is that my fault? Do you know that Chinese funeral home on Pell Street? When people die they go back to their own. Racists in death. He never believed in God. He never went to church. They said the prayers in Chinese. And I thought: my God, I don’t understand a word. The coffin was open. That’s important. Otherwise you don’t want to believe in death. Psychologically sound. Seems gruesome, though. Then the relatives came and took the last of our money. The business will provide, they said, but the business folded. I was a junior in high school. I could go to work when I graduated, the welfare lady said. But I thought: then I’ll wind up a waiter. And I can’t even be a waiter in a Chinese restaurant because I don’t know Chinese. I’ll be a tool, I thought, a poor slob. I have to go to college. Meanwhile you were on Central Park West. And you were in Cambridge for weekends. In medical school I was feeding laboratory animals. Christmas night. Everyone went out. I was in the lab feeding the goddamn rats. She is lying beside him very still. She touches herself to prove she’s not dead. She thinks of the first two weeks of her broken leg. She used to masturbate constantly then to convince herself that she could feel something besides pain. Pain was a religion then. A total commitment.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I am staying in a big, draughty English country house with crazy English friends who drink gin all day to keep warm and make Oscar Wilde-ish conversation and I spend the next ten days in a drunken stupor. I cable Pia to meet me in Florence sooner than planned, and the two of us take revenge on our faithless lovers (hers is in Boston) by sleeping with every man in Florence except Michelangelo’s David. Only it is no good. We are still desperately unhappy. Charlie calls me in Florence to beg forgiveness (he is still in Paris with Sally) and that precipitates another joyless orgy…. Then Pia and I repent and decide to purify ourselves. We douche with Italian white chianti vinegar. We kneel before the statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi and ask forgiveness. We go to the top of Giotto’s Campanile and pray to the ghost of Giotto (any famous old ghost will do, really). We give up food for two days and drink only San Pellegrino. We douche with San Pellegrino. Finally, as the ultimate act of expiation, we decide to mail our diaphragms to our faithless lovers and try to make them feel guilty instead. But what to wrap them in? Pia has an old Motta Panetone box under the bed of our hurricane-struck pensione room. I look and look but can’t find an appropriate box to mail my diaphragm in, so I abandon the project rather hastily. (What good would it do to send my diaphragm to Charlie and Sally in a panetone box anyway?) But Pia is undeterred. She is bustling around looking for brown paper and tape. She is scrawling addresses and return addresses. She reminds me of myself at thirteen furtively sending away for Kotex booklets in “plain brown wrappers.” We troop off to American Express (where we have slept with half the leering Florentine mail clerks). We are told to make out a customs declaration. But what to put on the customs declaration? “One diaphragm, used?” “One diaphragm, much abused?” “Used clothing” perhaps? Can a diaphragm be considered an article of clothing? Pia and I debate this. “You do wear it,” she says. I maintain that she ought to send it to Boston as an antique and thus avoid all import duty. What if her erring boyfriend had to pay duty on her old diaphragm? Would that be adding expense to injury, insult to guilt? “Fuck him!” Pia says. “Let him pay import duty on it and be as embarrassed as possible.” And with that she labels the package: “1 Florentine leather bag—valuation $100.”

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

  In a later study, we had subjects construct atypical, infrequent simulations, such as the pleasant fear of riding a rollercoaster and the unpleasant happiness of injuring yourself while winning a competition. We hypothesized that less typical simulations would require the interoceptive network to work harder to issue predictions, compared to simulating more typical instances like pleasant happiness and unpleasant fear, which are like mental habits. This is exactly what we observed.14 In a more recent set of experiments, our test subjects watched evocative movie scenes, and we saw the interoceptive network construct ongoing emotional experiences. Talma Hendler’s lab at Tel Aviv University in Israel chose film clips that would create a variety of different experiences of sadness, fear, and anger. For example, some test subjects watched a scene from Sophie’s Choice where the title character, played by Meryl Streep, must choose one of her children to be taken from her at Auschwitz. Other test subjects watched a clip from the film Stepmom, where Susan Sarandon’s character reveals to her children that she is dying of cancer. In all cases, we observed that the default mode network and the remainder of the interoceptive network were firing more in synchrony in the moments when subjects reported more intense emotional experiences, and less so when subjects reported less intense experiences.15 Other studies make a similar case for emotion perception. In one study, subjects watched movies and explicitly categorized the characters’ physical movements as emotional expressions. In other words, they made mental inferences about what the movements meant, a task that requires concepts. Their brains showed increased activity in the interoceptive network, in nodes of the control network, and in visual cortex where objects are represented.16 … When discussing concepts, we must be mindful not to essentialize because it’s super easy to imagine concepts as “stored” in your brain. For example, you could think concepts live in the default mode network alone (as if the summaries exist apart from their sensory and motor details). There is abundant evidence (and very little doubt), however, that any instance of any concept is represented by the entire brain. As you look at the hammer in figure AD-3, neurons in your motor cortex that control your hand movements have increased their firing. (And if you are like me, the neurons that simulate pain in your thumb are also firing madly.) This increase even occurs when you read the name of the object (“hammer”). Viewing the hammer also makes it easier for you to make a gripping motion with your hand.17 [image file=image_rsrc7BG.jpg] Figure AD-3: Tweaking your motor cortex Likewise, as you read these words: Apple, Tomato, Strawberry, Heart, Lobster neurons that process color sensations in early visual cortex also increase their firing rate, because all of the objects are typically red. So concepts have no mental core in the default mode network; they are represented throughout the entire brain.18

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

  There is no analogous legal avenue for stress or other harm seen as emotional. (Awards for pain and suffering are relatively rare.) Having made this observation, I must point out that the law is deeply inconsistent and even ironic in its view of emotional harm when you consider international norms for torture. The Geneva Conventions prohibit psychological harm to prisoners of war, and the U.S. Constitution likewise forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” So it’s illegal for a government to torture a prisoner psychologically, but it’s perfectly legal to place a prisoner in solitary confinement for long periods, even though the stress of confinement may shorten the prisoner’s telomeres and therefore his life. 6 2 It’s also perfectly legal for a high school bully to insult, torment, and humiliate your children even though this will shorten their telomeres and potentially their lifespan. When a group of middle-school girls deliberately excludes another girl, they are acting with intent and motivation to cause suffering, yet legal action is rare. In one highly publicized case, fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself in 2010 after months of verbal aggression and physical threats. Six teenagers were criminally prosecuted for harassment, stalking, assault, and assorted civil rights violations after they bullied her and then posted crude comments on her Facebook memorial page. This case prompted Massachusetts to pass anti-bullying laws. These laws are a start, but they punish only the most extreme cases. How do you regulate the playground in a legal context? 6 3 Bullies intend to cause suffering, but is the intent to cause harm? We cannot know for sure, but in most cases I doubt it. Most kids are unaware that the mental anguish they inflict can translate into physical illness, atrophied brain tissue, reduced IQ, and shortened telomeres. Kids will be kids, we say. But bullying is a national epidemic. In one study, over 50 percent of children nationwide reported being verbally or socially bullied at school, or having participated in bullying another child at school, at least once in two months. Over 20 percent reported being the victim or perpetrator of physical bullying, and over 13 percent reported involvement with electronic bullying. Bullying is considered a serious enough childhood risk, with potential lifelong health consequences, that at press time, the U.S. Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice are producing a comprehensive report on its biological and psychological ramifications. 6 4 If you suffer mental anguish in the moment, whether from bullying or another cause, should your suffering count as harm, and should the perpetrators be punished? A recent legal case implies the answer is sometimes yes. A company in Atlanta demanded DNA samples from its employees because someone was contaminating its warehouse with feces.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  30 Sed forsitan lector scrupulosus reprehendens nar- ratum meum sic argumentaberis : “Unde autem tu, astutule asine, intra terminos pistrini contectus, quid secreto, ut affirmas, mulieres gesserint scire potuisti ?*" Accipe igitur quemadmodum homo curiosus iumenti faciem sustinens cuncta quae in perniciem pistoris mei gesta sunt cognovi. Diem ferme circa mediam repente intra pistrinum mulier reatu miraque tristitie deformis apparuit, flebili centunculo semiamicta, nudis et intectis pedibus, lurore | buxeo macieque foedata, et dis- cerptae comae semicanae sordentes inspersu cineris pleramque eius anteventulae contegebant faciem. Haec talis manu pistori clementer iniecta, quasi quippiam secreto collocutura in suum sibi cubiculum deducit eum et adducta fore quam diutissime de- moratur. Sed cum esset iam confectum omne fru- mentum, quod inter manus opifices tractaverant, necessarioque peti deberet aliud, servuli cubiculum propter &dstantes dominum vocabant operique supplementum: postulabant: atque ut illis saepicule 446 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX Then the witch with her abominable science began at first to conjure with the lighter arts of her wicked practice, and to make her ceremonies to turn the offended heart of the baker to the love of his wife: but all was in vain; wherefore angry with her gods, and considering on the one side that she could not bring her purpose to pass, and on the other side the . loss of her gain and the little account that was made of her science, she began to aim against the life of the baker,threatening to send an ill spirit of a certain woman that had died violently to kill him by mean of her conjurations. But peradventure some scrupulous reader may demand me a question, how I, being an ass, and tied always within the walls of the mill-house, could be so clever as to know the secrets of these women: learn then, I answer, notwithstanding my shape of an ass, yet having the sense and knowledge of a man, how I did curiously find out and know out such injuries as were done to my master. About noon there came suddenly a woman into the mill-house, very sorrowful, clothed in wretched rags, and in loomy garb like those that are accused of a crime, half naked and with bare and unshod feet, meagre, exceeding pale and thin, ill-favoured, and her hair, which was growing towards white, mixed with cinders and scattering upon her face. This woman gently took the baker by the hand, and feigning that she had some secret matter to tell him, led him into his chamber, where they remained a good space with closed doors. But when all the corn was ground that was ready to hand, and the servants were com- pelled to call their master to give them more, they called very often at his chamber door, and asked that they might have further matter for their labour. 447 LUCIUS APULEIUS

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

  When Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s voice wavered during his speech after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, he didn’t cry, he didn’t pout, and at one point he actually smiled. And yet, somehow, viewers inferred that he was experiencing intense sadness. Sensation and simple feeling are not sufficient to explain how an audience of thousands perceived the depth of Malloy’s anguish. Affect alone also doesn’t explain how we construct our own experiences of sadness, nor how one instance of sadness differs from another. Nor does affect tell you what sensations mean or what to do about them. That’s why people eat when they are tired or find a defendant guilty when they are hungry. You must make the affect meaningful so your brain can execute a more specific action. One way to make meaning is to construct an instance of emotion. So, how do interoceptive sensations become emotions? And why do we experience these sensations (really predictions) in such diverse ways: as physical symptoms, as perceptions of the world, as simple affective feeling, and sometimes as emotion? That is the next mystery we’ll address. 9 Mastering Your Emotions E very time you bite into a juicy peach or munch a bag of crunchy potato chips, you’re not simply replenishing your energy. You’re having an experience that is pleasant, unpleasant, or something in between. You bathe not only to stave off disease but also to enjoy warm water against your skin. You seek out other people not to stand in a herd for protection from predators but to feel the glow of friendship or to unload when you’re feeling burdened. And sex is clearly for more than propagating your genes. These examples show that you have a special link between the physical and the mental. Each time you perform a physical act for your body budget, you’re also doing something mental with concepts. Every mental activity has a physical effect as well. You can put this connection to work for you, to master your emotions, enhance your resilience, become a better friend or parent or lover, and even change your conception of who you are. Change is not easy. Ask any therapist or Buddhist monk; they’ve trained for years to become aware of their experiences and control them. Even so, you can take small steps right now based on the theory of constructed emotion and the new view of human nature it implies. Some of the suggestions I propose in this chapter will sound familiar, like getting enough sleep, but with new scientific justification to motivate you. Other advice will probably be entirely new, like learning words from a foreign language, which you’ve probably never associated with emotional health. Not every suggestion will be right for you; some will fit your lifestyle better than others. But the effort can lead to greater well-being and success. Students with a richer emotion vocabulary do better in school.

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

  When Malloy’s voice caught in his throat, it did not trigger a brain circuit for sadness inside me, causing a distinctive set of bodily changes. Rather, I felt sadness in that moment because, having been raised in a certain culture, I learned long ago that “sadness” is something that may occur when certain bodily feelings coincide with terrible loss. Using bits and pieces of past experience, such as my knowledge of shootings and my previous sadness about them, my brain rapidly predicted what my body should do to cope with such tragedy. Its predictions caused my thumping heart, my flushed face, and the knots in my stomach. They directed me to cry, an action that would calm my nervous system. And they made the resulting sensations meaningful as an instance of sadness. In this manner, my brain constructed my experience of emotion. My particular movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. With different predictions, my skin would cool rather than flush and my stomach would remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensations into sadness. Not only that, but my original thumping heart, flushed face, knotted stomach, and tears could become meaningful as a different emotion, such as anger or fear, instead of sadness. Or in a very different situation, like a wedding celebration, those same sensations could become joy or gratitude. If this explanation doesn’t make complete sense or even sounds counterintuitive so far, believe me, I am right there with you. After Governor Malloy’s speech, as I came back to myself, wiping my tears, I was reminded that no matter what I know about emotions as a scientist, I experience them much as the classical view conceives them. My sadness felt like an instantly recognizable wave of bodily changes and feelings that overwhelmed me as a reaction to tragedy and loss. If I were not a scientist using experiments to reveal that emotions are in fact made and not triggered, I too would trust my immediate experience. The classical view of emotion remains compelling, despite the evidence against it, precisely because it’s intuitive. The classical view also provides reassuring answers to deep, fundamental questions like: Where do you come from, evolutionarily speaking? Are you responsible for your actions when you get emotional? Do your experiences accurately reveal the world outside you? The theory of constructed emotion answers such questions differently. It’s a different theory of human nature that helps you see yourself and others in a new and more scientifically justified light. The theory of constructed emotion might not fit the way you typically experience emotion and, in fact, may well violate your deepest beliefs about how the mind works, where humans come from, and why we act and feel as we do. But the theory consistently predicts and explains the scientific evidence on emotion, including plenty of evidence that the classical view struggles to make sense of. Why should you care which theory of emotion is correct?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I wrote that I felt like hell (I did). And as I was writing “I love you” for the tenth time Bennett walked in. “I’m leaving,” I said crying. “I was just writing you a letter but now I don’t need to.” I started tearing up the letter. “Don’t!” he said, snatching it from me. “It’s all I have left of you.” Then I really began to cry in long awful sobs. “Please, please, forgive me,” I pleaded. (Executioner asks condemned’s forgiveness before the ax falls.) “You don’t need forgiveness,” he snapped. He began throwing his things into a suitcase we had gotten as a wedding present from the friend who’d introduced us. A long and happy marriage. Many travels down the road of life. Had I engineered this whole scene just for the intensity of it? Never had I loved him more. Never had I longed to stay with him more. Was that why I had to go? Why didn’t he say “Stay, stay—I love you?” He didn’t. “I can’t stay in this room anymore without you,” he said, dumping guidebooks and all sorts of junk into his suitcase. We went downstairs together, lugging our suitcases. At the desk, we lingered, paying the bill. Adrian was waiting outside. If only he’d go! But he waited. Bennett wanted to know if I had traveler’s checks and my American Express card. Was I all right? He was trying to say “Stay, I love you.” This was his way of saying it, but I was so bewitched that I read it to mean “Go!” “I have to get away for a while,” I said again, wavering. “You’re not going to be alone—I am.” It was true. A really independent woman would go to the mountains alone and meditate—not take off with Adrian Goodlove in a battered Triumph. I was desolate. I lingered and lingered. “What the hell are you waiting for? Why don’t you go already?” “Where are you going? Where can I find you?” “I’m going to the airport. I’m going home. Maybe I’ll go to London and see if I can cash in the charter flight ticket or maybe I’ll go right home. I don’t care. What do you care?” “I care. I care.” “I’ll bet.” And with that I picked up my suitcase and walked out of the hotel. What else could I do? I had painted myself into a corner. I had written myself into this hackneyed plot. By now it was a bet, a dare, a game of Russian roulette, a test of Womanhood. There was no way to back out. Bennett stood there very calmly, saving face. He was wearing a bright red turtleneck. Why didn’t he run out and sock Adrian in the jaw? Why didn’t he fight for what was his?

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  in his service. This gardener accustomed to drive me every morning laden with herbs to the next village, and there, when he had sold his herbs, he would mount upon my back and return to the garden. Now while he digged the ground, and watered the herbs, and bent himself to his other business, I did nothing but repose myself with great ease: but when the signs of heaven were turned in their ordained courses, and the year in due order passed by days and by months from the pleasant delights of the autumn unto Capricorn, with sharp hail, rain, and wintry frosts, I had no stable, but standing always under a hedgeside, beneath the unceasing rain and the dews of night, was well nigh killed with cold; for my master was so poor that he had no lodging for himself, much less he had any litter or place to cover me withal; but he himself always lay under a little roof, shadowed and covered with boughs. In che morning when I walked, I had no shoes to my hoofs to pass upon the sharp ice and frosty mire, neither could I fill my belly with meat as I accus- tomed to do; for my master and I supped together and had both one fare, and it was very slender, since we had nothing else saving old and unsavoury salads, which were suffered to grow for seed, like long brooms, and all their sweet sap and juiee had become bitter and stinking. It fortuned on a day that an honest man of the nextvillage was benighted, and constrained, by reason of the rain and that it was dark without moon, to lodge (his horse being very weary) in our garden; where although he was but meanly received, yet served well enough considering time and necessity. This honest man, to recompense our kindly entertainment, promised to give my master some corn, oil, and two 451 34 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The Belseys got so good at it that they grew almost blase´, more proud than excited. They wanted to demonstrate the technique to the neighbours. But Howard did not feel blase´ just now. He lifted his head and shoulders off the floor, grappled with her backside and pulled her tighter on to him; he apologized to her as his release came early, but in fact she joined him seconds later as the last ripples of the thing went through them both. The back of Howard’s head connected with the carpet, and he lay there breathing frantically, saying nothing. Kiki moved off him slowly and sat cross-legged like a big Buddha beside him. He reached out his hand, the open flat palm awaiting hers, the way they used to. She did not take it. ‘Oh, God ,’ she said instead. She picked up a cushion and buried her face in it. Howard didn’t hesitate. He said: ‘No, Keeks – this is a good thing. It’s been hell – ’ Kiki pushed her face further into the cushion.  On Beauty ‘I know it has. But I don’t want to be without . . . us . You’re the person I – you’re my life, Keeks. You have been and you will be and you are. I don’t know how you want me to say it. You’re for me – you are me. We’ve always known that – and there’s no way out now anyway. I love you. You’re for me,’ repeated Howard. Kiki had not raised her face from the cushion and now she spoke into it. ‘I’m not sure you’re the person for me any more.’ ‘I can’t hear you – what?’ Kiki looked up. ‘Howard, I love you. But I’m just not interested in watching this second adolescence . I had my adolescence. I can’t go through yours again.’ ‘But – ’ ‘I haven’t had my period in three months – did you even know that? I’m acting crazy and emotional all the time. My body’s telling me the show’s over. That’s real. And I’m not going to be getting any thinner or any younger , my ass is gonna hit the ground, if it hasn’t already – and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here . I’m still in here. And I don’t want to be resented or despised for changing . . . I’d rather be alone. I don’t want someone to have contempt for who I’ve become. I’ve watched you become too. And I feel like I’ve done my best to honour the past, and what you were and what you are now – but you want something more than that, something new. I can’t be new. Baby, we had a good run.’ Weeping, she lifted his palm and kissed it in the centre. ‘Thirty years – almost all of them really happy . That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She took notes for me while I was away, and when I came back, she wasn’t afraid to ask questions. In class, she diverged from the curriculum to ask, in halting, bad French, how I was doing, what had happened, if I felt sad or angry, if I wanted to get together outside of class to speak in English. I agreed. She wanted to know every detail of the whole ordeal with my parents, hear the deep insights I had gleaned, how I felt, how I’d mourned. I gave her the basic gist. Talking to Reva about misery was insufferable. “Look on the bright side,” was what she wanted everyone to do. But at least she cared. Senior year, I moved out of the sorority house and into a two-bedroom suite with Reva in an off-campus dorm. Living together solidified our bond. I was the vacant, repressed depressive, and she was the obsessive blabbermouth, always knocking on my door, asking random questions, looking for any excuse to talk. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling that year, trying to cancel out thoughts about death with thoughts about nothingness. Reva’s frequent interruptions probably kept me from jumping out the window. Knock, knock. “Chat break?” She liked to look through my closet, turning over price tags, checking the sizes of all the clothes I’d bought with the money I’d inherited. Her obsession with the material world pulled me out of whatever existential wormhole I’d wandered into. I never confronted Reva about the fact that I could hear her vomiting when she came back from the dining hall each night. All she ate at home were sugar-free mini yogurts and baby carrots, which she dressed with yellow mustard. The palms of her hands were orange from all the carrots she ate. Dozens of mini yogurt containers cluttered the recycling bin. That spring, I went for long walks around the city with earplugs in. I felt better just listening to the echoing sounds of my breathing, the phlegm roiling in my throat when I swallowed, my eyes blinking, the weak ticking of my heart. Gray days spent staring down at sidewalks, skipping classes, shopping for things I’d never wear, paying through the nose for a gay guy to put a tube up my asshole and rub my stomach, tell me how much better I would feel once my colon was clean. Together we watched little flakes of shit flowing through the outgoing tube. His voice was soft but enthusiastic.

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

  Since the division between cortex and the subcortical regions is so important in the history of emotion, I’ll talk about the brain in those simplified terms. [back] * Different neuroscientists slice and dice the brain in different ways, using different terms to suit their goals and preferences. I’m presenting only a selection of the most conventional distinctions. [back] Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption O n December 14, 2012, the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people inside the school, including twenty children, were massacred by a lone gunman. Several weeks after this horror, I watched the governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy, give his annual “State of the State” speech on television. He spoke in a strong and animated voice for the first three minutes, thanking individuals for their service. And then he began to address the Newtown tragedy: We have all walked a very long and very dark road together. What befell Newtown is not something we thought possible in any of Connecticut’s beautiful towns or cities. And yet, in the midst of one of the worst days in our history, we also saw the best of our state. Teachers and a therapist that sacrificed their lives protecting students. 1 As the governor spoke the last two words, “protecting students,” his voice caught in his throat ever so slightly. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have missed it. But that tiny waver devastated me. My stomach instantly knotted into a ball. My eyes flooded. The TV camera panned to the crowd where other people had started to sob too. As for Governor Malloy, he stopped speaking and was gazing downward. Emotions like Governor Malloy’s and mine seem primal—hardwired into us, reflexively deployed, shared with all our fellow humans. When triggered, they seem to unleash themselves in each of us in basically the same way. My sadness was like Governor Malloy’s sadness was like the crowd’s sadness. Humanity has understood sadness and other emotions in this way for over two thousand years. But at the same time, if humanity has learned anything from centuries of scientific discovery, it’s that things aren’t always what they appear to be. The time-honored story of emotion goes something like this: We all have emotions built-in from birth. They are distinct, recognizable phenomena inside us. When something happens in the world, whether it’s a gunshot or a flirtatious glance, our emotions come on quickly and automatically, as if someone has flipped a switch. We broadcast emotions on our faces by way of smiles, frowns, scowls, and other characteristic expressions that anyone can easily recognize. Our voices reveal our emotions through laughter, shouts, and cries. Our body posture betrays our feelings with every gesture and slouch. Modern science has an account that fits this story, which I call the classical view of emotion.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I am aware that men do not kiss each other in American films, nor, for the most part, in America, nor do the black detective and the white Sheriff kiss here. But the obligatory, fade-out kiss, in the classic American film, did not really speak of love, and, still less, of sex: it spoke of reconciliation, of all things now becoming possibl e. It was a device desperately needed among a people for whom so much had to be made possible. And, 520 THE DE VIL FIND S WORK no matter how inept one must judge this film to be, in spite of its absolutely appalling distance from reality, in spite of my own helple ssly sardonic tone when discussing it, and even in spite of the fact that the effect of such a film is to increase and not lessen white confusion and complacency, and black rage and despair, I still do not wish to be guilty of the gra tuitous injustice of seeming to impute base motives to the people responsible for its existence. Our situation would be far more coherent if it were possible to categorize, or dis miss, In the Heat of the Night so painlessly. No: the film help lessly conveys- without confronting-the anguish of people trapped in a legend. They cannot live within this legend; nei ther can they step out of it. The film gave me the impression, according to my notes the day I saw it, of "something stran gling, alive, struggling to get out." And I certainly felt this during the final scene, when the white Sheriff takes the black detective's bag as they walk to the train. It is not that the creators of the film were inspired by base motives, but that they could not understand their motives, nor be responsible tor the effect of their exceedingly complex motives, in action. (All motives arc complex, and it is just as well to remember this: including, or perhaps especially, one's own.) The history which produces such a film cannot, after all, be swiftly un derstood, nor can the eff ects of this history be easily resolved. Nor can this history be blamed on any single individual; but, at the same time, no one can be let off the hook.