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.

Page 45 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Most men are moody, darling, some more than others. Take your father, for instance…” Her eyes soften and sadden whenever she thinks of my dad. My real dad, this mythical man I never knew, snatched so cruelly from us in a combat training accident when he was a marine. Part of me thinks my mom has been looking for someone like my dad all this time… Maybe she’s finally found what she’s looking for in Bob. Pity she couldn’t find it with Ray. “I used to think your father was moody. But now when I look back, I just think he was too caught up in his job and trying to make a life for us.” She sighs. “He was so young; we both were. Maybe that was the issue.” Hmm…Christian is not exactly old. I smile fondly at her. She can become a little too soulful thinking about my father, but I’m sure he had nothing on Christian’s moods. “Bob wants to take us out tonight for dinner. To his golf club.” “Oh no! Bob’s started playing golf?” I scoff in disbelief. “Tell me about it,” groans my mother, rolling her eyes. After a light lunch back at the house, I start to unpack. I am going to treat myself to a siesta. My mother has disappeared to mold some candles or whatever she does with them, and Bob is at work, so I have time to catch up on some sleep. I open the Mac and fire it up. It’s two in the afternoon in Georgia, eleven in the morning in Seattle. I wonder if I have a reply from Christian. Nervously, I open up my email. From: Christian Grey Subject: Finally! Date: May 31 2011 07:30 To: Anastasia Steele Anastasia, I am annoyed that as soon as you put some distance between us, you communicate openly and honestly with me. Why can’t you do that when we’re together? Yes, I’m rich. Get used to it. Why shouldn’t I spend money on you? We’ve told your father I’m your boyfriend, for heaven’s sake. Isn’t that what boyfriends do? As your Dom, I would expect you to accept whatever I spend on you with no argument. Incidentally, tell your mother, too.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  The car pulls up in front of the gallery, and Christian climbs out, leaving me speechless. He opens the car door for me, and I clamber out. “Why do you do that?” My voice is louder than I expected. “Do what?” Christian is taken aback. “Say something like that and then just stop.” “Anastasia, we’re here. Where you want to be. Let’s do this and then talk. I don’t particularly want a scene in the street.” I glance around. He’s right. It’s too public. I press my lips together as he glares at me. “Okay,” I mutter sulkily. Clasping my hand, he takes me into the building. We are in a converted warehouse—brick walls, dark wood floors, white ceilings, and white pipe work. It’s airy and modern, and there are several people wandering across the gallery floor, sipping wine and admiring José’s work. For a moment, my troubles melt away as I grasp that José has realized his dream. Way to go, José! “Good evening and welcome to José Rodriguez’s show.” A young woman dressed in black with very short brown hair, bright red lipstick, and large hooped earrings greets us. She glances briefly at me, then much longer than is strictly necessary at Christian, then turns back to me, blinking as she blushes. My brow creases. He’s mine—or was. I try hard not to scowl at her. As her eyes regain their focus, she blinks again. “Oh, it’s you, Ana. We’ll want your take on all this, too.” Grinning, she hands me a brochure and directs me to a table laden with drinks and snacks. “You know her?” Christian frowns. I shake my head, equally puzzled. He shrugs, distracted. “What would you like to drink?” “I’ll have a glass of white wine, thank you.” His brow furrows, but he holds his tongue and heads for the open bar. “Ana!” José comes barreling through a throng of people. Holy cow! He’s wearing a suit. He looks good and he’s beaming at me. He enfolds me in his arms, hugging me hard. And it’s all I can do not to burst into tears. Tears pool in my eyes. “Ana, I’m so glad you made it,” he whispers in my ear. Abruptly he holds me at arm’s length, examining me. “What?” “Hey are you okay? You look, well, odd. Dios mío, have you lost weight?” I blink back my tears—not him too. “José, I’m fine. I’m just so happy for you. Congratulations on the show.” My voice wavers as I see the concern etched on his oh-so-familiar face, but I have to hold myself together. “How did you get here?” he asks. “Christian brought me.” “Oh.” José’s face falls and he releases me. “Where is he?” His expression darkens.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In the course of any work or any pleasure, neither work nor pleasure was now the essential; my first concern was to get through it without fatigue. A recovery which seemed so complete astonished my friends; they tried to believe that the illness had been due merely to excessive efforts in those years of war, and would not recur. I judged otherwise; I recalled the great pines of Bithynia's forests which the woodsman notches in passing, and which he will return next season to fell. Towards the end of spring I embarked for Italy on a large galley of the fleet, taking with me Celer, now become indispensable, and Diotimus of Gadara, a young Greek of slave origin encountered in Sidon, who had beauty. The route of return crossed the Archipelago; for the last time in my life, doubtless, I was watching the dolphins leap in that blue sea; with no thought henceforth of seeking for omens I followed the long straight flight of the migrating birds, which sometimes alighted in friendly fashion to rest on the deck of the ship; I drank in the odor of salt and sun on the human skin, the perfume of lentisk and terebinth from the isles where each voyager longs to dwell, but knows in advance that he will not pause. Diotimus read me the poets of his country; he has had that perfect instruction in letters which is often given to young slaves endowed with bodily graces in order to increase further their value; as night fell I would lie in the stern, protected by the purple canopy, listening till darkness came to efface both those lines which describe the tragic incertitude of our life, and those which speak of doves and kisses and garlands of roses. The sea was exhaling its moist, warm breath; the stars mounted one by one to their stations; the ship inclining before the wind made straight for the Occident, where showed the last shreds of red; phosphorescence glittered in the wake which stretched out behind us, soon covered over by the black masses of the waves. I said to myself that only two things of importance awaited me in Rome: one was the choice of my successor, of interest to the whole empire; the other was my death, of concern to me alone. Rome had prepared me a triumph, which this time I accepted. I no longer protested against these vain but venerable customs; anything which honors man's effort, even if only for a day, seemed to me salutary in presence of a world so prone to forget. I was celebrating more than the suppression of the Jewish revolt; in a sense more profound, and known to me alone, I had triumphed. I included the name of Arrian in these honors.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  I note that tomorrow is the gallery opening for your friend’s show, and I’m sure you’ve not had time to purchase a car, and it’s a long drive. I would be more than happy to take you—should you wish. Let me know. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. Tears swim in my eyes. I hastily leave my desk and bolt to the restroom to escape into one of the stalls. José’s show. I’d forgotten all about it, and I promised him I’d go. Shit, Christian is right; how am I going to get there? I clutch my forehead. Why hasn’t José phoned? Come to think of it—why hasn’t anyone phoned? I’ve been so lost I haven’t noticed that my cell phone has been silent. Shit! I’m such an idiot! I still have it set to forward calls to the BlackBerry. Holy crap. Christian’s been getting my calls—unless he’s just thrown the BlackBerry away. How did he get my email address? He knows my shoe size; an email address is hardly going to present him with many problems. Can I see him again? Could I bear it? Do I want to see him? I close my eyes and tilt my head back as grief and longing lance through me in equal measure. Of course I do. Perhaps—perhaps I can tell him I’ve changed my mind… No, no, no. I cannot be with someone who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on me, someone who can’t love me. Torturous memories flash through my mind—the gliding, holding hands, kissing, the bathtub, his gentleness, his humor, and his dark, brooding, sexy stare. I miss him. It’s been five days, five days of agony that has felt like an eternity. I cry myself to sleep at night, wishing I hadn’t walked out, wishing that he could be different, wishing that we were together. How long will this harrowing feeling last? I’m in purgatory. I wrap my arms around my body, hugging myself tightly, holding myself together. I miss him. I really miss him… I love him. Simple. Anastasia Steele, you are at work! I must be strong, but I want to go to José’s show, and deep down, the masochist in me wants to see Christian. Taking a deep breath, I head back to my desk and respond to his email. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Tomorrow Date: June 8 2011 14:25 To: Christian Grey Hi Christian Thank you for the flowers; they are lovely. Yes, I would appreciate a lift. Thank you. Anastasia Steele Assistant to Jack Hyde, Editor, SIP Then I check my phone and find that it’s still set to forward calls to the BlackBerry. Jack is in a meeting, so I quickly call José. “Hi, José. It’s Ana.” “Hello, stranger.” His tone is so warm and welcoming it’s almost enough to push me over the edge again. “I can’t talk long. What time should I be there tomorrow for your show?” “You’re still coming?” He sounds excited.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved. “God, we’ll miss you,” Mom said suddenly, stepping through the minefield of suitcases to get to the bed. I stood and hugged her. My dad walked over, too, and we formed a sort of huddle. It was too hot, and we were too sweaty, for the hug to last terribly long. I knew I ought to cry, but I’d lived with my parents for sixteen years, and a trial separation seemed overdue. “Don’t worry.” I smiled. “I’s a-gonna learn how t’talk right Southern.” Mom laughed. “Don’t do anything stupid,” my dad said. “Okay.” “No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.” As an alumnus of Culver Creek, he had done the things I had only heard about: the secret parties, streaking through hay fields (he always whined about how it was all boys back then), drugs, drinking, and cigarettes. It had taken him a while to kick smoking, but his badass days were now well behind him. “I love you,” they both blurted out simultaneously. It needed to be said, but the words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss. “I love you, too. I’ll call every Sunday.” Our rooms had no phone lines, but my parents had requested I be placed in a room near one of Culver Creek’s five pay phones. They hugged me again—Mom, then Dad—and it was over. Out the back window, I watched them drive the winding road off campus. I should have felt a gooey, sentimental sadness, perhaps. But mostly I just wanted to cool off, so I grabbed one of the desk chairs and sat down outside my door in the shade of the overhanging eaves, waiting for a breeze that never arrived. The air outside sat as still and oppressive as the air inside. I stared out over my new digs: Six one-story buildings, each with sixteen dorm rooms, were arranged in a hexagram around a large circle of grass. It looked like an oversize old motel. Everywhere, boys and girls hugged and smiled and walked together. I vaguely hoped that someone would come up and talk to me. I imagined the conversation: “Hey. Is this your first year?” “Yeah. Yeah. I’m from Florida.” “That’s cool. So you’re used to the heat.” “I wouldn’t be used to this heat if I were from Hades,” I’d joke. I’d make a good first impression. Oh, he’s funny. That guy Miles is a riot. That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined them. Bored, I went back inside, took off my shirt, lay down on the heat-soaked vinyl of the lower bunk mattress, and closed my eyes. I’d never been born again with the baptism and weeping and all that, but it couldn’t feel much better than being born again as a guy with no known past.

• From The Lover (1984)

  We still went every day to the flat in Cholon. He behaved as usual, for a while he behaved as usual, giving me a shower with the water from the jars, carrying me over to the bed. He’d come over to me, lie down too, but now he had no strength, no potency. Once the date of my departure was fixed, distant thought it still was, he could do nothing with my body any more. It had happened suddenly, without his realizing it. His body wanted nothing more to do with the body that was about to go away, to betray. He’d say, I can’t make love to you any more, I thought I still could, but I can’t. He’d say he was dead. He’d give a sweet, apologetic smile, say that perhaps it would never come back. I’d ask him if that’s what he wanted. He, almost laughing, would say, I don’t know, at this moment perhaps yes. His gentleness was unaffected by his pain. He didn’t speak of the pain, never said a word about it. Sometimes his face would quiver, he’d close his eyes and clench his teeth. But he never said anything about the images he saw behind his closed eyes. It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he’d loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me. Sometimes he’d say he’d like to caress me because he knew I longed for it, and he’d like to watch me as the pleasure came. So he did, and watched me at the same time, and called me his child. We decided not to see each other any more, but it wasn’t possible, it turned out to be impossible. Every evening he was there outside the high school in his black car, his head averted from humiliation. When it was due to sail the boat gave three blasts on its siren, very long and terribly loud, they were heard all over the town, and over the harbor the sky grew dark. Then the tugs came up and towed the boat to the middle of the river, after which they cast off their cables and returned to harbor. Then the boat bade farewell again, uttering once more its terrible, mysteriously sad wails that made everyone weep, not only those who were parting from one another but the onlookers too, and those who were there for no special reason, who had no one particular in mind. Then, very slowly, under its own steam, the boat launched itself on the river. For a long while its tall shape could be seen advancing toward the sea. Many people stayed to watch, waving more and more slowly, more and more sadly, with scarves and handkerchiefs. Then finally the outline of the ship was swallowed up in the curve of the earth. On a clear day you could see it slowly sink.

• From The Lover (1984)

  When I’m on the Mekong ferry, the day of the black limousine, my mother hasn’t yet given up the land by the dike. Every so often, still, we make the journey, at night, as before, still all three of us, to spend a few days there. We stay on the veranda of the bungalow, facing the mountains of Siam. Then we go home again. There’s nothing she can do there, but she goes. My younger brother and I are beside her on the veranda overlooking the forest. We’re too old now, we don’t go bathing in the river any more, we don’t go hunting black panther in the marshes in the estuary any more, or go into the forest, or into the villages in the pepper plantations. Everything has grown up all around us. There are no more children, either on the buffalos or anywhere else. We too have become strange, and the same sluggishness that has overtaken my mother has overtaken us too. We’ve learned nothing, watching the forest, waiting, weeping. The lower part of the land is lost for good and all, the servants work the patches higher up, we let them keep the paddy for themselves, they stay on without wages, making use of the stout straw huts my mother had built. They love us as if we were members of their own family, they act as if they were looking after the bungalow for us, and they do look after it. All the cheap crockery is still there. The roof, rotted by the endless rain, goes on disintegrating. But the furniture is kept polished. And the shape of the bungalow stands out clear as a diagram, visible from the road. The doors are opened every day to let the wind through and dry out the wood. And shut every night against stray dogs and smugglers from the mountains. So you see it wasn’t in the bar at Réam, as I wrote, that I met the rich man with the black limousine, it was after we left the land by the dike, two or three years after, on the ferry, the day I’m telling you about, in that light of haze and heat. It’s a year and a half after that meeting that my mother takes us back to France. She’ll sell all her furniture. Then go one last time to the dike. She’ll sit on the veranda facing the setting sun, look toward Siam one last time as she never will again, not even when she leaves France again, changes her mind again and comes back once more to Indochina and retires to Saigon. Never again will she go and see that mountain, that green and yellow sky above that forest.

• From The Lover (1984)

  It’s a place of distress, shipwrecked. He asks me to tell him what I’m thinking about. I say I’m thinking about my mother, she’ll kill me if she finds out the truth. I see he’s making an effort, then he says it, says he understands what my mother means, this dishonor, he says. He says he himself couldn’t bear the thought if it were a question of marriage. I look at him. He looks back, apologizes, proudly. He says, I’m Chinese. We smile at each other. I ask him if it’s usual to be sad, as we are. He says it’s because we’ve made love in the daytime, with the heat at its height. He says it’s always terrible after. He smiles. Says, Whether people love one another or not, it’s always terrible. Says it will pass as soon as it gets dark. I say he’s wrong, it’s not just because it was in the daytime, I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. Today I tell him it’s a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life. I say I don’t quite understand what she says, but I know this room is what I was expecting. I speak without waiting for an answer. I tell him my mother shouts out what she believes like the messengers of God. She shouts that you shouldn’t expect anything, ever, either from anybody else or from any government or from any God. He watches me speak, doesn’t take his eyes off me, watches my lips, I’m naked, he caresses me, perhaps he’s not listening, I don’t know. I say I don’t regard my present misfortune as a personal matter. I tell him how it was just so difficult to get food and clothes, to live, in short, on nothing but my mother’s salary. I’m finding it more and more difficult to speak. He says, How did you all manage? I say we lived out of doors, poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that’s what we were. That’s how I came to be here with you. He is on me, engulfed again. We stay like that, riveted, moaning amid the din of the still external city. We can still hear it. And then we don’t hear it any more. • • •

• From The Lover (1984)

  It was one day during the vacation in Sadec. She was resting in a rocking chair with her feet up on another chair, she’d made a draft between the door of the sitting room and the door of the dining room. She was peaceful, not aggressive. She’d suddenly noticed her daughter, wanted to talk to her. It happened not long before the end, before she gave up the land by the dike. Not long before we went back to France. I watched her fall asleep. Every so often my mother declares, Tomorrow we’ll go to the photographer’s. She complains about the price but still goes to the expense of family photos. We look at them, we don’t look at each other but we do look at the photographs, each of us separately, without a word of comment, but we look at them, we see ourselves. See the other members of the family one by one or all together. Look back at ourselves when we were very young in the old photos, then look at ourselves again in the recent ones. The gulf between us has grown bigger still. Once they’ve been looked at the photos are put away with the linen in the closets. My mother has us photographed so that she can see if we’re growing normally. She studies us at length, as other mothers do other children. She compares the photos, discusses how each one of us has grown. No one ever answers. My mother only has photos taken of her children. Never anything else. I don’t have any photographs of Vinh Long, not one, of the garden, the river, the straight tamarind-lined avenues of the French conquest, not of the house, nor of our institutional whitewashed bedrooms with the big black-and-gilt iron beds, lit up like classrooms by the red streetlights, the green metal lampshades, not a single image of those incredible places, always temporary, ugly beyond expression, places to flee from, in which my mother would camp until, as she said, she really settled down, but in France, in the regions she’s spoken of all her life and that vary, according to her mood, her age, her sadness, between Pas-de-Calais and Entre-Deux-Mers. But when she does halt for good, when she settles down in the Loire, her room will be a terrible replica of the one in Sadec. She will have forgotten. She never had photos taken of places, of landscapes, only of us, her children, and mostly she had us taken in a group so it wouldn’t cost so much. The few amateur photos of us were taken by friends of my mother’s, new colleagues just arrived in the colony who took views of the equatorial landscape, the coconut palms, and the coolies to send to their families.

• From The Lover (1984)

  The one who bought the flat-brimmed pink hat with the broad black ribbon was her, the woman in another photograph, my mother. I recognize her better in that than in more recent photos. It’s the courtyard of a house by the Small Lake in Hanoi. We’re together, she and us, her children. I’m four years old. My mother’s in the middle of the picture. I recognize the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn’t smile, the way she waits for the photo to be over and done with. By her drawn face, by a certain untidiness in her dress, by her drowsy expression, I can tell that it’s hot, that she’s tired, that she’s bored. But it’s by the way we’re dressed, us children, all anyhow, that I recognize a mood my mother sometimes used to fall into, and of which already, at the age we were in the photo, we knew the warning signs—the way she’d suddenly be unable to wash us, dress us, or sometimes even feed us. Every day my mother experienced this deep despondency about living. Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the dark. I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t quite make her forget it. What I’ll never know is what kind of practical considerations made her leave us like that, every day. This time, perhaps, it’s the foolish thing she’s just done, the house she’s just bought—the one in the photograph—which we absolutely didn’t need, and at a time when my father was already very ill, not far from death, only a few months. Or has she just learned she’s got the same illness he is going to die of? The dates are right. What I don’t know, and she can’t have known either, is what kind of considerations they were that haunted her and made that dejection rise up before her. Was it the death, already at hand, of my father? Or the dying of the light? Doubts about her marriage? About her husband? About her children? Or about all these appurtenances in general? It happened every day. Of that I’m sure. It must have come on quite suddenly. At a given moment every day the despair would make its appearance. And then would follow an inability to go on, or sleep, or sometimes nothing, or sometimes, instead, the buying of houses, the removals, or sometimes the moodiness, just the moodiness, the dejection. Or sometimes she’d be like a queen, give anything she was asked for, take anything she was offered, that house by the Small Lake, for absolutely no reason, my father already dying, or the flat-brimmed hat, because the girl had set her heart on it, or the same thing with the gold lamé shoes. Or else nothing, or just sleep, die.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And I wasn’t great at talking for myself either. We had something important in common, then, a personality quirk I didn’t share with Alaska or anybody else, although almost by definition Lara and I couldn’t express it to each other. So maybe it was just the way the not-yet- setting sun shone against her lazy dark curls, but at that moment, I wanted to kiss her, and we did not need to talk in order to kiss, and the puking on her jeans and the months of mutual avoidance melted away. “Eet’s your turn, Takumi.” “Worst day of my life,” Takumi said. “June 9, 2000. My grandmother died in Japan. She died in a car accident, and I was supposed to leave to go see her two days later. I was going to spend the whole summer with her and my grandfather, but instead I flew over for her funeral, and the only time I really saw what she looked like, I mean other than in pictures, was at her funeral. She had a Buddhist funeral, and they cremated her, but before they did she was on this, like—well, it’s not really Buddhist. I mean, religion is complicated there, so it’s a little Buddhist and a little Shinto, but y’all don’t care—point being that she was on this, like, funeral pyre or whatever. And that’s the only time I ever saw her, was just before they burned her up. That was the worst day.” The Colonel lit a cigarette, threw it to me, and lit one of his own. It was eerie, that he could tell when I wanted a cigarette. We were like an old married couple. For a moment, I thought, It’s massively unwise to throw lit cigarettes around a barn full of hay, but then the moment of caution passed, and I just made a sincere effort not to flick ash onto any hay. “No clear winner yet,” the Colonel said. “The field is wide open. Your turn, buddy.” Alaska lay on her back, her hands locked behind her head. She spoke softly and quickly, but the quiet day was becoming a quieter night—the bugs gone now with the arrival of winter—and we could hear her clearly. “The day after my mom took me to the zoo where she liked the monkeys and I liked the bears, it was a Friday. I came home from school. She gave me a hug and told me to go do my homework in my room so I could watch TV later. I went into my room, and she sat down at the kitchen table, I guess, and then she screamed, and I ran out, and she had fallen over.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  endowment effect, because the asymmetry between the pleasure of getting and the pain of giving up is irrelevant. Recent studies of the psychology of “decision making under poverty” suggest that the poor are another group in which we do not expect to find the endowment effect. Being poor, in prospect theory, is living below one’s reference point. There are goods that the poor need and cannot afford, so they are always “in the losses.” Small amounts of money that they receive are therefore perceived as a reduced loss, not as a gain. The money helps one climb a little toward the reference point, but the poor always remain on the steep limb of the value function. People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses. We all know people for whom spending is painful, although they are objectively quite well-off. There may also be cultural differences in the attitude toward money, and especially toward the spending of money on whims and minor luxuries, such as the purchase of a decorated mug. Such a difference may explain the large discrepancy between the results of the “mugs study” in the United States and in the UK. Buying and selling prices diverge substantially in experiments conducted in samples of students of the United States, but the differences are much smaller among English students. Much remains to be learned about the endowment effect. Speaking of the Endowment Effect “She didn’t care which of the two offices she would get, but a day after the announcement was made, she was no longer willing to trade. Endowment effect!” “These negotiations are going nowhere because both sides find it difficult to make concessions, even when they can get something in return. Losses loom larger than gains.” “When they raised their prices, demand dried up.” “He just hates the idea of selling his house for less money than he paid for it. Loss aversion is at work.” “He is a miser, and treats any dollar he spends as a loss.”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Peak-end rule: The global retrospective rating was well predicted by the average of the level of pain reported at the worst moment of the experience and at its end. Duration neglect: The duration of the procedure had no effect whatsoever on the ratings of total pain. You can now apply these rules to the profiles of patients A and B. The worst rating (8 on the 10-point scale) was the same for both patients, but the last rating before the end of the procedure was 7 for patient A and only 1 for patient B. The peak-end average was therefore 7.5 for patient A and only 4.5 for patient B. As expected, patient A retained a much worse memory of the episode than patient B. It was the bad luck of patient A that the procedure ended at a bad moment, leaving him with an unpleasant memory. We now have an embarrassment of riches: two measures of experienced utility—the hedonimeter total and the retrospective assessment—that are systematically different. The hedonimeter totals are computed by an observer from an individual’s report of the experience of moments. We call these judgments duration-weighted, because the computation of the “area under the curve” assigns equal weights to all moments: two minutes of pain at level 9 is twice as bad as one minute at the same level of pain. However, the findings of this experiment and others show that the retrospective assessments are insensitive to duration and weight two singular moments, the peak and the end, much more than others. So which should matter? What should the physician do? The choice has implications for medical practice. We noted that: If the objective is to reduce patients’ memory of pain, lowering the peak intensity of pain could be more important than minimizing the duration of the procedure. By the same reasoning, gradual relief may be preferable to abrupt relief if patients retain a better memory when the pain at the end of the procedure is relatively mild. If the objective is to reduce the amount of pain actually experienced, conducting the procedure swiftly may be appropriate even if doing so increases the peak pain intensity and leaves patients with an awful memory. Which of the two objectives did you find most compelling? I have not conducted a proper survey, but my impression is that a strong majority will come down in favor of reducing the memory of pain. I find it helpful to think of this dilemma

• From The Lover (1984)

  Kisses on the body bring tears. Almost like a consolation. At home I don’t cry. But that day in that room, tears console both for the past and for the future. I tell him one day I’ll leave my mother, one day even for my mother I’ll have no love left. I weep. He lays his head on me and weeps to see me weep. I tell him that when I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams. My dreams were of my mother, never of Christmas trees, always just her, a mother either flayed by poverty or distraught and muttering in the wilderness, either searching for food or endlessly telling what’s happened to her, Marie Legrand from Roubaix, telling of her innocence, her savings, her hopes. Through the shutters evening has come. The noise has got louder. It’s more penetrating, less muffled. The livid red streetlights are lit. We’ve left the flat. I’ve put on the man’s hat with the black ribbon again, the gold shoes, the dark lipstick, the silk dress. I’ve grown older. I suddenly know it. He sees it, he says, You’re tired. On the sidewalk the crowd, going in all directions, slow or fast, forcing its way, mangy as stray dogs, blind as beggars, a Chinese crowd, I can still see it now in pictures of present prosperity, in the way they go along together without any sign of impatience, in the way they are alone in a crowd, without happiness, it seems, without sadness, without curiosity, going along without seeming to, without meaning to, just going this way rather than that, alone and in the crowd, never alone even by themselves, always alone even in the crowd. We go to one of those Chinese restaurants on several floors, they occupy whole buildings, they’re as big as department stores, or barracks, they look out over the city from balconies and terraces. The noise that comes from these buildings is inconceivable in Europe, the noise of orders yelled out by the waiters, then taken up and yelled out by the kitchens. No one ever merely speaks. On the terraces there are Chinese orchestras. We go up to the quietest floor, the Europeans’ floor, the menus are the same but there’s less yelling. There are fans, and heavy draperies to deaden the noise.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I positioned him in between two tiles of the linoleum floor. “Follow that line of tiles. Walk straight, toe to heel.” He raised one leg and immediately leaned to the left, his arms windmilling. He took a single unsteady step, sort of a waddle, as his feet were seemingly unable to land directly in front of each other. He regained his balance briefly, then took a step backward and landed on the couch. “I fail,” he said matter-of-factly. “Okay, how’s your depth perception?” “My what perwhatshun?” “Look at me. Is there one of me? Are there two of me? Could you accidentally drive into me if I were a cop car?” “Everything’s very spinny, but I don’t think so. This is bad. Was she really like this?” “Apparently. Could you drive like this?” “Oh God no. No. No. She was really drunk, huh.” “Yeah.” “We were really stupid.” “Yeah.” “I’m spinning. But no. No cop car. I can see.” “So there’s your evidence.” “Maybe she fell asleep. I feel awfully sleepy.” “We’ll find out,” I said, trying to play the role that the Colonel had always played for me. “Not tonight,” he answered. “Tonight, we’re gonna throw up a little, and then we are going to sleep through our hangover.” “Don’t forget about Latin.” “Right. Fucking Latin.” twenty-eight days after THE COLONEL MADE IT to Latin the next morning—“I feel awesome right now, because I’m still drunk. But God help me in a couple of hours”—and I took a French test for which I had studied un petit peu. I did all right on the multiple choice (which-verb-tense-makes-sense-here type questions), but the essay question, In Le Petit Prince, what is the significance of the rose? threw me a bit. Had I read The Little Prince in English or French, I suspect this question might have been quite easy. Unfortunately, I’d spent the evening getting the Colonel drunk. So I answered, Elle symbolise l’amour (“It symbolizes love”). Madame O’Malley had left us with an entire page to answer the question, but I figured I’d covered it nicely in three words. I’d kept up in my classes well enough to get B-minuses and not worry my parents, but I didn’t really care much anymore. The significance of the rose? I thought. Who gives a shit? What’s the significance of the white tulips? There was a question worth answering. — After I’d gotten a lecture and ten work hours at Jury, I came back to Room 43 to find the Colonel telling Takumi everything—well, everything except the kiss. I walked in to the Colonel saying, “So we helped her go.” “You set off the fireworks,” he said. “How’d you know about the fireworks?” “I’ve been doing a bit of investigating,” Takumi answered. “Well, anyway, that was dumb.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  A U-index can also be computed for activities. For example, we can measure the proportion of time that people spend in a negative emotional state while commuting, working, or interacting with their parents, spouses, or children. For 1,000 American women in a Midwestern city, the U-index was 29% for the morning commute, 27% for work, 24% for child care, 18% for housework, 12% for socializing, 12% for TV watching, and 5% for sex. The U-index was higher by about 6% on weekdays than it was on weekends, mostly because on weekends people spend less time in activities they dislike and do not suffer the tension and stress associated with work. The biggest surprise was the emotional experience of the time spent with one’s children, which for American women was slightly less enjoyable than doing housework. Here we found one of the few contrasts between French and American women: Frenchwomen spend less time with their children but enjoy it more, perhaps because they have more access to child care and spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities. An individual’s mood at any moment depends on her temperament and overall happiness, but emotional well-being also fluctuates considerably over the day and the week. The mood of the moment depends primarily on the current situation. Mood at work, for example, is largely unaffected by the factors that influence general job satisfaction, including benefits and status. More important are situational factors such as an opportunity to socialize with coworkers, exposure to loud noise, time pressure (a significant source of negative affect), and the immediate presence of a boss (in our first study, the only thing that was worse than being alone). Attention is key. Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment. There are exceptions, where the quality of subjective experience is dominated by recurrent thoughts rather than by the events of the moment. When happily in love, we may feel joy even when caught in traffic, and if grieving, we may remain depressed when watching a funny movie. In normal circumstances, however, we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it. To get pleasure from eating, for example, you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted. These observations have implications for both individuals and society. The use of time is one of the areas of life over which people have some control. Few individuals can will themselves to have a sunnier disposition, but some may be able to arrange their lives to spend less of their day commuting, and more time

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The whole business of don the subject, her questions became gentler: what were his personal feel-eroticism is to strike to the ings toward the leaders of South and North Vietnam? Still, he ducked: inmost core of the living "I'm not the kind of person to be swayed by emotion. Emotions serve being, so that the heart stands still. . . . The no purpose." She moved to grander philosophical issues—war, peace. She Mix Pleasure with Pain • 375 praised him for his role in the rapprochement with China. Without real- whole business of izing it, Kissinger began to open up. He talked of the pain he felt in dealing eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of with Vietnam, the pleasures of wielding power. Then suddenly the harsher the participators as they are questions returned—was he simply Nixon's lackey, as many suspected? Up in their normal lives. . . . and down she went, alternately baiting and flattering him. His goal had We ought never to forget been to pump her for information while revealing nothing about himself; that in spite of the bliss love promises its first effect by the end, though, she had given him nothing, while he had revealed a is one of turmoil and range of embarrassing opinions—his view of women as playthings, for in- distress. Passion fulfilled stance, and his belief that he was popular with the public because people itself provokes such violent agitation that the saw him as a kind of lonesome cowboy, the hero who cleans things up by happiness involved, before himself. When the interview was published, Nixon, Kissinger's boss, was being a happiness to be livid about it. enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite, In 1973, the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Riza Pahlavi, granted Fallaci an suffering. . . . The interview. He knew how to handle the press—be noncommittal, speak in likelihood of suffering is all generalities, seem firm, yet polite. This approach had worked a thousand the greater since suffering times before. Fallaci began the interview on a personal level, asking how it alone reveals the total significance of the beloved felt to be a king, to be the target of assassination attempts, and why the object. shah always seemed so sad. He talked of the burdens of his position, the —GEORGES BATAILLE, pain and loneliness he felt. It seemed a release of sorts to talk about his pro- EROTISM: DEATH AND fessional problems. As he talked, Fallaci said little, her silence goading him SENSUALITY, TRANSLATED BY MARY DALWOOD

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  adjusting the length of another line to match the average. System 2 is not needed to form an impression of the norm of length for an array. System 1 does it, automatically and effortlessly, just as it registers the color of the lines and the fact that they are not parallel. We also can form an immediate impression of the number of objects in an array—precisely if there are four or fewer objects, crudely if there are more. Now to another question: What is the total length of the lines in figure 8? This is a different experience, because System 1 has no suggestions to offer. The only way you can answer this question is by activating System 2, which will laboriously estimate the average, estimate or count the lines, and multiply average length by the number of lines. The failure of System 1 to compute the total length of a set of lines at a glance may look obvious to you; you never thought you could do it. It is in fact an instance of an important limitation of that system. Because System 1 represents categories by a prototype or a set of typical exemplars, it deals well with averages but poorly with sums. The size of the category, the number of instances it contains, tends to be ignored in judgments of what I will call sum- like variables. Participants in one of the numerous experiments that were prompted by the litigation following the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill were asked their willingness to pay for nets to cover oil ponds in which migratory birds often drown. Different groups of participants stated their willingness to pay to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds. If saving birds is an economic good it should be a sum-like variable: saving 200,000 birds should be worth much more than saving 2,000 birds. In fact, the average contributions of the three groups were $80, $78, and $88 respectively. The number of birds made very little difference. What the participants reacted to, in all three groups, was a prototype—the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times. Intensity Matching Questions about your happiness, the president’s popularity, the proper punishment of financial evildoers, and the future prospects of a politician share an important characteristic: they all refer to an underlying dimension of intensity or amount, which permits the use of the word more: more happy, more popular, more severe, or more powerful (for a politician). For example, a candidate’s political future can range from the low of “She will be defeated in the primary”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  So we stayed with Mama and Papa for the sake of “good north light” and “real gold leaf"—or at least my mother said so. And meanwhile my father traveled around the world for his tzatzka business and my mother stayed home and had babies and screamed at her mother and father. My father was designing ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets. He was designing families of ceramic animals chained together with tiny gold chains. And he was making quite a fortune at it—amazingly enough. We could easily have moved away, but obviously my mother would not or could not. A little gold chain chained my mother to her mother, and me to my mother. All our unhappiness was strung along the same (rapidly tarnishing) gold chain. Of course my mother had a rationalization for it all—a patriarchal rationalization, the age-old rationalization of women seething with talent and ambition who keep getting knocked up. “Women cannot possibly do both,” she said, “you’ve got to choose. Either be an artist or have children.” With a name like Isadora Zelda it was clear what I was supposed to choose: everything my mother had been offered and had passed up. How could I possibly take off my diaphragm and get pregnant? What other women do without half thinking was for me a great and momentous act. It was a denial of my name, my destiny, my mother. My sisters were different. Gundra Miranda called herself “Randy” and married at eighteen. She married a Lebanese physicist at Berkeley, had four sons in California, and then moved her family to Beirut where she proceeded to have five daughters. Despite the seeming rebelliousness of a nice Jewish girl from Central Park West marrying an A-Rab, she led the most ordinary family life imaginable in Beirut. She was almost religiously in favor of Kinder, Küche, and Kirche—especially the Catholic Church, which she attended in order to impress the Arabs with her non-Jewishness. Not, of course, that they liked Catholicism that much, but it was better than the other alternative. Both she and Pierre, my brother-in-law, believed in Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Lionel Tiger as if they were Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. “Instinct!” they snorted. “Pure animal instinct!” They came to hate the Berkeley beatniks of their college days and to preach territoriality, the immorality of contraception and abortion, and the universality of war. At times they honestly seemed to believe in the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of Kings. And meanwhile, they just kept on breeding. (“Why should people with superior genes use contraception when all the undesirables are breeding the world into extinction?"—the old refrain whenever Randy was announcing a new pregnancy.)

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

  Typical self-help books focus on your mind. If you think differently, they say, you will feel differently. You can regulate your emotions if you try hard enough. These books, however, don’t give much consideration to your body. If there’s one thing that (I hope) you’ve learned from the past five chapters, it’s that your body and your mind are deeply interconnected. Interoception drives your actions. Your culture wires your brain.1 The most basic thing you can do to master your emotions, in fact, is to keep your body budget in good shape. Remember, your interoceptive network labors day and night, issuing predictions to maintain a healthy budget, and this process is the origin of your affective feelings (pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, and calmness). If you want to feel good, then your brain’s predictions about your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, hormones, metabolism, and so on, must be calibrated to your body’s actual needs. If they aren’t, and your body budget gets out of whack, then you’re going to feel crappy no matter what self-help tips you follow. It’s just a matter of which flavor of crap. Modern culture, unfortunately, is engineered to screw up your body budget. Many of the products sold in supermarkets and chain restaurants are pseudo-food loaded with budget-warping refined sugar and bad fats. Schools and jobs require you to wake early and go to sleep late, leaving over 40 percent of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four regularly sleep-deprived, a condition that can lead to chronic misbudgeting and possibly depression and other mental illnesses. Advertisers play on your insecurities, suggesting you’ll be judged badly by your friends unless you buy the right clothing or car, and social rejection is toxic for your body budget. Social media offers new opportunities for social rejection and adds ambiguity, which is even worse for your body budget. Friends and employers expect you to be surgically attached to your cell phone at all hours, which means you never truly relax, and late-night screen time disrupts your sleeping patterns. Your culture’s expectations for work, rest, and socializing determine how easily you can manage that internal budget. Social reality transmutes into physical reality.2 Your body budget, you may remember, is regulated by predictive circuitry in your interoceptive network. If those predictions become chronically out of sync with your body’s actual needs, it’s hard to bring them back into balance. Your body-budgeting circuitry, the loudmouth of your brain, doesn’t respond quickly to counterevidence (prediction error) from your body. Once the predictions have been off-base for long enough, you will feel chronically miserable.