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

  Clore has spent decades performing clever experiments to better understand how people make decisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called affective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings. For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather. When you apply for a job or college or medical school, make sure you interview on a sunny day, because interviewers tend to rate applicants more negatively when it is rainy. And the next time a good friend snaps at you, remember affective realism. Maybe your friend is irritated with you, but perhaps she didn’t sleep well last night, or maybe it’s just lunchtime. The change in her body budget, which she’s experiencing as affect, might not have anything to do with you. 4 4 Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. * Photographs of kittens are deemed pleasant. Photographs of rotting human corpses are deemed unpleasant. But these images do not have affective properties inside them. The phrase “an unpleasant image” is really shorthand for “an image that impacts my body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant.” In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” In my lab, when we manipulate people’s affect without their knowing, it influences whether they experience a stranger as trustworthy, competent, attractive, or likable, and they even see the person’s face differently. 4 5 People employ affect as information, creating affective realism, throughout daily life. Food is “delicious” or “bland.” Paintings are “beautiful” or “ugly.” People are “nice” or “mean.” Women in certain cultures must wear scarves and wigs so as not to “tempt men” by showing a bit of hair. Sometimes affective realism is helpful, but it also shapes some of humanity’s most troubling problems. Enemies are “evil.” Women who are raped are perceived as “asking for it.” Victims of domestic violence are said to “bring it on themselves.” 4 6 The thing is, a bad feeling doesn’t always mean something is wrong. It just means you’re taxing your body budget. When people exercise to the point of labored breathing, for example, they feel tired and crappy well before they run out of energy. When people solve math problems and perform difficult feats of memory, they can feel hopeless and miserable, even when they are performing well. Any graduate student of mine who never feels distress is clearly doing something wrong.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  grandpa died six fifteen tuesday stop revived by massage stop heart failure stop rectal hemmorage stop nothing could be done stop funeral january 4 stop love mother I read the telegram first, then gave it to Bennett. I had that sick feeling I always have when I know something awful is going to be blamed on me. I knew that Bennett would somehow find a way to blame me for his grandfather’s death. My mother’s parents were still alive. I put my arms around Bennett and he drew away. I remember thinking I was not so sad that his grandfather had died, but that I was going to have to die a little bit more for it in penance. Bennett sat on the living-room couch with the telegram in his hands. I sat next to him and reread it over his shoulder. “The moving finger writes and it misspells words,” I thought. I hardly knew Bennett’s grandfather (an ancient Chinese man who was either 99 or 100, looked like a yellowed ivory statue, and spoke barely any English at all). I pretended it was my own grandfather who had died and began to cry. I was really crying for myself, dying slowly at the age of twenty-five. Bennett was marked by death, up to his neck in it. He carried his sadness on his shoulders like an invisible knapsack. If he had turned to me, if he had let me comfort him, I might have borne it with him. But he blamed me for it. And his blame drove me away. But I was afraid to go away. I stayed and grew more secret. I turned more and more to my fantasies and to my writing. And that was how I began to discover myself. He retreated into his sadness, barricaded himself in it, and I retreated into my room to write. All that long winter, he mourned his grandfather, his father, his sister who had died at sixteen, his brother who had been born retarded and died at eighteen, his friend who had died of polio at fourteen, his poverty, his silence. He mourned the army, the life he’d left in New York. He mourned the dead and his own preoccupation with death. He mourned his mourning. The rigid expression he wore on his face was a kind of death mask. So many people he had loved (but also hated) had died, and he wore this mask in penance. Why should he be alive when they were dead? So he made his life resemble death. And his death was my death too. I learned to keep myself alive by writing.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva opened the bathroom door and handed me an old hairbrush with a long wooden handle. There was a spot on the back that was all scratched up. When I held it under the light, I could make out teeth marks. I sniffed it but couldn’t detect the smell of vomit, only Reva’s coconut hand cream. “I’ve never seen you in a suit before,” Reva said stiffly when she came out of the bathroom. The dress she wore was tight with a high center slit. “You look really put together,” she said to me. “Did you get a haircut?” “Duh,” I said, handing her back the brush. We put our coats on and went upstairs. The living room was empty, thank God. I filled my McDonald’s cup with coffee again as Reva stood at the fridge, shoving cold steamed broccoli in her mouth. It was snowing again. “I’m warning you,” Reva said, wiping her hands. “I’m going to cry a lot.” “It would be weird if you didn’t,” I said. “I just look so ugly when I cry. And Ken said he’d be there,” she told me for the second time. “I know we should have waited until after New Year’s. Not like it would have made a difference to my mom. She’s already cremated.” “You told me.” “I’ll try not to cry too hard,” she said. “Tearing up is OK. But my face just gets so puffy.” She stuck her hand in a box of Kleenex and pulled out a stack. “You know, in a way, I’m glad we didn’t have to get her embalmed. That’s just creepy. She was just a sack of bones, anyway. She probably weighed half of what I weigh now. Well, maybe not half exactly. But she was super skinny. Skinnier than Kate Moss, even.” She stuck the tissues in her coat pocket and turned off the lights. We went out the kitchen door into the garage. There was a storage freezer in the corner, shelves of tools and flowerpots and ski boots, a few old bikes, stacks of blue plastic storage bins along one wall. “It’s unlocked,” Reva said, motioning to a small silver Toyota. “This was my mom’s car. I started it last night. Hopefully I can start it again now. She hadn’t been driving it, obviously.” Inside, it smelled like menthol rub. There was a polar bear bobblehead on the dash, an issue of the New Yorker and a bottle of hand cream on the passenger seat. Reva started the car, sighed, clicked the garage door opener clipped to the visor, and started crying. “See? I warned you,” she said, taking out the wad of tissues. “I’m just going to cry while the car heats up. Just a sec,” she said. She cried on, gently shaking under her puffy jacket.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She closed the door. I sat on the bed and turned off the light. Reva was making noise in the bathroom. “I’m leaving clean towels for you here by the sink,” she said through the door. I wondered if my presence was keeping her from vomiting. I wished I could tell her I wouldn’t mind it if she threw up. I really wouldn’t have. I would have understood. If puking could have brought me any solace, I would have tried it years ago. I waited until I heard her close the outside door of the bathroom and creak up the stairs before I went and looked through her medicine cabinet. There was an old bottle of bubblegum-flavored amoxicillin and a half-empty tube of Monistat anti-itch cream. I drank the amoxicillin. I peed into the running toilet. The underwear I had on was white cotton with an old brown bloodstain. It reminded me that I hadn’t menstruated in months. I got back under the sleeping bag and listened to Reva’s relatives through the ceiling—footsteps, whining, all that neurotic energy and food getting passed around, jaws grinding, the heartache and opinions and Reva’s pent-up anguish or fury or whatever it was that she was trying to stuff down. I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee. I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother—complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows. The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine. My mother hadn’t been easy to love. I’m sure she was complicated and worthy of further analysis, and she was beautiful, but I didn’t ever really know her. So the sadness in the room felt canned to me. It felt trite. Like the nostalgia for a mother I’d seen on television—someone who cooked and cleaned, kissed me on the forehead and put Band-Aids on my knees, read me books at night, held and rocked me when I cried. My own mother would have rolled her eyes at the thought of doing that. “I’m not your nanny,” she had often said to me. But I never had a nanny. There were babysitters—girls from the college my father’s secretary had found. We always had a housekeeper, Dolores. My mother called her “the maid.” I could make a case for my mother’s rejection of domesticity as some kind of feminist assertion of her right to leisure, but I actually think that she refused to cook and clean because she felt that doing so would cement her failure as a beauty queen.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Men don’t attach as easily. They’re more rational,” my father corrected her. After a long pause, he said, “We just want you to be careful.” “He means use a rubber.” “And take these.” My father gave me a small, pink, shell-shaped compact of birth control pills. “Gross,” was all I could say. “And your father has cancer,” my mother said. I said nothing. “Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.” “The man always dies first,” my mother whispered. My dad’s chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table. “I was only teasing,” my mom said, batting the smoke of her own cigarette away from her face. “About the cancer?” “No.” That was the end of the conversation. Later, while I packed up to move into the dorm, my mother came and stood in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cigarette out behind her in the hall as if it would make any difference. The whole house always smelled like stale smoke. “You know I don’t like it when you cry,” she said. “I wasn’t crying,” I said. “And I hope you’re not packing any shorts. Nobody wears shorts in Manhattan. And they’ll shoot you in the street if you go around in those disgusting tennis shoes. You’ll look ridiculous. Your father isn’t paying this much for you to go look ridiculous in New York City.” I wanted her to think that I was crying over my father’s cancer, but that wasn’t quite it. “Well, Goddamnit, if you insist on getting weepy,” my mother said, turning to leave. “You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle? You had colic and cried for hours and hours, inconsolable and for no good reason. And change your shirt. I can see the sweat under your arms. I’m going to bed.” A realty company managed my parents’ property after they were dead. The house got rented out to a history professor and his family. I never had to meet them. The company handled the maintenance and gardening and made any repairs necessary. When something broke or wore out, they sent me a letter with a photo and an estimate. When I got lonely or bored or nostalgic, I’d go through the photos and try to disgust myself with the banality of the place—a cracked step, a leak in the basement, a peeling ceiling, a broken cabinet. And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me. They were too busy to want to imagine my life in Manhattan. My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had

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

  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. According to this view, the waver in Governor Malloy’s voice launched a chain reaction that began in my brain. A particular set of neurons—call it the “sadness circuit”—leaped into action and caused my face and body to respond in a certain, specific way. My brow furrowed, I frowned, my shoulders stooped, and I cried. This proposed circuit also triggered physical changes inside my body, causing my heart rate and breathing to speed up, my sweat glands to activate, and my blood vessels to constrict.* This collection of movements on the inside and outside of my body are said to be like a “fingerprint” that uniquely identifies sadness, much like your own fingerprints uniquely identify you. The classical view of emotion holds that we have many such emotion circuits in our brains, and each is said to cause a distinct set of changes, that is, a fingerprint. Perhaps an annoying coworker triggers your “anger neurons,” so your blood pressure rises; you scowl, yell, and feel the heat of fury. Or an alarming news story triggers your “fear neurons,” so your heart races; you freeze and feel a flash of dread. Because we experience anger, happiness, surprise, and other emotions as clear and identifiable states of being, it seems reasonable to assume that each emotion has a defining underlying pattern in the brain and body.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together in a succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell. Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observations of American morals and mores are satiric, the product of his maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-emphasized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov: “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov shows how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody figures in the design of each of his novels. The Eye parodies the nineteenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened after death to view his old life with new clarity, while Laughter in the Dark is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the love triangle; Despair is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something quite different; and The Gift parodies the major nineteenth-century Russian writers. Invitation to a Beheading is cast as a mock anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s We (1920) had been restaged by the Marx Brothers. Pnin masquerades as an “academic novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a “reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s orbital exit from Dead Souls (1842), just as the last paragraph of The Gift conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  AT WORK, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. “Napping” is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy. But coming out of that sleep was excruciating. My entire life flashed before my eyes in the worst way possible, my mind refilling itself with all my lame memories, every little thing that had brought me to where I was. I’d try to remember something else—a better version, a happy story, maybe, or just an equally lame but different life that would at least be refreshing in its digressions—but it never worked. I was always still me. Sometimes I woke up with my face wet with tears. The only times I cried, in fact, were when I was pulled out of that nothingness, when the alarm on my cell phone went off. Then I had to trudge up the stairs, get coffee from the little kitchen, and rub the boogers out of my eyes. It always took me a while to readjust to the harsh fluorescent lighting. • • • FOR A YEAR OR SO, everything seemed fine with Natasha. The most grief she gave me was about ordering the wrong pens. “Why do we have all these cheap clicky pens? They’re so loud when you click them. You can’t hear this?” She stood there, clicking at me. “Sorry, Natasha,” I said. “I’ll order quieter pens.” “Has FedEx come yet?” I would rarely know how to answer that. Once I’d started seeing Dr. Tuttle, I was getting in fourteen, fifteen hours of sleep a night during the workweek, plus that extra hour at lunchtime. Weekends I was only awake for a few hours a day. And when I was awake, I wasn’t fully so, but in a kind of murk, a dim state between the real and the dream. I got sloppy and lazy at work, grayer, emptier, less there. This pleased me, but having to do things became very problematic.

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

  Emotional experiences have no objective fingerprints in the face, body, or brain that would enable us to compute an answer. The best we can do is ask people how they feel, but they’d have to use emotion concepts to answer the question, defeating the purpose of the experiment! The way around this conundrum is to study people who have a naturally impoverished conceptual system for emotion, a condition called alexithymia, which by one estimate affects about 10 percent of the world’s population. Its sufferers do have difficulty experiencing emotion, as the theory of constructed emotion would predict. In a situation where a person with a working conceptual system might experience anger, people with alexithymia are more likely to experience a stomachache. They complain of physical symptoms and report feelings of affect but fail to experience them as emotional. People with alexithymia have difficulty perceiving emotion in others as well. If a person with a working conceptual system saw two men shouting at each other, she might make a mental inference and perceive anger, whereas a person with alexithymia would report perceiving only shouting. People with alexithymia also have a restricted emotion vocabulary and have difficulty remembering emotion words. These clues provide further evidence that concepts are critical for experiencing and perceiving emotion. 4 8 … Concepts are linked to everything you do and perceive. And as you learned in the previous chapter, everything you do and perceive is linked to your body budget. Therefore, concepts must be linked to your body budget. And, in fact, they are. When you were born, you couldn’t regulate your budget, so your caregivers did it for you. Each time your mother picked you up to feed you was a multisensory event with regularities: the sight of your mother’s face, the sound of her voice, her motherly aroma, her touch, the taste of her milk (or formula), and your interoceptive sensations associated with being held and cuddled and fed. Your brain captured the entire sensory context in the moment, as a pattern of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and interoceptive sensations. This is how concepts begin to form. You learn in a multisensory way. Your inner-body changes and their interoceptive consequences are part of every concept that you learn, whether you’re aware of it or not.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I could admit that. I wanted her to hold me while I cried, bring me cups of warm milk and honey, give me comfy slippers, rent me videos and watch them with me, order deliveries of Chinese food and pizza. Of course I didn’t tell her that this was what I wanted. She was usually passed out in her bed with the door locked. A few times that week, people visited the house, and my mother would do her hair and makeup, spray air freshener, raise the blinds. She got phone calls from Peggy twice a day. “I’m fine, Peggy. No, don’t come over. I’m going to take a bath and a nap. Sunday? Fine, but call first.” In the afternoons, I took the car out, driving aimlessly or to the mall or the supermarket. My mother left me lists of things to buy, with a note for the guy at the liquor store. “This girl is my daughter, and I permit her to purchase alcohol. Call if you’d like to verify her identity. The number is . . .” I bought her vodka. I bought her whiskey and mixers. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. She’d been a heavy drinker for years. Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that. I remember one afternoon, she came out of her room and walked past me where I lay on the floor sobbing. She went to the kitchen, wrote a check for the housekeeper, took a bottle of vodka from the freezer, told me to turn down the television, and went back to her room. That was the worst of it. I was pretty upset. I couldn’t have described with any accuracy how I was “doing.” And nobody called to ask me. Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Reva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me. We didn’t get to be friends until later that year. For the rest of my week of mourning, my moods trespassed out of the standard categories I’d come to recognize. One moment was silent and gray, Technicolor and garish and absurd the next. I felt like I was on drugs, though I had taken nothing. I didn’t even drink that week until a man from the university, Professor Plushenko, one of my father’s colleagues, came to the house, and my mother attempted to entertain him. Professor Plushenko had come under the veil of condolence with a store-bought Bundt cake and a bottle of Polish brandy. He was there to convince my mother to give him my father’s papers. I had the feeling he wanted something my father wouldn’t have given to him willingly.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  And having her firmly in place, her ankles clasped to his hip, he scolded her lovingly, and gave her several hard spanks with his left hand until he heard her crying. "You must never protest," he repeated. "Not with sound, not with gesture. Only your tears may show your Prince what you feel, and never think that he does not wish to know what you feel. Now respectfully, answer me." "Yes, my Prince," Beauty whimpered softly. He thrilled to the sound of it. When they came to the small town in the middle of the forest, there was great excitement, as everyone had already heard of the enchantment being broken. And as the Prince rode into the crooked little street with its high half-timbered houses blocking out the sky, people ran to the narrow windows and doorways. They crowded into the cobblestone alleyways. Behind him, the Prince could hear his men in hushed voices telling the townspeople who he was, that it was their Lord who had broken the enchantment. The girl he carried with him was the Sleeping Beauty. Beauty was sobbing softly, her body struggling with these sobs, but the Prince held her firmly. Finally with a great crowd following him, he arrived at the Inn, and his horse, with loud clops, entered the courtyard. His page quickly helped him down. "We'll stop only for food and drink," said the Prince. "We can go miles before sundown." He stood Beauty on her feet and watched with admiration as her hair fell down around her. And he turned her around twice, pleased to see she kept her hands clasped behind her neck and her eyes down as he looked at her. He kissed her devotedly. "Do you see how they all look at you?" he said. "Do you feel how they admire your beauty? They are adoring you," he said. And opening her lips again, he sucked another kiss out of her, his hand squeezing her sore buttocks. It seemed her lips clung to his as if she were afraid to let him go, and then he kissed her eyelids. "Now everyone is going to want to have a look at Beauty," the Prince said to the Captain of the Guard. "Bind her hands over her head by a rope from the sign over the Inn gate, and let the people have their fill of her. But no one is to touch her. They can look all they like, but you stand guard and see that no one touches her. I'll have your food sent out to you." "Yes, my Lord," said the Captain of the Guard. But as the Prince gently gave Beauty over to him, she leaned forward, her lips out to the Prince, and he received her kiss gratefully. "You're very sweet, my darling," he said. "Now be modest and very very good. I should be very disappointed if all this adulation made my Beauty vain." He kissed her again, and let the Captain have her.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Our marriage began under that heavy burden. That it survived at all is rather a miracle. In Heidelberg, we set up house in a vast American concentration camp in the postwar section of town (a far cry from the beautiful old section near the Schloss , which tourists see). Our neighbors were mostly army captains and their “dependents.” With a few notable exceptions they were the most considerate people I’ve ever lived among. The wives welcomed you with coffee when you moved in. The children were maddeningly friendly and polite. The husbands would spring gallantly to help you dig your car out of a snowbank or carry heavy boxes upstairs. It was all the more astonishing then when they announced to you that life was cheap in Asia, that the U.S. ought to bomb the hell out of the Viet Cong, and finally, that soldiers were only there to do a job but not to have political opinions. They regarded Bennett and me as creatures from outer space, and that was rather how we felt ourselves. Across the way were our other neighbors, the Germans. In 1945, when they were still militarists, they had hated Americans for winning the war. Now, in 1966, the Germans were pacifists (at least where other nations were concerned) and they hated the Americans for being in Vietnam. The ironies multiplied so fast you could hardly absorb them. If San Antonio had been strange, Heidelberg was a thousand times stranger. We lived between two sets of enemies and we were both so unhappy that we were enemies to each other as well. I can still close my eyes and remember the dinner hour in Mark Twain Village, Heidelberg. The smell of TV dinners in passageways. The Armed Forces Radio Network blaring out the football scores and the (inflated) number of Viet Cong killed on the other side of the world. Children screaming. Twenty-five-year-old freckle-faced matrons from Kansas wandering about in housecoats and hair rollers, always awaiting that Cinderella evening for which it will be worthwhile to comb out their curls. It never comes. Instead come the salesmen who stalk the hallways, ringing doorbells, selling everything from mutual funds to picture encyclopedias (in simplified vocabulary) to Oriental rugs. Besides the American strays and British dropouts and Pakistani students selling “on the side,” there is a veritable Bundeswehr of gnomelike Germans, peddling everything from “handpainted” oils of sugared Alps under honeyed sunsets to beer steins which play “God Bless America” to Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks which chime perpetually. And the army people buy and buy and buy. The wives buy to fill up their empty lives, to create an illusion of home in their drab quarters, to spread the grease of American money around. The kids buy helmets and war toys and child-sized fatigues so that they can play their favorite games of VC’s versus Green Berets and prepare for their future. The husbands buy power tools to counteract their own sense of impotence.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer. She visited me just once in New York, my sophomore year. She took the train down and was an hour late to meet me at the Guggenheim. I could smell alcohol on her breath as we wandered around. She was skittish and quiet. “Oh, isn’t that pretty?” she said about a Kandinsky, a Chagall. She left me abruptly when we got to the top of the ramp, saying she’d lost track of time. I followed her down and out of the museum, watched her try to hail a cab, seething and flabbergasted when each passing taxi was occupied. I don’t know what her problem was. Maybe she’d seen a piece of art that unnerved her. She never explained it. But she called me later from her hotel and had me meet her for dinner that evening. It was as if nothing strange had happened at the museum. She was accountable for nothing when she was drunk. I was used to it. I paid for my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in cash from my inheritance. From the windows in the living room, I could see some of Carl Schurz Park and a sliver of the East River. I could see the nannies with their strollers. Wealthy housewives milled up and down the Esplanade in visors and sunglasses. They reminded me of my mother—pointless and self-obsessed—only she had been less physically active. If I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see the uppermost tip of Roosevelt Island with its weird geometry of low brick buildings. I liked to think those buildings housed the criminally insane, though I knew that wasn’t the case, at least anymore. Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would. • • • THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  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. “You’re doing great, doll,” he’d say. More often than I needed, I’d get face peels and pedicures, massages, waxings, haircuts. That was how I mourned, I guess. I paid strangers to make me feel good. I might as well have hired a prostitute, I thought. That’s kind of what Dr. Tuttle was years later, I thought—a whore to feed me lullabies. If anything was going to make me cry, it was the thought of losing Dr. Tuttle. What if she lost her license? What if she dropped dead? What would I do without her? Then, finally, in Reva’s basement bedroom, I felt a tinge of sadness. I could feel it in my throat, like a chicken bone caught in my windpipe. I loved Dr. Tuttle, I guessed. I got up and drank some water from the tap in the bathroom. I went back to bed. A few minutes later, Reva was knocking on the door. “I brought you some quiche,” she said. “Can I come in?”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It reminded me that I hadn’t menstruated in months. I got back under the sleeping bag and listened to Reva’s relatives through the ceiling—footsteps, whining, all that neurotic energy and food getting passed around, jaws grinding, the heartache and opinions and Reva’s pent-up anguish or fury or whatever it was that she was trying to stuff down. I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee. I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother—complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows. The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine. My mother hadn’t been easy to love. I’m sure she was complicated and worthy of further analysis, and she was beautiful, but I didn’t ever really know her. So the sadness in the room felt canned to me. It felt trite. Like the nostalgia for a mother I’d seen on television—someone who cooked and cleaned, kissed me on the forehead and put Band-Aids on my knees, read me books at night, held and rocked me when I cried. My own mother would have rolled her eyes at the thought of doing that. “I’m not your nanny,” she had often said to me. But I never had a nanny. There were babysitters—girls from the college my father’s secretary had found. We always had a housekeeper, Dolores. My mother called her “the maid.” I could make a case for my mother’s rejection of domesticity as some kind of feminist assertion of her right to leisure, but I actually think that she refused to cook and clean because she felt that doing so would cement her failure as a beauty queen. Oh, my mother. At her most functional, she kept to a strict diet of black coffee and a few prunes for breakfast. For lunch she’d have Dolores fix her a sandwich. She’d eat just a few bites, and put the leftovers on a bone china plate on the counter—a lesson for me, I took it, in how not to overindulge. In the evenings, she’d drink piss-colored Chardonnay on ice. There were cases of it in the pantry. I’d watched her face bloat and unbloat from day to day according to how much she drank. I liked to imagine her crying in private, mourning her shortcomings as a mother, but I doubt that was why she cried.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He didn't work hard enough for his degree at Dorset; he got muddled up doing French and Film Theory and Vernacular Handcrafts and came out with a Third that caused considerable tension at home. His father was a workaholic insurance-broker who stubbornly thought Dawn should be the same. Instead he took a menial job with the Acomat Carpet-Cleaning Co. For a year or more that great rear presented in bedrooms and sitting-rooms in the Croydon area as Dawn moved around on hands and knees, applying his Deep Foam Cleanser to the wine and cigarette damage of innumerable teenagers' parties. Once or twice he found himself removing stains of which he was himself the author. In time a friend of Edie's gave him a call and he was magicked up to London to be a picture-researcher on The World of Chandeliers. I didn't see much of him then, though I knew from Edie about the editor of the magazine, and the affair he had had with him. When the affair was over, so was the job. Dawn was on the loose then for about a year. I had a sense of his giddy footing and fucking around, of the various older, richer men who needed to look after him. It was 1983. When we met again he was different, flamboyant, high on sexual deceit. Then it started to go adrift—a lover of his died with incomprehensible swiftness. Suddenly he didn't have any money. For a while he was the young man who holds up the clocks and vases on the plinth at Christie's as the lot-numbers are announced. He wore the porters' maroon apron with a certain flair, as if it might catch on; but would blush terrifically with a hundred or more covetous pairs of eyes on him or at least on what he held in his hands. One such pair of eyes belonged to a sexy Italian dealer with shops in Bath and Tunbridge Wells who picked him up at a sale of antique chronometers and fucked him within five minutes in the customers' loo. That relationship lasted for five years, with Dawn in the end running the Tunbridge Wells establishment. To me he was still a boy, but he must have had a business nous I didn't quite like to think of his acquiring. Then very quietly he made the transition to Colin. It almost looked as if he had been passed over, in exchange perhaps for a lovely bureau that hadn't been tampered with. But Colin knew he was ill. He fell in love with him and he had the kind of love Dawn needed just then. You wouldn't have known it as you sat bored rigid by him in the pub and smiling wanly at his pleasantries, but Colin found himself in giving and sheltering and taking care.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I knew you'd be fascinated," he said quietly. "I think we should have a few of them in the catalogue, don't you?" "But obviously." It had become our catalogue only in the past week or so, and he appeared to welcome the uninformed certainty with which I saw some matters he had fretted over for years. "Besides they are themselves art-works by Orst," I pronounced. "We—you might even put them all in." "It's not usual," he said crisply, crossing to the print-cabinet, and stooping to tug out one of the wide shallow drawers. "But see what you think later"—in a teasing tone; was I drunk? He came back with a big square folder, and handed it to me carefully. "A la nuit tombante" was written on it in an old-fashioned hand—not Paul's pretty writing, some earlier guardian, perhaps the high-minded Delphine . . . "I just want you to see this," he said. I opened it with a little mime of curiosity, as if it were a present. An expanse of creamy-white, a sheet that was more like a wall, with a small square aperture at the centre—through which you looked at a dark sea and a sky that rose from a rim of light into deepening greys. The image was only four or five inches high, but intensified by a heavy black frame that gave one the impression of looking out from a high-up window in a thick-walled castle—for some reason I thought of Elsinore. At the same time I knew it was the lithograph to which Orst had returned in the simple late panel of the triptych, though there he had dispensed with the heavy masonry of the surround. It had a certain power, the lonely sea and the sky, though I felt it took enigma to the verge of emptiness. Underneath, though, was another sheet—an earlier state, Paul said, that showed what the black margins hid, like worn old details boarded up against the salt air: the white balustrade of a balcony below, tall windows at either side folded steeply back, in the left one the letters DROME reversed, running downwards and very faint. The sky was lighter and crossed with high striations of cloud and in its depths I thought I saw (what may only have been a hesitation of the penal) a pale speck of the folding star—well, you didn't fold at sea, but it gave me a disconsolate shiver. "Presumably Hippo and not Aero," I said, envisaging the white cliff of sea-front hotels; it might be Eastbourne, and then seeing of course where it was, the whole thing shifting into a deeper perspective, a hotel at Ostend—"Cold as the wind without an end."

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  His divorced parents had done a magnificent job. How to Protect the Vulnerable Child after Divorce W HAT PARENTS NEED to know is that all vulnerable children have exceptional trouble with rapid or radical change. The gains that parents work so hard to achieve (a baby finally learns to sit up, a toddler can make it to the toilet, the child is able to travel on the school bus) may be wiped out by divorce. Vulnerable children regress with frightening speed and recovery is painfully slow. Thus families with a vulnerable child who are planning to divorce should carefully plan the transition period. The child’s routines should change as gradually as possible. If one parent has been primary caregiver and the other will now have the child in a separate residence, the caregiver should spend two to three afternoons a week in the child’s new home. The goal is to overlap the old with the new, to enable the child to become slowly used to the new. Obviously, the child’s medical needs take priority, but every effort should be made to maintain familiar interventions, treatments, exercises, and the like so that the child feels comfortable with routines . If less care is given, as in Billy’s case, because the mother is ready for new interests and a different life, parents need to understand that the child will take this as pure rejection. It will break his heart. Like Billy, he may react with depression, anger, or rebelliousness, and there is no reason to assume that his hurt will lessen. His loss is enormous and can be the defining event of his growing up years. This is because every ill or handicapped child carries a double burden. First, he must deal with his own handicap in an often pitiless world. Second, and even more difficult, he must cope with his parents’ disappointment in him, for he knows that they had hoped for a healthy baby. He mustn’t disappoint them any further. As the vulnerable child sees his parents’ struggle to contain their grief, he is likely to feel anxious, ashamed, or depressed. He is likely to be hyperalert to their moods and more likely than a healthy child to feel responsible for any troubles in the family. The vulnerable child needs a double dose of praise and encouragement for every step he takes toward realistic independence. He needs assurance that there is a great deal he can do by himself and that he can master important ways to care for himself. He especially needs praise for his courage in trying. When the parent of a vulnerable child remarries, he or she needs to proceed gradually. Billy’s mother, for example, could have set aside exclusive time with her son in the early months, which would have helped him make the transition.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She herself was a piglety shade of pink. She wore a straw-colored sack of a dress that looked like coarse linen. Her hair was at a high frizz. A tight, chunky strand of pearls rolled up and down her throat as she spoke. The fans stirred up a roar of wind and made me dizzy. I gripped the bookshelf, knocking a swollen copy of Apparent Death to the floor. “Sorry,” I yelled over the din, and picked it up. “An interesting book about possums. Animals have so much wisdom,” Dr. Tuttle paused. “I hope you’re not a vegetarian,” she said, lowering her glasses. “I’m not.” “That’s a relief. Now tell me how you feel. Your affect is very flat today,” Dr. Tuttle said. She was right. I could barely arouse the enthusiasm to stand up straight. “Have you been taking your Risperdal?” “I skipped yesterday. I was so busy at work, I just forgot. The insomnia is really bad these days,” I lied. “You’re exhausted. Plain and simple.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. “According to that book you’re holding, the death gene is passed from mother to child in the birth canal. Something about microdermabrasions and infectious vaginal rash. Does your mother exhibit any signs of hormonal abnormalities?” “I don’t think so.” “You might want to ask her. If you are a carrier, I can suggest something for you. An herbal lotion. Only if you want it. I’d have to order it special from Peru.” “I was born caesarian, in case that’s a factor.” “The noble method,” she said. “Ask her anyway. Her answer might shed some light on your mental and biorhythmic incapacities.” “Well, she’s dead,” I reminded her. Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and folded her hands into prayer. I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn’t expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched up her face, sneezed violently, turned to wipe her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more. “And how did she die?” she asked. “Not pineal failure, I suppose.” “She mixed alcohol with sedatives,” I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle had forgotten that I’d told her my mother had slit her wrists, telling her the truth wouldn’t matter in the long run. “People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.” • • • SEPTEMBER CAME AND WENT. The sunlight tilted through the blinds once in a while, and I’d peek out to see if the leaves on the trees were dying yet. Life was repetitive, resonated at a low hum. I shuffled down to the Egyptians. I filled my prescriptions. Reva continued to appear from time to time, usually drunk and always on the brink of hysteria or outrage or complete meltdown one way or another.

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

  This view, which I call the theory of constructed emotion, offers a very different interpretation of the events during Governor Malloy’s speech. 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?