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 48 of 212 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wing professor at a Midwestern university) and Marcel Proust. All these poor people seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had also an album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and when I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gaston would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout “ Oui, ils sont gentils.” His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say “Prenez done une de ces poires. La bonne dame d’en face m!en offre plus que je n’en peux savourer.” Or: “Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dablias, belles fleurs que j’exècre.” (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.) For obvious reasons, I preferred my house to his for the games of chess we had two or three times weekly. He looked like some old battered idol as he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were a corpse. Wheezing he would meditate for ten minutes—then make a losing move. Or the good man, after even more thought, might utter: Au roi! with a slow old-dog woof that had a gargling sound at the back of it which made his jowls wabble; and then he would lift his circumflex eyebrows with a deep sigh as I pointed out to him that he was in check himself. Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo’s bare feet practicing dance techniques in the living room downstairs; but Gaston’s outgoing senses were comfortably dulled, and he remained unaware of those naked rhythms—and-one, and-two, and-one, and-two, weight transferred on a straight right leg, leg up and out to the side, and-one, and-two, and only when she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, and flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her toes—only then did my pale, pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheek as if confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable Queen . Sometimes Lola would slouch in while we pondered the board—and it was every time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye still fixed on his pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her, and forthwith release her limp fingers, and without looking once at her, descend again into his chair to topple into the trap I had laid for him.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Are they here for various reasons?" "Sent as Tributes mostly," Leon answered. "Our Queen is very powerful and commands many allies. And of course, all Tributes are well fed, well guarded, well treated just as you are well treated." "And...what happens to them?" Beauty asked tentatively. "I mean, they are all young and..." "They're returned to their Kingdoms when the Queen so wishes, and obviously very much better off for their service here. They're not so vain any longer, they have great self-control, and often a different view of the world, one which enables them to achieve great understanding." Beauty could scarcely guess what this meant. Leon massaged the oil into her sore calves and the tender flesh behind her knees. She felt drowsy. The sensation was growing ever more delicious, and she resisted it slightly, unwilling to let that craving between her legs torment her. Leon's fingers were strong, almost a little too strong, and they moved to her thighs which the Prince had reddened with his strap as much as her calves and buttocks. She shifted slightly against the soft, firm bedding. Her thoughts slowly cleared. "Then I might be sent home," she asked, but it had no meaning for her. "Yes, but you must never mention it, and certainly never ask for it. You are the property of your Prince. You are his slave entirely." "Yes..." she whispered. "And to beg to be released would be a terrible thing," Leon continued. "However in time you will be sent home. There are different agreements for different slaves. Do you see that Princess there?" In a great hollow in the wall, on a shelf-like bed, lay a dark-haired girl whom Beauty had noticed. She had olive skin, richer in tone than that of Prince Alexi who was also dark, and her hair was so long it lay in rippling strands over her buttocks. She slept with her face to the room, her mouth slightly open on the flat pillow. "Now, she is Princess Eugenia," said Leon, "and she must be returned in two years by agreement. Her time is almost up and she is broken-hearted. She wants to remain on the condition that her continued slavery will save two slaves from having to come here. Her Kingdom might agree to these terms to keep back two other Princesses." "You mean she wants to stay?" "O yes," Leon said. "She is mad for Lord William, the Queen's eldest cousin, and can't bear the thought of being sent home. But there are others who are ever rebellious."

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

  When you feel bad, treat yourself like you have a virus, rather than assuming that your unpleasant feelings mean something personal. Your feelings might just be noise. You might just need some sleep. … At this point you’ve seen how to work on becoming more emotionally intelligent about your experiences. Now let’s turn to perceiving emotion intelligently in other people around you, and the subsequent benefits for your well-being. My husband, Dan, went through a brief, difficult time a few decades ago, before we knew each other, and was referred to a psychiatrist. About thirty seconds into the first session, Dan knitted his brow and scowled, as he often does when he is concentrating, and the psychiatrist, trusting his perceptions as accurate, pronounced that Dan was “filled with pent-up anger.” The thing is, Dan is one of the calmest people I know. When Dan assured the psychiatrist that he wasn’t angry, the psychiatrist, confident in his ability to read his patients, insisted, “Yes, you are.” Well, Dan was out the door before the second hand had completed its first revolution. He may well hold the world record for the shortest therapy session. My point here isn’t to knock the mental-health profession but to illustrate the false confidence that one’s perceptions of other people’s mental states are—or ever can be—“right.” It comes from the classical view, which proposes that Dan broadcasts anger with a distinct fingerprint and the therapist detects it, even if Dan is unaware. If you want to gain mastery at perceiving other people’s emotional experiences, you must let go of this essentialist assumption. What happened during Dan’s minute in therapy? He constructed an experience of concentration, and the therapist constructed a perception of anger. Both constructions were real, not in the objective sense but in the social sense. Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they’re “correct” only when they match the other person’s experience; that is, both people agree on which concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You’re just having a moment of affective realism. 4 5 To improve at emotion perception, we must all give up the fiction that we know how other people feel. When you and a friend disagree about feelings, don’t assume that your friend is wrong like Dan’s ex-therapist did. Instead think, “We have a disagreement,” and engage your curiosity to learn your friend’s perspective. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right. So, if our perceptions are just guesses, how do we ever communicate with each other?

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

  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.

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

  In contrast, when you ruminate about something unpleasant, you cause fluctuations in your body budget. Rumination is a vicious cycle: each time you dwell on (say) a recent breakup of a relationship, you add another instance to predict with, which expands your opportunity to ruminate. Certain concepts about your breakup, such as your final shouting match, or the look on your lover’s face as he or she walked away for the last time, become entrenched in your model of the world. These concepts, as patterns of neural activity, get easier and easier for your brain to re-create, like well-trodden walking paths that grow deeper with each passerby’s footsteps. You don’t want them to become paved roads. Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future. Sometimes it’s helpful to construct instances of unpleasant emotion on purpose. Think about football players who cultivate anger before a big game. They shout and jump and pump their fists in the air to get themselves in the right frame of mind for crushing the competition. By elevating their heart rates, breathing more deeply, and generally influencing their body budgets, they create a familiar physical state and categorize it in the context of the sports stadium, based on their knowledge of past situations where a particular emotion helped with performance. Their aggression also strengthens bonds with their teammates and tells their opponents to beware. This is EI at work in a somewhat unlikely place.19 If you are a parent, you can help your children develop the skills to become emotionally intelligent. Speak to them about emotions and other mental states as early as you can, even if you think they are too young to understand. Remember that infants develop concepts well before you realize it is happening. So look children straight in the eye, widen your eyes to grab their attention, and speak about bodily sensations and movements in terms of emotions and other mental states. “See that little boy? He is crying. He is feeling pain from falling down and scraping his knee. He is sad and probably wants a hug from his parents.” Elaborate on the feelings of storybook characters, on your children’s own emotions, and on your emotions. Use a wide variety of emotion words. Talk about what causes emotions and what are their consequences to others. In general, think of yourself as your children’s tour guide through the mysterious world of humans and their movements and sounds. Your detailed explanations help your children build a well-developed conceptual system for emotion.20 When you teach emotion concepts to children, you are doing more than communicating. You are creating reality for these kids—social reality. You’re handing them tools to regulate their body budget, to make meaning of their sensations and act on them, to communicate how they feel, and to influence others more effectively. They will use these skills their whole lives.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, won dominance over her husband early on through a calculated coquetry. Later on, though, she held on to that power through her constant—and not so innocent—use of tears. Seeing someone cry usually has an immediate effect on our emo- frigate, he was taken by the Sicilian galleys, and carried prisoner to the Castel-à- mare at Palermo, where he was shut up in an exceeding narrow, dark and wretched dungeon, and very ill entreated by the space of three months. By good hap the Governor of the Castle, who was a Spaniard, had two very fair daughters, who hearing him complaining and making moan, did one day ask leave of their father to visit him, for the honor of the good God; and this he did freely give them permission to do. And seeing the Captain was of a surety a right gallant gentleman, and as ready- tongued as most, he was able so to win them over at this, the very first visit, that they did gain their father's leave for him to quit his wretched dungeon and to be put in a seemly enough chamber and receive better treatment. Nor was this all, for they did crave and get permission to come and see him freely every day and converse with him. • And this did fall out so well that presently both the twain of them were in love with him, albeit he was not handsome to look upon, and they very fair ladies. And so, without a thought of the chance of more rigorous imprisonment or even death, but rather tempted by such opportunities, he did set himself to the enjoyment of the two girls with good will and hearty appetite. And these pleasures did continue without any scandal, for so fortunate was he in this conquest of his for the space of eight whole months, that no scandal did ever hap all that time, and no ill, 292 • The Art of Seduction tions: we cannot remain neutral. We feel sympathy, and most often will do anything to stop the tears—including things that we normally would not do. Weeping is an incredibly potent tactic, but the weeper is not always so innocent. There is usually something real behind the tears, but there may also be an element of acting, of playing for effect. (And if the target senses this the tactic is doomed.) Beyond the emotional impact of tears, there is something seductive about sadness. We want to comfort the other person, and as Tourvel discovered, that desire quickly turns into love. Affecting sad- ness, even crying sometimes, has great strategic value, even for a man. It is a skill you can learn. The central character of the eighteenth-century French novel Marianne, by Marivaux, would think of something sad in her past to make herself cry or look sad in the present.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  It is always easier to fish in troubled waters. Also, an air of sadness is itself quite seductive—Genji, the hero of the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, could not resist a woman with a melancholic air. In Kierkegaard's book The Seducer's Diary, the narrator, Johannes, has one main requirement in his victim: she must have imagination. That is why he chooses a woman who lives in a fantasy world, a woman who will envelop his every gesture in poetry, imagining far more than is there. Just as it is hard to seduce a person who is happy, it is hard to seduce a person who has no imagination. For women, the manly man is often the perfect victim. Mark Antony was of this type—he loved pleasure, was quite emotional, and when it came to women, found it hard to think straight. He was easy for Cleopatra to manipulate. Once she gained a hold on his emotions, she kept him per- manently on a string. A woman should never be put off by a man who seems overly aggressive. He is often the perfect victim. It is easy, with a few coquettish tricks, to turn that aggression around and make him your slave. Such men actually enjoy being made to chase after a woman. in rank or ability; a woman who is proud of her skill in the arts; . . . a woman who is slighted by her husband without any cause; . . . a woman whose husband is devoted to travelling; the wife of a jeweler; a jealous woman; a covetous woman. —THE HINDI: ART OF LOVE, EDITED BY EDWARD WINDSOR Leisure stimulates love, leisure watches the lovelorn, \ Leisure's the cause and sustenance of this sweet \ Evil. Eliminate leisure, and Cupid's bow is broken, \ His torches lie lightless, scorned. \ As a plane-tree rejoices in wine, as a poplar in water, \ As a marsh-reed in swampy ground, so Venus loves \ Leisure. . . . \ Why do you think Aegisthus \ Became an adulterer? Easy: he was idle—and bored. \ Everyone else was away at Troy on a lengthy \ Campaign: all Greece had shipped \ Its contingent across. Suppose he hankered for warfare? Argos \ Had no wars to offer. Suppose he fancied the courts? \ Argos lacked litigation. Love was better than doing nothing. \ That's how Cupid slips in; that's how he stays. —OVID, CURES FOR LOVE, TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN The Chinese have a proverb: "When Yang is in the ascendant, Yin is born," which means, translated into our language, that when a man has devoted the better of his life to the ordinary business of living, the Yin, Choose the Right Victim • 173 Be careful with appearances. The person who seems volcanically pas- sionate is often hiding insecurity and self-involvement.

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

  So “Pain,” like “Stress,” is another concept with which you make meaning of physical sensations. You could characterize pain and stress as emotions, or even emotion and stress as types of pain. I’m not saying that instances of emotion and pain are indistinguishable in the brain, but neither has a fingerprint. If I scan your brain while you’re having a toothache and when you’re angry, the scans will look somewhat different. But then, if I scan your brain during different instances of anger, they look somewhat different too. Different instances of dental pain likely vary as well. This is degeneracy; variation is the norm.25 Emotion, acute pain, chronic pain, and stress are constructed in the same networks, the same neural pathways to and from the body, and most likely the same primary sensory region of cortex, so it is completely plausible that we distinguish emotion and pain by concept—that is, via the concepts the brain applies to make sense of bodily sensations. Chronic pain is likely a misapplication of the concept “Pain” by your brain, as it constructs the experience of pain without injury or threat to your tissue. Chronic pain seems to be a tragic case of predicting poorly and receiving misleading data from your body.26 … Keeping in mind what you’ve just learned about chronic stress and chronic pain, let’s turn our attention to depression, which is another debilitating condition that can overwhelm a life. Also known as major depressive disorder, depression is far beyond the everyday distress that people feel when they groan, “I’m like sooo depressed.” Marvin the Paranoid Android, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was truly depressed. Sometimes he was so despondent about life that he shut himself down. A major depressive episode is similarly incapacitating. “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it,” recalled the novelist William Styron in his memoir, “and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.”27 To many scientists and physicians, depression remains a disease of the mind. It’s classified as a disorder of affect and often blamed on negative thinking: You’re too hard on yourself, or have too many self-defeating, catastrophic thoughts. Or perhaps traumatic events trigger depression, particularly if your genes make you vulnerable. Or maybe you don’t regulate your emotions well, making you too responsive to negative events and too unresponsive to positive ones. All of these explanations assume that thinking controls feeling—the old “triune brain” idea. Change your thoughts or regulate your emotions better, the logic goes, and depression will lift. The mantra seems to be: “Don’t worry, be happy; and if that doesn’t work, try antidepressants.”28

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

  A population of citizens with imbalanced body budgets doesn’t just cost billions of dollars in health care. It costs people their well-being, their relationships, and even their lives. People who study these illnesses are beginning to set aside the essentialism that creates categories like “Anxiety” and “Depression” and “Chronic Pain,” and looking to common underlying factors instead. If we could add interoception, body-budget balancing, and emotion concepts to the list of those common factors, I suspect we’d make more progress against these debilitating disorders. In the meantime, your own knowledge of these common factors may help you avoid illness and communicate more effectively with your doctors.48 We all walk a tightrope between the world and the mind, and between the natural and the social. Many phenomena that were once considered purely mental—depression, anxiety, stress, and chronic pain—can, in fact, be explained in biological terms. Other phenomena that were believed to be purely physical, like pain, are also mental concepts. To be an effective architect of your experience, you need to distinguish physical reality from social reality, and never mistake one for the other, while still understanding that the two are irrevocably entwined. 11Emotion and the LawEvery society has rules for which emotions are acceptable, when they are acceptable, and how to express them. In my American culture, it’s appropriate to feel grief when someone dies, and inappropriate to chuckle as the casket is lowered into the ground. A surprise party is a time to feel surprised and then joyful, and if you know about your own party in advance, it’s appropriate to feign surprise when you arrive. Members of the Ilongot tribe in the Philippines may feel the emotion liget when acting as a team to behead an enemy, in celebration of a job well done.1 If you violate your culture’s rules of social reality, punishment may follow. Laughter at a funeral may get you shunned. Failure to be surprised at your own party may yield disappointed guests. And most cultures no longer prize decapitation. The ultimate rules for emotion in any society are set by its legal system.* That might seem like a surprising claim, but consider this. In the United States, if your accountant steals your life savings, or a banker sells you a bad mortgage, it’s considered unacceptable to kill them; but if you murder your spouse in a fit of rage for cheating on you with a secret lover, the law might cut you some slack, especially if you’re a man. It’s unacceptable to make your neighbor feel fear that you will harm him bodily—that is considered a form of assault—but in some states it’s okay for you to “stand your ground” and harm someone first, even if you kill the person. It’s acceptable for you to profess romantic love, but not (at various times in U.S. history) toward people whose sex is the same as yours or whose skin color isn’t. Violate these norms, and you might lose your money, your freedom, or your life.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  My hair splatted against my neck. Maybe I should cut it even shorter, I thought. Maybe I would enjoy that. Boy cut. Gamine. I’d look like Edie Sedgwick. “You’d look like Charlize Theron,” Reva would have said. I wrapped the towel around myself and lay back down on the bed. There were other things that might make me sad. I thought of Beaches, Steel Magnolias, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., River Phoenix dying on the sidewalk in front of the Viper Room, Sophie’s Choice, Ghost, E.T., Boyz n the Hood, AIDS, Anne Frank. Bambi was sad. An American Tail and The Land Before Time were sad. I thought of The Color Purple, when Nettie gets kicked out and has to leave Celie in that house, a slave to her abusive husband. “Nothing but death can keep me from her!” That was sad. That should have done it, but I couldn’t cry. None of that penetrated deep enough to press whatever button controlled my “outpouring of sorrow.” But I kept trying. I pictured the day of my father’s funeral—brushing my hair in the mirror in my black dress, picking at my cuticles until they bled, how my vision got blurry with tears walking down the stairs and I almost tripped, the streaks of autumn leaves blearing by as I drove my mother to the university chapel in her Trans Am, the space between us filling with tangled ribbons of pale blue smoke from her Virginia Slim, her saying not to open a window because the wind would mess up her hair. Still, no sorrow. “I’m just so sorry,” Peggy said over and over at my father’s funeral. Peggy was the only friend my mother had left by the end—a Reva type, for sure. She lived around the corner from my parents’ house in a lavender Dutch Colonial with a front yard full of wildflowers in the summer, sloppy snowmen and forts built by her two young sons in the winter, tattered Tibetan prayer flags hanging over the front door, lots of wind chimes, a cherry tree. My father had called it “the hippie house.” I sensed that Peggy wasn’t very intelligent, and that my mother didn’t really like her. But Peggy offered my mother a lot of pity. And my mother loved pity. I stayed home for a week after my father’s funeral. I wanted to do what I thought I was supposed to do—to mourn. I’d seen it happening in movies —covered mirrors and stilled grandfather clocks, listless afternoons silent but for sniffling and the creaks of old floorboards as someone in an apron came out from the kitchen saying, “You should eat something.” And I wanted a mother.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Sorry,” she said and went into the bathroom to blow her nose. I lay down and turned to face the back of the sofa, snuggled against the fox and beaver furs. Maybe I could sleep now, I thought. I closed my eyes. I pictured the fox and the beaver, cozied up together in a little cave near a waterfall, the beaver’s buckteeth, its raspy snore, the perfect animal avatar for Reva. And me, the little white fox splayed out on its back, a bubble-gum pink tongue lolling out of its pristine, furry snout, impervious to the cold. I heard the toilet flush. “You’re out of toilet paper,” Reva said, rupturing the vision. I’d been wiping myself with napkins from the bodega for weeks—she must have realized that before. “I could really use a drink,” she huffed. Her heels clacked on the tile in the kitchen. “I’m sorry to come over like this. I’m such a mess right now.” “What is it, Reva?” I groaned. “Spit it out. I’m not feeling well.” I heard her open and close a few cabinets. Then she came back with a mug and sat down in the armchair and poured herself a cupful of gin. She wasn’t crying anymore. She sighed once morosely, and then once again violently, and drank. “Ken got me transferred. And he says he doesn’t want to see me anymore. So that’s it. After all this time. I’ve had such a day, I can’t even tell you.” But there she was, telling me. Five whole minutes spent on what it was like to come back from lunch and find a note on her desk. “Like you can break up with someone over memo. Like he doesn’t care about me at all. Like I’m some kind of secretary. Like this is a matter of business. Which it is not!” “Then what was it, Reva?” “A matter of the heart!” “Oh.” “So I go in and he’s like, ‘Leave the door open,’ and my heart is pounding because, you know? A memo? So I just close the door and I’m like, ‘What is this? How can you do this?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s over. I can’t see you anymore.’ Like in a movie!” “What did the memo say?” “That I’m getting a promotion, and they’re transferring me to the Towers. On my first day back to work after my mom died. Ken was at the funeral. He saw the state I was in. And now suddenly it’s over? Just like that?” “You’re getting a promotion?” “Marsh is starting a new crisis consulting firm. Terrorist risks, blah blah. But did you hear what I said? He doesn’t want to see me anymore, not even at the office.” “What a dick,” I said robotically. “I know. He’s a coward. I mean, we were in love. Totally in love!” “You were?” “How do you just decide to turn that off?”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The train slowed again. I picked up my things, cradling the unwieldy bouquet in my arms like a baby. The roses were pristine and scentless. I touched them to see if they were real. They were. • • • FARMINGDALE WAS AN UGLY, flat, gray landscape spiked with telephone poles. In the distance, I could see rows of long, two-story buildings covered in beige aluminum siding, bare trees shaking in the wind, a silo maybe, a dark plume of smoke from some unseen source rising up into the pale wide gray sky. People bundled in coats and scarves and hats shuffled across a small ice-covered plaza toward minivans and cheap sedans whose running engines filled the small parking lot with a fog of exhaust. An enormous white Lincoln Continental pulled up alongside the curb and flashed its headlights. It was Reva. She lowered the power window of the passenger seat and waved to me. I considered ignoring her and turning back across the tracks to catch the next train back to the city. She honked. I walked out to the road and got into the car. The interior was all burgundy leather and fake wood. It smelled like cigars and cherry air freshener. Reva’s lap was filled with crumpled tissues. “New coat? Is it real?” she asked, sniffling. “A Christmas present,” I mumbled. I shoved the shopping bag down between my feet and lay the bouquet across my lap. “To myself.” “This is my uncle’s car,” Reva said. “I can’t believe you made it. I almost didn’t believe you on the phone last night.” “You didn’t believe what on the phone?” “I’m just happy you got here.” She had the radio on classical music. “The funeral is today,” I said, affirming what I was loath to believe. I really didn’t want to go, but I was stuck now. I turned the music down. “I just thought you’d be late, or sleep through the day or something. No offense. But here you are!” She patted my knee. “Pretty flowers. My mom would have loved them.” I slumped back in my seat. “I don’t feel very well, Reva.” “You look nice,” she said, eying the coat again. “I brought an outfit to change into,” I said, kicking the shopping bag. “Something black.” “You can borrow whatever you want,” said Reva. “Makeup, whatever.” She turned and smiled falsely, petted my hand with hers. She looked awful. Her cheeks were swollen, her eyes red, her skin waxy. She’d looked like that when she used to throw up all the time. Senior year, she’d even popped blood vessels in her eyes, so for weeks she’d worn dark glasses around campus. She kept them off at home in our dorm. It was hard to look at her. She started driving. “Isn’t the snow so beautiful? It’s peaceful here, right? Away from the city? It really puts things in perspective. You know . . . life?” Reva looked at me for a reaction, but I gave none.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  A dozen people went up to say nice things about Reva’s mother. A few made jokes, a few broke down shamelessly. Everyone agreed that Reva’s mother had been a good woman, that her death was sad, but that life was mysterious, death more so, and what’s the use in speculating so let’s remember the good times—at least she’d lived at all. She’d been brave, she’d been generous, she’d been a good mother and wife, a good cook and a good gardener. “My wife’s only wish was that we move on quickly and be happy,” Reva’s father said. “Everyone has already said so much about her.” He looked out at the crowd, shrugged, then seemed to get flummoxed, turned red, but instead of bursting into tears, he started coughing into the microphone. Reva covered her ears. Someone brought her father a glass of water and helped him back to his seat. Then it was Reva’s turn to speak. She checked her makeup in her compact mirror, powdered her nose, dabbed her eyes with more tissues, then went up and stood at the rostrum and read lines off index cards, shuffling them back and forth as she sniffled and cried. Everything she said sounded like she’d read it in a Hallmark card. Halfway through, she stopped and looked down at me as though for approval. I gave her a thumbs-up. “She was a woman of many talents,” Reva said, “and she inspired me to follow my own path.” She went on for a while, mentioned the watercolors, her mother’s faith in God. Then she seemed to space out. “To be honest . . .” she began. “It’s like, you know . . .” She smiled and apologized and covered her face with her hands and sat back down next to me. “Did I look like a complete idiot?” she whispered. I shook my head no and put an arm around her, as awkwardly as such a thing can be done, and sat there until the funeral was over, this strange young woman in the throes of despair, trembling into my armpit. • • • THE RECEPTION AFTERWARD was at Reva’s house. The same middle-aged women were there, the same bald men, only multiplied. Nobody seemed to notice us when we walked in. “I’m starving,” Reva said and went straight to the kitchen. I trudged back down to the basement and fell into a kind of half sleep.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  13 * Suscipit Psyche singultu lacrimoso sermonem in- certans: * Iamdudum, quod sciam, fidei atque par- ciloquio meo perpendisti documenta, nee eo setius approbabitur tibi nunc etiam firmitas animi mei. Tu modo Zephyro nostro rursum praecipe fungatur obsequio, et in vicem denegatae sacrosanctae ima- 218 | THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK V she should be honoured as a mother: she reckoned and numbered carefully the days and months that passed, and being never with child before, did marvel greatly that her belly should swell so big from so small a beginning. : * But those pestilent and wicked furies, breathing out their serpentine poison, were hastening with wicked speed to bring their enterprise to pass. Then Psyche was warned again by her husband, while he briefly tarried with her, in this sort: * Behold the last day and the extreme case. The enemies of thy own sex and blood have armed themselves against us, pitehed their camps, set their host in array; sounded for advance, and are now marching towards us, for thy two sisters have drawn their swords and are ready to slay thee. Oh with what force and slaughter are we assailed this day, sweet Psyche: I pray thee to take pity on thyself, and on me, keep a seal on thy lips, and deliver thy husband, and thyself, and this infant within thy belly from so great and imminent a danger, and see not neither hear these cursed women, which are not worthy to be called thy sisters, for their great and murderous hatred, and breach of sisterly amity, for they will come (like Sirens) to the mountain, and yield out therein their piteous and lamentable cries. * When Psyche had heard these words, she sighed sorrowfully and said: *O dear husband, this long time you have had experience and trial of my faith and my silence, and doubt you not but that I will persevere in the same stedfastness of mind : where- fore command you our servant Zephyrus that he may do as he hath done before, to the intent that instead of your form that you have forbidden me to see, yet 219 LUCIUS APULEIUS ginis tuae redde saltem conspectum sororum. Per istos cinnameos et undique pendulos crines tuos, per teneras et teretes et mei similes genas, per pectus nescioquo calore fervidum, sic in hoe saltem parvulo cognoscam faciem tuam: supplicis anxiae piis pre- cibus erogatus germani complexus indulge fructum et tibi devotae Psychae animam gaudio recrea. Nec quiequam amplius in tuo vultu requiro, iam nil officiunt mihi vel ipsae nocturnae tenebrae: teneo te meum lumen. His verbis et amplexibus mollibus decantatus maritus, lacrimasque eius suis crinibus detergens, se facturum spopondit et praevertit statim lumen nascentis diei.

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

  And don’t limit yourself to words in your native language. Pick another language and seek out its concepts for which your language has no words, like the Dutch emotion of togetherness, gezellig, and the Greek feeling of major guilt, enohi. Each word is another invitation to construct your experiences in new ways. 14 Try also to invent your own emotion concepts, using your powers of social reality and conceptual combination. The author Jeffrey Eugenides presents a collection of amusing ones in his novel Middlesex, including “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age,” “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy,” and “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar,” though he does not assign them words. You can do the same thing yourself. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a car, driving away from your hometown, knowing that you will never, ever return. Can you characterize that feeling by combining emotion concepts? If you can employ this technique day to day, you’ll be better calibrated to cope with varied circumstances, and potentially more empathic to others, with improved skill to negotiate conflict and get along. You can even name your creations, like my word “chiplessness” in chapter 7, and teach them to your family and friends. Once you’ve shared your creations, they are just as real as any other emotion concept and bring the same benefits to your body budget. An emotionally intelligent person not only has lots of concepts but also knows which ones to use and when. Just like painters learn to see fine distinctions in colors, and wine lovers develop their palettes to experience tastes that non-experts cannot, you can practice categorizing like any other skill. Suppose you see your teenage son heading out to school looking like he just rolled out of bed: hair unkempt, clothing wrinkled, and remnants of last night’s dinner dotting his shirt. You could berate him and send him back to his room to change, but instead, ask yourself what you are feeling. Are you concerned that his teachers won’t take him seriously? Disgusted by his greasy hair? Nervous that his attire will reflect badly on you as a parent? Irritated that you spend money on clothing he never wears? Or perhaps you’re sad that your little boy has grown up and you miss the exuberance of his childhood. If all this introspection sounds implausible, realize that people pay good money to therapists and life coaches for exactly this purpose: to help them reframe situations, that is, find the most useful categorization in the service of action. You can do it yourself and become an expert categorizer of emotion with enough practice, and it gets easier with repetition. Fine-grained categorizations have been shown to beat two other popular approaches for “regulating” emotions, in a study about fear of spiders. The first approach, called cognitive reappraisal, taught subjects to describe the spider in a nonthreatening way: “Sitting in front of me is a little spider, and it’s safe.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He wanted to eat orange segments out of my cunt because he’d read about it in The Perfumed Garden. And then there was the Italian voice student (tenor) who, on our second date, told me his favorite book was Sade’s Justine, and did I want to enact scenes from it? Experience for experience’s sake, Pia and I believed—but I never saw him again. The best part of these adventures seemed to be the way we went into hysterics describing them to each other. Otherwise, they were mostly joyless. We were attracted to men, but when it came to understanding and good talk, we needed each other. Gradually, the men were reduced to sex objects. There is something very sad about this. Eventually we came to accept the lying and the role-playing and the compromises so completely that they were invisible—even to ourselves. We automatically began to hide things from our men. We could never let them know, for example, that we talked about them together, that we discussed the way they screwed, that we aped the way they walked and spoke. Men have always detested women’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared. In the most paranoid societies (Arab, Orthodox Jewish) the women are kept completely under wraps (or under wigs) and separated from the world as much as possible. They gossip anyway: the original form of consciousness-raising. Men can mock it, but they can’t prevent it. Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed. But who was oppressed? Pia and I were “free women” (a phrase which means nothing without quotes). Pia was a painter. I was a writer. We had more in our lives than just men; we had our work, travel, friends. Then why did our lives seem to come down to a long succession of sad songs about men? Why did our lives seem to reduce themselves to manhunts? Where were the women who were really free, who didn’t spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man? We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold—Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he’ll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love, which is seldom. And the rest—the women writers, the women painters—most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers... Flannery O’Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O’Keeffe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We came to know the ugliest part of France, that badland near the German border where the roads are broken-surfaced meandering two-lane caravans and the French refuse to repair them, saying that the Germans get to Paris fast enough anyway. We came to know an endless series of cheap hostelries with two-watt lightbulbs and fly-speckled bidets (into which we peed because we were reluctant to trek out to the filthy hall toilet whose light only went on when you broke your nails turning the door lock). We came to know the more posh sort of campsite with indoor toilets and a bar with a jukebox blaring the Beatles. But most of the time (this being August and every burgher in Europe being on a camping vacation with his 2.5 children), we found the better campsites filled and had to pitch our tent by the side of the road (and crap squatting with the weeds tickling our asses and the horseflies zooming hideously close to our assholes to alight upon the fresh turds). We came to know the Autostrada del Sole with its phantasmagoric Pavese auto-grills—Fellini visions of cellophane-wrapped candy, mountains of toys, barrels of silver-foil-wrapped panetone , gift-ribboned jam pots, and tricycles trailing streamers of lollipops. We came to know the Italian madmen who race their Fiat Cinquecenti ninety miles an hour, but always stop to cross themselves and drop a few lire in the collection box at a roadside Jesus. We came to know dozens of major and minor airports in Germany and France and Italy, because at that point in the day when the second round of beers wore off and my massive depression reared its ugly head once more (along with secondary symptoms of headache and hangover), I would panic and command Adrian to drive me to the nearest airport. He never said no. Oh he would become silent and act disappointed with me, but he never directly opposed any clearly stated wish of mine. To the nearest Flughafen or aeroporto we went, getting lost and asking directions a dozen times along the way. When we got there we inevitably found out that the next plane was not for two days, or that it was booked solid (Europa in August: tout le monde en vacances) , or that it had left two minutes ago. And then there would be a bar at the airport and we would drink more beer and Adrian would kiss me and joke with me and grab my ass affectionately and talk about our shared adventure. So off we’d go again in good spirits for the time being. After all, I wasn’t entirely sure I had any other place to go. Our tour was hardly a leisurely pleasure jaunt. If we looped and zigzagged and went round in circles, it was because our itinerary took its shape not from landmarks or Michelin three-star attractions, but from my own vertiginous moods—and, to a lesser extent, Adrian’s.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Then I took Marty by the hand and led him to the old swimming hole where we sat down on a rock. “Do you want to tell me the story of your life, or just describe Judy’s affairs?” He looked glum. “Do you always take things so casually?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the camper. “I’m usually a terrific worrywart, but my friend there has been building my character.” “How do you mean?” “He’s trying to teach me to stop agonizing, and he may succeed—but not for the reasons he thinks.” “I don’t understand,” Marty said. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m jumping ahead. It’s a long, sad story, and not the most original plot in the world.” Marty looked wistfully in the direction of the camper. I took his hand. “Let me tell you a secret—the chances are that not much action is taking place in there. He’s not the stud he thinks he is,” I said. “Impotent?” “Often.” “That doesn’t make me feel much better, but I appreciate your thoughtfulness.” I looked at Marty. He wasn’t bad looking. I thought of all the times I’d yearned for strange men, strange places, strange enormous cocks. But all I felt was indifference. I knew that screwing Marty would not take me any nearer the truth I was seeking—whatever that was. I wanted some ultimate beautiful act of love in which each person becomes the other’s prayer wheel, toboggan, rocket. Marty was not the answer. Was anyone? “How’d you get here?” he asked. “Aren’t you American?” “Those two things don’t cancel each other out…. Actually, I left my perfectly nice husband for this.” Now Marty perked up. A faint shock wave passed over his face. Was that why I had done it after all—just to be able to say brazenly, “I left my husband” and see the shock waves pass between me and some stranger? Was it no more than exhibitionism? And a pretty seedy sort of exhibitionism at that. “Where are you from?” “New York.” “What do you do?” The odd intimacy of waiting outside a camper while our partners fucked each other called for some kind of confession, so I gave out. “New Yorker, Jewish, from a very neurotic upper-middle-class family, married for the second time to a shrink, no children, twenty-nine years old, just published a book of supposedly erotic poems which caused strange men to call me up in the middle of the night with propositions and prepositions, and caused a big fuss to be made over me—college reading tours, interviews, letters from lunatics, and such—I flipped out. Started reading my own poems and trying to become one with the image presented in them. Started trying to live out my fantasies.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “It’s in the book I gave you. On the last endpaper.” But he’d lost the book. The copy I’d inscribed for him in shocking-pink ink. Needless to say, he’d never finished it. “Here—let me get you another.” And I began unzipping my huge canvas suitcase in the middle of the street. Jars of cosmetics rolled out. Loose papers, notes for poems I was working on, tape cassettes, film, lipsticks, paperback novels, a dog-eared Michelin Guide. I shoved all this junk back into the squashy Italian suitcase and dug out one of my own books. I cracked the virgin spine. To careless Adrian [I wrote] who loses books. With love and many kisses, your friendly social worker from New York— And I wrote my New York address and telephone number on the endpaper again, knowing he’d probably lose this copy too. That was how we parted. Loss piled on loss. My life spilling out into the street, and nothing but a slim volume of verse between me and the void. —

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Or maybe it was Brian’s age that was the problem. I had been raised on the various sexual myths of the fifties like: There is no such thing as rape. Nobody can rape a woman unless she consents at the last minute. (The girls in my high school actually used to repeat this piously to each other. God only knows where we got it. It was the received wisdom, and like robots, we passed it on.) There are two kinds of orgasm: vaginal and clitoral. One is “mature” (i.e. good). The other is “immature” (i.e. evil). One is “normal” (i.e. good). The other is “neurotic” (i.e. evil). This pseudohip, pseudopsychological moral code was more Calvinistic than Calvinism. C. Men reach their sexual peak at sixteen and decline thereafter…. Brian was twenty-four. No doubt he was over the hill. Eight years over the hill. If he only fucked me once a month at twenty-four—imagine how little he’d fuck me at thirty-four! It was terrifying to contemplate. Maybe even the sex wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been an indication of all the other things wrong with our marriage. We never saw each other. He stayed in the office until seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve at night. I kept house and moldered away in the library over my eighteenth-century sexual slang. The ideal bourgeois marriage. Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married. Things went on like this for several months. I got increasingly depressed. I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I was usually comatose until noon. I started cutting nearly all my classes, except the holy of holies: the Proseminar. Graduate school seemed ridiculous to me. I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. You were supposed to keep all the names of the professors and all the theories straight so that you could pass exams on them. Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading Tom Jones as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. All the books of criticism had names like The Rhetoric of Laughter or The Comic Determinants of Henry Fielding’s Fiction or Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire. Fielding would have been rolling over in his grave.