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 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty watched her in wonder, her vision still unclear from her crying, and the woman seemed, like the Queen, immense and powerful. She turned her smiling face on Beauty like a light. And the glare of the torches flashed in the deep red brooch she wore at her throat, and in the jewels sewn skillfully into her heavy girdle. Her pink satin slippers had silver heels and she danced up to Beauty and kissed the top of her head lovingly. "But you look so forlorn and that is not good. Now kneel up, fold your arms behind your back to show your exquisite breasts, that's it, and arch your back more becomingly. Her hair, Felix, brush it." And as the Page hastened to obey, gently untangling Beauty's long locks down her back, Beauty saw the Lady Juliana take from a chest nearby a long oval paddle. It was very like the paddle used on the Bridle Path, but nothing as big or as heavy. In fact it was so flexible that Lady Juliana, setting down her basket of flowers, could make it vibrate when she pressed the tip of it with her thumb. It was white, smooth, and limber. It will sting, Beauty realized, but it will not truly hurt as badly as the Queen's hand, and it will hurt nothing as badly as that weapon on the Bridle Path, yet she realized her buttocks were so thoroughly welted that each light blow would enkindle a certain amount of pain in her. Lady Juliana, laughing, whispering with the Queen in her girlish manner, turned back as Felix finished. Beauty knelt waiting. "And so our gracious Sovereign spanked you over her lap, did she? And you have had the Bridle Path, and you have learned something of grooming. And then there has been your Lord and Master's temper and demands, and now and then a little routine smacking from your groom or Lord Gregory." "My groom has never smacked me," Beauty thought crossly, but she merely replied, "Yes, my Lady..." as was expected. "But now you shall learn some actual discipline, for in the little game I devise your will to please is direly tested. And don't think you shan't profit from it. Now..." She lifted a handful of roses from the basket. "I shall scatter these about the room, and do you know what you shall do, my precious girl, you shall run very fast to gather each one in your teeth and place in the lap of your Sovereign. And when she has quite finished with you, you shall go fetch another, and another, and another.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Tomson at daybreak. Next time I expect to see fat old Ivor in the ivory. He is really a freak, that man. Last time he told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears—” “Hullo there,” said John’s voice. 21 My habit of being silent when displeased, or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying “ Ce qui me rend folle, c’est que je ne sais à quoi tu penses quand tu es connne ça .” I tried being silent with Charlotte—and she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under the chin. An astonishing woman! I would retire to my former room, now a regular “studio,” mumbling I had after all a learned opus to write, and cheerfully Charlotte went on beautifying the home, warbling on the telephone and writing letters. From my window, through the lacquered shiver of poplar leaves, I could see her crossing the street and contentedly mailing her letter to Miss Phalen’s sister. The week of scattered showers and shadows which elapsed after our last visit to the motionless sands of Hourglass Lake was one of the gloomiest I can recall. Then came two or three dim rays of hope—before the ultimate sunburst. It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it. If I dared not meddle with my wife’s plans for her daughter (getting warmer and browner every day in the fair weather of hopeless distance), I could surely devise some general means to assert myself in a general way that might be later directed toward a particular occasion. One evening, Charlotte herself provided me with an opening. “I have a surprise for you,” she said looking at me with fond eyes over a spoonful of soup. “In the fall we two are going to England.” I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh, the cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel!) and said: “I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going to England.” “Why, what’s the matter?” she said, looking—with more surprise than I had counted upon—at my hands (I was involuntarily folding and tearing and crushing and tearing again the innocent pink napkin). My smiling face set her somewhat at ease, however. “The matter is quite simple,” I replied. “Even in the most harmonious of households, as ours is, not all decisions are taken by the female partner. There are certain things that the husband is there to decide.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In 1971, the American financier and Democratic Party power-player Averell Harriman saw his life drawing to a close. He was seventy-nine, his wife of many years, Marie, had just died, and with the Democrats out 86 • The Art of Seduction of office his political career seemed over. Feeling old and depressed, he resigned himself to spending his last years with his grandchildren in quiet retirement. A few months after Marie's death, Harriman was talked into attending a Washington party. There he met an old friend, Pamela Churchill, whom he had known during World War II, in London, where he had been sent as a personal envoy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was twenty-one at the time, and was the wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph. There had certainly been more beautiful women in the city, but none had been more pleasant to be around: she was so attentive, listening to his problems, befriending his daughter (they were the same age), and calming him when- ever he saw her. Marie had remained in the States, and Randolph was in the army, so while bombs rained on London Averell and Pamela had begun an affair. And in the many years since the war, she had kept in touch with him: he knew about the breakup of her marriage, and about her endless se- ries of affairs with Europe's wealthiest playboys. Yet he had not seen her since his return to America, and to his wife. What a strange coincidence to run into her at this particular moment in his life. At the party Pamela pulled Harriman out of his shell, laughing at his jokes and getting him to talk about London in the glory days of the war. He felt his old power returning—it was as if he were charming her. A few days later she dropped in on him at one of his weekend homes. Harriman was one of the wealthiest men in the world, but was no lavish spender; he and Marie had lived a Spartan life. Pamela made no comment, but when she invited him to her own home, he could not help but notice the bright- ness and vibrancy of her life—flowers everywhere, beautiful linens on the bed, wonderful meals (she seemed to know all of his favorite foods). He had heard of her reputation as a courtesan and understood the lure of his wealth, yet being around her was invigorating, and eight weeks after that party, he married her. Pamela did not stop there. She persuaded her husband to donate the art that Marie had collected to the National Gallery. She got him to part with some of his money—a trust fund for her son Winston, new houses, constant redecorations. Her approach was subtle and patient; she made him somehow feel good about giving her what she wanted. Within a few years, hardly any traces of Marie remained in their life. Harriman spent less time with his children and grandchildren.

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

  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 Twenty-seven million Americans take daily antidepressants, yet more than 70 percent continue to experience symptoms anyway, and psychotherapy is not effective for everyone either. Often the symptoms begin in adolescence to early adulthood and then recur throughout life. The World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will cause more premature deaths and years of disability than cancer, stroke, heart disease, war, or accidents. Those are pretty dreadful outcomes for a “mental” illness. 29 A lot of research seeks to find the universal genetic or neural essence of depression. But most likely, depression is not just one thing. Depression is—you guessed it—a concept. It is a population of diverse instances, so there are many degenerate paths to depression, many of which begin with an imbalanced body budget. If depression is a disorder of affect, and affect is an integrated summary of how your body budget is doing (answer: pretty poorly), then depression may actually be a disorder of misbudgeting and prediction. 30 We know that your brain continually predicts your body’s energy needs based on past experience. Under normal circumstances, your brain also corrects its predictions based on actual sensory information from your body. But what if this correction wasn’t working properly? Your momentary experience would be constructed from the past but not corrected by the present. In general terms, that’s what I think is happening in depression. Your brain is continually mispredicting your metabolic needs. Your body and brain therefore act as if you were fighting off an infection or healing from a wound when none exists, as in chronic stress or pain. As a result, your affect is out of whack: you experience debilitating misery, fatigue, or other symptoms of depression. Simultaneously, your body is quickly metabolizing unnecessary glucose to meet those high yet nonexistent energy needs, leading to weight problems and leaving you at risk for other metabolic-related illnesses that co-occur with depression, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. 31 The traditional view of depression is that negative thoughts cause negative feelings. I’m suggesting it’s the other way around. Your feelings right now drive your next thought, as well as your perceptions, as predictions. So a depressed brain relentlessly keeps making withdrawals from the budget, basing its predictions on similar withdrawals from the past. This means constantly reliving difficult, unpleasant events. You wind up in a cycle of budgeting imbalances, unbroken by prediction error because it is ignored, gets tuned down, or doesn’t make it to the brain.

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

  As our subjects simulated these concepts, we saw even more increased activity in the interoceptive network. We also saw activations representing the low-level sensory and motor details, as well as increased activity in a key node in the control network. 1 3 In a later study, we had subjects construct atypical, infrequent simulations, such as the pleasant fear of riding a rollercoaster and the unpleasant happiness of injuring yourself while winning a competition. We hypothe sized that less typical simulations would require the interoceptive network to work harder to issue predictions, compared to simulating more typical instances like pleasant happiness and unpleasant fear, which are like mental habits. This is exactly what we observed. 1 4 In a more recent set of experiments, our test subjects watched evocative movie scenes, and we saw the interoceptive network construct ongoing emotional experiences. Talma Hendler’s lab at Tel Aviv University in Israel chose film clips that would create a variety of different experiences of sadness, fear, and anger. For example, some test subjects watched a scene from Sophie’s Choice where the title character, played by Meryl Streep, must choose one of her children to be taken from her at Auschwitz. Other test subjects watched a clip from the film Stepmom, where Susan Sarandon’s character reveals to her children that she is dying of cancer. In all cases, we observed that the default mode network and the remainder of the interoceptive network were firing more in synchrony in the moments when subjects reported more intense emotional experiences, and less so when subjects reported less intense experiences. 1 5 Other studies make a similar case for emotion perception. In one study, subjects watched movies and explicitly categorized the characters’ physical movements as emotional expressions. In other words, they made mental inferences about what the movements meant, a task that requires concepts. Their brains showed increased activity in the interoceptive network, in nodes of the control network, and in visual cortex where objects are represented. 1 6 … When discussing concepts, we must be mindful not to essentialize because it’s super easy to imagine concepts as “stored” in your brain. For example, you could think concepts live in the default mode network alone (as if the summaries exist apart from their sensory and motor details). There is abundant evidence (and very little doubt), however, that any instance of any concept is represented by the entire brain. As you look at the hammer in figure AD-3 , neurons in your motor cortex that control your hand movements have increased their firing. (And if you are like me, the neurons that simulate pain in your thumb are also firing madly.) This increase even occurs when you read the name of the object (“hammer”). Viewing the hammer also makes it easier for you to make a gripping motion with your hand.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Rescuer. We are often drawn to people who seem vulnerable or weak—their sadness or depression can actually be quite seductive. There are people, however, who take this much further, who seem to be attracted only to people with problems. This may seem noble, but Rescuers usually have complicated motives: they often have sensitive natures and truly want to help. At the same time, solving people's problems gives them a kind of power they relish—it makes them feel superior and in control. It is also the perfect way to distract them from their own problems. You will recognize these types by their empathy—they listen well and try to get you to open up and talk. You will also notice they have histories of relationships with dependent and troubled people. Rescuers can make excellent victims, particularly if you enjoy chivalrous or maternal attention. If you are a woman, play the damsel in distress, giving a man the chance so many men long for—to act the knight. If you are a man, play the boy who cannot deal with this harsh world; a female Rescuer will envelop you in maternal attention, gaining for herself the added satisfaction of feeling more powerful and in control than a man. An air of sadness will draw either gender in. Exaggerate your weaknesses, but not through overt words or gestures—let them sense that you have had too little love, that you have had a string of bad relationships, that you have gotten a raw deal in life. Having lured your Rescuer in with the chance to help you, you can then stoke the relationship's fires with a steady supply of needs and vulnerabilities. You can also invite moral rescue: you are bad. You have done bad things. You need a stern yet loving hand. In this case the Rescuer gets to feel morally superior, but also the vicarious thrill of involvement with someone naughty. The Roué. These types have lived the good life and experienced many pleasures. They probably have, or once had, a good deal of money to finance their hedonistic lives. On the outside they tend to seem cynical and jaded, but their worldliness often hides a sentimentality that they have struggled to repress. Roués are consummate seducers, but there is one type that can easily seduce them—the young and the innocent. As they get 158 • The Art of Seduction older, they hanker after their lost youth; missing their long-lost innocence, they begin to covet it in others.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Horrific as it may be for us to contemplate, infanticide is anything but a rarity, even today. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes studied contemporary infant deaths in northeast Brazil, where about 20 percent of infants die in their first year. She found that women consider the deaths of some children a “blessing” if the babies were lethargic and passive. Mothers told Scheper-Hughes they were “children who wanted to die, whose will to live was not sufficiently strong or developed.” Scheper-Hughes found that these children received less food and medical attention than their more vigorous siblings.6 Joseph Birdsell, one of the world’s greatest scholars of Australian Aboriginal culture, estimated that as many as half of all infants were intentionally destroyed. Various surveys of contemporary pre-industrial societies conclude that anywhere from half to three-quarters of them practice some form of direct infanticide. Lest we start feeling too smug in our compassion and superiority, recall the foundling hospitals of Europe. The number of babies delivered to near-certain death in France rose from 40,000 in 1784 to almost 140,000 by 1822. By 1830, there were 270 revolving boxes in French foundling hospital doors specially designed to protect the anonymity of those depositing unwanted infants. Eighty to 90 percent of these children are estimated to have died within a year of arrival. Once our ancestors began cultivating land for food, they were running on a wheel, but never fast enough. More land provides more food. And more food means more children born and fed. More children provide more help on the farm and more soldiers. But this population growth creates demand for more land, which can be won and held only through conquest and war. Put another way, the shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutable belief that it’s better to take strangers’ land (killing them if necessary) than to allow one’s own children to die of starvation. Closer to our own time, the BBC reports that as many as 15 percent of the reported deaths of female infants in parts of southern India are victims of infanticide. Millions more die in China, where female infanticide is prevalent, and has been for centuries. A late nineteenth–century missionary living in China reported that of 183 sons and 175 daughters born in a typical community, 126 of the sons lived to age ten (69 percent), while only 53 of the daughters made it that far (30 percent).7 China’s one-child policy, combined with the cultural preference for sons, has only worsened the already dismal odds of survival for female infants.8 There are also problematic cultural assumptions lurking within demographers’ calculations, in which life is assumed to begin at birth. This view is far from universal. Societies that practice infanticide don’t consider newborn infants full human beings. Rituals ranging from baptism to naming ceremonies are delayed until it is determined whether or not the child will be permitted to live. If not, from this perspective, the child was never fully alive anyway.9 Is 80 the New 30?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Among foragers, where property is shared, poverty tends to be a nonissue. In his classic book Stone Age Economics, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains that “the world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”20 Socrates made the same point 2,400 years ago: “He is richest who is content with least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.” But the wealth of civilization is material. After reading every word of the Old Testament, journalist David Plotz was struck by its mercantile tone. “The overarching theme of the Bible,” he wrote, “particularly of Genesis, is real estate. God is…constantly making land deals (and then remaking them, on different terms)…. It’s not just land that the Bible is obsessed with, but also portable property: gold, silver, livestock.”21 Malthus and Darwin were both struck by the characteristic egalitarianism of foragers, the former writing, “Among most of the American tribes…so great a degree of equality prevailed that all the members of each community would be nearly equal sharers in general hardships of savage life and in the pressure of occasional famines.”22 For his part, Darwin recognized the inherent conflict between the capital-based civilization he knew and what he saw as the natives’ self-defeating generosity, writing, “Nomadic habits, whether over wide plains, or through the dense forests of the tropics, or along the shores of the sea, have in every case been highly detrimental…. The perfect equality of all the inhabitants,” he wrote, “will for many years prevent their civilization.”23 Finding Contentment “at the Bottom of the Scale of Human Beings” Looking for an example of the world’s most downtrodden, pathetic, desperately poor “savages,” Malthus cited “the wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” who had been judged by European travelers to be “at the bottom of the scale of human beings.” Just thirty years later Charles Darwin was in Tierra del Fuego, observing these same people. He agreed with Malthus concerning the Fuegians, writing in his journal, “I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.” As chance would have it, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle—the ship on which Darwin was sailing—had picked up three young Fuegians on an earlier voyage, and brought them back to England to introduce them to the glories of British life and a proper Christian education. Now, after they’d experienced firsthand the superiority of civilized living, FitzRoy was returning them to their own people to serve as missionaries. The plan was for them to show the Fuegians the folly of their “savage” ways and help them join the civilized world.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  61. See John Ray, Jr. for a summary of all the entomological allusions. spring of 1955 : a corrected author’s error (instead of “winter of 1954” in the 1958 edition). Mr. Taxovich : Maximovich, the ex-White Russian colonel reduced to driving a taxi, is totally infatuated with H.H.’s first wife, Valeria. H.H. graciously lets her go . class list of Ramsdale School : it is most notable for the way it mirrors the artist who created it (see her class at … school ff.), and for “Flashman, Irving,” who suffers quietly, the only Jew in a class of Gentiles (see Irving ). “waterproof ” : When Jean Farlow notices that H.H. has gone swimming with his watch on, Charlotte reassures her, and dreamily relishes a miracle of modern technology: “ ‘Waterproof,’ said Charlotte softly, making a fish mouth .”. The word is also the clue H.H. uses to torment the reader who strains to learn the identity of Lolita’s abductor (see Waterproof ), and one is thus reminded that Lolita is a very special kind of detective story (see Lo-lee-ta ). in slow motion … Humbert’s gifts : Lolita is remembered as an illusory creature in a dream, rather than as the object of H.H.’s lust (see here ), and the allusion to his gifts recalls his desperate bribery as well as its results. the pictures … of Gaston Godin : furtive love is invoked; like the artists whose portraits dominate his garret, Gaston is clearly homosexual. See large photographs . the Kasbeam barber : he talks of his son, dead for thirty years, as though he were still alive (see here ). Lolita playing tennis : if ever H.H. succeeds in “ fix[ing] once for all the perilous magic of nymphets ,” it is in this scene. the hospital at Elphinstone … irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star : Nabokov is referring to Lolita by her married name. Twin deaths are recorded: Lolita “dies” for H.H. when Quilty steals her from the hospital ( here ) and “dies” for Nabokov when the book is completed, and her image is irretrievable. But Lolita does not die in the book; as H.H. says, “ I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive .” Her creator points beyond the novel’s fictive time into the future, for he would agree with H.H.’s closing statement that art “is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” It is important to note that none of these “secret points” is exclusively sexual.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The story was called “Bad at Math.” It was about an adolescent Chinese American in Cleveland who bombs the PSAT, jumps off his two-story junior high school, and breaks both his legs. After the school guidance counselor pressures the boy’s family into group therapy, his parents tell him they love him in a supermarket parking lot and they all start to cry and wail and fall on their knees, while all the other shoppers wheel their carts past and pretend like nothing amazing is going on. “Listen to this opening,” Reva said. “‘For the first time, they said the words. I think it pained them more than the cracking of my shins and femurs.’” “Go on,” I said. The story was terribly written. Reva read aloud. Ping Xi appeared in my mind as I listened. I imagined his small, dark eyes staring at me and squinting, one pinching shut as his paint-stained hand, outstretched with a brush, measured me for proportions. But that was all I could remember. He struck me as a reptilian, small-hearted being, someone placed on the planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them. Shallow, I guess. But there were worse people on this Earth. “I had studied for months for the PSAT.” Reva read the story in its entirety. It took at least half an hour. I knew she was just trying to fill the air, take up the time until she could go and leave me forever. That’s what it felt like at least. I can’t say it didn’t hurt me that she held herself at such a distance. But to confront her about it would have been cruel. I had no right to make any demands. I sensed she didn’t really want to hear about my experiences in “rehab” or whatever it was she imagined I’d been through. I watched her mouth move, every little wrinkle in the skin of her lips, the vague dimple on her left cheek, the moon-shaped sadness of her eyes. “‘A black shred of bok choy had dried and attached itself to the rim of the garbage can,’” she read. I nodded along, hoping to make her feel at ease. When she was done, she sighed, and pulled a piece of gum from her purse. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it, how certain cultures can be so cold?” “It’s heartbreaking, yes,” I said. “I really identify with the Chinese kid,” Reva said, rolling the magazine back up. I reached across her folded legs, tugged at the magazine in her tense clutch, like a tug-of-war.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But muted. I hated it worse than anything else about our marriage. It was the theme song of all our worst moments together. We ate breakfast without speaking. I waited, half-cringing, for the blows to fall, but Bennett did not accuse me further. His boiled egg rattled against the cup. His spoon clanked in the coffee. In the deathly silence between us, every sound and every motion seemed exaggerated as if in a movie close-up. His slicing off the top of the skull of his egg could be an Andy Warhol epic. Egg , it would be called. Six hours of a man’s hand amputating the top of an egg’s head. Slow motion. His silence was so strange now, I thought, because there had been times when he’d blasted me about little failures: my failure to make him coffee on time in the morning, my failure to do some errand, my failure to point out a road sign when we were lost in a foreign city. But now: nothing. He just kept clearing his throat nervously and peering into the open head of his egg. His cough was his only protestation. That cough took me back to one of the worst of our bad times together. The first Christmas we were married. We were in Paris. Bennett was hideously depressed and had been almost from the first week we were married. He hated the army. He hated Germany. He hated Paris. He hated me, it seemed, as if I were responsible for these things and more. Glaciers of grievances which extended far, far beneath the surface of the sea. Throughout the whole long drive from Heidelberg to Paris, Bennett said almost not a word to me. Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could. I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves! Christmas Eve in Paris. The day has been white and gray. They walked in Versailles this morning pitying the naked statues. The statues were glaring white. Their shadows were slate gray. The clipped hedges were as flat as their shadows. The wind was sharp and cold. Their feet were numb. Their footsteps made a sound as hollow as their hearts. They are married, but they are not friends. Now it is night. Near Odéon. Near St. Sulpice. They walk up the Métro steps. There are the echoing sounds of frozen feet. They are both American. He is tall and slim with a small head. He is Oriental with shaggy black hair. She is blond and small and unhappy. She stumbles often. He never stumbles.

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

  If you grow up in poverty, a situation that leads to chronic body-budget imbalance and an overactive immune system, these body-budgeting problems are reduced if you have a supportive person in your life. In contrast, when you lose a close, loving relationship and feel physically ill about it, part of the reason is that your loved one is no longer helping to regulate your budget. You feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself because, in a sense, you have. 3 4 Every person you encounter, every prediction you make, every idea you imagine, and every sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell that you fail to anticipate all have budgetary consequences and corresponding interoceptive predictions. Your brain must contend with this continuous, ever-changing flow of interoceptive sensations from the predictions that keep you alive. Sometimes you’re aware of them, and other times you’re not, but they are always part of your brain’s model of the world. They are, as I’ve said, the scientific basis for simple feelings of pleasure, displeasure, arousal, and calmness that you experience every day. For some, the flow is like the trickle of a tranquil brook. For others, it’s like a raging river. Sometimes the sensations are transformed into emotions, but as you will now learn, even when they’re only in the background, they influence what you do, what you think, and what you perceive. 3 5 … When you wake up in the morning, do you feel refreshed or crabby? In the middle of the day, do you feel dragged out or full of energy? Consider how you feel right now. Calm? Interested? Energetic? Bored? Tired? Cranky? These are the simple feelings we discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Scientists call them affect. * Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence. The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and the weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. Anytime you have an intuition that an investment is risky or profitable, or a gut feeling that someone is trustworthy or an asshole, that’s also affect. Even a completely neutral feeling is affect.

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

  By tweaking your conceptual system and changing your predictions, you not only change your future experiences; you can actually change your “Self.” Suppose you are feeling bad—worried because you are struggling with your finances, angry that you did not receive the promotion you deserved, dejected because your teacher believes you are not as intelligent as other students, or heartbroken because your lover abandoned you. A Buddhist mindset would describe these feelings as the suffering that results from clinging to material wealth, reputation, power, and security in an effort to reify the self. In the language of the theory of constructed emotion, wealth, reputation, and the rest are firmly within your affective niche, impacting your body budget, which ultimately leads you to construct instances of unpleasant emotions. Deconstructing the self for a moment allows you to reduce the size of your affective niche so concepts like “Reputation,” “Power,” and “Wealth” become unnecessary. 3 9 Western culture has some common wisdom associated with these ideas. Don’t be materialistic. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Sticks and stones. But I am asking you to take this one step further. When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self ? The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water. 4 0 I’m not saying this kind of recategorization is easy, but with practice it’s possible, and it’s also healthful. When you categorize something as “Not About Me,” it exits your affective niche and has less impact on your body budget. Similarly, when you are successful and feel proud, honored, or grat ified, take a step back and remember that these pleasant emotions are entirely the result of social reality, reinforcing your fictional self. Celebrate your achievements but don’t let them become golden handcuffs. A little composure goes a long way. If you are interested in taking this strategy further, try meditation. Mindfulness meditation, just one type of many, teaches you to stay alert and present in the moment but to observe sensations as they come and go, non-judgmentally. * This state (which requires tremendous practice) reminds me of the quiet, alert state of newborn babies when they observe the world, their brains comfortably awash in prediction error, with no anxiety in sight. They experience sensations and release them. Meditation achieves something similar. This state may take years of practice to achieve, so the next best thing is to recategorize your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions as physical sensations, which are easier to let go of. You can use meditation, at least at first, to prioritize categorizations that focus on the physical, and deprioritize those that add more psychological meaning about you or your place in the world.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The shower stall in her basement bathroom was small, the door clouded, gray glass. There was no soap, only a bottle of Prell. I washed my hair and stayed under the water until it ran cold. When I got out, I could hear the news blaring through the ceiling. The towels Reva had left for me on the sink were pink and seafoam green and smelled faintly of mildew. I rubbed the fog off the mirror and looked at myself again. 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

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, won dominance conquest of his for the space over her husband early on through a calculated coquetry. Later on, though, of eight whole months, that no scandal did ever hap all she held on to that power through her constant—and not so innocent—use that time, and no ill, of tears. Seeing someone cry usually has an immediate effect on our emo- 292 • The Art of Seduction inconvenience, nor any tions: we cannot remain neutral. We feel sympathy, and most often will do surprise or discovery at all. anything to stop the tears—including things that we normally would not For indeed the two sisters do. Weeping is an incredibly potent tactic, but the weeper is not always so had so good an understanding between them and innocent. There is usually something real behind the tears, but there may did so generously lend a also be an element of acting, of playing for effect. (And if the target senses hand to each other and so this the tactic is doomed.) Beyond the emotional impact of tears, there is obligingly play sentinel to one another, that no ill hap something seductive about sadness. We want to comfort the other person, did ever occur. And he and as Tourvel discovered, that desire quickly turns into love. Affecting sad-swore to me, being my very ness, even crying sometimes, has great strategic value, even for a man. It is a intimate friend as he was, that never in his days of skill you can learn. The central character of the eighteenth-century French greatest liberty had he novel Marianne, by Marivaux, would think of something sad in her past to enjoyed so excellent make herself cry or look sad in the present. entertainment or felt keener Use tears sparingly, and save them for the right moment. Perhaps this ardor or better appetite for it than in the said might be a time when the target seems suspicious of your motives, or when prison— which truly was a you are worrying about having no effect on him or her. Tears are a sure right good prison for him, barometer of how deeply the other person is falling for you. If they seem albeit folk say no prison can be good. And this annoyed, or resist the bait, your case is probably hopeless. happy time did continue for In social and political situations, seeming too ambitious, or too con-the space of eight months, trolled, will make people fear you; it is crucial to show your soft side. The till the truce was made betwixt the Emperor and display of a single weakness will hide a multitude of manipulations. Emo-Henri II., King of France, tion or even tears will work here too. Most seductive of all is playing the whereby all prisoners did victim. For his first speech in Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli prepared an leave their dungeons and

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

  They assumed that the owner’s behavior was identical, and that the dog understood that jealously was called for in only one condition. So even though many pet owners are confident that their dogs experience jealousy, we have no scientific evidence to support this belief. 37 Scientists are still exploring the limits of what dogs can do, emotionally speaking. Their affective niche is broader than ours in some respects, because their senses of smell and hearing are superior; but their affective niche is narrower in other respects, because they can’t travel into the future to imagine a world other than the present one. My view, from evaluating the evidence, is that dogs don’t have human emotion concepts like anger, guilt, and jealousy. It’s conceivable that one individual dog could develop some emotion-like concept of its own, different from any human emotion concept, in relation to its owner. Without language, however, the dog’s emotion concept would necessarily be narrower than a human’s, and it couldn’t teach the concept to other dogs. So the possibility of a common “Anger” (or similar concept) experienced by dogs is vanishingly remote. Even if dogs don’t share human emotions, it’s remarkable just how much dogs and other animals can accomplish through affect alone. Many animals can experience unpleasant affect when another animal nearby is suffering. The first animal’s body budget is taxed by the second animal’s discomfort, so the first animal tries to fix the situation. * Even a rat will help another rat who is in distress, for example. Human infants can comfort another infant who is in distress. You don’t need emotion concepts for this ability, just a nervous system with interoception that produces affect. 38 Amid the accumulating evidence that dogs have some truly remarkable skills, we still severely misunderstand dogs. We see them relative to ourselves, using the outmoded essentialist theory of human nature, instead of seeing them on their own terms. John Bradshaw, the author of Dog Sense, explains that we view dogs wrongly as having a dominance-seeking “inner wolf” that needs to be tamed by a civilizing force, their owners (an intriguing parallel to our own mythical inner beast that must be tamed by rationality). Dogs are extremely social creatures, continues Bradshaw, as are wolves in the wild when you don’t toss them into zoos with a bunch of strangers. Put a few dogs together in a park and in a few moments they’re playing together. What looks like dominance in dogs is what Bradshaw calls “anxiety,” and what we’d say is a body budget that’s out of balance. Think about it: we take an affiliative, affectionate creature whose body budget we regulate, and we abandon it for most of every day.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I missed that bed. The stiff blankness of my mother’s eggshell sheets. I sucked down the rest of coffee number one and put the empty cup in my Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s. Reva parked the car in the driveway next to a rusting burgundy minivan and an old yellow Volvo station wagon. “Come meet my relatives,” she said. “And then I’ll show you where you can lie down for a bit.” She led me up the shoveled pathway to the house. She was talking again. “Since her passing, I’ve just been so exhausted all the time. I haven’t been sleeping well with all these strange dreams. Creepy. Not really nightmares. Just weird. Totally bizarre.” “Everybody thinks their dreams are weird, Reva,” I said. “I’m overwhelmed, I guess. It’s been hard, but also sort of beautiful in this sad and peaceful way. You know what she said before she died? She said, ‘Don’t worry so much trying to be everybody’s favorite. Just go have fun.’ That really hit me, ‘everybody’s favorite.’ Because it’s true. I do feel the pressure to be like that. Do you think I’m like that? I guess I just never felt good enough. This is probably healthy for me, to have to face life now, you know, on my own. My dad and I aren’t really close. I’ll just introduce you to my relatives real quick,” she said, opening the front door. The interior of the house was as I’d predicted—cushy, lime green carpeting, yellow glass chandelier, gold patterned wallpaper, and low stucco ceilings. The heat was blasting, and the air carried a smell of food and coffee and bleach. Reva led me into a sitting room with windows looking out onto the snow-covered front yard. A huge television was on mute, and a row of bald men wearing glasses sat on a long paisley sofa covered in glossy clear plastic. As Reva stomped snow off her boots on the mat, three fat women in black dresses and curlers in their hair came out from the kitchen with trays of donuts and Danishes. “This is my friend, the one I had to go pick up,” she said to the women. I nodded. I waved. I could feel one of the women eying my fur coat, my sneakers. She had Reva’s eyes—honey brown. Reva took a donut off the tray the woman carried. “Is your friend hungry?” one woman asked. “Pretty flowers,” said another. “So you’re the friend we’ve heard so much about,” said the third. “Are you hungry?” Reva asked. I shook my head no, but Reva steered me into the brightly lit kitchen. “There’s so much food. See?”

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

  The famous 1983 study evoked emotion in a curious way—by having test subjects make and hold a facial pose from the basic emotion method. To evoke sadness, for example, a subject would frown for ten seconds. To evoke anger, a subject would scowl. While face-posing, subjects could use a mirror and were coached by Ekman himself to move particular facial muscles.21 The idea that a posed, so-called facial expression can trigger an emotional state is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Allegedly, contorting your face into a particular configuration causes the specific physiological changes associated with that emotion in your body. Try it yourself. Knit your brows and pout for ten seconds—do you feel sad? Smile broadly. Do you feel happier? The facial feedback hypothesis is highly controversial—there is wide disagreement on whether a full-blown emotional experience can be evoked this way.22 The 1983 study did, in fact, observe bodily changes as people posed the required facial configurations. This is a remarkable finding: just posing a particular facial configuration changed the test subjects’ peripheral nervous system activity, even while they were comfortably motionless in a chair. Their fingertips were warmer when posing a scowl (anger pose). Their heartbeats were faster when posing scowls, wide-eyed startle (fear pose), and pouts (sad pose) when compared to the poses for happiness, surprise, and disgust. The remaining two measures, skin conductance and arm tension, did not distinguish one facial configuration from another.23 Even so, you must take some additional steps before you can claim that you’ve found a bodily fingerprint for an emotion. For one thing, you must show that the response during one emotion, say, anger, is different from that of other emotions—that is, it’s specific to instances of anger. Here, the 1983 study starts having some difficulty. It showed some specificity for anger but not for the other emotions tested. That means the bodily responses for different emotions were too similar to be distinct fingerprints. In addition, you must show that no other explanations can account for your results. Then, and only then, can you claim to have found physical fingerprints for anger, sadness, and the rest. The 1983 study is, for this reason, subject to an alternative explanation, because the test subjects were given instructions for how to pose their faces. Western subjects could conceivably identify most of the target emotions from these instructions. This understanding can actually produce the heart rate and other physical changes Ekman and colleagues observed, a fact that was unknown when these studies were conducted. This alternative explanation is borne out by their later experiment with an Indonesian tribe, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra. These volunteers had less understanding of Western emotions and did not show the same physical changes as Western test subjects; they also reported feeling the expected emotion much less frequently than the Western subjects did.24

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The argument stopped. My father came into the middle bedroom, where I had gone to be as far from them as I could. In this house, the greatest distance is fifteen or twenty feet. My father sat on the end of the small bed that took the place of a couch in the middle room. The middle room became my bedroom when I entered college. I slept there on weekends when I went to graduate school in Orange County. It was my room when I left school and began a part-time teaching job.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Horrific as it may be for us to contemplate, infanticide is anything but a rarity, even today. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes studied contemporary infant deaths in northeast Brazil, where about 20 percent of infants die in their first year. She found that women consider the deaths of some children a “blessing” if the babies were lethargic and passive. Mothers told Scheper-Hughes they were “children who wanted to die, whose will to live was not sufficiently strong or developed.” Scheper-Hughes found that these children received less food and medical attention than their more vigorous siblings.6 Joseph Birdsell, one of the world’s greatest scholars of Australian Aboriginal culture, estimated that as many as half of all infants were intentionally destroyed. Various surveys of contemporary pre-industrial societies conclude that anywhere from half to three-quarters of them practice some form of direct infanticide. Lest we start feeling too smug in our compassion and superiority, recall the foundling hospitals of Europe. The number of babies delivered to near-certain death in France rose from 40,000 in 1784 to almost 140,000 by 1822. By 1830, there were 270 revolving boxes in French foundling hospital doors specially designed to protect the anonymity of those depositing unwanted infants. Eighty to 90 percent of these children are estimated to have died within a year of arrival. Once our ancestors began cultivating land for food, they were running on a wheel, but never fast enough. More land provides more food. And more food means more children born and fed. More children provide more help on the farm and more soldiers. But this population growth creates demand for more land, which can be won and held only through conquest and war. Put another way, the shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutable belief that it’s better to take strangers’ land (killing them if necessary) than to allow one’s own children to die of starvation. Closer to our own time, the BBC reports that as many as 15 percent of the reported deaths of female infants in parts of southern India are victims of infanticide. Millions more die in China, where female infanticide is prevalent, and has been for centuries. A late nineteenth–century missionary living in China reported that of 183 sons and 175 daughters born in a typical community, 126 of the sons lived to age ten (69 percent), while only 53 of the daughters made it that far (30 percent).7 China’s one-child policy, combined with the cultural preference for sons, has only worsened the already dismal odds of survival for female infants.8 There are also problematic cultural assumptions lurking within demographers’ calculations, in which life is assumed to begin at birth. This view is far from universal. Societies that practice infanticide don’t consider newborn infants full human beings. Rituals ranging from baptism to naming ceremonies are delayed until it is determined whether or not the child will be permitted to live. If not, from this perspective, the child was never fully alive anyway.9 Is 80 the New 30?