Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From On Beauty (2005)

  It surprised Kiki, how angry Jerome was about Howard, apparently on her behalf. It made her envious too – she wished she could muster up such clarity of hate. But she could not feel fury for Howard any more. If she was going to leave him, she should have done so in the winter. But she had stayed and now summer was  On Beauty here. The only account she could give of this decision was that she was not quite done loving him, which was the same as saying she was not yet done with Love – Love itself being coeval with knowing Howard. What was one night in Michigan set against Love! ‘Jerome,’ she said regretfully, and looked to the ground. But now he was determined to have his parting shot – children in a righteous mood always are. Kiki recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old; remembered feeling exactly this: that if her family could only speak the truth, together they would emerge, weeping but clear-eyed, into the light. Jerome said, ‘It’s like, a family doesn’t work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?’ Kiki’s kids always seemed to say ‘you know’ at the end of their sentences these days, but they never waited to find out if she did know. By the time Kiki looked up, Jerome was already a hundred feet away, tunnelling into the accepting crowd.  Jerome sat in the front seat next to the taxi-driver because the trip was Jerome’s treat and Jerome’s idea; Levi, Zora and Kiki were in the second row of this people-carrier, and Howard lay flat on his back with a row to himself. The Belsey family car was at the mechanics’, having its twelve-year-old engine replaced. The Belseys themselves were on their way to hear Mozart’s Requiem performed on Boston Common. It was a classic family outing, proposed at the moment when all the members of the family had never felt less familial. The black mood in the house had been building these past two weeks, ever since Howard learned the news of Monty’s appointment. He saw it as an unforgivable betrayal on the part of the Humanities Faculty. A close personal rival invited on to campus! Who had supported it? He made angry calls to colleagues, trying to uncover the Brutus – with no success. Zora, with her  kipps and belsey creepily expert knowledge of college politics, poured poison in his ear. Neither paused to recall that Monty’s appointment might affect Jerome too. Kiki held her temper, waiting for the two to think of someone other than themselves.

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

  You can predict the loser by simply counting the justices’ negative words during questioning. Not only that, but by examining the affective connotations in the judges’ words during oral arguments, you can predict their votes. 5 5 Common sense dictates that judges experience strong affect in the courtroom. How could they not? They hold people’s futures in their hands. Their working hours are filled with heinous crimes and grievously harmed victims. I know how draining this can be, having been a therapist for victims of rape and childhood sexual abuse, and sometimes working with the perpetrators. Judges also encounter defendants who are more likable than the people they have preyed on, a situation that surely is challenging to grapple with, especially in a courtroom full of whispering spectators and bickering attorneys. And sometimes a judge must shoulder the affect of an entire country. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter suffered so much while deciding Bush v. Gore that he wept because of its deliberations (along with half of the United States). All this mental effort taxes a judge’s body budget. The judge’s life is one of intense and continual emotional labor under the fiction of equanimity. 5 6 Nevertheless, the law continues to hold dear the fiction of the dispassionate judge, even at the highest levels. When Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, as a nominee in 2010, was asked whether it was ever appropriate for feelings to help decide a case, she replied to the contrary, “It’s the law all the way down.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor also ran into opposition during her confirmation hearings, as some senators feared that her emotions and empathy were in direct opposition to her abilities to judge fairly. Her take on all this, for the most part, was that judges do have feelings but should not make decisions based on them. Nonetheless, the evidence is clear that judges are not affectless in their rulings. The next question is: should they be? Is pure reason really the best way to render a wise decision? Imagine a person who is very calmly and coolly weighing the pros and cons about whether or not another person should die. There’s not a trace of emotion in sight. Like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. I am being a bit facetious here, but this kind of dispassionate decision-making is essentially what the law instructs in the sentencing portion of criminal cases. Rather than pretend that affect is absent, it’s better to use affect wisely. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once expressed, “Sensitivity to one’s intuitive and passionate responses, and awareness of the range of human experience, is therefore not only an inevitable but a desirable part of the judicial process, an aspect more to be nurtured than feared.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I pretended it was my own grandfather who had died and began to cry. I was really crying for myself, dying slowly at the age of twenty-five. Bennett was marked by death, up to his neck in it. He carried his sadness on his shoulders like an invisible knapsack. If he had turned to me, if he had let me comfort him, I might have borne it with him. But he blamed me for it. And his blame drove me away. But I was afraid to go away. I stayed and grew more secret. I turned more and more to my fantasies and to my writing. And that was how I began to discover myself. He retreated into his sadness, barricaded himself in it, and I retreated into my room to write. All that long winter, he mourned his grandfather, his father, his sister who had died at sixteen, his brother who had been born retarded and died at eighteen, his friend who had died of polio at fourteen, his poverty, his silence. He mourned the army, the life he’d left in New York. He mourned the dead and his own preoccupation with death. He mourned his mourning. The rigid expression he wore on his face was a kind of death mask. So many people he had loved (but also hated) had died, and he wore this mask in penance. Why should he be alive when they were dead? So he made his life resemble death. And his death was my death too. I learned to keep myself alive by writing. That was the winter I began to write in earnest. I began to write as if it were my only hope for survival, for escape. I had always written, after a fashion. I had always worshipped authors. I used to kiss their pictures on the backs of books when I finished reading. I regarded anything printed as a holy relic and authors as creatures of superhuman knowledge and wit. Pearl Buck, Tolstoy, or Carolyn Keene, the author of Nancy Drew. I made none of the snotty divisions you learn to make later. I could happily go from Through the Looking Glass to a horror comic, from Great Expectations or The Secret Garden to Mad Magazine. Growing up in my chaotic household, I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, “the absentminded professor.” They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Why!’ cried Amelia. ‘She’s nasty – I saw her that time in the station and she looked right through me like I didn’t even exist! She’s uppity. And she’s practically a Rastafarian!’ Monty frowned. It was becoming clear that Amelia was not the quietest of quiet Christian girls. ‘Ammy has a point. Why should we?’ said Michael. ‘Clearly, in some way your mother felt close to Mrs Belsey. She’d been left alone a lot in the last few months, by all of us.’ Upon hearing this obvious truth, everyone found a spot on the floor to focus on. ‘She made this friend. Whatever we think of it, we should respect it. We should invite her. It’s only decent. Are we agreed? I don’t suppose she’ll be able to make it anyway.’ A few minutes later the children filed out again, feeling a degree more confused as to the true character of the person whose obituary was to appear in tomorrow morning’s Times : Lady Kipps, loving wife of Sir Montague Kipps, devoted mother of Victoria and Michael, Windrush passenger, tireless church worker, patron of the arts.  on beauty and being wrong  Through the grubby windows of their minicab, the Belseys watched Hampstead morph into West Hampstead, West Hampstead into Willesden. At every railway bridge, a little more graffiti; on each street, fewer trees, and in their branches, more fluttering plastic bags. An acceleration of establishments selling fried chicken, until, in Willesden Green, it seemed every other shop sign made reference to poultry. Written in a giant, death-defying font above the train-tracks, a message:   . In different circumstances this would have amused. ‘It gets kind of . . . more crappy down here,’ ventured Zora, in the new, quiet voice she had assumed for this death. ‘Aren’t they rich? I thought they were rich.’ ‘It’s their home,’ said Jerome simply. ‘They love it here. They’ve always lived here. They’re not pretentious. That’s what I was always trying to explain.’ Howard rapped the thick glass side window with his wedding ring. ‘Don’t be fooled. There’re some bloody grand houses around here. Besides, men like Monty like being the big fish in a small pond.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi stood up and, without saying goodbye to Carl, followed Elisha out of the room.  On Beauty ‘Baby, you can’t lie to me. I can see it in your face.’ Kiki took Levi by the chin, tilted his head back and examined the swollen pockets of skin under the eyes, the blood that had leaked into his corneas, the dryness of his lips. ‘I’m just tired.’ ‘Tired my ass .’ ‘Let go of my chin.’ ‘I know you’ve been crying,’ insisted Kiki, but she didn’t know the half of it: couldn’t know, would never know, the lovely sadness of that Haitian music, or what it was like to sit in a small dark booth and be alone with it – the plangent, irregular rhythm, like a human heartbeat, the way the many harmonized voices had sounded, to Levi, like a whole nation weeping in tune. ‘I know things at home haven’t been good,’ said Kiki, looking into his red eyes. ‘But they’re going to get better, I promise you that. Your daddy and I are determined to make it better. OK?’ There was no point in explaining. Levi nodded and zipped up his coat. ‘The Bus Stop,’ said Kiki, and resisted the urge to deliver a curfew that would only be ignored. ‘You go and have fun.’ ‘You want a ride?’ asked Jerome, who was passing through the kitchen with Zora. ‘I’m not drinking.’ Just before they got in the car, Zora took off her coat and turned her back to Levi. ‘Seriously, do you think I should wear this – I mean, does it look OK?’ Her dress was a bad colour and it had no back and it was the wrong material for her lumpy body and it was too short. Normally, Levi would have bluntly told his sister all of this, and Zoor would have been upset and angry, but at least she would have gone back in and changed, and, as a consequence, arrived at the party looking a hell of a lot better than she did now. But tonight Levi had other things on his mind. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. Fifteen minutes later they dropped Levi off in Kennedy Square and continued on to the party. There was nowhere to park. They had to leave the car several blocks from the party itself. Zora had specifically worn the shoes she was wearing because she had not  on beauty and being wrong anticipated any walking. To make progress she had to grip her brother around his waist, take little pigeon-steps and lean far back on her heels. For a long time Jerome restrained himself from commentary, but at the fourth pit stop he could keep silent no longer. ‘I don’t get you. Aren’t you meant to be a feminist? Why would you cripple yourself like this?’ ‘I like these shoes, OK? They actually make me feel powerful.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I must look like a total freak. But I just have to be comfy once I’m in the house – I’ve always been like that. Couldn’t take that skirt any longer. Have to be comfy.’ She bounced her knees up and down against the mattress. ‘Is your family here?’ she asked. ‘I was looking for them. That’s what I was doing.’ ‘I thought you said you were looking for the loo,’ said Victoria accusingly, closing one eye, stretching out her arm and pointing one unsteady finger at him. ‘That too.’ ‘Hmm.’ She swivelled round again and now bellyflopped towards him, so her feet were against the bedstead and her head not far from Howard’s knees. She balanced her glass hazardously on top of the duvet and rested her chin on her hands. She examined his face and, after a time, softly smiled, as if something she found there had amused her. Howard followed her eyes with his own as they roved, trying to focus them on the matter at hand. ‘My mother died,’ he attempted, quite unable to hit the note he meant to. ‘So I know what you’re going through. I was younger than you when she died. Much younger.’ ‘That would probably explain it,’ she said. She lost her smile and replaced it with a thoughtful scowl. ‘Why you can’t say I like the tomato .’ Howard frowned. What game was this? He took out his pocket  On Beauty of tobacco. ‘I – like – the – tomato,’ he said slowly and pulled the Rizlas from the bag. ‘May I?’ ‘I don’t care. Don’t you want to know what that means?’ ‘Not terribly. I’ve got other things on my mind.’ ‘It’s a Wellington thing – it’s a student thing,’ said Victoria rapidly, coming up on her elbows. ‘It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is ‘‘The tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture’’, and Jane Colman’s class is ‘‘To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory’’ – she’s such a silly bitch that woman – and Professor Gilman’s class is ‘‘The tomato is structured like an aubergine’’, and Professor Kellas’s class is basically ‘‘There is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself ’’, and Erskine Jegede’s class is ‘‘The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul’’. And so on. So you say, ‘What class have you got coming up?’ and the person says ‘Tomatoes –.’ Or whatever.’ Howard sighed. He licked one side of his Rizla. ‘Hilarious.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He had an alcoholic American wife in Fiesole, a gleaming bald head, a goatee, and a passion for Granità di Coffee. 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 How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  An emotion category like anger or sadness is far more complex than a simple feeling of unpleasantness and arousal. When Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s voice wavered during his speech after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, he didn’t cry, he didn’t pout, and at one point he actually smiled. And yet, somehow, viewers inferred that he was experiencing intense sadness. Sensation and simple feeling are not sufficient to explain how an audience of thousands perceived the depth of Malloy’s anguish. Affect alone also doesn’t explain how we construct our own experiences of sadness, nor how one instance of sadness differs from another. Nor does affect tell you what sensations mean or what to do about them. That’s why people eat when they are tired or find a defendant guilty when they are hungry. You must make the affect meaningful so your brain can execute a more specific action. One way to make meaning is to construct an instance of emotion. So, how do interoceptive sensations become emotions? And why do we experience these sensations (really predictions) in such diverse ways: as physical symptoms, as perceptions of the world, as simple affective feeling, and sometimes as emotion? That is the next mystery we’ll address. 5 Concepts, Goals, and Words When you look at a rainbow, you see discrete stripes of color, roughly like the drawing on the left side of figure 5-1. But in nature, a rainbow has no stripes—it’s a continuous spectrum of light, with wavelengths that range from approximately 400 to 750 nanometers. This spectrum has no borders or bands of any kind. Why do you and I see stripes? Because we have mental concepts for colors like “Red,” “Orange,” and “Yellow.” Your brain automatically uses these concepts to group together the wavelengths in certain ranges of the spectrum, categorizing them as the same color. Your brain downplays the variations within each color category and magnifies the differences between the categories, causing you to perceive bands of color. 1 Figure 5-1: Rainbows, drawn with stripes (left) and continuous as in nature (right) Human speech also is continuous—a stream of sound—yet when you listen to your native language, you hear discrete words. How does that happen? Once again, you use concepts to categorize the continuous input. Beginning in infancy, you learn regularities in the stream of speech that reveal the boundaries between phonemes, the smallest bits of sound that you can distinguish in a language (for example, the sound of “D” or “P” in English). These regularities become concepts that your brain later uses to categorize the stream of sound into syllables and words.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up. And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears. 30Leaving as I did Coalmont around four in the afternoon (by Route X—I do not remember the number), I might have made Ramsdale by dawn had not a short-cut tempted me. I had to get onto Highway Y. My map showed quite blandly that just beyond Woodbine, which I reached at nightfall, I could leave paved X and reach paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road. It was only some forty miles long according to my map. Otherwise I would have to follow X for another hundred miles and then use leisurely looping Z to get to Y and my destination. However, the short-cut in question got worse and worse, bumpier and bumpier, muddier and muddier, and when I attempted to turn back after some ten miles of purblind, tortuous and tortoise-slow progress, my old and weak Melmoth got stuck in deep clay. All was dark and muggy, and hopeless. My headlights hung over a broad ditch full of water. The surrounding country, if any, was a black wilderness. I sought to extricate myself but my rear wheels only whined in slosh and anguish. Cursing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into slacks, pulled on the bullet-riddled sweater, and waded four miles back to a roadside farm. It started to rain on the way but I had not the strength to go back for a mackintosh. Such incidents have convinced me that my heart is basically sound despite recent diagnoses. Around midnight, a wrecker dragged my car out. I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on. Utter weariness overtook me an hour later, in an anonymous little town. I pulled up at the curb and in darkness drank deep from a friendly flask.

• From On Beauty (2005)

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

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

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

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

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From On Beauty (2005)

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

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

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

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

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

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

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

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

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