Surprise

Passages

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

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

  The basic emotion method has shaped the scientific landscape and influenced public understanding of emotion. Thousands of scientific studies claim that emotions are universal. Popular books, magazine articles, radio broadcasts, and TV shows casually assume that everyone makes and recognizes the same facial configurations as expressions of emotion. Games and books teach preschool children these allegedly universal expressions. International political and business negotiation strategies are likewise based on this assumption. Psychologists assess and treat emotion deficits in people suffering from mental illness using similar methods. The growing economy of emotion-reading gadgets and apps also assumes universality, as if emotions can be read in the face or in patterns of bodily changes in the absence of context, as easily as reading words on a page. The sheer amount of time, effort, and money going into these efforts is mind-boggling. But what if the fact of universal emotions isn’t a fact at all? What if it’s evidence for something else entirely . . . namely, our ability to use concepts to shape perception? This is the crux of the theory of constructed emotion: a full-fledged, alternative explanation for the mystery of human emotion that does not rely on universal emotion fingerprints. The next four chapters dive into the details of this theory and the scientific evidence that supports it. 4The Origin of FeelingThink about the last time you were awash in pleasure. I don’t necessarily mean sexual pleasure but everyday delights: gazing at a vivid sunrise, sipping a cold glass of water when you are hot and sweaty, or enjoying a brief moment of peace at the end of a troubling day. Now contrast this with feeling unpleasant, like the last time you were sick with a cold, or just after an argument with a close friend. Pleasure and displeasure feel qualitatively different. You and I might not agree that a specific object or event produces pleasure or displeasure—I find walnuts delicious whereas my husband calls them an offense against nature—but each of us can, in principle, distinguish one from the other. These feelings are universal, even as emotions like happiness and anger are not, and they flow like a current through every waking moment of your life.1 Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from an ongoing process inside you called interoception. Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system. Think about what’s happening within your body right this second. Your insides are in motion. Your heart sends blood rushing through your veins and arteries. Your lungs fill and empty. Your stomach digests food. This interoceptive activity produces the spectrum of basic feeling from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery, and even completely neutral.2

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

  Consider what this means: events in the world, such as a snake slithering at your feet, merely tune your predictions, roughly the way that your breathing is tuned by exercise. Right now, as you read these words and understand what they mean, each word barely perturbs your massive intrinsic activity, like a small stone skipping on a rolling ocean wave. In brain-imaging experiments, when we show photographs to test subjects or ask them to perform tasks, only a small portion of the signal we measure is due to the photos and tasks; most of the signal represents intrinsic activity. You might think that your perceptions of the world are driven by events in the world, but really, they are anchored in your predictions, which are then tested against those little skipping stones of incoming sensory input. 1 4 Figure 4-1: Your brain contains complete maps of your visual field. One map is located in your primary visual cortex, known as V1. If your brain merely reacted to the light waves that hit your retina and traveled to primary visual cortex (V1) via your thalamus, then it would have many neurons to carry that visual information to V1. But it has far fewer than one would expect (top image), and ten times as many projections going in the other direction, carrying visual predictions from V1 to the thalamus (center image). Likewise, 90 percent of all connections coming into V1 (lower image) carry predictions from neurons in other parts of cortex. Only a small fraction carries visual input from the world. 1 3 Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It’s a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act. But predictions aren’t always correct, when compared to actual sensory input, and the brain must make adjustments. Sometimes a skipping stone is large enough to make a splash. Consider this sentence: Once upon a time, in a magical kingdom far beyond the most distant mountains, there lived a beautiful princess who bled to death. Did you find the last three words unexpected? That’s because your brain predicted incorrectly based on its stored knowledge of fairy tales—it made a prediction error— and then adjusted its prediction in the blink of an eye based on the final words: a few skipping stones of visual information. The same process happens when you mistake a stranger’s face for someone you know, or step off a moving walkway in an airport and feel surprised by the change in your pace. Your brain computes prediction errors speedily by comparing the prediction to actual sensory input, and then it reduces the prediction error quickly and efficiently. For example, your brain can change the prediction: the stranger looks different from your friend; the moving walkway came to its end.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Brutally murdering someone would, of course, require the State to hold that person accountable and to protect the public. But to completely disregard a person’s disability would be unfair in evaluating what degree of culpability to assign and what sentence to impose. I went back home feeling very good about the hearing, but the truth was that a state postconviction hearing rarely resulted in a favorable ruling. If relief was to come, it would most likely be on appeal. I wasn’t expecting any miracle rulings. About a month after the hearing, before judgment was rendered, I decided to go to the prison and see Avery. We hadn’t had much time to talk after the hearing, and I wanted to make sure he was okay. Throughout most of the hearing he had sat pleasantly, but when some of his former foster parents had come into the court, I could see him become upset. I thought a posthearing visit would be helpful. When I pulled into the parking lot, I once again saw that loathsome truck, with its flags, stickers, and menacing gun rack. I feared another encounter with the guard. Sure enough, after checking in with the warden’s secretary and heading toward the visitation room, I saw him approaching me. I braced myself, preparing for the encounter. And then something surprising happened. “Hello, Mr. Stevenson. How are you?” the guard asked. He sounded earnest and sincere. I was skeptical. “Well, I’m fine. How are you?” He was looking at me differently from how he had before; he wasn’t glaring and seemed genuinely to want to interact. I decided to play along. “Look, I’ll step into the bathroom to get ready for your search.” “Oh, Mr. Stevenson, you don’t have to worry about that,” he quickly replied. “I know you’re okay.” Everything about his tone and demeanor was different. “Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll go back and sign the book, then.” “Mr. Stevenson, you don’t have to do that. I saw you coming and signed your name in for you. I’ve taken care of it.” I realized that he actually looked nervous. I was confused by the shift in his attitude. I thanked him and walked to the visitation room door with the officer following behind me. He turned to unlock the padlock so that I could go inside. As I started to walk past him to enter, he placed his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, um, I’d like to tell you something.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “You know I took ole Avery to court for his hearing and was down there with y’all for those three days. And I, uh, well, I want you to know that I was listening.” He removed his hand from my shoulder and looked past me, as if staring at something behind me. “You know, I—uh, well, I appreciate what you’re doing, I really do.

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

  As a child gets older, her brain begins to predict more effectively using her concepts—but of course she still makes mistakes. When Sophia was three years old, for instance, we were in a shopping mall when she spotted a man ahead of us, with his hair in dreadlocks. She knew three people with dreadlocks at that time: her beloved Uncle Kevin, who is medium height and dark-skinned; an acquaintance who also has dark skin but is quite tall and broad-shouldered; and one of our neighbors, who is female and short with light skin. In that moment, Sophia’s brain was furiously launching multiple, competing predictions that could potentially become her experience. For the sake of argument, let’s say this included 100 predictions of Uncle Kevin from Sophia’s past experience, from different places and times and angles, along with 14 predictions of her acquaintance, and 60 predictions of her female neighbor. Each prediction was assembled from bits and pieces of patterns in her brain, all mixed and matched. These 174 predictions were also accompanied by many other predictions of people, places, and things from Sophia’s prior experiences—anything at all that was statistically related to the scene in front of her. In total, Sophia’s population of 174 predictions is what we’ve been calling a “concept” (in this case, the concept “People with Dreadlocks”). When we say these instances are “grouped” as a concept, be aware that there is no “grouping” stored anywhere in Sophia’s brain. Any given concept is not represented in the information flow among one single set of neurons; each concept is itself a population of instances, and these instances are represented in different patterns of neurons on each occasion. (This is degeneracy.) The concept is constructed in the moment, ad hoc. And among these myriad instances, one of them will be the most similar (by pattern matching) to Sophia’s current situation. That’s what we’ve been calling the “winning instance.”7 On that particular day, Sophia leaped out of her stroller, ran across the mall, and wrapped her little arms around the man’s leg, shouting, “Uncle KEVIN!” Her delight was short-lived, however, as Uncle Kevin was at home six hundred miles away. She looked up into a total stranger’s face and shrieked.*

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  23I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss Opposite’s sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turf of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dressed—doublebreasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tie—lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.’s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porch—where the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to group—from a bunch of neighbors already collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses. At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he lay—a banked banker so to speak—was not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket.

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

  Several years ago, my family was eating dinner in our kitchen in Boston when suddenly, simultaneously, all of us had a sensation that was entirely new. Our chairs tipped backward for a moment, then righted themselves, but in a curvy sort of way like cresting an ocean wave. This completely novel experience left us in a state of experiential blindness, so we started forming hypotheses. Did we all simply lose our balance momentarily? No, that wasn’t likely to happen to three people at once. Did a car crash outside the house? No, we hadn’t heard anything. Had a building exploded far away, out of audible range, making the ground tremble? Maybe, but the feeling wasn’t so much a tremble as a swoop. What about an earthquake? Maybe, but we’d never been in an earthquake before, and ours had lasted only one second, much shorter than earthquakes we’d seen in disaster movies. However, the rising and falling shape, an almost sinusoidal motion, was consistent with our understanding of earthquakes. An earthquake was the best match to our knowledge, so we settled on that hypothesis. A few hours later, we learned that a magnitude 4.5 earthquake had struck in nearby Maine and rippled throughout New England. This same process of elimination that my family performed consciously, the brain does naturally, automatically, and extremely rapidly. Your brain has a mental model of the world as it will be in the next moment, developed from past experience. This is the phenomenon of making meaning from the world and the body using concepts. In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. I’ve been calling this process “categorization,” but it’s known by many other names in science. Experience. Perception. Conceptualization. Pattern completion. Perceptual inference. Memory. Simulation. Attention. Morality. Mental Inference. In the folk psychology of daily life, these words mean different things, and scientists often study them as different phenomena, assuming each is produced by a distinct process in the brain. But really, they arise via the same neural processes. When I feel cheerful as my nephew Jacob exuberantly wraps his little arms around my neck for a big hug, this is conventionally called “an emotional experience.” When I see happiness in the big smile on his face as he is hugging me, I am no longer experiencing but “perceiving.” When I recollect the hug and how warm it made me feel, I am no longer perceiving but “remembering.” When I contemplate whether I was feeling happy or sentimental, I am no longer remembering but “categorizing.” My view is that these terms don’t mark sharp distinctions, and they can all be accounted for with the same brain ingredients for making meaning.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She seemed too full of light and gaiety for the vast shadowy chamber with the torches throwing huge uneven shadows on the high arched ceiling. The Queen sat in the corner on a great chair that resembled a throne, her foot on a plump green velvet cushion. Her arms rested on the chair, and she smiled faintly when Lady Juliana bowed to her. Prince Alexi, sitting on his heels at the Queen's feet, very politely kissed the pretty Lady's slippers. Beauty knelt in the center of the flowered carpet, still much shaken and tear-stained, and as soon as Lady Juliana approached her she kissed her slippers as Alexi had done, only perhaps a little more fervently. Beauty was surprised at her response to Lady Juliana. She had been appalled to hear her name, and yet she almost welcomed her. She felt some connection with her. Lady Juliana had, after all, showered Beauty with affectionate attention. She felt almost as if Lady Juliana were on her side, though she had little doubt that she would now be punished by her. Lady Juliana's paddle had been too diligent on the Bridle Path for Beauty to have any doubt of that. Yet she felt almost as if this were a girlhood friend of great confidence and strength, coming to embrace her. Lady Juliana was beaming at her. "Ah, Beauty, sweet Beauty, is the Queen pleased?" And as she stroked Beauty's hair and pushed her back to sit on her heels, Lady Juliana glanced at the Queen politely. "She is all that you said she would be," answered the Queen. "But I wish to see more of her to judge properly. Use your imagination, lovely one. Do as you please, for me." At once Lady Juliana motioned to the Page. He opened the door to admit yet another young man who carried a great flower basket filled with pink roses. Lady Juliana took the basket over her arm, and the two Pages retired to the shadows. They stood as still as guards, and Beauty wondered that their presence meant so little to her. For all she cared, there might have been a row of them there. It did not matter. "Look up, precious, with those beautiful blue eyes of yours," said Lady Juliana, "and see what I have prepared to amuse the Queen, and further demonstrate your lovliness." She lifted a rose which had a rather short stem, no more than eight inches. "No thorns, my pet, and this I show you so you fear only what you should fear, and not carelessness or blunders." Beauty could see the basket was heaped with such carefully prepared flowers. The Queen gave a cheerful laugh and shifted in her chair. "Wine, Alexi," she said, "sweet wine, this room is rather permeated with sweetness." Lady Juliana burst into soft laughter as though this were a wonderful compliment, and she danced about the room, twirling her rose-colored skirts, her braids swinging.

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

  [image file=image_rsrc7AP.jpg] Figure 4-1: Your brain contains complete maps of your visual field. One map is located in your primary visual cortex, known as V1. If your brain merely reacted to the light waves that hit your retina and traveled to primary visual cortex (V1) via your thalamus, then it would have many neurons to carry that visual information to V1. But it has far fewer than one would expect (top image), and ten times as many projections going in the other direction, carrying visual predictions from V1 to the thalamus (center image). Likewise, 90 percent of all connections coming into V1 (lower image) carry predictions from neurons in other parts of cortex. Only a small fraction carries visual input from the world.13 Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world. It’s a huge, ongoing simulation that constructs everything you perceive while determining how you act. But predictions aren’t always correct, when compared to actual sensory input, and the brain must make adjustments. Sometimes a skipping stone is large enough to make a splash. Consider this sentence: Once upon a time, in a magical kingdom far beyond the most distant mountains, there lived a beautiful princess who bled to death. Did you find the last three words unexpected? That’s because your brain predicted incorrectly based on its stored knowledge of fairy tales—it made a prediction error—and then adjusted its prediction in the blink of an eye based on the final words: a few skipping stones of visual information. The same process happens when you mistake a stranger’s face for someone you know, or step off a moving walkway in an airport and feel surprised by the change in your pace. Your brain computes prediction errors speedily by comparing the prediction to actual sensory input, and then it reduces the prediction error quickly and efficiently. For example, your brain can change the prediction: the stranger looks different from your friend; the moving walkway came to its end. Prediction errors aren’t problems. They’re a normal part of the operating instructions of your brain as it takes in sensory input. Without prediction error, life would be a yawning bore. Nothing would be surprising or novel, and therefore your brain would never learn anything new. Most of the time, at least when you are an adult, your predictions aren’t too far off-base. If they were, you would go through life feeling constantly startled, uncertain . . . or hallucinating.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We turned a corner and there it was, at the end of the street. It gave me a shock: not only its nightmarish appearance—the bleak, battlemented tower so out of scale with the low old cottages around it, the derelict theatricality of the porch, with its barley-sugar columns and shit-crusted ledges—but also the shot of pure recall, my first hours here, full of forced excitement and independence, fighting back home-sickness. "The area's suffered a lot in the past ten years. There used to be several factories across the canal but they've all been closed down." "And I believe there was a hotel?" I said—half-expecting to be told there wasn't. "The old Pilgrimage and Commercial? Quite right. You have picked up an amazing knowledge of the town." I thought how lamentably wide of the mark that was. Anything I knew had been absorbed unconsciously on my wishful loopings through certain quarters; I'd been incurious about every history but one. When we entered the church Paul swept off his hat and at the first pew-end dipped to one knee, his coat fanned for a second behind him on the stones. I was surprised, and the way he rose and hurried me on suggested it was mere habit, a conciliatory gesture to the believers kneeling here and there in prayer. In front of them, and at several side-altars, pyramids of patchy candle-light lit up the insensible faces of saints and Virgins. Beyond that there was only an impression of decrepitude and Romanesque gloom. I followed Paul as he wandered down a narrow aisle, almost blocked with the black wardrobes of confessionals. Perhaps we should just pop into one of those and get it over with. Then he turned back, he seemed uncertain himself, hesitated with a hand on my shoulder, looked guardedly across the scattering of kneeling figures. "Let's stay a moment," he muttered, and slipped into a pew. I followed him again and sat by him waiting. There was a sombre echo. It was as if a coffin might any moment be brought in.

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

  When I speak to audiences in the United States about emotion concepts as variable and culture-specific, and then suggest that our own English-language concepts are similarly local to our culture, some people are very surprised, as my friend Carmen was. “But happiness and sadness are real emotions,” they insist, as if the emotions of other cultures are not as real as our own. To this I usually say: you are exactly right. Fago, litost, and the rest are not emotions . . . to you. That’s because you don’t know these emotion concepts; the associated situations and goals are not important in middle-class American culture. Your brain cannot issue predictions based on “Fago,” so the concept doesn’t feel automatic the way that happiness and sadness do to you. To understand fago, you have to combine other concepts that you do know, performing conceptual combination and expending mental effort. But the Ifaluk do have this emotion concept. Their brains automatically predict with it. When they experience fago, it feels just as automatic and real as happiness or sadness does to you, as if fago just happens to them. Yes, fago, litost, and the rest are just words made up by people, but so are “happy,” “sad,” “fearful,” “angry,” “disgusted,” and “surprised.” Invented words are the very definition of social reality. Would you say that your local currency is real money and the currencies of other cultures are just made up? To someone who has never traveled, it might seem that way, lacking the concept for another currency. But experienced travelers have the concept “Currency from Another Culture.” I’m asking you to learn the concept of “Emotion from Another Culture,” so you understand that its instances are just as real to others as your own emotions are to you. If you’ve found these ideas challenging, try this one: some cherished Western emotion concepts are completely absent in other cultures. Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.” This last item is very difficult for Westerners to accept . . . life without sadness? Really? When Tahitians are in a situation that a Westerner would describe as sad, they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic, all of which are covered by their broader term pe’ape’a. Someone who believes in the classical view of emotion would explain away this variability, saying that a frowning Tahitian really is in a biological state of sadness, whether he knows it or not. A constructionist does not have the luxury of such certainty, because people frown for many reasons such as while thinking, exerting effort, in humor, when censoring a thought, or when feeling pe’ape’a.30

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He— “Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?” “No, of course not. Her father—” “Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?” She swallowed and shook her head—and then did a double take. “Say, how come you know all those kids?” I explained. “Well,” she said. “They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but not that bad. If you have to know, her name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive.” I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as “when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl.” I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions? “Gosh no,” exhaled limp Lo mimicking dread and relief, pressing a falsely fluttering hand to her chest. I was more interested, however, in heterosexual experience. She had entered the sixth grade at eleven, soon after moving to Ramsdale from the Middle West. What did she mean by “pretty bad”? Well, the Miranda twins had shared the same bed for years, and Donald Scott, who was the dumbest boy in the school, had done it with Hazel Smith in his uncle’s garage, and Kenneth Knight—who was the brightest—used to exhibit himself wherever and whenever he had a chance, and— “Let us switch to Camp Q,” I said. And presently I got the whole story.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turf of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dressed—doublebreasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tie—lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure. I have to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll, Miss O.’s nurse running with a rustle, a half-empty tumbler in her hand, back to the screened porch—where the propped-up, imprisoned, decrepit lady herself may be imagined screeching, but not loud enough to drown the rhythmical yaps of the Junk setter walking from group to group—from a bunch of neighbors already collected on the sidewalk, near the bit of checked stuff, and back to the car which he had finally run to earth, and then to another group on the lawn, consisting of Leslie, two policemen and a sturdy man with tortoise shell glasses. At this point, I should explain that the prompt appearance of the patrolmen, hardly more than a minute after the accident, was due to their having been ticketing the illegally parked cars in a cross lane two blocks down the grade; that the fellow with the glasses was Frederick Beale, Jr., driver of the Packard; that his 79-year-old father, whom the nurse had just watered on the green bank where he lay—a banked banker so to speak—was not in a dead faint, but was comfortably and methodically recovering from a mild heart attack or its possibility; and, finally, that the laprobe on the sidewalk (where she had so often pointed out to me with disapproval the crooked green cracks) concealed the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox, at the corner of Miss Opposite’s lawn. These were picked up and handed to me by a pretty child in a dirty pink frock, and I got rid of them by clawing them to fragments in my trouser pocket. Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but he opened his mouth only to impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination and disposal of a dead woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood. The sun was still a blinding red when he was put to bed in Dolly’s room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean; who, to be near, retired to the Humberts’ bedroom for the night; which, for all I know, they may not have spent as innocently as the solemnity of the occasion required.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Why had she chosen him for this ex- cursion? Her story was not quite credible. Then, as they traveled, she sug- gested he look out the window at the passing landscape, as she was doing. He had to lean over toward her to do so, and just as he did, the carriage jolted. She grabbed his hand and fell into his arms. She stayed there for a moment, then pulled away from him rather abruptly. After an awkward si- lence, she said, "Do you intend to convince me of my imprudence in your regard?" He protested that the incident had been an accident and reassured her he would behave himself. In truth, however, having her in his arms had made him think otherwise. They arrived at the château. The husband came to meet them, and the young man expressed his admiration of the building: "What you see is nothing," Madame interrupted, "I must take you to Monsieur's apartment." Before he could ask what she meant, the subject was quickly changed. The husband was indeed a bore, but he excused himself after supper. Now Madame and the young man were alone. She invited him to walk with her in the gardens; it was a splendid evening, and as they walked, she slipped her arm in his. She was not worried that he would take advantage of her, she said, because she knew how attached he was to her good friend the countess. They talked of other things, and then she returned to the topic of As we were about to enter the chamber, she stopped me. "Remember," she said gravely, "you are supposed never to have seen, never even suspected, the sanctuary you're about to enter. . . ." • . . . All this was like an initiation rite. She led me by the hand across a small, dark corridor. My heart was pounding as though I were a young proselyte being put to the test before the celebration oj the great mysteries. . . . • "But your Countess ..." she said, stopping. I was about to reply when the doors opened; my answer was interrupted by admiration. I was astonished, delighted, I no longer know what became of me, and I began in good faith to believe in magic. . . . In truth, I found myself in a vast cage of mirrors on which images were so artistically painted that they produced the illusion of all the objects they represented. —VIVANT DENON,"NO TOMORROW," IN MICHEL FEHER, ED., THE LIBERTINE READER 213 214 • The Art of Seduction his lover: "Is she making you quite happy?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She had tabooed my pin. Bark and bang went the icebox. Carrying the glasses, I walked through the dining room and spoke through the parlor door which was a fraction ajar, not quite space enough for my elbow. “I have made you a drink,” I said. She did not answer, the mad bitch, and I placed the glasses on the sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring. “Leslie speaking. Leslie Tomson,” said Leslie Tomson who favored a dip at dawn. “Mrs. Humbert, sir, has been run over and you’d better come quick.” I answered, perhaps a bit testily, that my wife was safe and sound, and still holding the receiver, I pushed open the door and said: “There’s this man saying you’ve been killed, Charlotte.” But there was no Charlotte in the living room. 23 I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight. A big black glossy Packard had climbed Miss Opposite’s sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk (where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap), and stood there, shining in the sun, its doors open like wings, its front wheels deep in evergreen shrubbery. To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turf of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dressed—doublebreasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tie—lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group—mother, daddy, baby—that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me! Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic about strangers on trains. Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all? The trip to London proved purgatorial. First, there were my companions in the compartment: a stuffy American professor, his dowdy wife, and their drooly baby. The husband led off with the interrogation. Was I married? What answer could I make to that? I didn’t really know anymore. It might have been an easy enough situation for a more taciturn person, but I am one of those morons who feels compelled to spill the story of her life to any passerby who asks. It took all my will power to say quite simply: “No!” “Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?” I smiled. Isadora Sphinx. Should I begin a little tirade about marriage and the oppression of women? Should I plead for sympathy, saying my lover dumped me? Should I make a brave front of it and say my husband drowned in jargon in Vienna? Should I hint at lesbian mysteries beyond their ken? “I don’t know,” I said, smiling hard enough to crack my face. Change the subject fast, I thought, before I tell them. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s self-concealment. “Where are you headed for?” I asked brightly. They were off to London for a vacation. The husband talked and the wife fed the baby. The husband issued policy statements and the wife kept her mouth shut. “Why isn’t a nice girl like you single?” I thought. Oh shut up Isadora, don’t meddle…. The train wheels seemed to be saying: shut up…shut up…shut up…. The husband was a chemistry professor. He was teaching on a Fulbright at Toulouse. He really liked the French system. “Discipline,” he said. We needed more of it in America—didn’t I agree? “Not really,” I said. He looked vexed. Actually, I informed him, I’d taught in college myself. “Really?” This gave me new status. I might be a curious lone female, but at least I was not a bottle-washer like his wife. “Don’t you agree that our American educational system has misconstrued the meaning of democracy?” he asked, all pomposity and bile. “No,” I said, “I don’t agree.” Oh Isadora, you are getting crusty. When was the last time you said “I don’t agree…” and said it so calmly? I’m beginning to like me quite a lot, I thought.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Samuel Wallis, another ship captain who spent time in Tahiti, reported, “The women in General are very handsome, some really great Beauties, yet their Virtue was not proof against a Nail.” The Tahitians’ fascination with iron resulted in a de-facto exchange of a single nail for a sexual tryst with a local woman. By the time Wallis set sail, most of his men were sleeping on deck, as there were no nails left from which to hang their hammocks.13 There is a yam-harvest festival in the present-day Trobriand Islands, in which groups of young women roam the islands “raping” men from outside their own village, purportedly biting off their eyebrows if the men do not satisfy them. Ancient Greece celebrated sexual license in the festivals of Aphrodisia, Dionysia, and Lenea. In Rome, members of the cult of Bacchus hosted orgies no fewer than five times per month, while many islands in the South Pacific are still famous for their openness to unconstrained sexuality, despite the concerted efforts of generations of missionaries preaching the morality of shame.14 Many modern-day Brazilians let it all hang out during Carnival, when they participate in a rite of consensual nonmarital sex known as sacanagem that makes the goings-on in New Orleans or Las Vegas look tame. Though the eager participation of women in these activities may surprise some readers, it has long been clear that the sources of female sexual reticence are more cultural than biological, despite what Darwin and others have supposed. Over fifty years ago, sex researchers Clellan Ford and Frank Beach declared, “In those societies which have no double standard in sexual matters and in which a variety of liaisons are permitted, the women avail themselves as eagerly of their opportunity as do the men.”15 Nor do the females of our closest primate cousins offer much reason to believe the human female should be sexually reluctant due to purely biological concerns. Instead, primatologist Meredith Small has noted that female primates are highly attracted to novelty in mating. Unfamiliar males appear to attract females more than known males with any other characteristic a male might offer (high status, large size, coloration, frequent grooming, hairy chest, gold chains, pinky ring, whatever). Small writes, “The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety…. In fact,” she reports, “the search for the unfamiliar is documented as a female preference more often than is any other characteristic our human eyes can perceive.”16

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

  My friend Carmen, who was born in Bolivia, was surprised when I told her that emotion concepts vary widely from culture to culture. “I thought everybody in the world has the same emotions,” she explained to me in Spanish. “Well, Bolivians do have stronger emotions than Americans. Más fuerte.” Most people have lived with one set of emotion concepts their whole lives, so like Carmen, they find this cultural relativity surprising. Yet, scientists have documented numerous emotion concepts around the world that don’t exist in English. Norwegians have a concept for an intense joy of falling in love, calling it “Forelsket.” The Danes have the concept “Hygge” for a certain feeling of close friendship. The Russian “Tocka” is a spiritual anguish, and the Portuguese “Saudade” is a strong, spiritual longing. After a little research, I located a Spanish emotion concept that has no direct equivalent in English, called “Pena Ajena.” Carmen described it to me as “sadness over another person’s loss,” but I’ve also seen it characterized as discomfort or embarrassment on someone else’s behalf. Here are a few more I find compelling:25 Gigil (Filipino): The urge to hug or squeeze something that is unbearably adorable.26 Voorpret (Dutch): Pleasure felt about an event before the event takes place.27 Age-otori (Japanese): The feeling of looking worse after a haircut.28 Some emotion concepts from other cultures are incredibly complicated, perhaps impossible to translate into English, yet natives experience them as a matter of course. The concept of “Fago” in Ifaluk (Micronesian) culture can mean love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion, depending on context. In Czech culture, the concept of “Litost” is said to be untranslatable but roughly “torment over one’s own misery combined with the desire for revenge.” The Japanese emotion concept “Arigata-meiwaku” is felt when someone has done you a favor that you didn’t want from them, and which may have caused difficulty for you, but you’re required to be grateful anyway.29

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The prairie vole is another supposed paragon of “natural monogamy.” According to one newspaper article, “Prairie voles—squat rodents indigenous to plains and grasslands—are considered to be a near-perfect monogamous species. They form pair bonds that share a nest. Both male and female actively protect each other, their territory, and their young. The male is an active parent and, if one of the pair dies, the survivor does not take a new mate.”19 Considering the vitriol Darwin faced 150 years ago when he dared compare humans to apes, it’s striking to note the scraps of comfort contemporary scientists find in equating human sexual behavior with that of the ratlike prairie vole. We who once compared ourselves to angels now see ourselves reflected in this lowly rodent. But C. Sue Carter and Lowell L. Getz, who have studied the biology of monogamy in prairie voles and other species for thirty-five years, are unambiguous: “Sexual exclusivity,” they write “is not a feature of [the vole’s] monogamy.”20 Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (formerly director of Yerkes Primate Center) and an expert on the prairie vole, says that those in the know have a less exalted view of the prairie vole’s monogamy: “They’ll sleep with anyone but they’ll only sit by their partners.”21 Then there’s that line (invariably directed at women, for some reason) that goes, “If you’re looking for monogamy, marry a swan.”* So what about swans, then? Many species of birds have long been believed to be monogamous because two parents are needed for the 24/7 labor of incubating eggs and feeding nestlings. As with humans, investment-minded theorists assumed males would help out only if they were certain the young were their own. But the recent advent of affordable DNA testing has blown embarrassing holes in this story, too. Although a pair of bluebirds may build a nest and rear the young together, an average of 15 to 20 percent of the chicks are not sired by the male in the partnership, according to Patricia Adair Gowaty, a behavioral ecologist. And bluebirds aren’t particularly slutty songbirds: DNA studies of the chicks of some 180 bird species previously thought to be monogamous have shown that about 90 percent of them aren’t. Swans, alas, are not among the virtuous 10 percent. So if you’re looking for monogamy, forget the swan, too! Is monogamy natural? Yes…. Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time. Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal. HELEN FISHER

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Then one day, weeks later, she was at the country manor of a friend when the marquis suddenly appeared. She blushed, trembled, walked away, but his unexpected appearance had caught her unawares—it had pushed her over the edge. A few days later she be- came another of Richelieu's victims. Of course he had set the whole thing up, including the supposed surprise encounter. Not only does suddenness create a seductive jolt, it conceals manipula- three years pass.] Now during this time Shahrazad had borne King Shahriyar three sous. On the thousand and first night, when she had ended the tale of Ma'aruf she rose and kissed the ground before him, saying: "Great King, for a thousand and one nights I have been recounting to you the fables of past ages and the legends of ancient kings. May I be so bold as to crave a favor of your majesty?" • The king replied: "Ask, and it shall be granted. " • Shahrazad called out to the nurses, saying: "Bring me my children. " • . . . "Behold these three [little boys] whom Allah has granted to us. For their sake I implore you to spare my life. For if you destroy the mother of these infants, they will find none among women to love them as I would." • The king embraced his three sous, and his eyes filled with tears as he answered: "I swear by Allah, Shahrazad, that you were already pardoned before the coming of these children. I loved you because I found you chaste and tender, wise and eloquent. May Allah bless you, and bless your father and mother, your ancestors, and all your descendants. O, Shahrazad, this thousand and first night is brighter for us than the day!" —TALES FROM THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, TRANSLATED BY N.J. DAWOOD 248 • The Art of Seduction tions. Appear somewhere unexpectedly, say or do something sudden, and people will not have time to figure out that your move was calculated. Take them to some new place as if it only just occurred to you, suddenly reveal some secret. Made emotionally vulnerable, they will be too bewildered to see through you. Anything that happens suddenly seems natural, and any- thing that seems natural has a seductive charm. Only months after arriving in Paris in 1926, Josephine Baker had com- pletely charmed and seduced the French public with her wild dancing. But less than a year later she could feel their interest wane. Since childhood she had hated feeling out of control of her life. Why be at the mercy of the fickle public?

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Most people have a misconception about illusion. As any magician knows, it need not be built out of anything grand or theatrical; the grand and theatrical can in fact be destructive, calling too much attention to you and your schemes. Instead create the appearance of normality. Once your targets feel secure—nothing is out of the ordinary—you have room to deceive them. Pei Pu did not spin the lie about his gender immediately; he took his time, made Bouriscout come to him. Once Bouriscout had fallen for it, Pei Pu continued to wear men's clothes. In animating a fantasy, the great mistake is imagining it must be larger than life. That would border on camp, which is entertaining but rarely seductive. Instead, what you aim for is what Freud called the "uncanny," something strange and familiar at the same time, like a deja vu, or a childhood memory—anything slightly irrational and dreamlike. The uncanny, the mix of the real and the unreal, has immense power over our imaginations. The fantasies you bring to life for your targets should not be bizarre or exceptional; they should be rooted in reality, with a hint of the strange, the theatrical, the occult (in talk of destiny, for example). You vaguely remind people of something in their childhood, or a character in a film or book. Even before Bouriscout heard Pei Pu's story, he had the uncanny feeling of something remarkable and fantastical in this normal-looking man. The secret to creating an uncanny effect is to keep it subtle and suggestive.