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 The Art of Seduction (2001)

  feelings: he stopped bothering her. 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 became 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- 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 anything that seems natural has a seductive charm. Only months after arriving in Paris in 1926, Josephine Baker had completely 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? She left Paris and returned a year later, her manner completely altered—now she played the part of an elegant Frenchwoman, who happened to be an ingenious dancer and performer. The French fell in love again; the power was back on her side. If you are in the public eye, you must learn from this trick of surprise. People are bored, not only with their own lives but with people who are meant to keep them from being bored. The minute they feel they can predict your next step, they will eat you alive. The artist Andy Warhol kept moving from incarnation to incarnation, and no one could predict the next one—artist, filmmaker, society man. Always keep a surprise up your sleeve. To keep the public's attention, keep them guessing. Let the moralists accuse you of insincerity, of having no core or center. They are actually jealous of the freedom and playfulness you reveal in your public persona.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  on for weeks. She could pry nothing personal out of him. In a way, she scepter, the father and ruler of the gods, whose hand understood—there were the differences in rank (she was far above him) and wields the flaming three-age (she was six years older). Then, a few months later, the wife of the forked bolt, whose nod king's brother died, and King Louis suggested to the Grande Mademoiselle shakes the universe, adopted the guise of a bull; that she replace his late sister-in-law—that is, that she marry his brother. and, mingling with the Anne Marie was disgusted; clearly the brother was trying to get his hands other bullocks, joined in the on her fortune. She asked Lauzun his opinion. As the king's loyal servants, lowing and ambled in the tender grass, a fair sight to he replied, they must obey the royal wish. His answer did not please her, sec. His hide was white as and to make things worse, he stopped visiting her, as if it were no longer untrodden snow, snow not proper for them to be friends. This was the last straw. The Grande Made-yet melted by the rainy moiselle told the king she would not marry his brother, and that was that. South wind. The muscles stood out on his neck, and Now Anne Marie met with Lauzun, and told him she would write on a deep folds of skin hung piece of paper the name of the man she had wanted to marry all along. He along his flanks. His horns was to put the paper under his pillow and read it the next morning. When were small, it is true, but so beautifully made that he did, he found the words "C'est vous" —It is you. Seeing the Grande you would swear they were Mademoiselle the following evening, Lauzun said she must have been jok-the work of an artist, more ing; she would make him the laughing stock of the court. She insisted that polished and shining than any jewel. There was no she was serious. He seemed shocked, surprised—but not as surprised as the menace in the set of his rest of the court was a few weeks later, when an engagement was an-head or in his eyes; he nounced between this relatively low-ranking Don Juan and the second-looked completely placid. • Agenor's daughter highest-ranking lady in France, a woman known for both her virtue and [ Europa] was filled with her skill at defending it. admiration for one so handsome and so friendly. But, gentle though he seemed, she was afraid at Interpretation. The Duke de Lauzun was one of the greatest seducers in first to touch him; then she history, and his slow and steady seduction of the Grande Mademoiselle was went closer, and held out his masterpiece. His method was simple: indirection. Sensing her interest in flowers to his shining lips. The lover was delighted him in that first conversation, he decided to beguile her with friendship.

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

  I discovered this quite by chance in 2006 while cleaning my office, when I stumbled across a couple of old papers from the 1930s when emotion research was allegedly dead. These papers did not embrace behaviorism. They said that emotions do not have biological essences. Following a trail of references, I discovered a treasure trove of over a hundred publications, written across a span of fifty years, that most of my scientific colleagues had never heard of. The writers were nascent constructionists, though they did not use that term. They were running experiments to find physical fingerprints for distinct emotions, failing to do so, concluding that the classical view was unjustified, and speculating about constructionist ideas. I call this band of scientists the Lost Chorus because their work, published in prestigious journals, has been largely overlooked, ignored, or misunderstood since the supposed dark ages ended.37 Why did the Lost Chorus flourish for half a century and then vanish? My best guess is that these scientists did not offer a fully formed, alternative theory of emotion to compete with the compelling classical view. They presented solid counterevidence to be sure, but criticism alone was not enough to remain relevant. As philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote about the structure of scientific revolutions: “To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” So when the classical view reasserted itself in the 1960s, half a century of anti-essentialist research was swept into history’s dustbin. And we are all the poorer for it, considering how much time and money are being wasted today in pursuit of illusory emotion essences. At press time, Microsoft is analyzing facial photographs in an attempt to recognize emotion. Apple has recently purchased Emotient, a startup company using artificial intelligence techniques in an effort to detect emotion in facial expressions. Companies are programming Google Glass ostensibly to detect emotion in facial expressions in an effort to help autistic children. Politicians in Spain and Mexico are engaging in so-called neuropolitics to discern voter preferences from their facial expressions. Some of the most pressing questions about emotion remain unanswered, and important questions remain obscured, because many businesses and scientists continue practicing essentialism while the rest of us are figuring out how emotions are made.38

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before—and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new awareness. When in 1966 I visited Vladimir Nabokov for four days in Montreux, to interview him for Wisconsin Studies and in regard to my critical study of his work, I told him about this incident, and how for me it defined literary involution and the response which he hoped to elicit from his readers at “the end” of a novel. “Exactly, exactly,” he said as I finished. “You must put that in your book.” In parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification with a character, which in its mindlessness limits consciousness, Nabokov is able to create the detachment necessary for a multiform, spatial view of his novels. The “two plots” in Nabokov’s puppet show are thus made plainly visible as a description of the total design of his work, which reveals that in novel after novel his characters try to escape from Nabokov’s prison of mirrors, struggling toward a self-awareness that only their creator has achieved by creating them—an involuted process which connects Nabokov’s art with his life, and clearly indicates that the author himself is not in this prison. He is its creator, and is above it, in control of a book, as in one of those Saul Steinberg drawings (greatly admired by Nabokov) that show a man drawing the very line that gives him “life,” in the fullest sense. But the process of Nabokov’s involution, the global perspective which he invites us to share with him, is best described in Speak, Memory, Chapter Fifteen, when he comments on the disinclination of ... physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, the whereabouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert’s search for the whereabouts and identity of Detective Trapp (Quilty) invites the reader to wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve this mystery, a process which both parallels and parodies the Poe “tale of ratiocination.” When Humbert finds Lolita and presses her for her abductor’s name, She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well it was—” And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago. Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. (p2.c29.1.) Even here Humbert withholds Quilty’s identity, though the “astute reader” may recognize that “Waterproof” is a clue which leads back to an early scene at the lake, in which Charlotte had said that Humbert’s watch was waterproof and Jean Farlow had alluded to Quilty’s Uncle Ivor (by his first name only), and then had almost mentioned Clare Quilty by name: Ivor “told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears—” But she is interrupted and the chapter ends. This teasing exercise in ratiocination—“peace” indeed!—is the detective trap, another parody of the reader’s assumptions and expectations, as though even the most astute reader could ever fully discover the identity of Quilty, Humbert, or of himself. Provided with Quilty’s name, Humbert now makes his way to Pavor Manor, that latter-day House of Usher on Grimm Road, where the extended and variegated parodies of Poe are laid to rest. All the novel’s parodic themes are concluded in this chapter. Its importance is telescoped by Humbert’s conclusion: “This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty.” In form, of course, this bravura set piece is not a play; but, as a summary parodic commentary on the main action, it does function in the manner of an Elizabethan play-within-the-play, and its “staging” underscores once more the game-element central to the book. Simultaneous with these games is a fully novelistic process that shows Humbert traveling much further than the 27,000 miles he and Lolita literally traverse.

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

  A third group saw the scenarios and the faces. In each case, we handed subjects a short list of emotion words to categorize whatever emotion they saw. 1 6 For the shooting scenario I just mentioned, 66 percent of subjects who read the scenario alone or with Landau’s face rated the scenario as a fearful situation. But for subjects who saw Landau’s face alone, devoid of context, only 38 percent of them rated it as fear and 56 percent rated it as surprise. ( Figure 1-6 compares Landau’s facial configuration to basic emotion method photos for “fear” and “surprise.” Does Landau look afraid or surprised? Or both?) Figure 1-6: Actor Martin Landau (center) flanked by basic emotion method faces for fear (left) and surprise (right) Other actors’ poses for fear were strikingly different from Landau’s. In one case, the actress Melissa Leo portrayed fear for the scenario: “She is trying to decide if she should tell her husband about a rumor going around that she is gay before he hears it from someone else.” Her mouth is closed and downturned, and her brow is slightly knitted. Nearly three-quarters of our test subjects who saw her face alone rated it as sad, but when presented with the scenario, 70 percent of subjects rated her face as displaying fear. 1 7 This sort of variation held true for every emotion that we studied. An emotion like “Fear” does not have a single expression but a diverse population of facial movements that vary from one situation to the next. * (Think about it: When is the last time an actor won an Academy Award for pouting when sad?) This may seem obvious once you pause to consider your own emotional experiences. When you experience an emotion such as fear, you might move your face in a variety of ways. While cowering in your seat at a horror movie, you might close your eyes or cover them with your hands. If you’re uncertain whether a person directly in front of you could harm you, you might narrow your eyes to see the person’s face better. If danger is potentially lurking around the next corner, your eyes might widen to improve your peripheral vision. “Fear” takes no single physical form. Variation is the norm. Likewise, happiness, sadness, anger, and every other emotion you know is a diverse category, with widely varying facial movements. 1 8 If facial movements have so much variation within an emotion category like “Fear,” you might wonder why we find it so natural to believe that a wide-eyed face is the universal fear expression. The answer is that it’s a stereotype, a symbol that fits a well-known theme for “Fear” within our culture. Preschools teach these stereotypes to children: “People who scowl are angry. People who pout are sad.” They are cultural shorthands or conventions. You see them in cartoons, in advertisements, in the faces of dolls, in emojis—in an endless array of imagery and iconography.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  If you aren’t confused already, consider that research psychiatrist Andrey Anokhin and his colleagues found that erotic images elicit significantly quicker and stronger response in women’s brains than either pleasant or frightening images without erotic content. They showed 264 women a randomly ordered collection of images ranging from snarling dogs to water skiers to semi-naked couples getting hot and heavy. The women’s brains responded about 20 percent faster to the erotic images than to any others. With men this eager responsiveness was expected, but the results among the supposedly less visual, less libidinous women surprised the researchers.5 The female erotic brain is full of such surprises. Dutch researchers used positron emission tomography (PET) to scan the brains of thirteen women and eleven men in the throes of orgasm. While the brevity of the male orgasm made reliable readings difficult to get, the heightened activity they found in the secondary somatosensory cortex (associated with genital sensation) was what they’d expected. But the women’s brains left the researchers befuddled. It seems the female brain goes into standby mode at orgasm. What little increase in cerebral activity the ladies’ brains exhibited was in the primary somatosensory cortex, which registers the presence of sensation, but not much excitement about it. “In women the primary feeling is there,” one of the researchers said, “but not the marker that this is seen as a big deal. For males, the touch itself is all-important. For females, it is not so important.”6 Every woman knows her menstrual cycle can have profound effects on her eroticism. Spanish researchers confirmed that women experience greater feelings of attractiveness and desire around ovulation, while others have reported that women find classically masculine faces more attractive around ovulation, opting for less chiseled-looking guys when not fertile.7 Since the birth control pill affects the menstrual cycle, it’s not surprising that it may affect a woman’s patterns of attraction as well. Scottish researcher Tony Little found women’s assessment of men as potential husband material shifted if they were on the pill. Little thinks the social consequences of his finding may be immense: “Where a woman chooses her partner while she is on the Pill, and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences have changed and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man.”8 Little’s concern is not misplaced. In 1995, Swiss biological researcher Claus Wedekind published the results of what is now known as the “Sweaty T-shirt Experiment.” He asked women to sniff T-shirts men had been wearing for a few days, with no perfumes, soaps, or showers. Wedekind found, and subsequent research has confirmed, that most of the women were attracted to the scent of men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) differed from her own.9 This preference makes genetic sense in that the MHC indicates the range of immunity to various pathogens. Children born of parents with different immunities are likely to benefit from a broader, more robust immune response themselves.

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

  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. Your brain’s colossal, ongoing storm of predictions and corrections can be thought of as billions of tiny droplets. Each little drop represents a certain wiring arrangement that I’ll call a prediction loop, shown in figure 4-2 . This arrangement holds at many levels throughout your entire brain. Neurons participate in prediction loops with other neurons. Brain regions par ticipate in prediction loops with other regions. Your multitudes of prediction loops run in a massive parallel process that continues nonstop for your whole life, creating the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches that make up your experiences and dictate your actions. Figure 4-2: Structure of a prediction loop. Predictions become simulations of sensations and movement. These simulations are compared to actual sensory input from the world. If they match, the predictions are correct and the simulation becomes your experience. If they don’t match, your brain must resolve the errors. Suppose you are playing baseball. Someone throws the ball in your direction, and you reach out and catch it. Most likely, you’d experience this as two events: seeing a ball and then catching it. If your brain actually reacted like this, however, baseball couldn’t exist as a sport. Your brain has about half a second to prepare to catch a baseball in a typical game. This isn’t enough time to process the visual input, calculate where the ball will land, make the decision to move, coordinate all the muscle movements, and send the motor commands to move you into position for the catch. 1 5 Prediction makes the game possible. Your brain launches predictions well before you consciously see the ball, just like it predicts a red apple in the grocery store, using your past experience. As each prediction propagates through millions of prediction loops, your brain simulates the sights, sounds, and other sensations that the predictions represent, as well as the actions you will take to catch the ball. Your brain then compares the simulations to actual sensory input. If they match . . . success! The prediction is correct, and the sensory input proceeds no further into your brain. Your body is now prepared to catch the ball, and your movement is based on your prediction. Finally, you consciously see the ball, and you catch it. 1 6 That’s what happens when the prediction is correct, like when I throw a baseball to my husband, who has some skill at the sport.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Given all the energy required to get there, it’s surprising that the female reproductive tract is not a particularly welcoming place for sperm cells. Researchers Robin Baker and Mark Bellis found that approximately 35 percent of the sperm are ejected within half an hour of intercourse and those that remain are anything but home free.23 The female’s body perceives sperm as antigens (foreign bodies) that are promptly attacked by anti-sperm leucocytes, which outnumber sperm 100:1. Only one in 14 million ejaculated human sperm even reach the oviduct.24 In addition to the obstacles imposed by the female’s body, even those lucky few sperm are going to run into competition from other males (at least, if our model of human sexuality has any validity). But while presenting obstacles to most sperm, the woman’s body can assist others. There is striking evidence that the female reproductive system is capable of making subtle judgments based upon the chemical signature of different men’s sperm cells. These assessments may go well beyond general health to the subtleties of immunological compatibility. The genetic compatibility of different men with a given woman means that sperm quality is a relative characteristic. Thus, as Anne Pusey explains, “Females may benefit from sampling many males, and different females will not necessarily benefit from mating with the same ‘high quality’ male.”25 This is a crucially important point. Not every “high quality” male would be a good match for any specific woman—even on a purely biological level. Because of the complexities of how the two sets of parental DNA interact in fertilization, a man who appears to be of superior mate value (square jaw, symmetrical body, good job, firm handshake, Platinum AMEX card) may in fact be a poor genetic match for a particular woman. So, a woman (and ultimately, her child) may benefit by “sampling many males” and letting her body decide whose sperm fertilizes her. Her body, in other words, might be better informed than her conscious mind. So, in terms of reproduction, the “fitness” of our prehistoric male ancestors was not decided in the external social world, where conventional theories tell us men competed for mates in struggles for status and material wealth. Rather, paternity was determined in the inner world of the female reproductive tract where every woman is equipped with mechanisms for choosing among potential fathers at a cellular level. Remember this next time you read something like, “The predisposition for influence, substance and prestige are all merely expressions of a male positioning himself to acquire women with whom to mate,” or, “Mate competition will involve contests over resources [men’s] wives will need to raise children.”26 This may well be the situation for most people today, but our bodies suggest our ancestors faced an entirely different scenario.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In the classic form of the game, participants almost always betray one another, as each sees the benefit of quick betrayal: talk first, and walk away free. But take that theoretical conclusion to a prison anywhere in the world and ask what happens to “rats.” Theory finally caught up to reality when scientists decided to let players gain experience with the game and see whether their behavior changed over time. As Robert Axelrod explains in The Evolution of Cooperation, players soon learned that they had a better chance if they kept quiet and assumed that their partner would do the same. If their partner talked, he acquired a bad reputation and was punished, in a “tit-for-tat” pattern. Over time, those players with the more altruistic approach flourished, while those who acted only in their individual short-term interest met serious problems—a shiv in the shower, maybe. The classic interpretation of the experiment took another blow when psychologist Gregory S. Berns and his colleagues decided to monitor female players with an MRI machine. Berns et al. were expecting to find that subjects would react most strongly to being cheated—when one tried to cooperate and the other “snitched.” But that’s not what they found. “The results really surprised us,” Berns told Natalie Angier, of The New York Times. The brain responded most energetically to acts of cooperation: “The brightest signals arose in cooperative alliances and in those neighborhoods of the brain already known to respond to desserts, pictures of pretty faces, money, cocaine and any number of licit and illicit delights.”4 Analyzing the brain scans, Berns and his team found that when the women cooperated, two parts of the brain, both responsive to dopamine, were activated: the anteroventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex. Both regions are involved in impulse control, compulsive behavior, and reward processing. Though surprised by what his team found, Berns found comfort in it. “It’s reassuring,” he said. “In some ways, it says that we’re wired to cooperate with each other.” The Tragedy of the Commons First published in the prestigious journal Science in 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin’s paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” is one of the most reprinted articles ever to appear in a scientific journal. The authors of a recent World Bank Discussion Paper called it “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues,” while anthropologist G. N. Appell says the paper “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals.”5

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ishing money and gifts on her. then turned to the lady she Otero's New York debut, in October of 1890, was an astounding suc-was with— some friend, I guess— and spoke to her in cess. "Otero dances with abandon," read an article in The New York Times. English, which she thought "Her lithe and supple body looks like that of a serpent writhing in quick, I didn't understand. graceful curves." In a few short weeks she became the toast of New York However, I did. • " 'Who's the very society, performing at private parties late into the night. The tycoon Wil-handsome young man?' liam Vanderbilt courted her with expensive jewels and evenings on his Otero asked. • "The other yacht. Other millionaires vied for her attention. Meanwhile Jurgens was one answered, 'He's dipping into the company till to pay for presents for her—he would do Chevalier.' • " 'He has such beautiful eyes' ha anything to keep her, a task in which he was facing heavy competition. A Belle said, looking straight few months later, after his embezzling became public, he was a ruined man. at me, right up and down. He eventually committed suicide. • "Then she almost floored me with her frankness. • Otero went back to France, to Paris, and over the next few years rose to " 'I wonder if he'd like to become the most infamous courtesan of the Belle Epoque. Word spread go to bed with me. I think quickly: a night with La Belle Otero (as she was now known) was more ef-I'll ask him!' Only she didn't say it so delicately. fective than all the aphrodisiacs in the world. She had a temper, and was de-She was much cruder and manding, but that was to be expected. Prince Albert of Monaco, a man more to the point. • "It who had been plagued by doubts of his virility, felt like an insatiable tiger was at this moment I had after a night with Otero. She became his mistress. Other royalty followed— to make up my mind rather quickly. La Belle Prince Albert of Wales (later King Edward VII), the Shah of Persia, Grand moved toward me. Instead Duke Nicholas of Russia. Less wealthy men emptied their bank accounts, of introducing myself and and Jurgens was only the first of many whom Otero drove to suicide. succumbing to the consequences, I pretended I During World War I, a twenty-nine-year-old American soldier named didn't understand what Frederick, stationed in France, won $37,000 in a four-day crap game. On she'd said, uttered some his next leave he went to Nice and checked himself into the finest hotel. pleasantry in French and moved away to my dressing On his first night in the hotel restaurant, he recognized Otero sitting alone room. • "I could see La at a table. He had seen her perform in Paris ten years before, and had be-Belle smile in an odd

• From Querelle (1953)

  . . . (he hesitated, not really knowing whether to say ' . . . all the genuflections, all the caresses of seraphim's wings, all the perfume of lilies . . .' ) . You deserve to be punished." Querelle looked him in the eye. Simply and so calmly that it was hurtful, he said: 82 I JEAN GENET "Have you finished with my handkerchief, sir?" ''That's right. Well, come along and get it." Querelle followed the officer to his cabin. The latter started looking for the handkerchief, but did not find it. Querelle waited, immobile, strictly at attention. Then Lieutenant Seblon took one of his own, monogrammed, clean handkerchiefs, white cambric, and offered it to the seaman. "Sorry. Seems I can't find yours. Do you mind if I give you this one?" Querelle nodded his indifferent-seeming acceptance. "I'm sure it'll tum up again. I had it laundered. Now, I'm pretty certain you wouldn't have done that yourself. You don't look like that kind of lad to me." Querelle was taken aback by the officer's "tough" expression as he uttered those words in an aggressive, almost accusing tone. All the same, he smiled. "That ain't quite so, sir. I know how to take care of things." That's news to me. You're the kind of guy, it seems to me, takes his washing to some little sixteen-year-old Syrian chick, so she can do it and . . . (here Lieutenant Seblon's voice quavered. He knew he better not say what he perfectly well knew he would say, after three seconds of silence) . . . bring it to you all nicely stnoothed and ironed." "No such luck. I don't know any girls in Beirut. What there is to wash, I do myself." And then, without understanding why, Querelle noticed a slight relaxation of the officer's rigid attitude. Spontaneously, with the amazing sense for putting their attractions to work for them that young men have, even those to whom any degree of methodical coquetry is quite foreign, he gave his voice a somewhat sly inflection, and his body, relaxing too, became animated from neck to calves-by the almost imperceptible shifting of one foot in front of the other-by a series of short-lived ripples that were truly graceful and reminded Querelle himself of the 83 I QUERELLE existence of his buttocks and shoulders. Suddenly he appeared as if drawn in quick, broken lines, and, to the officer, drawn by the very hand of the master. "Well?" The Lieutenant looked at him. Querelle was again immobile, yet the grace of his movements remained. He smiled. His eyes were like asterisks. "Well, in that case . . .'' The Lieutenant spoke in a casual drawl. "Well . . . (and in one breath, managing not to betray too much of his unease) . . . if you're really so good at all that, how would you like to be my steward for a while?"

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In the classic form of the game, participants almost always betray one another, as each sees the benefit of quick betrayal: talk first, and walk away free. But take that theoretical conclusion to a prison anywhere in the world and ask what happens to “rats.” Theory finally caught up to reality when scientists decided to let players gain experience with the game and see whether their behavior changed over time. As Robert Axelrod explains in The Evolution of Cooperation, players soon learned that they had a better chance if they kept quiet and assumed that their partner would do the same. If their partner talked, he acquired a bad reputation and was punished, in a “tit-for-tat” pattern. Over time, those players with the more altruistic approach flourished, while those who acted only in their individual short-term interest met serious problems—a shiv in the shower, maybe. The classic interpretation of the experiment took another blow when psychologist Gregory S. Berns and his colleagues decided to monitor female players with an MRI machine. Berns et al. were expecting to find that subjects would react most strongly to being cheated—when one tried to cooperate and the other “snitched.” But that’s not what they found. “The results really surprised us,” Berns told Natalie Angier, of The New York Times. The brain responded most energetically to acts of cooperation: “The brightest signals arose in cooperative alliances and in those neighborhoods of the brain already known to respond to desserts, pictures of pretty faces, money, cocaine and any number of licit and illicit delights.”4 Analyzing the brain scans, Berns and his team found that when the women cooperated, two parts of the brain, both responsive to dopamine, were activated: the anteroventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex. Both regions are involved in impulse control, compulsive behavior, and reward processing. Though surprised by what his team found, Berns found comfort in it. “It’s reassuring,” he said. “In some ways, it says that we’re wired to cooperate with each other.” The Tragedy of the Commons First published in the prestigious journal Science in 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin’s paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” is one of the most reprinted articles ever to appear in a scientific journal. The authors of a recent World Bank Discussion Paper called it “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues,” while anthropologist G. N. Appell says the paper “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals.”5

• From Querelle (1953)

  Those were Querelle's first words. In the dark, he held out a pack of cigarettes to Gil, and their hands met in a groping handshake that enclosed the pack. "Thanks, buddy. That's good of you. I won't forget it." "Come on. Don't even mention it." "And I got you some cold meat and a little bit of pate." "Put 'em on the crate there." · 168 I JEAN GENET Querelle took out another pack and lit himself a cigarette from it. He wanted to be able to see Gil's face. He was surprised when he saw how emaciated, pain-racked and dirty it was, and covered with a fair, soft growth of beard. Gil's hair was matted. The face was a moving sight, in the light of the match. It was a murderer's face. Querelle raised the match to look around. "It must be pretty grim, living here." "You said it, it's no joke. But what could I do? 'Where else c.ould I have gone?" Querelle stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and all three were silent for a moment or two. "Aren't you going to eat, Gil?" Gil certainly was hungry, but he didn't want to show it to Querelle. "Go ahead and light the candle, there's no one else around." Gil sat down on a comer of the crate. He started to eat, in a casual manner. The boy hunkered down at his feet, and Querelle stood looking at the two of them, his legs apart, smoking his ciagarette without touching it with his hands. "I probably look like hell, don't I?" Querelle grinned. "Can't say you're a beaut, but it'll be easy to fix. You're safe here, in any case?" "Yeah. Unless someone snitches, that is." "If that's me you have in mind, you're wrong. I got no truck with informers. But I can't see how much longer you can make it here. You've got to get out of here, and that's for sure." Querelle knew that his expression had suddenly turned cruel, as on the days of arms drill when it was shielded by the steel triangle of the bayonet fixed to his rifle. Those times his face, itself, became as if plated with steel. Sheltering behind it and representing that bayonet was the true soul of a Querelle otherwise put together out of flesh and cloth. To the officer inspect- 169 I QUERELLE ing the men on deck, the bayonet was exactly in line with Querelle's left eyebrow and eye, and when he met Querelle's stare it seemed to him like looking into an entire arms factory. "With a little dough I could perhaps make it to Spain. I know some guys in Perpignan; I used to work down there."

• From Querelle (1953)

  168 I JEAN GENET Querelle took out another pack and lit himself a cigarette from it. He wanted to be able to see Gil's face. He was sur prised when he saw how emaciated, pain-racked and dirty it was, and covered with a fair, soft growth of beard. Gil's hair was matt ed. The face was a moving sight, in the light of the match. It was a murderer's face. Querelle raised the match to look around. "It must be pretty grim, living here." "You said it, it's n o joke. But what could I do? 'Where else c.o uld I have gone?" Querelle stuck his ha n ds in his pants pockets, and all three were silent for a moment or two. "Aren't you going to eat, Gil?" Gil certainly was hungry, but he didn't want to show it to Querelle. "Go ahead and light the candle, there's no one else around." Gil sat down on a comer of the crate. He started to eat, in a casual manner. The boy hunkered down at his feet, and Qu erelle stood looking at the two of them, his legs apart, smoking his ciagarette without touching it with his hands. "I probably look like hell, don't I?" Querelle grinned. "Can 't say you're a beaut, but it'll be easy to fix. You're safe here, in any case?" "Yeah. Unless someone snitches, that is." "If that's me you have in mind, you're wrong. I got no truck with informers. But I can't see how much longer you can make it here. You've got to get out of here, and that's for sure." Querelle knew that his expression had suddenly turned cruel, as on the days of arms drill when it was shielded by the steel triangle of the bayonet fixed t o his rifle. Those times his face, itself, became as if plated with steel. Sheltering behind it and representing that bayonet was the true soul of a Querelle other wise put together out of flesh and cloth. To the officer inspect-

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and Matvey?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling hardly perceptibly, and addressing his wife. The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyevitch was happy and cheerful, but not so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his offense. At half-past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family conversation over the tea-table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck everyone as strange. Talking about common acquaintances in Petersburg, Anna got up quickly. “She is in my album,” she said; “and, by the way, I’ll show you my Seryozha,” she added, with a mother’s smile of pride. Towards ten o’clock, when she usually said good-night to her son, and often before going to a ball put him to bed herself, she felt depressed at being so far from him; and whatever she was talking about, she kept coming back in thought to her curly-headed Seryozha. She longed to look at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the first pretext, she got up, and with her light, resolute step went for her album. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase. Just as she was leaving the drawing-room, a ring was heard in the hall. “Who can that be?” said Dolly. “It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s late,” observed Kitty. “Sure to be someone with papers for me,” put in Stepan Arkadyevitch. When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a servant was running up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself was standing under a lamp. Anna glancing down at once recognized Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time of dread of something stirred in her heart. He was standing still, not taking off his coat, pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and into the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing behind her Stepan Arkadyevitch’s loud voice calling him to come up, and the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing. When Anna returned with the album, he was already gone, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was telling them that he had called to inquire about the dinner they were giving next day to a celebrity who had just arrived. “And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!” added Stepan Arkadyevitch.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin went to his brother’s room. He had not in the least expected what he saw and felt in his brother’s room. He had expected to find him in the same state of self-deception which he had heard was so frequent with the consumptive, and which had struck him so much during his brother’s visit in the autumn. He had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked—greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things. He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree. And he had prepared himself for this; but he found something utterly different. In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls filthy with spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake-handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and tense, transparent-looking forehead. “It cannot be that that fearful body was my brother Nikolay?” thought Levin. But he went closer, saw the face, and doubt became impossible. In spite of the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to glance at those eager eyes raised at his approach, only to catch the faint movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache, to realize the terrible truth that this death-like body was his living brother. The glittering eyes looked sternly and reproachfully at his brother as he drew near. And immediately this glance established a living relationship between living men. Levin immediately felt the reproach in the eyes fixed on him, and felt remorse at his own happiness. When Konstantin took him by the hand, Nikolay smiled. The smile was faint, scarcely perceptible, and in spite of the smile the stern expression of the eyes was unchanged. “You did not expect to find me like this,” he articulated with effort. “Yes ... no,” said Levin, hesitating over his words. “How was it you didn’t let me know before, that is, at the time of my wedding? I made inquiries in all directions.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  “I’m telling you this because today is our wedding anniversary—and if you don’t mind my saying so, you two kind of remind me of us. If you wouldn’t be offended, I’d like to give you a free ride—so I can go home and tell my wife I helped another young couple like us.” Surprised and touched, we say his words are enough, but we end up accepting because it matters so much to him. At the airport, we all stand outside his taxi, shaking hands—a little awkward with emotion. “You know,” the driver says, “me and my wife and you two, we’re what this country is all about.” Later my friend and I will agree that the worst punishment of that racist shout in the street was making us mistrust this man when we first got into his taxi. Years pass. My friend and I are carried into different lives. He lives on the West Coast, has children, grandchildren, and a life I cannot know. We are only sure that we wish each other well. When I run into him again almost thirty years later, the first thing he says to me is, “Do you remember that taxi driver?” And I do. —WHEN I ENTER A TAXI, I find myself in someone’s life. Kids’ photos on the dashboard, religious or other decorations hanging from the rearview mirror, name and perhaps ethnicity evident from the hack license on display—plus the sensory hit of the driver’s physical self in a small space—all plunge me into a mobile world. In what writer Pete Hamill calls a “common strategy against loneliness, a fleeting intimacy with their passengers,”1 drivers tell you stories and are happy to listen to yours. I discovered these worlds on wheels when I was first living in New York. After I began writing “The City Politic,” a weekly column for New York magazine, I depended on cabbies not only to get me to my destination but to give me tips on public opinion and elections. They tend to be shit-free guides to the state of social issues, and are often better political predictors than most media pundits. After all, they spend more time listening to random strangers than any public opinion poll could afford; they overhear more private conversations than a wiretapper; and they often are themselves new immigrants or work with those who are. This makes them treasure troves of information on what’s really going on, not only here but in other countries. An example came only ten days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks felled the Twin Towers in Manhattan. I was haunted by the televised scenes of office workers diving to their deaths rather than be immolated in that inferno, images so terrible that television stations soon stopped showing them. Downtown streets were covered with surrealistic gray ash and debris, and gutters were filled with the bodies of birds that had been incinerated in flight.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When he had finished with his speech, the governor walked out of the hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly—some even enthusiastically—followed him and thronged round him while he put on his fur coat and conversed amicably with the marshal of the province. Levin, anxious to see into everything and not to miss anything, stood there too in the crowd, and heard the governor say: “Please tell Marya Ivanovna my wife is very sorry she couldn’t come to the Home.” And thereupon the nobles in high good-humor sorted out their fur coats and all drove off to the cathedral. In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand like the rest and repeating the words of the archdeacon, swore with most terrible oaths to do all the governor had hoped they would do. Church services always affected Levin, and as he uttered the words “I kiss the cross,” and glanced round at the crowd of young and old men repeating the same, he felt touched. On the second and third days there was business relating to the finances of the nobility and the female high school, of no importance whatever, as Sergey Ivanovitch explained, and Levin, busy seeing after his own affairs, did not attend the meetings. On the fourth day the auditing of the marshal’s accounts took place at the high table of the marshal of the province. And then there occurred the first skirmish between the new party and the old. The committee who had been deputed to verify the accounts reported to the meeting that all was in order. The marshal of the province got up, thanked the nobility for their confidence, and shed tears. The nobles gave him a loud welcome, and shook hands with him. But at that instant a nobleman of Sergey Ivanovitch’s party said that he had heard that the committee had not verified the accounts, considering such a verification an insult to the marshal of the province. One of the members of the committee incautiously admitted this. Then a small gentleman, very young-looking but very malignant, began to say that it would probably be agreeable to the marshal of the province to give an account of his expenditures of the public moneys, and that the misplaced delicacy of the members of the committee was depriving him of this moral satisfaction. Then the members of the committee tried to withdraw their admission, and Sergey Ivanovitch began to prove that they must logically admit either that they had verified the accounts or that they had not, and he developed this dilemma in detail. Sergey Ivanovitch was answered by the spokesman of the opposite party. Then Sviazhsky spoke, and then the malignant gentleman again. The discussion lasted a long time and ended in nothing. Levin was surprised that they should dispute upon this subject so long, especially as, when he asked Sergey Ivanovitch whether he supposed that money had been misappropriated, Sergey Ivanovitch answered:

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  When I was in Salt Lake City in the 1990s, for instance, a new Mormon temple had just been built in a nearby suburb. Since non-Mormons would not be allowed inside once it was dedicated and in use, this was a rare opportunity. With an official guide, I entered its huge white marble foyer and noticed television screens embedded in the walls. My guide explained that each member would have a Temple Recommend Card, like a credit card, and once it was inserted, a screen would display whether he or she had tithed, had attended weekly meetings, and was otherwise in good standing and allowed to enter. Soon all Mormon temples would be automated, he added proudly. As we moved into the temple, we came to private spaces where members would change into the all-white garments worn during worship. Then in the center of a big open space was an enormous stone baptismal pool where, as my guide explained, even the dead, whether or not they had been Mormon in life, could be converted by proxy, thus becoming eligible to enter the first of three levels of Heaven. Finally, he ushered me into a series of elegant Sealing Rooms, each one with rows of gilded chairs facing a movie screen. Here, he explained, children would be “sealed” to their parents for eternity, and also wives to their husbands; otherwise they would not be able to enter Heaven. There were similar Celestial Rooms and Ordinance Rooms for higher levels of secret instruction. When I said I was surprised to see no central space for the congregation to gather, as in a cathedral, church, or mosque, he explained that there was no need; instruction is better done in small groups. Perhaps old Mormon temples had too little space, he added, but these private and automated rooms were the wave of the future. Ever since, when I’ve looked at the beautiful fairy-tale spires of Mormon temples in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and other great cities of the world, I’ve imagined a honeycomb of isolated spaces inside and a people both united and divided by secrets. This and mysteries in other religions have made me wonder if secrets are the difference between religion and spirituality. In religion, god is a secret hidden within some people and places but not others. In spirituality, god is revealed in all living things. Other secrets are about not belief but safety. I was in college in 1955 when a few brave women founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil and political rights group in this country. To be public in this way took courage. Homosexuality was still against laws that weren’t always enforced but could be. Even in the 1980s, joyful lesbian bars like Bonnie & Clyde, with the best dancing in Manhattan, might pretend to be bars like any other or pay for police protection.