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 Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  [image "A cartoon-style illustration drawn on lined paper depicts two people in conversation. One person has glasses and is wearing a tie, while the other has messy hair. Speech bubbles show them discussing learning to walk." file=image_rsrc4RY.jpg] “It was a different time,” Mr. P said. “A bad time. Very bad. It was wrong. But I was young and stupid and full of ideas. Just like you.” Mr. P smiled. He smiled at me. There was a piece of lettuce stuck between his front teeth. “You know,” he said. “I taught your sister, too.” “I know.” “She was the smartest kid I ever had. She was even smarter than you.” I knew my sister was smart. But I’d never heard a teacher say that about her. And I’d never heard anybody say that she was smarter than me. I was happy and jealous at the same time. My sister, the basement mole rat, was smarter than me? “Well,” I said, “My mom and dad are pretty smart, too, so I guess it runs in the family.” “Your sister wanted to be a writer,” Mr. P said. “Really?” I asked. I was surprised by that. She’d never said anything about that to me. Or to Mom and Dad. Or to anybody. “I never heard her say that,” I said. “She was shy about it,” Mr. P said. “She always thought people would make fun of her.” “For writing books? People would have thought she was a hero around here. Maybe she could have made movies or something, too. That would have been cool.” “Well, she wasn’t shy about the idea of writing books. She was shy about the kind of books she wanted to write.” “What kind of books did she want to write?” I asked. “You’re going to laugh.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” Jeez, we had both turned into seven-year-olds. “Just tell me,” I said. It was weird that a teacher was telling me things I didn’t know about my sister. It made me wonder what else I didn’t know about her. “She wanted to write romance novels.” Of course, I giggled at that idea. “Hey,” Mr. P said. “You weren’t supposed to laugh.” “I didn’t laugh.” “Yes, you laughed.” “No, I didn’t.” “Yes, you did.” “Maybe I laughed a little.” “A little laugh is still a laugh.” And then I laughed for real. A big laugh. “Romance novels,” I said. “Those things are just sort of silly, aren’t they?” “Lots of people—mostly women—love them,” Mr. P said. “They buy millions of them. There are lots of writers who make millions by writing romance novels.” “What kind of romances?” I asked. “She never really said, but she did like to read the Indian ones. You know the ones I’m talking about?” Yes, I did know. Those romances always featured a love affair between a virginal white schoolteacher or preacher’s wife and a half-breed Indian warrior. The covers were hilarious:

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Meanwhile, Rathbun administered the star’s six-month checkup. Because of his insubordination, Rathbun had to go through a program of penitence. One of the steps was to write up a list of his offenses against the church, which Miscavige had sketched out for him. “ I am writing this public announcement to inform executives and staff that I have come to my senses and I am no longer committing present time overts and have ceased all attacks and suppressions on Scientology,” Rathbun admitted in September 2003, adopting the abject tone that characterizes many Scientology confessions. Speaking in full-blown Scientologese, he wrote, “The end result is unmocked org form, overworked and enturbulated executives and staff.” This meant that he had not thought out his intentions clearly, causing the church and the people who worked for it to be in disarray. He had a particular apology to make to David Miscavige: “Each and every time on major situations, COB has had to intervene to clean up wars I had exacerbated.… The cumulative amount of COB’s time I have cost in terms of dropping balls, creating situations internally and externally, is on the order of eight years.” Rathbun was shocked, not just by being declared an SP, but also by the changes at Gold Base in the year and a half he had been posted to Flag. All communications into and out of the base had been cut off. The leader had several of his top executives confined to the Watchdog Committee headquarters—a pair of double-wide trailers that had been married together. By the end of the year, the number who were living there under guard had grown to about forty or fifty people. It was now called the Hole. Except for one long conference table, there was no furniture—no chairs or beds, just an expanse of outdoor carpet—so the executives had to eat standing up and sleep on the floor, which was swarming with ants. In the morning, they were marched outside for group showers with a hose, then back to the Hole. Their meals were brought to them—a slop of reheated leftovers. When temperatures in the desert location mounted to more than a hundred degrees, Miscavige turned off the electricity, letting the executives roast inside the locked quarters. The leader ordered them to stay until they finally had rearranged the “ Org Board”—the church’s organizational chart—to his satisfaction, which was never given. Photographs of Sea Org personnel were continually moved from one position to another on the chart, which meant that people were constantly being reassigned to different posts, whimsically, and no post was secure. About nine hundred positions needed to be filled at Int and Gold Bases, and the stack of personnel and ethics files was five feet high. This anarchic process had been going on more or less intensively for four years.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Short and trim, with brown hair and sharp features, Miscavige announced to the assembled Scientologists that for the past six years of exile, Hubbard had been investigating new, higher OT levels. “ He has now moved on to the next level,” Miscavige said. “It’s beyond anything any of us has imagined. This level is, in fact, done in an exterior state. Meaning that it is done completely exterior from the body.” Someone in the audience whistled in amazement. “At this level of OT, the body is nothing more than an impediment, an encumbrance to any further gain as an OT.” The audience began to stir as the realization began to sink in. “Thus—,” Miscavige said, then paused and adjusted the microphone. “Thus, at two thousand hours, Friday, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36 [that is, thirty-six years after the publication of Dianetics ], L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months, and eleven days.” Miscavige turned to a large photograph of Admiral Hubbard with the waves behind him and began to applaud. “Hip, hip, hooray!” he cried, as the audience echoed him. “Hip, hip, hooray!” MISSIONAIRES HAD BEEN SENT to Scientology centers all over the world to coordinate the announcement of Hubbard’s death. Afterward, they flew back to Los Angeles and met at the Liberace mansion in West Hollywood, near the church headquarters. Most executives in the church naturally assumed that the leadership had already passed to Pat and Annie Broeker, who were the Loyal Officers, the highest post available. That seemed to be as clear a statement of the line of succession as anyone would ever find. Miscavige was not mentioned in the founder’s final declaration. Jesse Prince was at the gathering, having just returned from delivering the news to Scientologists in Italy. After his lengthy indoctrination in RPF, Prince had become a trusted member of the Sea Org inner circle. He and Miscavige were friendly. Prince could tell that he was upset when Miscavige confided that something would have to be done about Pat Broeker. During the memorial service at the Hollywood Palladium, Broeker had told the assembled Scientologists that Hubbard had made significant breakthroughs in his research. At that point, the highest level possible on the Bridge to Total Freedom was OT VII ( OT VIII would not be introduced for another two years). Broeker surprised everyone by saying that before Hubbard dropped his body, he had completed the OT IX and OT X levels. Broeker even held up a handwritten page that he represented as being from OT X. It was a very long string of numbers, which he said was a date. It was so far back in time he couldn’t denominate it, except to say it was “ twelve down and fifteen across,” about 180 numerals altogether. “I wanted to show the significance, the magnitude of what he’s done,” Broeker had said. The audience had tittered in amazement.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I early expressed to Rosalie my astonishment that her father, while performing his functions as a doctor, could at the same time act as a schoolmaster; it struck me as odd, said I, that being able to live comfortably without exercising either the one or the other of these professions, he devoted himself to both. Rosalie, who by now had become very fond of me, fell to laughing at my remark; the manner in which she reacted to what I said only made me the more curious, and I besought her to open herself entirely to me. "Listen," said that charming girl, speaking with all the candor proper to her age, and all the naivete of her amiable character; "listen to me, Therese, I am going to tell you everything, for I see you are a well brought up girl... incapable of betraying the secret I am going to confide to you. "Certainly, dear friend, my father could make ends meet without pursuing either of these two occupations; and if he pursues both at once, it is because of the two motives I am going to reveal to you. He practices medicine because he has a liking for it; he takes keen pleasure in using his skill to make new discoveries, he has made so many of them, he has written so many authoritative texts based upon his investigations that he is generally acknowledged the most accomplished man in France at the present time; he worked for twenty years in Paris, and for the sake of his amusements he retired to the country. The real surgeon at Saint-Marcel is someone named Rombeau whom he has taken under his tutelage and with whom he collaborates upon experiments; and now, Therese, would you know why he runs a school?... Libertinage, my child, libertinage alone, a passion he carries to its extremes. My father finds in his pupils of either sex objects whose dependence submits them to his inclinations, and he exploits them....

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Probably her tortured nerves had suggested to her the truth about the baseness of our relations, but she found no words in which to say it. I began to question her; she answered that she missed her absent mother. It seemed to me that she was not telling the truth. I sought to console her by maintaining silence in regard to her parents. I did not imagine that she felt herself simply overwhelmed, and that her parents had nothing to do with her sorrow. She did not listen to me, and I accused her of caprice. I began to laugh at her gently. She dried her tears, and began to reproach me, in hard and wounding terms, for my selfishness and cruelty. “I looked at her. Her whole face expressed hatred, and hatred of me. I cannot describe to you the fright which this sight gave me. ‘How? What?’ thought I, ‘love is the unity of souls, and here she hates me? Me? Why? But it is impossible! It is no longer she!’ “I tried to calm her. I came in conflict with an immovable and cold hostility, so that, having no time to reflect, I was seized with keen irritation. We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us. Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. We stood face to face in our true light, like two egoists trying to procure the greatest possible enjoyment, like two individuals trying to mutually exploit each other. “So what I called our quarrel was our actual situation as it appeared after the satisfaction of sensual desire. I did not realize that this cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I thought that we had disputed with each other, and had become reconciled, and that it would not happen again. But in this same honeymoon there came a period of satiety, in which we ceased to be necessary to each other, and a new quarrel broke out. “It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance. ‘It was inevitable,’ I thought. This second quarrel stupefied me the more, because it was based on an extremely unjust cause. It was something like a question of money,—and never had I haggled on that score; it was even impossible that I should do so in relation to her. I only remember that, in answer to some remark that I made, she insinuated that it was my intention to rule her by means of money, and that it was upon money that I based my sole right over her.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It made me wonder what he did on the mornings of his days off. He walked toward me and stopped just in time to keep two solid feet between us. He was wearing a light blue fleece, pushed up past his elbows. I was shocked to see the dark ink of tattoos peeking out. What type of doctor had tattoos? “I have a doctor’s appointment,” I said stepping around him. “I’m a doctor.” I was glad to be turned away from him when I smiled. “Yes, I know. There are quite a few others in the state of Washington.” His head jerked back like he was surprised I was anything but the stoic, expressionless victim he’d been cooking for. I was opening the driver’s side door to my Volvo when he held out his hand for my keys. “I’ll drive you.” I dropped my eyes into his hand and snuck another look at the tattoos. Words—I could just make out the tip of them. My eyes slid up the sleeves of his shirt and rested on his neck. I didn’t want to look in his eyes when I handed him my keys. A doctor who loved words. Imagine that. I was curious. What did a man who had held a screaming woman all night have written on his body? I sat in the passenger seat and instructed Isaac where to go. My radio was on the classical station. He turned it up to hear what was playing and then lowered it back down. “Do you ever listen to music with words?” “No. Turn left here.” He turned the corner and shot me a curious look. “Why not?” “Because simplicity speaks the loudest.” I cleared my throat and stared straight ahead. I sounded like such a chump. I felt him looking at me, cutting into me like one of his patients. I didn’t want to be dissected. “Your book,” he said. “People talk about it. It’s not simple.” I don’t say anything. “You need simplicity to create complexity,” he said. “I get it. I suppose too much can clog up your creativity.” Exactly. I shrugged. “This is it,” I said softly. He turned into a medical complex and pulled into a parking spot near the main entrance. “I’ll wait for you right here.” He didn’t ask where I was going or what I was here for. He simply parked the car where he could see me walk in and out of the building and waited. I liked that. Dr. Monroe was an oncologist. In mid December I found a lump in my right breast. I forgot about the worry of cancer in the wake of a more immediate and needier pain. I sat in his waiting room, my hands pressed between my knees, a strange man waiting in my car, and all I could think about were Isaac’s words.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  When he finished the tale, Deborah finally said, “You know, we’re Scientologists.” “What?” Brolin exclaimed. “When the fuck did that happen?” “A long time ago,” Deborah said. “I am so sorry, I had no idea!” Brolin said. After that, Brolin went with Deborah to a couple of gatherings to hear about Scientology’s opposition to psychotropic drugs. Although Brolin had never talked about it, he had gone to the Celebrity Centre himself, “in a moment of real desperation,” and received spiritual counseling. He quickly decided Scientology wasn’t for him. But he still wondered what the religion did for celebrities like Tom Cruise and John Travolta: “Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?” Brolin once witnessed Travolta giving a Scientology assist at a dinner party in Los Angeles. Marlon Brando arrived with a cut on his leg. He had been injured while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway pull his car out of a mudslide, and he was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology, which gave him enhanced abilities. Brando said, “ Well, John, if you have powers, then absolutely.” Travolta touched Brando’s leg and they each closed their eyes. Brolin watched, thinking it was bizarre and surprisingly physical. After ten minutes, Brando opened his eyes and said, “That really helped. I actually feel different!” IN 2003, Cruise continued working with Rathbun on his upper levels. While he was at Gold Base, instead of staying in the cottage he had formerly shared with Nicole Kidman, Cruise moved into the guesthouse of L. Ron Hubbard’s residence, Bonnie View. One Sunday night, following a late-night meal in Hubbard’s baronial dining room, Cruise got food poisoning. The culprit was thought to be an appetizer of fried shrimp in an egg roll. The cook was summarily sent to Happy Valley. Rathbun accompanied Cruise to Flag Base in Clearwater where he could perform the exercises required to attain OT VII. Because Miscavige depended on Rathbun to handle so many of the church’s most sensitive problems, he had been lulled into feeling a kind of immunity from the leader’s violent temper. In September, he returned to Gold Base and gave a report to Miscavige about Cruise’s progress. Miscavige asked where Cruise would be doing his semiannual checkups. “ At Flag,” Rathbun said. All OT VIIs do their checkups at Flag. “Who’s going to do it?” Rathbun named an auditor in Clearwater whom he thought highly of. Miscavige turned to his wife and said, “Can you believe this SP?” He declared that unlike any other OT VII, Cruise would get his checkups at Gold Base. When Cruise duly arrived at Gold for his semiannual check, he was preparing for his role as a contract killer in Collateral . Miscavige took him out to the gun range and showed him how to shoot a .45-caliber pistol.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Sharfstein, the president of the APA. But at the 2005 annual meeting of the International Association of Scientologists, Mike Rinder, who had been let out of the Hole for the occasion, credited Cruise with persuading the Food and Drug Administration to post suicide warnings on the labels of two psychiatric drugs within days of his interview with Lauer. “If someone wants to get off drugs, I can help them,” Cruise told the German magazine Der Spiegel, in April 2005. “I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs.” HAGGIS HAD SENT a rough cut of his movie Crash to the Toronto Film Festival, an important venue for independent films that are looking for distribution. In September 2004, the movie met its first audience at the Elgin Theatre, an elegant old vaudeville house downtown, not far from the spot where Paul sold tickets at the soft-porn theater his professor used to run. As he watched the movie, Haggis was appalled. Everything that was wrong was glaringly apparent on the huge screen. He sat glumly waiting for it to end, calculating what could be salvaged. So when the audience rose to its feet at the end, cheering, Haggis couldn’t believe what was happening. Lion’s Gate Films bought Crash for $3.5 million and scheduled it for release the following spring. Crash opened quietly in April 2005. There were no billboards or bus signs, which were already touting the arrival of War of the Worlds in June. The reviews for Crash were passionate but polarized. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, calling it “a movie of intense fascination.” A. O. Scott, who reviewed it for the New York Times, was less infatuated. It was a “frustrating movie,” he wrote, “full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.” There was no actual premiere, just a screening at the Academy Theater on Wilshire Boulevard, and no grand party afterward. Haggis and his family went out to dinner. Despite the conflicting reviews and limited distribution, a groundswell was building for the movie, driven entirely by audiences who were caught up in a national conversation over race and class that the movie prompted. It would go on to earn nearly $100 million in international sales. Million Dollar Baby had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture that February. Haggis was writing a James Bond movie, Casino Royale, in addition to the Eastwood picture Flags of Our Fathers. He was flying. Tom Cruise’s career was headed in the opposite direction. Haggis had seen him at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Cruise and Tommy Davis arrived on Ducati motorcycles, wearing black jackets, and were let in the back door of Morton’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills. They said hello to Haggis, but nothing more.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  One of the attendees was Stephen Pfauth, known as Sarge, a Vietnam veteran who had gotten into Scientology in 1975. He is a slender man with haunted eyes. “ It was one of those sudden things that happened,” he explained. “I was looking for something, especially spiritually.” He had run across an advertisement on the back of a magazine for Hubbard’s book Fundamentals of Thought . Soon after reading it, he flew to Washington, DC, and took a three-day workshop called Life Repair Auditing. “I was blown away.” He immediately quit his job. “I sold my house and bought the Bridge.” Soon, a church official began cultivating him, saying, “LRH needs your help.” Pfauth joined the Sea Org that November. He became head of Hubbard’s security detail and was with the founder on his Creston ranch in his final days, with Pat and Annie Broeker. In early 1985, Hubbard became extremely ill and spent a week in a hospital. Pfauth was told it was for pancreatitis. “I didn’t find out about the strokes until later,” he said. After that, Hubbard stayed mostly in his Blue Bird bus, except when he came out to do his own laundry. Pfauth might be shoveling out the stables and they’d talk. Six weeks before the leader died, Pfauth hesitantly related, Hubbard called him into the bus. He was sitting in his little breakfast nook. “He told me he was dropping his body. He named a specific star he was going to circle. That rehabs a being. He told me he’d failed, he’s leaving,” Pfauth said. “He said he’s not coming back here to Earth. He didn’t know where he’d wind up.” “How’d you react?” I asked. “I got good and pissy-ass drunk,” Pfauth said. “Annie found me at five in the morning in my old truck, Kris Kringle, and I had beer cans all around me. I did not take it well.” I mentioned the legend in Scientology that Hubbard will return. “That’s bull crap,” Pfauth said. “He wanted to drop the body and leave. And he told me basically that he’d failed. All the work and everything, he’d failed.” I had heard a story that Pfauth had built some kind of electroshock mechanism for Hubbard in the last month of his life. I didn’t know what to make of it, given Hubbard’s horror of electroshock therapy. Pfauth’s eyes searched the ceiling as if he were looking for divine help. He explained that Hubbard was having trouble getting rid of a body thetan. “He wanted me to build a machine that would up the voltage and basically blow the thetan away. You can’t kill a thetan but just get him out of there. And also kill the body.” “So it was a suicide machine?” “Basically.” Pfauth was staggered by Hubbard’s request, but the challenge interested him. “I figured that building a Tesla coil was the best way to go.” The Tesla coil is a transformer that increases the voltage without upping the current.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  You don’t have anything. And he could put you on the streets and ruin you.” Tommy Davis had produced nine senior church executives who told the Times that the abuse had never taken place. Dan Sherman, the church’s official Hubbard biographer and Miscavige’s speechwriter, recounted a scene in which he observed Miscavige talking to an injured sparrow. “ It was immensely tender,” Sherman told the reporters. Much of the abuse being alleged had taken place at Gold Base. Haggis had visited the place only once, in the early 1980s, when its existence was still a closely held secret. That was when he was preparing to direct the Scientology commercial that was ultimately rejected. At first glance, it seemed like a spa, beautiful and restful; but he had been put off by the uniforms, the security, and the militarized feel of the place. “ At the top of the church, people were whacking folks about like Laurel and Hardy,” Haggis said. He was embarrassed to admit that he had never even asked himself where Rathbun and Rinder had gone. He decided to call Rathbun, who was now living on Galveston Bay in South Texas. Although the two men had never met, they were well known to each other. After being one of the most powerful figures in Scientology, Rathbun was scraping together a living by freelancing stories to local newspapers and selling beer at a ballpark. He figured that South Texas was about as far from Los Angeles and Clearwater as he could hope to get. Haggis was floored when he learned that Rathbun had had to escape. He was also surprised to learn that other friends, such as Jim Logan, the man who brought him into the church so long ago on the street corner in Ontario, had also fled or been declared Suppressive Persons. One of Haggis’s closest friends in the church hierarchy, Bill Dendiu, told Haggis that he had escaped from Gold Base by driving a car—actually, an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through the fence. He still had scars on his forehead to show for that. “What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?” Haggis wondered. He also came across a number of anti-Scientology websites, including Exscientologykids.com , which was created by Jenna Miscavige Hill, the leader’s niece, who joined the Sea Org when she was twelve. For her and many others, formal education had stopped when they entered the organization, leaving them ill prepared for life outside the church. Jenna says that for much of her early life, she was kept in a camp with other Sea Org children and little adult supervision. They rarely saw their parents. “ We ran ourselves completely,” she recalled. For several years, Haggis had been working with a charity he established to set up schools in Haiti. These stories reminded him of the child slaves he had encountered in that country.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  II. Paulinus (deacon of Milan and secretary of Ambrose): Vita S. Ambrosii (written by request of St. Augustine, derived from personal knowledge, from Marcella, sister of Ambrose, and several friends). The Vita of an anonymous writer, in Greek and Latin, in the Bened. ed. of the Opera. Both in the Appendix to tom. ii. ed. Benedictinae. Benedictini Editores: Vita Ambrosii ex ejus potissimum scriptis collecta et secundum chronologiae ordinem digesta, in the Bened. ed., in the Appendix to tom. ii., and in Migne’s reprint, tom. i. (very thorough and instructive). Comp. also the Selecta veterum testimonia de S. Ambr. in the same editions. The biographies of Hermant (1678), Tillemont (tom. x. pp. 78–306), Vagliano (Sommario degli archivescovi di Milano), Butler (sub Dec. 7), Schröckh, Böhringer, J. P. Silbert (Das Leben des heiligen Ambrosius, Wien, 1841). Ambrose, son of the governor (praefectus) of Gaul, which was one of the three great dioceses of the Western empire, was born at Treves (Treviri) about 340, educated at Rome for the highest civil offices, and after greatly distinguishing himself as a rhetorician, was elected imperial president (praetor) of Upper Italy; whereupon Probus, prefect of Italy, gave him the remarkable advice, afterwards interpreted as an involuntary prophecy: "Go, and act not the judge, but the bishop." He administered this office with justice and mildness, enjoying universal esteem. The episcopal chair of Milan, the second capital of Italy, and frequently the residence of the emperors, was at that time occupied by the Cappadocian, Auxentius, the head of the Arian party in the West. Soon after the arrival of Ambrose, Auxentius died. A division then arose among the people in the choice of a successor, and a dangerous riot threatened. The governor considered it his duty to allay the storm. But while he was yet speaking to the people, the voice of a child suddenly rang out: "Let Ambrose be bishop!" It seemed a voice of God, and Arians and Catholics cried, Amen. Ambrose was at that time a catechumen, and therefore not even baptized. He was terrified, and seized all possible, and even most eccentric, means to escape the responsible office. He was obliged to submit, was baptized, and eight days afterwards, in 374, was consecrated bishop of Milan. His friend, Basil the Great of Caesarea, was delighted that God had chosen such a man to so important a post, who counted noble birth, wealth, and eloquence loss, that he might win Christ.

• From Between Us

  Without ever mentioning the emotion words, respondents were coached to produce facial configurations that, to a Western eye, would make them look angry or disgusted (or any of the other “basic” emotions). For disgust, the instruction was: “(a) wrinkle your nose and let it open, (b) pull your lower lip down, and (c) move your tongue forward, but do not stick it out.” Levenson and his colleagues wanted to know: Did a person who looked disgusted also have the associated autonomic arousal of “disgust,” and did they feel disgusted? In the United States, the answer to both of these questions had been “yes”: when trained actors and undergraduate college students looked disgusted, they also felt disgusted, and their autonomic arousal tended to be distinguishable from the pattern associated with different expressions. And was their hypothesis confirmed? The answer is no. Even if we disregard the lower quality of both facial configurations and the physiological data produced in the Minangkabau group, the Minangkabau men did not report any emotions when asked “if any emotions, memories, or physical sensations had occurred during the facial configurations.” As the Levenson team acknowledged, an important reason may have been that “the task [was] missing the critical element for emotional experience as defined by [the Minangkabau] culture, namely the meaningful involvement of another person.” Heider himself had observed in his fieldwork that: “[i]n comparison with Americans, for whom the internal experience of emotion is very important, Minangkabau more commonly emphasize the external aspects of emotion, focusing on the implications of emotion for interpersonal interactions and relationships.” Minankabau emphasized OURS emotions—emotions as relational acts between people. The test in isolation that had worked so well to elicit emotions in American respondents failed to cue emotional experience in the Minangkabau. Physiological and bodily markers may well play a role in Minangkabau emotional experience, but only if socially contextualized or shared. Japanese emotions may be similarly shared with others. Yukiko Uchida, a professor of psychology at Kyoto University, watched the media coverage of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games in Japan and the United States and was struck by a difference in the ways Japanese and American athletes talked about their emotions. When Americans talked about their emotions, they located their emotions inside themselves, but when Japanese talked about their emotions, they often located them in relationships with others. A female soccer player who came back from the Olympics after the team had lost was asked by an interviewer: Now you are back in Japan. How did other people react? And she answered in response: We came back without any medals. But when we arrived at Narita airport, many people told us “you did a good job”! I was so grateful for their encouragement, but at the same time, I really felt sorry we had lost the game. . . . I wished I could have met their expectations.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Church members who had been in Portland would always feel an ecstatic sense of kinship. (A year and a half later, the church settled with Christofferson Titchbourne for an undisclosed sum.) FOR YEARS, Hubbard’s declining health was a secret known to few in the upper levels of the church. Only a handful of his closest followers were allowed to see him. He had made no clear arrangements for a successor, nor was there any open talk of it. There was an unstated belief that Operating Thetans did not grow frail or lose their mental faculties. Old age and illness were embarrassing refutations of Scientology’s core beliefs. Death was a subject that Hubbard rarely addressed, assuring Scientologists that it was of little importance: “If you had an automobile sitting out here on the street and you came out totally expecting to find this automobile there and it’s gone, it’s been stolen and so forth, you’d be upset,” he said in 1957, reflecting on the death of one of his close followers. “Well, that’s just about the frame of mind a thetan is usually in when he finds his body dead.” The thetan has to report to a “between- lives” area, Hubbard later explained, which for most of them is the planet Mars. There the thetan is given a “forgetter implant.” “The implant is very interesting,” Hubbard later wrote. “The preclear is seated before a wheel which contains numbers of pictures. As the wheel turns, these pictures go away from him.... The whole effect is to give him the impression that he has no past life.” The thetan is then sent back to Earth to pick up a baby’s body as soon as it is born. “The baby takes its first gasp, why, a thetan usually picks it up.” Sometimes there is a shortage of new bodies, and occasionally a thetan will follow a pregnant woman around waiting for the moment of delivery so he can pounce. Contrarily, when a body dies, it’s important for the thetan to be freed as quickly as possible—preferably by cremating the corpse and scattering the ashes in water, so that nothing clings together. “It’s very confused, this whole subject of death,” Hubbard observed. “It’s quite funny, as a matter of fact, the amount of this and that that is paid, the amount of flowers and that sort of thing which are shipped around at dead corpses after the thetan has shoved off, and so on. It’s very amusing.” He presented himself as an expert on the subject, claiming he had been pronounced dead but had come back to life on two or three occasions.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  We said “exit” because at the moment we were so flabbergasted that we couldn’t think of the French for exit. Without a word of response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening the door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we tumbled into the blinding light of day. It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that when we hit the sidewalk we were in a daze. We walked a few paces, blinking our eyes, and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest was still standing on the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling like the devil himself. He must have been sore as hell. Later, thinking back on it, I couldn’t blame him for it. But at that moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skull cap on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. I looked at Fillmore and he began to laugh too. For a full minute we stood there laughing right in the poor bugger’s face. He was so bewildered, I guess, that for a moment he didn’t know what to do; suddenly, however, he started down the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if he were in earnest. When he swung out of the enclosure he was on the gallop. By this time some preservative instinct warned me to get a move on. I grabbed Fillmore by the coat sleeve and started to run. He was saying, like an idiot: “No, no! I won’t run!”—“Come on!” I yelled, “we’d better get out of here. That guy’s mad clean through.” And off we ran, beating it as fast as our legs would carry us. On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my thoughts reverted to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat similar nature, which occurred during my brief sojourn in Florida. It was during the celebrated boom when, like thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down. Trying to extricate myself I got caught, along with a friend of mine, in the very neck of the bottle. Jacksonville, where we were marooned for about six weeks, was practically in a state of siege. Every bum on earth, and a lot of guys who had never been bums before, seemed to have drifted into Jacksonville. The YMCA, the Salvation Army, the firehouses and police stations, the hotels, the lodging houses, everything was full up. Complet absolutely, and signs everywhere to that effect. The residents of Jacksonville had become so hardened that it seemed to me as if they were walking around in coats of mail. It was the old business of food again. Food and a place to flop. Food was coming up from below in trainloads—oranges and grapefruit and all sorts of juicy edibles. We used to pass by the freight sheds looking for rotten fruit—but even that was scarce.

• From Between Us

  By that time, I lived in the United States, and psychology had started to discover the power of culture. Driven by opportunity mostly, many psychological studies had started to test if “fundamental” psychological processes could be replicated in East Asian cultures; most studies were done in Japan, but some comparative research looked towards China and Korea. The opportunity was created by East Asian researchers trained in the United States, who together with their American colleagues and advisors, started to challenge the textbook psychology in which they did not recognize themselves. Karasawa was not one of them: she was trained in Japan. We met at a conference, and started to collaborate. She was an assistant professor in Japan at the time, and I was an assistant professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Her questions were often uncomfortable because they challenged my training as an emotion scientist. How could I reconcile her questions with what we “clearly knew” as emotion psychologists? We started our collaboration by organizing interviews on emotions. We asked participants to describe emotional events from the past, how they felt at the time, how intense their emotions were, what the events meant to them, how they and others present in the situation had acted, how the events and their feelings had evolved, and how the events changed their beliefs, relationships, and outlook on life. Similar interviews had turned out to be very informative during my emotion research with different cultural groups in Amsterdam (more on this in chapter 2), and for interviews in Japan and North Carolina, we decided to use a slightly adapted version of the interview schedule I had developed earlier. We first tried out the questions on three respondents in each of the cultural contexts. The results of these pilot interviews in Japan returned several surprising findings—so surprising that I briefly suspected the questions had not been correctly translated (they had been!). The Japanese respondents in the pilot study had trouble answering the simple question about the “intensity” of their emotion. Karasawa insisted that there was a reason the Japanese participants weren’t able to report the intensity of their emotions: the question did not make sense in Japan. For the time being, we ended up settling for another translation: “How important was the emotional event?” The Japanese respondents were okay with that translation, and I could forestall dealing with the inconvenience of Japanese not understanding the question of intensity. The intensity question was not the only issue for the Japanese respondents: they were equally puzzled by questions about the consequences of emotions, such as “Did your emotions change your beliefs about the other person?” Again, we settled for an alternative translation, asking: “Did the situation cause you to feel or think differently about the other person?” We received answers to those questions, also from our Japanese interviewees, and for the moment the “problem” had been silenced.

• From Between Us

  How could I reconcile her questions with what we “clearly knew” as emotion psychologists? We started our collaboration by organizing interviews on emotions. We asked participants to describe emotional events from the past, how they felt at the time, how intense their emotions were, what the events meant to them, how they and others present in the situation had acted, how the events and their feelings had evolved, and how the events changed their beliefs, relationships, and outlook on life. Similar interviews had turned out to be very informative during my emotion research with different cultural groups in Amsterdam (more on this in chapter 2 ), and for interviews in Japan and North Carolina, we decided to use a slightly adapted version of the interview schedule I had developed earlier. We first tried out the questions on three respondents in each of the cultural contexts. The results of these pilot interviews in Japan returned several sur prising findings—so surprising that I briefly suspected the questions had not been correctly translated (they had been!). The Japanese respondents in the pilot study had trouble answering the simple question about the “intensity” of their emotion. Karasawa insisted that there was a reason the Japanese participants weren’t able to report the intensity of their emotions: the question did not make sense in Japan. For the time being, we ended up settling for another translation: “How important was the emotional event?” The Japanese respondents were okay with that translation, and I could forestall dealing with the inconvenience of Japanese not understanding the question of intensity. The intensity question was not the only issue for the Japanese respondents: they were equally puzzled by questions about the consequences of emotions, such as “Did your emotions change your beliefs about the other person?” Again, we settled for an alternative translation, asking: “Did the situation cause you to feel or think differently about the other person?” We received answers to those questions, also from our Japanese interviewees, and for the moment the “problem” had been silenced. If I had been asked to articulate my views at that point, I would have told you that the phenomena themselves —the intensity of emotional feeling or the causal consequences of the emotions—were universal, but that Japanese language had difficulty expressing them. I would have told you that, of course, emotions influenced and changed beliefs, but that Japanese somehow did not allow for a literal translation. I believed the Japanese translations on which we settled were roundabout ways of expressing the same thing I had set out to measure in my original questions.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  He was an old, wiry, simpering man, as shrivelled as a frost-bitten pippin. His cheeks were very hollow, and his projecting cheek bones very red; his face was shaven and shorn, and he wore a wig with long, fair, flaxen locks. "He walked in the posture of the Venus de Medici; that is, with one hand on his middle parts, and the other on his breast. His looks were not only very demure, but there was an almost maidenly coyness about the old man that gave him the appearance of a virgin-pimp. "He did not stare, but cast a side-long glance at me as he went by. He was met by a workman—a strong and sturdy fellow, either a butcher or a smith by trade. The old man would evidently have slunk by unperceived, but the workman stopped him. I could not hear what they said, for though they were but a few steps away, they spoke in that hushed tone peculiar to lovers; but I seemed to be the object of their talk, for the workman turned and stared at me as I passed. They parted. "The workman walked on for twenty steps, then he turned on his heel and walked back exactly on a line with me, seemingly bent on meeting me face to face. "I looked at him. He was a brawny man, with massive features; clearly, a fine specimen of a male. As he passed by me he clenched his powerful fist, doubled his muscular arm at the elbow, and then moved it vertically hither and thither for a few times, like a piston-rod in action, as it slipped in and out of the cylinder. "Some signs are so evidently clear and full of meaning that no initiation is needed to understand them. This workman's sign was one of them. "Now I knew who all these night-walkers were. Why they so persistently stared at me, and the meaning of all their little tricks to catch my attention. Was I dreaming? I looked around. The workman had stopped, and he repeated his request in a different way. He shut his left fist, then thrust the forefinger of his right hand in the hole made by the palm and fingers, and moved it in and out. He was bluntly explicit. I was not mistaken. I hastened on, musing whether the cities of the plain had been destroyed by fire and brimstone. "As I learnt later in life, every large city has its particular haunts—its square, its garden for such recreation. And the police? Well, it winks at it, until some crying offence is committed; for it is not safe to stop the mouths of craters. Brothels of men-whores not being allowed, such trysting-places must be tolerated, or the whole is a modern Sodom or Gomorrah."

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He had both arms around paper bags loaded to the brim with groceries. He brought me groceries. “Why are you here?” “Because you are.” He stepped passed me and walked to the kitchen without my permission. I stood frozen for several minutes, looking at his car. It was drizzling outside, the sky covered in a thick fog that hung over the trees likes a burial shroud. When I finally closed the door, I was shivering. “Doctor Asterholder,” I said, walking into the kitchen. My kitchen. He was unpacking things on my counter: cans of tomato paste, boxes of rigatoni, bright yellow bananas and clear cartons of berries. “Isaac,” he corrected me. “Doctor Asterholder. I appreciate … I … but—” “Did you eat today?” He fished his soggy business card out of the sink and held it between two fingers. Not knowing what else to do, I wandered over to my barstool and took a seat. I wasn’t used to this sort of aggression. People gave me space, left me alone. Even if I asked them not to—which was rare. I didn’t want to be anyone’s project and I definitely didn’t want this man’s pity. But for the moment I had no words. I watched him open bottles and chop things. He took out his phone and set it on the counter and asked me if I minded. When I shook my head, he put it on. Her voice was raspy. It had both an old and new feel to it, innovative, classic. I asked him who she was and he told me, “Julia Stone.” It was a literary name. I liked it. He played her entire album, tossing things into a pot he found by himself. The house was dark aside from the kitchen light he stood underneath. It felt quaint, like a life that didn’t belong to me, but I enjoyed watching. When was the last time I had someone over? Not since I bought the house. That was three years ago. There was a long window above my sink that stretched the length of the room. My appliances were all on the same wall, so no matter what you were doing you had a panoramic view of the lake. Sometimes when I was washing dishes I’d get so caught up looking outside, my hand would still and the water would turn cold before I realized that I’d been staring for fifteen minutes. I saw him peering into the darkness as he stood at the stove. The lights from the houses floated like fireflies in ink behind him. I let my eyes leave him and I watched the darkness instead. The darkness comforted me. “Senna?” I jumped. Isaac was next to me. He put a placemat and utensils in front of me, along with a bowl of steaming food, and a glass of something bubbly.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Here I fell into a gentle breathing slumber, which stole upon my senses, as they fainted under the excessive heat of the season at that hour; a cane couch, with my work basked for a pillow, were all the conveniences of my short repose; for I was soon awaked and alarmed by a flounce, and noise of splashing in the water. I got up to see what was the matter; and what indeed should it be but the son of a neighbouring gentleman, as I afterwards found (for I had never seen him before), who had strayed that way with his gun, and heated by his sport, and the sultriness of the day, had been tempted by the freshness of the clear stream; so that presently stripping, he jumped into it on the other side, which bordered on a wood, some trees whereof, inclined down to the water, formed a pleasing shady recess, commodious to undress and leave his clothes under. “My first emotions at the sight of this youth, naked in the water, were, with all imaginable respect to truth, those of surprise and fear; and, in course, I should immediately have run out, had not my modesty, fatally for itself, interposed the objection of the door and window being so situated, that it was scarce possible to get out, and make my way along the bank to the house, without his seeing me: which I could not bear the thought of, so much ashamed and confounded was I at having seen him. Condemned then to stay till his departure should release me, I was greatly embarrassed how to dispose of myself: I kept some time betwixt terror and modesty, even from looking through the window, which being an old fashioned casement, without any light behind me, could hardly betray any one’s being there to him from within; then the door was so secure, that without violence, or my own consent, there was no opening it from without. “But now, by my own experience, I found it too true, that objects which affright us, when we cannot get from them, draw our eyes as forcibly as those that please us. I could not long withstand that nameless impulse, which, without any desire of this novel sight, compelled me towards it; emboldened too by my certainty of being at once unseen and safe, I ventured by degrees to cast my eyes on an object so terrible and alarming to my virgin modesty as a naked man. “But as I snatched a look, the first gleam that struck me, was in general the dewy lustre of the whitest skin imaginable, which the sun playing upon made the reflection of it perfectly beamy.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She took indeed great care that we were not overrated, or imposed on, as well as of managing as frugally as possible; expensiveness was not her vice. It was pretty late in a summer evening when we reached the town, in our slow conveyance, though drawn by six at length. As we passed through the greatest streets that led to our inn, the noise, of the coaches, the hurry, the crowds of foot passengers, in short, the new scenery of the shops and houses, at once pleased and amazed me. But guess at my mortification and surprise when we came to the inn, and our things were landed and delivered to us, when my fellow traveller and protectress, Esther Davis, who had used me with the utmost tenderness during the journey, and prepared me by no preceedings signs for the stunning blow I was to receive, when I say, my only dependence and friend, in this strange place, all of a sudden assumed a strange and cool air towards me, as if she dreaded my becoming a burden to her.