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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  Willy, my South African poet friend, lives in Tanzania now and he may be here, which I am very excited about. III We traveled south to Uzbekistan for the Conference, a five-hour journey that became seven because of delays. We arrived in Tashkent after dark following a long, exhausting plane ride. As I have said, Russian planes are incredibly packed, every single inch being taken up in seats. They absolutely utilize their air space. Even coming from New York to Moscow it was like air mass transit. Certainly from Moscow to Tashkent this was true since there were 150 delegates to the African-Asian Writers Conference, myself, one observer, interpreters, and press personnel. All together, a traveling group of about 250 people, which is a large group to move around a country at least four or five times the size of the United States (and in a standard, not wide-bodied, plane). As we descended the plane in Tashkent, it was deliciously hot and smelled like Accra, Ghana. At least it seemed to me that it did, from the short ride from the airport to the hotel. The road to the city had lots of wood and white marble all around broad avenues, and bright street lights. The whole town of Tashkent had been rebuilt after the 1966 earthquake. We arrived tired and hot, to a welcome that would make your heart grow still, then sing. Can you imagine 250 of us, weary, cramped, hungry, disoriented, overtalked, underfed? It is after dark. We step out of the plane and there before us are over a hundred people and TV cameras, and lights, and two or three hundred little children dressed in costumes with bunches of flowers that they thrust upon each of us as we walked down the ramp from the plane. “Surprise!” Well, you know, it was a surprise. Pure and simple, and I was pretty damn well surprised. I was surprised at the gesture, hokey or not, at the mass participation in it. Most of all, I was surprised at my response to it; I felt genuinely welcomed. So off to the hotel we went and I had the distinct feeling here, for the first time in Russia, that I was meeting warm-blooded people; in the sense of contact unavoided, desires and emotions possible, the sense that there was something hauntingly, personally familiar — not in the way the town looks because it looked like nothing I’d ever seen before, night and the minarets — but the tempo of life felt hotter, quicker than in Moscow; and in place of Moscow’s determined pleasantness, the people displayed a kind of warmth that was very engaging. They are an Asian people in Tashkent. Uzbeki. They look like the descendants of Ghengis Khan, some of whom I’m sure they are.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The station was very large and very beautiful and very clean — shockingly, strikingly, enjoyably clean. The whole station looked like a theater lobby — bright brass and mosaics and shining chandeliers. Even when they were rushing, and in Moscow there’s always a kind of rush, people lack the desperation of New York. One thing that characterized all of these people was a pleasantness in their faces, a willingness to smile, at least at me, a stranger. It was a strange contrast to the grimness of the weather. There are some Black people around the hotel and I inquired of Helen about the Patrice Lumumba University. This is a university located in Moscow for students from African countries. There were many Africans in and around the hotel when I got back from the Metro station and I think many of them were here for the Conference. Interestingly enough, most of them speak Russian and I don’t. When I went downstairs to dinner, I almost quailed in front of the linguistic task because I could not even find out where I was supposed to sit, or whether I should wait to be seated. Whenever the alphabet is unfamiliar, there are absolutely no cues to a foreign language. A young Black man swaggered across my eyesight with that particular swagger of fine, young Black men wanting to be noticed and I said, “Do you speak English?” “Yes,” he said and started walking very rapidly away from me. So I walked back to him and when I tried to ask him whether I should sit down or wait to be seated, I realized the poor boy did not understand a word that I said. At that point I pulled out my two trusty phrase books and proceeded to order myself a very delicious dinner of white wine, boiled fish soup that was lemon piquant, olive rich, and fresh mackerel, delicate, grilled sturgeon with pickled sauce, bread, and even a glass of tea. All of this was made possible by great tenacity and daring on my part, and the smiling forebearance of a very helpful waiter who brought out one of the cooks from the kitchen to help with the task of deciphering my desires. II It’s very cold in Moscow. The day I arrived it snowed in the morning and it snowed again today, and this is September 16th. My guide, Helen, put her finger on it very accurately. She said that life in Moscow is a constant fight against the cold weather, and that living is only a triumph against death by freezing. Maybe because of the cold, or maybe because of the shortage of food in the war years, but everyone eats an enormous amount here.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  This man wanted to know from me whether American Black people were allowed to go to school. I said yes, and Helen said yes to him, and then he wanted to know if we were allowed to teach, and I said yes, I was a professor at the University of the City of New York. And he was surprised at that. He said that he had seen a television program one time about the Black people of America. That we had no jobs. So Helen started to answer him and he stopped her. Then she angrily said he wanted me to speak because he wanted to look at my face so he could see how I answered. I told Helen to tell him that the question was not that we could never go to college, but that frequently even when Black people went to college, we had no jobs when we came out. That it was more difficult for Black people to find work and make any kind of living, and that the percentage of unemployment among American Black people was far higher than that of American white people. He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that’s what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it’s not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don’t have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don’t have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It’s things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I’ve returned. There’s much that I think that Russian people now take for granted. I think they take for granted free hospitalization and medical care. They take for granted free universities and free schooling as well as the presumption of universal bread, even with a rose or two, although no meat. We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I don’t expect this night to be my great reprisal and for #3 to become the keeper of my soul, but I can see how these just-right conditions could create a backdrop for an affair that encapsulates the essence of a love that was meant to be. Slipping off the thin straps of my dress, I let it fall down into a dark heap, step out of it onto the creaky wooden floorboards and stand in my strapless bra (yes, that one) and thong. I see the dog standing politely in the hallway as if waiting for an invitation and think oh boy, here we go again , but #3 gently kicks the door closed and tells me to ignore the dog when she starts whining. Progress , I think. We lie naked on his bed and I take note of his body. This is the third man I’ve been with in the past few weeks and, naïve as it may sound, it genuinely surprises me to find each one so different from the one before, and so different from the one I knew as my own for the past few decades. I haven’t thought about men’s bodies for so many years, as if the mere notion of what lay under their clothes had been completely erased from my brain with marriage. This man is tall, sturdy and fit, with hair on his chest and a well-endowed penis embedded in a mess of hair. The men I’ve been with so far have manscaped and I’ve liked it – how it makes them clean and smooth. It strikes me as ironic that women’s pubic hair is slangily called a bush as if offensively uncultivated and in need of landscaping, while men seem to have avoided any kind of moniker associated with nature and flora even though theirs are probably more like overgrown hedges unwinding over a larger region. He reaches over me for a condom in the night table drawer, but once he has it opened, he hesitates. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” he says. “It’s really strange to be here with you. I thought my girlfriend and I were going to get married and our breakup has been rough. I haven’t even thought about being with someone else for the past few months. The last thing I expected tonight when I walked into my usual watering hole was to find a beautiful woman in a slinky dress sitting alone.” I’m surprised to hear that he noticed me as I have felt invisible both times I have gone out to bars on my own. I assumed both when #1 and #3 started talking to me, they did so because they stumbled upon me, not because they actively noticed me. In my mind, when I’m alone in public, I am not much more than an apparition.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  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. 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.

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

  After listening to a description of the horrors of the plague, the reader is transferred to a beautiful garden, several miles from the city, where the members of the company, amid laughter and tears, relate the stories which range from moral tales to indecent love intrigues. One of the well-known stories is of the Jew, Abraham, who, refusing to comply with the appeals to turn Christian, went to Rome to study the question for himself. Finding the priestly morals most corrupt, cardinals with concubines and revelling in riches and luxury, he concluded Christianity must have a divine origin, or it would not have survived when the centre of Christendom was so rotten, and he offered himself for baptism. The Decamerone reveals a low state of morals among priests and monks as well as laymen and women. It derides marriage, the confessional, the hypocrisy of monkery and the worship of relics. The employment of wit and raillery against ecclesiastical institutions was a new element in literature, and Boccaccio wrote in a language the people understood. No wonder that the Council of Trent condemned the work for its immoralities, and still more for its anticlerical and antimonastic ridicule; but it could not prevent its circulation. A curious expurgated edition, authorized by the pope, appeared in Florence in 1573, which retained the indecencies, the impure personages, but substituted laymen for the priests and monks, thus saving the honor of the Church.1004

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The prophets, mystics, philosophers, and poets of the Axial Age were so advanced and their vision was so radical that later generations tended to dilute it. In the process, they often produced exactly the kind of religiosity that the Axial reformers wanted to get rid of. That, I believe, is what has happened in the modern world. The Axial sages have an important message for our time, but their insights will be surprising—even shocking—to many who consider themselves religious today. It is frequently assumed, for example, that faith is a matter of believing certain creedal propositions. Indeed, it is common to call religious people “believers,” as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics. A person’s theological beliefs were a matter of total indifference to somebody like the Buddha. Some sages steadfastly refused even to discuss theology, claiming that it was distracting and damaging. Others argued that it was immature, unrealistic, and perverse to look for the kind of absolute certainty that many people expect religion to provide. All the traditions that were developed during the Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not necessarily regard this as supernatural, and most of them refused to discuss it. Precisely because the experience was ineffable, the only correct attitude was reverent silence. The sages certainly did not seek to impose their own view of this ultimate reality on other people. Quite the contrary: nobody, they believed, should ever take any religious teaching on faith or at second hand. It was essential to question everything and to test any teaching empirically, against your personal experience. In fact, as we shall see, if a prophet or philosopher did start to insist on obligatory doctrines, it was usually a sign that the Axial Age had lost its momentum. If the Buddha or Confucius had been asked whether he believed in God, he would probably have winced slightly and explained—with great courtesy—that this was not an appropriate question. If anybody had asked Amos or Ezekiel if he was a “monotheist,” who believed in only one God, he would have been equally perplexed. Monotheism was not the issue. We find very few unequivocal assertions of monotheism in the Bible, but—interestingly—the stridency of some of these doctrinal statements actually departs from the essential spirit of the Axial Age.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  It may even provid e pan of the explanation for the striking fact about modern Western ci v ilization as against all others: the widespread incidence of unbelief within it. But this takes us too far ahead of the argument ; first we m ust look further at the impa ct of Descanes in his century . 9 LOCKE'S PUNCTUAL SELF 9.1 Desca rtes's disengaged subject, like his procedural notion of rationality, is n ot just an idiosyncratic conception. For all the challenges and disagreements to his dualism in modern thought, with the central idea of disengageme n t he was articulating one of the most important developments of the modern era. Recent research has shown the tremendous importance of the mode of thinking r oughly designated 'neo-Stoic' in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, associated with Justus Lipsius, and in France with Guillaume du Vair. As the name implies, these thinkers were inspired by classical Stoicism, but with a number of important differences. These included not only soul-body dualism but also an increasing emphasis on a model of self-mastery which prepares the Cartesian trans p osition to the model of instrumental control. More significantly, neo-Stoicism was bound up with a broad movement among political and military elites towards a wider and more rigorous application of new forms of discipline in a host of fields: first in the military, of course, as one sees with the reforms of William of Orange, which had wor ld-historical consequences in the Netherlands' revolt against Spain; but als o later in various dimensions of the civil administration, which grew with the new aspirations and capacities of the 'absolutist' state, regulating trade, labour, health conditions, mores, even routines of piety. 1 The spread of these n ew modes of discipline through a host of institutions--armies, hospitals, schools, workhouses--has been vividly, if somewhat one-sidedly, traced by Michel Foucault in his Surveiller et punir. 2 What one finds running t hrough all the aspects of this constellation-the n ew philosophy, methods of administration and military organization, spirit of government, and methods of discipline-is the growing ideal of a human ag ent who is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action. What this calls for is the ability to take an instrumental stance to one's given p roperties, desires, inclinations, tendencies, habits of thought and feeling, s o that they can be worked on, doing away with some and strengthening others, I J9 z6o • INWARDNESS until one meets the desired specifications. My suggestion is that Descar te s 's pictu re of the disengage d subject articulates the understanding of ag e ncy which is most congenial to this whole movement, and that is part of t he grounds for its great impact in his century and beyond.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Isn’t it striking how Megan’s reluctance dissolves into a burst of curiosity and desire? But notice the necessary conditions: (1) she decides when the time is right, and (2) her patient partner helps her establish safety so that (3) she can transform her nervousness into an arousal enhancer. As a result, she moves from uncertainty to confidence and is validated by her boyfriend’s responsiveness. Another type of surprise occurs when familiar people behave in unfamiliar ways. Manuel tells of an unexpected conclusion to what appeared to be a colorless day: I was hanging out with my girlfriend. Nothing much was happening—a little shopping, visiting a couple of friends. We were bored as shit to put it bluntly. Finally we gave up and went back to her place. Another Saturday night watching TV. I needed a hot shower to give me a lift. Just as I was soaping up I heard the bathroom door squeak. Suddenly her hand came through the shower curtain, she grabbed the soap out of my hand and jumped in with me. We’d been together for almost three years and she’d never acted like this before. Her aggressiveness blew me away—but I liked it. She got on her knees and soaped up my dick. It was as if she had studied how I masturbate (even though she never saw me do it) and added her own special touches. Was this my Angela? She brought me to a peak of ecstasy like never before. My orgasm was an explosion. We continued our adventures in bed for a couple more hours. Boredom was a thing of the past. For Manuel, the foreground (his intense excitement) stands out in bold relief against a background of boredom and low expectations. I predict that as you construct your own list of peak turn-ons, you’ll find at least one that contains a similar contrast. In fact, The Group only brings up the topic of expectations in their tales of peak sex when those expectations are being joyously shattered by a welcome surprise. In the coming chapters we will often be reminded that peak encounters share many features with memorable fantasies. But here’s a fascinating exception: while firsts and surprises obviously help make peak encounters memorable, they seem to be of little significance in fantasy. Only 5 percent of The Group’s favorite fantasies involve anything unexpected or surprising, and none of them contains a first of any kind. What shall we conclude from this? Our best encounters often take us to places we’ve never been. Favorite fantasies, on the other hand, cover familiar territory. Through repeated experimentation we refine them so that they express, in the shorthand of imagery, the essential elements needed for arousal. This amazing capacity of erotic fantasy to hold our interest in spite of repetition is something we’ll return to many times, especially in Chapter 5, “Your Core Erotic Theme.”

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  A study of the different temperaments in American Protestantism in the prerevolutionary era, Philip Greven's The Protestant Temperament, is ve ry illuminatin g in this connection. 9 Gr even distinguish es 'evangelical', 'm o d erate', a nd 'genteel' forms of spirituality. The last, as the name implies, was especially prominent among the social elites of the colonies. What distin g uished genteel piety from the first two, which were largely committed to the i nward route, was the way in which it was inseparable from solidarit y with established institutions and participation in their rituals. Greven speaks of their conviction "that r eligious experience and religious worship were public ex pr essions of the harmonious gathering of the whole community, joined toget her in the institutions, and the rituals and ceremonies, which symbo liz ed the essential unity of both this world and the next. Their piet y wa s synonymous with the act of worship, and thus was always directed outwardly by visible signs of communion with both worlds". As he puts it, "the piety of t he genteel became a public act, not an inner preoccupation" . 1 0 These people inevitably seem to us less deep, less serious, less really pious than their evangelical or moderate critics. This may be unfair. But w h at is clear is that they in their own way could be as utterly convinced theists (or p erhaps Deist s , in a minori ty of cases) as those who struggled inwardly with sin and grace . It is just this unshakeable rootedness in belief which seems strange to u s today . Even in societies where a majority of people profess some belief in God or a divine p r inciple, no one sees it as obvious that there is a God. This is what ultimately we have to be able to explain (though not, I hasten to add , i n the course of this study). Some people assume that the explanation ought mainly to point to the removal of obstacles. They assume that our present uncertainty reflects the real epistemic predicament, the way the question of God really is for us humans. No o ne can know for sure, hence what needs explanation is how people of earlier, more benighted ages could have been unaware of th i s. We have to understand the blinkers t hat narrowed their vision. Secularization i s e xplained by the gradual removal of these. A view like this obvious l y encour aged the theory that unbelief arises inevitably from science and education, which I attacked above. In a sense I want to concur that our present tentativeness, our los s o f a rooted certainty, represents an epistemi c gain.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "To my astonishment, I found that, the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery way unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man, who has not discerned his defect, has of the nature of color. They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who affirmed they possessed it were romancing. To illustrate their mental attitude it will be sufficient to quote a few lines from the letter of one of my correspondents, who writes: "These questions presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition regarding the "mind's eye," and the "images" which it sees. . . . This points to some initial fallacy. . . . It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a "mental image" which I can "see" with my "mind's eye. " . . . I do not see it . . . any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat. The memory possesses it,' etc. "Much the same result followed inquiries made for me by a friend among members of the French Institute. "On the other hand, when I spoke to persons whom I met in general society, I found an entirely different disposition to prevail. Many men and a yet large number of women, and many boys and girls, declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it way perfectly distinct to them and full of color. The more I pressed and crossed-questioned them, professing myself to be incredulous, the more obvious was the truth of their first assertions. They described their imagery in minute detail, and they spoke in a tone of surprise at my apparent hesitation in accepting what they said. I felt that I myself should have spoken exactly as they did if I had been describing a scene that lay before my eyes, in broad daylight, to a blind man who persisted in doubting the reality of vision. Reassured by this happier experience, I recommenced to inquire among" scientific men, and soon found scattered instances of what I sought, though in by no means the same abundance as elsewhere. I then circulated my questions more generally among my friends and through their hands, and obtained replies . . . from persons of both sexes, and of various ages, and in the end from occasional correspondents in nearly every civilized country.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The movements we have studied hitherto have been automatic and reflex, and (on the first occasion of their performance, at any rate) unforeseen by the agent. The movements to the study of which we now address ourselves, being desired and intended beforehand, are of course done with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from this that voluntary movements must be secondary, not primary functions of our organism. This is the first point to understand in the psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and emotional movements are all primary performances. The nerve-centres are so organized that certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain explosive parts; and a creature going through one of these explosions for the first time undergoes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was standing at a railroad station with a little child, when an express-train went thundering by. The child, who was near the edge of the platform, started, winked, had his breathing convulsed, turned pale, burst out crying, and ran frantically towards me and hid his face. I have no doubt that this youngster was almost as much astonished by his own behavior as he was by the train, and more than I was, who stood by. Of course if such a reaction has many times occurred we learn what to expect of ourselves, and can then foresee our conduct, even though it remain as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But if, in voluntary action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform an act voluntarily for the first time. Well, we are no more endowed with prophetic vision of what movements lie in our power, than we are endowed with prophetic vision of what sensations we are capable of receiving. As we must wait for the sensations to be given us, so we must wait for the movements to be performed involuntarily,[447] before we can frame ideas of what either of these things are. We learn all our possibilities by the way of experience. When a particular movement, having once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way, has left an image of itself in the memory, then the movement can be desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willed. But it is impossible to see how it could be willed before. A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible left in the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o'clock in the evening I went into the dining room to fix a cup of tea, and on turning from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the table before the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the gas, I saw standing with his hand clasped to his side in true military fashion a soldier of about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing eyes looking directly into mine. He wore a small cap with standing feather; his costume was also of a soldierly style. He did not strike me as being a spirit, ghost, or anything uncanny, only a living man; but after gazing for fully a minute I realized that it was nothing of earth, for he neither moved his eyes nor his body, and in looking closely I could see the fire beyond. I was of course startled, and yet did not run out of the room. I felt stunned. I walked out rapidly, however, and turning to the servant in the hall asked her if she saw anything. She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw nothing." Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case: "In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1888, I will inflict on you a letter. "On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1888, I was in———-, where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulæ. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her. She was, by the way, in B——, some fifty miles from me.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Now my first thesis is that this element, discernible in each and every sensation, though more developed in some than in others, is the original sensation of space, out of which all the exact knowledge about space that we afterwards come to have is woven by processes of discrimination, association, and selection. 'Extensity,' as Mr. James Ward calls it[149] on this view, becomes an element in each sensation just as intensity is. The latter every one will admit to be a distinguishable though not separable ingredient of the sensible quality. In like manner extensity, being an entirely peculiar kind of feeling indescribable except in terms of itself, and inseparable in actual experience from some sensational quality which it must accompany, can itself receive no other name than that of sensational element. It must now be noted that the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great in one direction as in another. Its dimensions are so vague that in it there is no question as yet of surface as opposed to depth; 'volume' being the best short name for the sensation in question. Sensations of different orders are roughly comparable, inter se, with respect to their volumes. This shows that the spatial quality in each is identical wherever found, for different qualitative elements, e.g. warmth and odor, are incommensurate. Persons born blind are reported surprised at the largeness with which objects appear to them when their sight is restored. Franz says of his patient cured of cataract: "He saw everything much larger than he had supposed from the idea obtained by his sense of touch. Moving, and especially living, objects appeared very large."[150] Loud sounds have a certain enormousness of feeling. It is impossible to conceive of the explosion of a cannon as fining a small space. In general, sounds seem to occupy all the room between us and their source; and in the case of certain ones, the cricket's song, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of the surf, or a distant railway train, to have no definite starting point. In the sphere of vision we have facts of the same order. 'Glowing' bodies, as Hering says, give us a perception "which seems roomy (raumhaft) in comparison with that of strictly surface color. A glowing iron looks luminous through and through, and so does a flame."[151] A luminous fog, a band of sunshine, affect us in the same way. As Hering urges:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  If they do not, this work, in common with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of Psychology is possible" (Principles of Psychology, I. 503), —are beneath criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other 'works on the subject,' treats of those general conditions of possible conduct within which all our real decisions must fall no matter whether their effort be small or great. However closely psychical changes may conform to law, it is safe to say that individual histories and biographies will never be written in advance no matter how 'evolved' psychology may become. [518] Caricatures of the kind of supposition which free will demands abound in deterministic literature. The following passage from John Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy (pt. II. chap. XVII) is an example: "If volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot infer from them the character of the antecedent states of feeling. If, therefore, a murder has been committed, we have a priori no better reason for suspecting the worst enemy than the best friend of the murdered man. If we see a man jump from a fourth-story window, we must beware of too hastily inferring his insanity, since he may be merely exercising his free-will; the intense love of life implanted in the human breast being, as it seems, unconnected with attempts at suicide or at self-preservation. We can thus frame no theory of human actions whatever. The countless empirical maxims of every-day life, the embodiment as they are of the inherited and organized sagacity of many generations, become wholly incompetent to guide us; and nothing which any one may do ought ever to occasion surprise. The mother may strangle her first-born child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces his lately-finished statue, in the presence of no other feelings than those which before led them to cherish, to hoard, and to create. "To state these conclusions is to refute their premise. Probably no defender of the doctrine of free-will could be induced to accept them, even to save the theorem with which they are inseparably wrapped up. Yet the dilemma cannot be avoided. Volitions are either caused or they are not. If they are not caused, an inexorable logic brings us to the absurdities just mentioned. If they are caused, the free-will doctrine is annihilated. . . . In truth, the immediate corollaries of the free-will doctrine are so shocking, not only to philosophy but to common-sense, that were not accurate thinking a somewhat rare phenomenon, it would be inexplicable how any credit should ever have been given to such a dogma.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  'The illustrious P. J. van Beneden, senior, was walking one evening with a friend along a moody hill near Chaudfontaine. 'Don't you hear,' said the friend, 'the noise of a hunt on the mountain?' M. van Beneden listens and distinguishes in fact the giving-tongue of the dogs. They listen some time, expecting from one moment to another to see a deer bound by; but the voice of the dogs seems neither to recede nor approach. At last a countryman comes by, and they ask him who it is that can be hunting at this late hour. But he, pointing to some puddles of water near their feet, replies: 'Yonder little animals are what you hear.' And there were in fact a number of toads of the species Bombinator igneus.... This batrachian emits at the pairing season a silvery or rather crystalline note. ... Sad and pure, it is a voice no wise resembling that of hounds giving chase."[110] The sense of sight, as we have seen in studying Space is pregnant with illusions of both the types considered. No sense gives such fluctuating impressions of the s object as sight does. With no sense are we so apt to treat the sensations immediately given as mere signs; with none is the invocation from memory of a thing, and the consequent perception of the latter, so immediate. The' thing' which we perceive always resembles, as we have seen, the object of some absent object of sensation, usually another optical figure which in our mind has come to be the standard of reality; and it is this incessant reduction of our optical objects to more 'real' forms which has led some authors into the mistake of thinking that the sensation which first apprehend them are originally and natively of any form at all.[111] Of accidental and occasional illusions of sight amusing examples might be given. Two will suffice. One is a reminiscence of my own. I was lying in my berth steamer listening to the sailors holystone the deck outside; when, on turning my eyes to the window, I perceived perfect distinctness that the chief-engineer of the vessel had entered my state-room, and was standing looking through the window at the men at work upon the guards. Surprised at his intrusion, and also at his intentness and immobility, I remained watching him and wondering how long he would stand thus. At last I spoke; but getting no reply, sat up in my berth, and then saw that what I had taken for the engineer was my own cap and coat hanging on a peg beside the window. The illusion was complete; the engineer was a peculiar-looking mall; and I saw him unmistakably; but after the illusion had vanished I found it hard voluntarily to make the cap and coat look like him at all. The following story, which I owe to my friend Prof. Hyatt, is of a probably not uncommon class:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Shortly after the experience above described, I retired for the night and, as I usually do, slept quietly until morning. I did not speculate particularly about the strange appearance of the night before, and though I thought of it some, I did not tell anybody. The following morning I rose, not conscious of having dreamed anything, but I was very firmly impressed with the idea that there was something for me at the telegraph-office. I tried to throw off the impression, for so far as I knew there was no reason for it. Having nothing to do, I went out for a walk; and to help throw off the impression above noted, I walked away from the telegraph-office. As I proceeded, however, the impression became a conviction, and I actually turned about and went to the very place I had resolved not to visit, the telegraph-office. The first person I saw on arriving at said office was the telegraph-operator, who being on terms of intimacy with me, remarked: 'Hello, papa, I've got a telegram for you.' The telegram announced the birth of a boy, weighing nine pounds, and that all were doing well. Now, then, I have no theory at all about the events narrated above; I never had any such experience before nor since; I am no believer in spiritualism, am not in the least superstitious, know very little about ' thought-transference,' 'unconscious cerebration;' etc., etc., but I am absolutely certain about what I have tried to relate. "In regard to the remark which I heard, 'It is a little Herman,' etc., I would add that we had previously decided to call the child, if a boy, Herman—my own name, by the way."[130] The hallucination sometimes carries a change of the general consciousness with it, so as to appear more like a sudden lapse into a dream. The following case was given me by a man of 43, who bad never anything resembling it before:

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  However, pathological states such as masochism are an exception because situations of self-induced injury can be experienced as pleasurable, at least in part. The feeling experience is a natural process of evaluating life relative to its prospects. Valence “judges” the current efficiency of body states, and feeling announces the judgment to the body’s owner. Feelings express fluctuations in the state of life, within the standard range and outside it. Some states within the standard range are more efficient than others, and feelings express the degree of efficiency. Life within the central homeostatic range is a necessity; life upregulated to the flourishing edges is desirable. States outside the overall homeostatic range are pernicious, and some are so pernicious that they will kill you. Examples include ungainly metabolism during a generalized infection or accelerated metabolism in an overactive, manic state. Given that we all experience feelings continuously, it is astonishing that for the most part it is so difficult to explain their nature satisfactorily. The matter of contents is about the only fairly straightforward and manageable aspect of the puzzle. We can agree on some of the events that constitute feelings, on the sequence in which they occur, and even on how events are distributed and sequenced in our bodies. In response to the big jolt of an earthquake, for example, one can sense the premature heartbeat that came fuller and earlier than normally and called attention to itself, or the dry mouth that came at the same time or just before or just after, or the tightened throat perhaps. A simple study from Riitta Hari’s laboratory, in Finland, confirms the observations that several of us have long been making and agrees with the brilliant intuitions of poets. It shows that a large group of human beings consistently identified certain regions of the body as being engaged during their typical feeling experiences relative to both general homeostatic and emotional situations. 3 The head, the chest, and the abdomen were the most commonly engaged theaters of feeling. They are indeed the stages on which feelings are created. Wordsworth would have been pleased. He did write about “sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,” those sensations that, as he said, passed into the “purer mind, with tranquil restoration.” 4 Curiously, the precise feelings that comparable situations evoke may well be tuned by cultures. Apparently, the nervousness of students before an exam can be experienced by German students as butterflies in the stomach and by Chinese students as a headache. 5 Kinds of Feelings At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the main physiological conditions that result in feelings. The first condition produces spontaneous feelings. The other two yield provoked feelings. Feelings of the spontaneous kind, the homeostatic feelings, arise from the background flow of life processes in our organisms, a dynamic ground state, and constitute the natural backdrop of our mental lives.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Isn’t it striking how Megan’s reluctance dissolves into a burst of curiosity and desire? But notice the necessary conditions: (1) she decides when the time is right, and (2) her patient partner helps her establish safety so that (3) she can transform her nervousness into an arousal enhancer. As a result, she moves from uncertainty to confidence and is validated by her boyfriend’s responsiveness. Another type of surprise occurs when familiar people behave in unfamiliar ways. Manuel tells of an unexpected conclusion to what appeared to be a colorless day: I was hanging out with my girlfriend. Nothing much was happening—a little shopping, visiting a couple of friends. We were bored as shit to put it bluntly. Finally we gave up and went back to her place. Another Saturday night watching TV. I needed a hot shower to give me a lift. Just as I was soaping up I heard the bathroom door squeak. Suddenly her hand came through the shower curtain, she grabbed the soap out of my hand and jumped in with me. We’d been together for almost three years and she’d never acted like this before. Her aggressiveness blew me away—but I liked it. She got on her knees and soaped up my dick. It was as if she had studied how I masturbate (even though she never saw me do it) and added her own special touches. Was this my Angela? She brought me to a peak of ecstasy like never before. My orgasm was an explosion. We continued our adventures in bed for a couple more hours. Boredom was a thing of the past. For Manuel, the foreground (his intense excitement) stands out in bold relief against a background of boredom and low expectations. I predict that as you construct your own list of peak turn-ons, you’ll find at least one that contains a similar contrast. In fact, The Group only brings up the topic of expectations in their tales of peak sex when those expectations are being joyously shattered by a welcome surprise. In the coming chapters we will often be reminded that peak encounters share many features with memorable fantasies. But here’s a fascinating exception: while firsts and surprises obviously help make peak encounters memorable, they seem to be of little significance in fantasy. Only 5 percent of The Group’s favorite fantasies involve anything unexpected or surprising, and none of them contains a first of any kind. What shall we conclude from this? Our best encounters often take us to places we’ve never been. Favorite fantasies, on the other hand, cover familiar territory. Through repeated experimentation we refine them so that they express, in the shorthand of imagery, the essential elements needed for arousal. This amazing capacity of erotic fantasy to hold our interest in spite of repetition is something we’ll return to many times, especially in Chapter 5, “Your Core Erotic Theme.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Holy shit,” I said. “This is fucking crazy. So, like, there actually are mer-people? And Sirens?” “Sort of. But not the way you conceive of us. Well, we are sort of the way you conceive of us. I mean, obviously I’m very sexy.” He laughed. “You are!” I said. “Ha, not really. But I mean, we aren’t like the Siren myths and stuff. It’s not like we are trying to kill humans or keep them imprisoned on an island. We aren’t like the way they are in The Odyssey. Homer slandered us. But we do live a long, long time. Youthfully. Hundreds of years. We spend most of them looking like we are in our late teens and early twenties. I think it’s the saltwater. It preserves us in some way.” “So are you mythic? Are you a mythic creature? Is this a joke you are playing? Am I hallucinating you?” But from the look on his face I knew it wasn’t a joke. There was no way the place his skin met his tail could be fake. The gradations were too rough and eerie. There was no makeup or costume in the world that could do that. He really was part man and part fish. Or something. Had I lost it at some point along the way? Was I worse off than I thought? “You aren’t hallucinating, not really,” he said. “I mean, you are kind of hallucinating in the sense that your perspective has shifted. But in a way you were really hallucinating before you met me—in the sense that there was only one part of life you could see. You believed only that which was in front of you. Most people do. Most people believe that which you cannot see or know could not possibly exist. Humans are very arrogant. I don’t think you are arrogant, but I think it’s just your nature to only believe in what you can see.” “I don’t even know what to say,” I said. “I have so many questions for you.” “Let’s start slow,” he said. “Are you real?” I asked. He laughed. “I suffer like I’m real. I have wants like I’m real. I fear that I will be unliked or unloved. Men, women, I think that maybe everyone wants the same thing.” “Men want sex,” I said. “Don’t you?” he asked. “I do,” I said. “Maybe. But I think I mistake it for love, or something.” “How do you know when you’re mistaking it?” “I think when I get high off it.” “Well, why not? That could be love,” he said. “Can’t you get high off of love? I don’t think I want a love that doesn’t make me feel amazing.” “I don’t know if that’s love or something else,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s love if the person disappears.” “I wouldn’t say it’s not love,” he said. “But it’s hard. That is a very painful experience.”