Tenderness

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.

Page 38 of 145 · 20 per page

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] NOW ONE of the hard margins bears us on, and the smoke of the rivulet makes shade above, so that from the fire it shelters the water and the banks. As the Flemings between Wissant and Bruges,1 dreading the flood that rushes towards them, make their bulwark to repel the sea; and as the Paduans, along the Brenta, to defend their villages and castles ere Chiarentana2 feels the heat: in like fashion those banks were formed, though not so high nor so large, the master, whoever it might be, made them. Already we were so far removed from the wood, that I should not have seen where it was, had I turned back, when we met a troop of spirits, who were coming alongside the bank; and each looked at us, as in the evening men are wont to look at one another under a new moon; and towards us sharpened their vision, as an aged tailor does at the eye of his needle. Thus eyed by that family, I was recognized by one3 who took me by the skirt, and said: “What a wonder!” And I, when he stretched out his arm to me, fixed my eyes on his baked aspect, so that the scorching of his visage hindered not my mind from knowing him; and bending my face to his, I answered: “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” And he: “O my son! let it not displease thee, if Brunetto Latini turn back with thee a little, and let go his train.” I said: “With all my power I do beseech it of you; and if you wish me to sit down with you, I will do so, if it pleases him there, for I go with him.” “O my son,” he said, “whoever of this flock stops one instant, lies a hundred years thereafter without fanning himself when the fires strikes him. Therefore go on; I will follow at thy skirts; and then will I rejoin my band, that go lamenting their eternal losses.” I durst not descend from the road to go level with him; but kept my head bent down, like one who walks in reverence. He began: “What chance, or destiny, brings thee, ere thy last day, down here? and who is this that shows the way?” “There above, up in the clear life, I lost myself,” replied I, “in a valley, before my age was full.” Only yester morn I turned my back to it; he appeared to me, as I was returning into it, and guides me home again by this path.” And he to me: “If thou follow thy star, thou canst not fail of glorious haven, if I discerned rightly in the fair life; and if I had not died so early, seeing Heaven so kind to thee, I would have cheered thee in the work. But that ungrateful, malignant people, who of old came down from Fiesole,4 and still savours of the mountain and the rock,

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi released the intercom and tried to get both his feet on the thin doorstep, which afforded him about three inches of cover from the overhang of the roof. When Choo opened the door, Levi practically fell on top of him. Together they stepped into a concrete stairwell that smelled bad. Choo met Levi’s fist with his own. Levi noticed that his friend’s eyes were red. Choo jerked his head upwards to signify that Levi should follow him. They began to climb the stairs. ‘Why did you come here?’ asked Choo. His voice was dull and quiet, and he did not turn to look at Levi as he spoke. ‘You know . . . I just thought I’d pay you a call,’ said Levi awkwardly. It was the truth. ‘I don’t have a phone.’ ‘No, I mean,’ said Levi, as they reached a landing and a damaged door, patched up with a panel of unpainted wood, ‘ pay a call . It’s like in America when you go visit someone to see how they are, you know.’ Choo opened his front door. ‘You wanted to see how I am?’ This too was true, but Levi now acknowledged that it sounded a little weird. How to explain it? He wasn’t sure himself. Simply: Choo had been on his conscience. Because . . . because Choo wasn’t  On Beauty like the other guys in the team. He didn’t travel with the pack, didn’t screw around or go dancing, and he seemed, by contrast, lonely, isolated. Basically, Levi figured that Choo was just plain smarter than all the people around him, and Levi, who lived with people similarly cursed, felt that his own experience in this area (as a carer of smart folk) made him especially qualified to help Choo out. And then the book on Haiti had conspired in Levi’s mind with the little he had surmised about Choo’s personal life. The tatty clothes he wore, the way he never bought a sub or a can of Coke like the others. His raggedy hair. His unfriendliness. That scar along his arm. ‘Yeah . . . basically . . . I was thinking, well, we down , ain’t we? I mean, I know you don’t talk too much when we be working, but . . . you know, I consider you my friend. I do. And brothers look out for each other. In America.’ For what felt like an awful long time, Levi thought Choo was about to kick his ass. Then he began to chuckle and put his hand heavily on Levi’s shoulder. ‘You have nothing to do, I think. You need to be more busy.’ They came into a reasonably sized room, but now Levi noted that the kitchen units, the bed and the table were all compressed into this one space. It was cold and it stank of marijuana. Levi slipped off his rucksack. ‘I brought you some stuff, man.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Here was Murdoch, curled in on himself. Howard bent down and stroked his little hound face, tugging the brown-pink skin of his jaw away from harmless, blunted teeth. Murdoch stirred crossly. When Jerome was a baby, Howard liked to go into the nursery and touch his son’s creˆpey head, knowing he would wake, wanting him to. He had liked that warm, talc-scented company resting in his lap, little baby fingers stretching for the keyboard. Was it a computer, back then? No: a typewriter. Howard lifted Murdoch from his stinking basket, hooked him under one arm and brought him to the book-case. He passed a restless eye over the rainbow of spines and titles. But every one met with resistance in Howard’s soul – he did not want fiction or biography, he didn’t want poetry or anything  on beauty and being wrong academic written by anyone he knew. Sleepy Murdoch barked softly and got two of Howard’s fingers in his mouth. With his free hand Howard took a turn-of-the-century edition of Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and brought it with Murdoch to the couch. As soon as he was released, Murdoch retreated to his basket. He seemed to look at Howard resentfully as he did so and, once he was in his former position, hid his head between his paws. Howard placed a cushion at one end of the couch and stretched out along it. He opened the book and was drawn to a handful of capitalized phrases.        -     He read a few lines. Gave up. Looked at the pictures. Gave up. Closed his eyes. The next thing was a soft, heavy mass, weighing down the couch by his thigh, and then a hand on his face. The porch light was on, bathing the room in amber. Kiki took the book from his hands. ‘Complex stuff. You staying down here?’ Howard shunted up a little. He brought his hand to his eye and dug from it a hard piece of yellow sleep. He asked the time. ‘Late. Kids are back – didn’t you hear them?’ Howard had not. ‘Did you get back early? I wish you’d told me – I would have asked you to walk the Doc.’ Howard shunted up further and grasped her wrist. ‘Nightcap,’ he said, and had to repeat it because the first time it was just a croaking sound. Kiki shook her head. ‘Keeks, please. Just one.’ Kiki pressed her palms into her eye sockets. ‘Howard, I’m real  On Beauty tired. I’ve had an emotional evening. And for me, it’s a little late to drink.’ ‘Please, darling. One.’ Howard stood and went over to the drinks cabinet by the stereo. He opened the little door and turned to see Kiki standing. He looked at her pleadingly.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Will you see me again in spite of this?” he pleaded. “You promise you won’t hold this against me?” “What kind of ghoul do you think I am?” I was astonished. All my maternal instincts had been roused by his helplessness. “What kind of creep would throw you out?” “The last one this happened with,” he moaned. “She threw me out and tossed my clothes to me in the hall. She forgot one sock. I had to go home on the subway with one bare ankle. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.” “Darling,” I said, rocking him. I guess I should have been tipped off about Charlie’s emotional instability by his sobbing and choking and shuddering—but not me. For me this only confirmed his sensitivity. The Prince and the Pea. It was understandable. Opening nights got him down. We could always sing Cole Porter together instead of fucking. But instead he fell asleep in my arms. He slept like no one I’ve ever known. He wheezed and sputtered and farted and thrashed. He groaned and shuddered. He even picked his pimples in his sleep. I stayed up half the night watching him in utter amazement. In the morning he woke up smiling and fucked me like a stud. I had passed the test. I had not thrown him out. This was my reward. For the next eight months or so we went together, usually spending nights either at his place or mine. I was in the process of getting an annulment from Brian, and was teaching at CCNY while finishing my M.A. at Columbia. I was still living in the same apartment where Brian had cracked up and I hated to stay alone nights, so when Charlie couldn’t stay with me, I followed him to the East Village and shared his narrow bed. He loved me, he said, he adored me, he said, and yet, he kept holding back. I sensed something funny in his declarations of love, something tentative and insincere. I was wild because it was the first time anyone had ever held back on me. I was used to having the upper hand and his tentativeness incensed me. It made me more and more crazy about him, which in turn made him more and more tentative. The old, old story. I knew there was another girl in Paris, an old girlfriend from Radcliffe now studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. According to Charlie, they were just friends. It was over, he said.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  8. I couldn’t be a rebel (or, at very least, a pariah) by marrying Bennett because my mother would think that was “at any rate, not ordinary.” What possibilities remained open to me? In what cramped corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I felt rather like those children of pot-smoking parents who become raging squares. I could, perhaps, take off across Europe with Adrian Goodlove, and never come home to New York at all. — And yet...I also have another mother. She is tall and thin, but her cheeks are softer than willow tips, and when I nuzzle into her fur coat on the ride home, I feel that no harm can come to me ever. She teaches me the names of flowers. She hugs and kisses me after some bully in the playground (a psychiatrist’s son) grabs my new English tricycle and rolls it down a hill into the playground fence. She sits up nights with me listening to the compositions I have written for school and she thinks I am the greatest writer in history even though I am only eight. She laughs at my jokes as if I were Milton Berle and Groucho Marx and Irwin Corey rolled into one. She takes me and Randy and Lalah and Chloe ice-skating on Central Park Lake with ten of our friends, and while all the other mothers sit home and play bridge and send maids to call for their children, she laces up all our skates (with freezing fingers) and then puts on her own skates and glides around the lake with us, pointing out danger spots (thin ice), teaching us figure eights, and laughing and talking and glowing pink with the cold. I am so proud of her! Randy and I boast to our friends that our mother (with her long flowing hair and huge brown eyes) is so young that she never has to wear makeup. She’s no old fuddy-duddy like the other mothers. She wears turtlenecks and ski pants just like us. She wears her long hair in a velvet ribbon just like us. And we don’t even call her Mother because she’s so much fun. She isn’t like anyone else. On my birthday (March 26, Aries, the Rites of Spring), I awaken to find my room transformed into a bower. Around my bed are vases of daffodils, irises, anemones. On the floor are heaps of presents, wrapped in the most fanciful tissue papers and festooned with paper flowers. There are Easter eggs, hand painted by my mother to look like Fabergé eggs. There are boxes of chocolates and jelly eggs (“for a sweet year,” she says, hugging me), and there is always a giant birthday card, painted in water colors and showing me in all my glory: the most beautiful little girl in the world, long blond hair, blue eyes, and masses of flowers in my arms.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook (simulating that Coffee Shoppe where in their college days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo together), she would sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness as I consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator. My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where pink mountains loom. Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years. The poor woman busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if (to prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy. With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the home.” Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart—since those days when from my chair I mentally mapped out Lolita’s course through the house—I had long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very ugliness and dirt, and now I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and ocher and putty-buff-and-snuff that Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank God, but she did use up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store, replacing them by others, and so on, in a constant chiaroscuro of smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa—the sacred sofa where a bubble of paradise had once burst in slow motion within me. She rearranged the furniture—and was pleased when she found, in a household treatise, that “it is permissible to separate a pair of sofa commodes and their companion lamps.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of a sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H” ’s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males—a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication)—enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book . This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! As a case history, “Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world . John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Widworth, Mass.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  1 Adlington here inserts in his text an explanation which is not in the Latin, but is convenient for following the thread 512 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK x would suffer even for a great reward so great a reproach, at length they obtained for money an evil woman, which was condemned to be eaten of wild beasts, with whom I should be set ina cage before the people. But first I will tell you what a tale I heard concerning her, This woman had a husband whose father, minding to ride forth, commanded his wife, the young man’s mother, which he left at home great with child, that if she were delivered of a daughter, it should incontinently be killed. Now when the time of her delivery came, it fortuned that she had a daughter born while her husband was still abroad, whom she would not suffer to be slain, by reason of the natural affection which she bare unto her child, but declined from the command of her husband and secretly committed her to one of her neighbours to nurse. And when her husband returned home, she declared unto him that she was delivered of a daughter, whom, as he commanded, she had caused to be put to death. But when this child came to the flower of her age, and was ready to be married, the mother knew not by what means she should endow her daughter without that her husband should understand and perceive it. Wherefore she could do naught but discover the matter to her son,! as a secret greatly to be hidden and kept dark; for she greatly feared lest he should unawares be urged by the natural heat of youth and fancy or fall in love with his own sister. The young man understanding the whole matter did (according to his known and proved piety) perform both his duty to his mother and his natural obligation towards his sister ; for he kept the matter of the story—that the son “was the husband of this womaz condemned to be eaten of wild beasts.” .9K 513 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Her son sat morosely in the beanbag, in his lap a notebook bound in fraying blue silk. Kiki put Murdoch on the floor and watched his maladroit waddle towards Jerome, where he sat upon the boy’s toes. ‘Writing?’ she asked. ‘No, dancing,’ came the reply. Kiki let her mouth close and then opened it once more with a mordant puck. Since London he was like this. Sarcastic, secretive, sixteen all over again. And always working away at this diary. He was threatening not to go back to college. Kiki felt that the two of them, mother and son, were now moving steadily in obverse directions: Kiki to forgiveness, Jerome to bitterness. For, though it had taken almost a year, Kiki had begun to release the memory of Howard’s mistake. She had had all the usual conversations with friends and with herself; she had measured a nameless, faceless woman in a hotel room next to what she knew of herself; she had weighed one stupid night against a lifetime of love and felt the difference in her heart. If you’d told Kiki a year ago, Your husband will screw somebody else, you will forgive him, you will stay , she wouldn’t have believed it. You can’t say how these things will feel, or how you will respond, until they happen to you. Kiki had drawn upon reserves of forgiveness that she didn’t even know she had. But for Jerome, friendless and brooding, it was clear that one week with Victoria Kipps, nine months ago, had expanded in his mind until it now took up all the space in his life. Where Kiki had felt her way instinctively through her problem, Jerome had written his out, words and words and words. Not for the first time, Kiki felt grateful she was not an intellectual. From here she could see the strangely melancholic format of Jerome’s text, italics and ellipses everywhere. Slanted sails blowing about on perforated seas. ‘Remember that thing . . .’ Kiki said absently, rubbing his exposed  On Beauty ankle with her own shin. ‘ Writing about music is like dancing about architecture . Who said that again?’ Jerome crossed his eyes like Howard and looked away. Kiki hunkered down to Jerome’s eye level. She put two fingers to his chin and drew his face to hers. ‘You OK, baby?’ ‘Mom, please.’ Kiki cupped Jerome’s face in her hands. She stared at him, seeking a refracted image of the girl who had caused all this misery, but Jerome had not given his mother any details when it happened and he wasn’t going to give her any now. It was a matter of an impossible translation – his mother wanted to know about a girl, but it wasn’t about a girl or, rather, it wasn’t about just the girl. Jerome had fallen in love with a family. He felt he couldn’t tell his own family this fact; it was easier for them to believe that last year was Jerome’s

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I sprang after them, but as I was crashing through the shrubbery, I saw, in an alternate vision, as if life’s course constantly branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area, and beating bushes with their rackets in listless search for their last lost ball. I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good time. How charming it was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope. With her right hand holding her left arm behind her untanned back, the lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavonine sun was all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that oculate paradise, my freckled and raffish lass skipped, repeating the movements of so many others I had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered, damp-smelling sidewalks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would hand the rope back to her little Spanish friend, and watch in her turn the repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow, and fold her arms, and step on one toe with the other, or drop her hands loosely upon her still unflared hips, and I would satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last finished cleaning up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy, dark-haired page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo’s hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them around the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a quick connection before dinner. “Whose cat has scratched poor you?” a full-blown fleshy handsome woman of the repulsive type to which I was particularly attractive might ask me at the “lodge,” during a table d’hôte dinner followed by dancing promised to Lo. This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as possible, while Lo, on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could. She would be, figuratively speaking, wagging her tiny tail, her whole behind in fact as little bitches do—while some grinning stranger accosted us and began a bright conversation with a comparative study of license plates. “Long way from home!” Inquisitive parents, in order to pump Lo about me, would suggest her going to a movie with their children.

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

  Scholars may debate in legal journals about the value of emotion in judicial action, but the anatomy of the human brain makes it implausible for any human, including a judge, to escape the influence of interoception and affect when making decisions. Emotions are neither the enemy nor a luxury but a source of wisdom. Judges need not reveal their emotions (just as therapists learn not to), but they must be aware of them and explicitly use them to the best of their ability. To employ emotions wisely, I suggest that judges learn to experience emotion with high granularity. If they feel unpleasant, they’ll be helped if they can categorize finely to experience (say) anger distinctly from irritation or hunger. Anger can be a reminder to cultivate empathy toward an unsympathetic defendant, a gullible plaintiff, a belligerent witness, or a particularly intrusive attorney. Without empathy, anger can foster the type of retributive punishment that risks undermining the very notion of justice at the foundation of the legal system. Judges can cultivate higher granularity using the exercises I recommended in chapter 9: collecting experiences, learning more emotion words, using conceptual combination to invent and explore new emotion concepts, and deconstructing and recategorizing their emotional experiences in the moment. It sounds like a lot of work, but like any skill, it becomes habitual with practice. Also, it would not hurt for judges who face defendants from other cultures to be briefed on the different cultural norms for emotional experience and communication. Judges might also be educated to reduce the influence of affective realism when selecting jurors (a process known as voir dire). Often, judges and attorneys weed out jurors by asking them direct, transparent questions such as “Can you be objective, fair, and impartial in this case?” or “Do you know the defendant?” They also try to assess superficial similarities between jurors and defendants. For example, if a financial advisor stands accused of embezzling millions of dollars of his clients’ retirement investments, the judge might ask potential jurors whether they themselves have been victims of embezzlement, or whether a close relative works in the financial industry. But surface markers of similarities and differences are only the tip of the iceberg. It might be wise to examine a juror’s affective niche to understand how the juror might predict during a trial, which could indicate biases that shape perception. For example, a judge could ask what magazines the jurors read, what movies they prefer to see, or whether they play first-person shooter games, using standard assessment techniques from psychology. Such information would allow a judge to consider the potential biases of jurors based on how they spend their time, rather than just asking jurors directly about their biases (since such self-reports are not necessarily valid). 70 My suggestions so far address low-hanging fruit. Now we’re ready for the really difficult stuff—scientific considerations that could change fundamental assumptions in the law.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first snow—saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our porch. She wore her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo—the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back— and her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series all over again. There was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to walk me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love. She had developed more than one conventional mannerism, such as the polite adolescent way of showing one is literally “doubled up” with laughter by inclining one’s head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly liked—perhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable confession—her trick of sighing “oh dear!” in humorous wistful submission to fate, or emitting a long “no-o” in a deep almost growling undertone when the blow of fate had actually fallen. Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale shade and sun. On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I had hoped she would be when considering my spoiled slave- child and the bangles of demeanor she naïvely affected the winter before in California. Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a session of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to review the concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to school.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I look back on her tenderly. What a maniac she was. Raging hormones ruled her life. She was always in love with the wrong man and always compulsively writing about it. I want to say to her: “Slow down, be calm, meditate, do yoga, everything will turn out all right.” But she can’t hear me. There is no time machine to take me back to her and revise the contents of her teeming brain. And if there were, this book would not exist. The twenties are as frenetic a decade as the teens. You have a voice inside your head repeating I want, I want, I want, but you don’t know what you want or how to get it. You hardly know who you are. You go on instinct. And your instinct mostly pushes you toward adventures you won’t grasp until you look back on them. Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward, some sage once said. Isadora wants love, but how can she recognize love when the madness of sex is blinding her? She is wildly ambitious yet her romantic fantasies are forever getting in her way. She wants to break away from her parents, she wants to find herself—and yet she is driven by family forces she can’t fully comprehend. She wants to break free of restraints but she keeps getting caught by new versions of the same old traps. She runs away from one man’s tyranny just to fall into the tyranny of another. Mostly she is tyrannized by her own neuroses. She wants everything all at once. She has no serenity. She desperately wants to be a writer but she can’t sit still. My heart goes out to women in their twenties—my own creature, Isadora Wing, among them. Let me try to go back in time and remember how I invented her. During the late sixties, early seventies, I was principally a student who wrote poetry. A Ph.D. candidate in eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia, I also taught at City College of New York. I slogged back and forth from 116th Street and Broadway to 135th Street and Convent Avenue with a briefcase bursting with my students’ blue books for English literature from Chaucer to Pope and for freshman composition. I was overworked, underpaid and full of angst about my future. I had just been through the shattering experience of nursing my first love through a schizophrenic breakdown that finished our marriage. I wanted to be a writer but I had no idea how to begin. Between graduate courses and teaching, I wrote poems—poetry has proven to be my creative lifeline to this day—but I hardly had the time to start the novel I longed to write.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora too wandered away. Kiki heard a great splash from outside, and then glimpsed the dark, curled dome of Jerome’s head before it went under the water again. She opened the drawer at her end of the long kitchen table and, among many batteries and fake fingernails, found a pen. She went in search of paper. She recalled a pad that had been squeezed between two paperbacks on a bookshelf in the hallway. ‘Chess?’ Kiki heard Zora ask Howard. When she came back into the kitchen, she could see them setting up play in the lounge as if nothing at all had happened, as if they didn’t have a party to  kipps and belsey host, Murdoch happily ensconced in Howard’s lap. Chess? Is that what it’s like, wondered Kiki, to be an intellectual? Can the tuned mind tune everything else out? Kiki sat alone in the kitchen. She wrote a short note welcoming the Kippses to town and expressing the hope they might attend a little gathering, any time after six thirty.  Turning the corner of Redwood, Kiki was already busy reading the signs. The size of the moving van, the style of the house, the colours of the garden. The light was fading and the streetlamps were not yet lit. It bugged her that she was unable to see more clearly the hanging baskets suspended like censers from the four storeys of balconies. Kiki was quite close to the front gate before she saw the outline of a tall woman sitting in a high-backed chair. Kiki put the letter she held in her hand back into her pocket. The woman was asleep. Kiki understood at once that she would never wish to be seen like this, with her thinning hair fanned out across her cheek, her mouth wide open and half of one fluttering, unseeing eyeball revealed to the world. It seemed rude to walk past her and continue to the doorbell, as if she were nothing more significant than a cat or an ornament. Equally, it didn’t seem right to wake her. On the porch now and hesitating, Kiki had the momentary fancy of placing the note in the woman’s lap and running away. She took another step towards the door; the woman woke. ‘Hi, hi – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you – I’m a neighbour here . . . are you . . . Mrs Kipps or . . .’ The woman smiled lazily and looked at Kiki, around Kiki, apparently assessing her bulk, where it began and where it ended. Kiki pulled her cardigan around herself. ‘I’m Kiki Belsey.’ Now Mrs Kipps made a jubilant sound of realization, beginning on a reed-thin high note and slowly making its way down  On Beauty the scale. She brought her long hands together slowly like a pair of cymbals. ‘Yes, I’m Jerome’s mother – I think you bumped into my youngest today, Levi?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  26, where the incident is quoted in proof of Æneas’ solicitude for old age).C A N T O X I XAs morning approaches Dante has a vision of the Siren, whose filthiness Virgil, at the exhortation of a lady from heaven, exposes. Dante is roused by Virgil’s repeated summons. The sun is fully up, and the pilgrim, deep in thought, advances to the next stair, where once again he feels the breath of the angel’s wing, and hears the blessing of them that mourn. Dante is still plunged in his reverie, from which Virgil rouses him by question, explanation, and admonition. They who have yielded to the Siren,—foul but seeming fair,—must expiate their offences in the three remaining circles. Let Dante tread the earth like a man and raise his eyes to the heavens above. And so they reach the fifth circle. There the souls of the avaricious and prodigal cleave to the pavement, no longer in sordid love, but in the anguished sense that they are unworthy to look upon aught more fair; and the limbs which had bound themselves on earth are now held in helpless captivity. Virgil inquires the way, and from the form in which the answer is given Dante gathers the law of Purgatory, hereafter to be more fully confirmed, which permits souls to pass without delay or scathe through any circles of the mount wherein sins are purged by which they themselves are unstained. He silently asks Virgil’s leave to stay and question the soul that has spoken. It is Pope Adrian V who for little over a month bore the weight of the papal mantle, scarce tolerable to him who would keep it from defilement; and in answer to Dante’s tender entreaty he expounds the nature of the penalties of this circle. He himself had been given over to avarice till he reached the summit of human greatness, saw its emptiness and turned in penitence to God. When Dante speaks again, Adrian perceives that he has knelt down, in reverence to Peter’s successor; whereon he bluntly bids him straighten his legs, and explains that no formal or official position or relation, however close or however august, has place in the spirit world, where personality is stripped of office. Then he urges Dante to pass on and leave his penitence undisturbed, making a reference to his niece who had married one of Dante’s future friends the Malaspini; which reference the pilgrim may, if he so choose, interpret as a request for prayers for the departed soul.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He put both arms behind his back, held hands with himself and stretched downwards, expanding his chest hugely. ‘Nothin’, Dad. It’s just what it is ,’ he said gnomically. He bit his thumb. ‘So then . . .’ said Howard, trying to translate, ‘it’s an aesthetic thing. For looks only.’ ‘I guess,’ Levi said and shrugged. ‘Yeah. Just what it is, just a thing that I wear. You know. Keeps my head warm, man. Practical and shit.’ ‘It does make your skull look rather . . . neat. Smooth. Like a bean.’ He gave his son a friendly squeeze on the shoulders and pulled him close. ‘Are you going to work today? They let you wear it at the wotsit, the record shop?’ ‘Sure, sure . . . It’s not a record shop – I keep telling you – it’s a mega-store. There’s like seven floors . . . You make me laugh, man,’ said Levi quietly, his lips buzzing Howard’s skin through his shirt. Levi pulled back now from his father, patting him down like a bouncer. ‘So you going now or what? What you gonna say to J? Who you flyin’ wid?’ ‘I don’t know – not sure. Air miles – someone from work booked it. Look . . . I’m just going to talk to him – have a reasonable conversation like reasonable people.’ ‘Boy . . .’ said Levi and clucked his tongue, ‘Kiki wants to kick your ass . . . An’ I’m with her . I think you should just let the whole thing go by, just go by . Jerome ain’t gonna marry anybody. He can’t find his dick with two hands.’ Howard, though duty bound to disapprove of this, did not completely disagree with the diagnosis. Jerome’s lengthy virginity (which Howard now presumed had come to an end) represented, in Howard’s opinion, an ambivalent relationship to the earth and its inhabitants, which Howard had trouble either celebrating or understanding. Jerome was not quite of the body somehow, and this had always unnerved his father.

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

  Judges need not reveal their emotions (just as therapists learn not to), but they must be aware of them and explicitly use them to the best of their ability. To employ emotions wisely, I suggest that judges learn to experience emotion with high granularity. If they feel unpleasant, they’ll be helped if they can categorize finely to experience (say) anger distinctly from irritation or hunger. Anger can be a reminder to cultivate empathy toward an unsympathetic defendant, a gullible plaintiff, a belligerent witness, or a particularly intrusive attorney. Without empathy, anger can foster the type of retributive punishment that risks undermining the very notion of justice at the foundation of the legal system. Judges can cultivate higher granularity using the exercises I recommended in chapter 9 : collecting experiences, learning more emotion words, using conceptual combination to invent and explore new emotion concepts, and deconstructing and recategorizing their emotional experiences in the moment. It sounds like a lot of work, but like any skill, it becomes habitual with practice. Also, it would not hurt for judges who face defendants from other cultures to be briefed on the different cultural norms for emotional experience and communication. Judges might also be educated to reduce the influence of affective realism when selecting jurors (a process known as voir dire ). Often, judges and attorneys weed out jurors by asking them direct, transparent questions such as “Can you be objective, fair, and impartial in this case?” or “Do you know the defendant?” They also try to assess superficial similarities between ju rors and defendants. For example, if a financial advisor stands accused of embezzling millions of dollars of his clients’ retirement investments, the judge might ask potential jurors whether they themselves have been victims of embezzlement, or whether a close relative works in the financial industry. But surface markers of similarities and differences are only the tip of the iceberg. It might be wise to examine a juror’s affective niche to understand how the juror might predict during a trial, which could indicate biases that shape perception. For example, a judge could ask what magazines the jurors read, what movies they prefer to see, or whether they play first-person shooter games, using standard assessment techniques from psychology. Such information would allow a judge to consider the potential biases of jurors based on how they spend their time, rather than just asking jurors directly about their biases (since such self-reports are not necessarily valid). 7 0 My suggestions so far address low-hanging fruit. Now we’re ready for the really difficult stuff—scientific considerations that could change fundamental assumptions in the law. We already know that our senses do not reveal reality, and judges and jurors necessarily suffer from affective realism. These factors, along with the rest of our knowledge of mind and brain, lead to a fairly radical idea (I’m almost afraid to say it): perhaps it is time to reevaluate trial by jury as the basis for determining guilt and innocence.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  So goes Howard’s spiel. He’s repeated it and written about it so many times over the years that he has now forgotten from which research he drew his original evidence. He will have to unearth some of this for the lecture. The thought makes him very tired. He slumps in his chair. The portable heater in Howard’s office is turned up so high he feels himself to be held in place by hot, thick air. Howard clicks his mouse, enlarging the image of the painting until it is as big as his computer screen. He looks at the men. Behind Howard, the icicles that have decorated his office window for two months melt and drip. In the quad the snow is retreating, and small oases of grass can be seen, although it is important not to derive hope from this: more snow is surely on its way. Howard regards the men. Outside there are bells ringing to mark the hour. There is the clunking sound of the tram linking with its overhead cables, there is the inane chatter of students. Howard looks at the men. History has retained a few of their names. Howard looks at Volckert Jansz, a Mennonite and collector of curiosities. He looks at Jacob van Loon, a Catholic cloth-maker, who lived on the corner of the Dam and the Kalverstraat. He looks at the face of Jochem van Neve: it is a sympathetic, spaniel face with kind eyes for which Howard feels some affection. How many times has Howard looked at these men? The first time he was fourteen, being shown a print of the painting in an art class. He had been alarmed and amazed by the way the Staalmeesters seemed to look directly at him, their eyes (as his  on beauty and being wrong schoolmaster put it) ‘following you around the room’, and yet, when Howard tried to stare back at the men, he was unable to meet any of their eyes directly. Howard looked at the men. The men looked at Howard. On that day, forty-three years ago, he was an uncultured, fiercely bright, dirty-kneed, enraged, beautiful, inspired, bloody-minded schoolboy who came from nowhere and nothing and yet was determined not to stay that way – that was the Howard Belsey whom the Staalmeesters saw and judged that day. But what was their judgement now? Howard looked at the men. The men looked at Howard. Howard looked at the men. The men looked at Howard. Howard pressed the ‘zoom’ option on his screen. Zoom, zoom, zoom until he was involved only with the burgundy pixels of the Turkey rug. ‘Hey, Dad – what’s up? Daydreaming?’ ‘Christ! Don’t you knock?’ Levi pulled the door to behind himself. ‘Not for family, no . . . can’t say I do.’ He perched on the end of Howard’s desk and reached out a hand for his father’s face. ‘You OK? You sweating, man.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “I’m supposed to be a man of God,” he said one evening as mosquitoes chewed up our limbs in the darkness. “But I feel so weak. I feel like every day I fight against my instincts, and half the time my instincts win.” He put his head into his hands. I reached out and touched his arm, and he didn’t shrug it away. When he spoke next, I felt the vibrations of his voice in my fingers. “I’m supposed to lead all of these people and be an example, but sometimes I wonder if I’m the right person for the job. Maybe it should be someone better.” I’d never heard anyone talk this way about himself. “I don’t know what God wants from me,” he said, finally. “As a leader, and as a man.” I wanted to cry. I considered my own lusts and shortcomings, the way my life was coming apart. My parents wouldn’t stop fighting. An assault was years in my past and yet continued to interfere with my sleep, my ability to receive touch. I thought often about sex, even though it frightened me. I was always crying, always uncertain. What, I wondered, did God want from someone like me? One night, Joel and I took our sleeping bags outside and slept next to each other under the stars. I’d never seen a sky like that, unstained by city light. The Milky Way was stunningly clear; starmatter smeared across the black. There were new constellations here, on the bottom of the world. The planets gleamed; satellites slipped across the sky. When I woke up, there was a dung beetle pushing a small brown ball through the grass inches from my nose. I am normally terrified of insects, but at that moment, instead, I was cracked open, ready for wonder. In the beetle’s determination and slow progress, I saw indescribable splendor. When Joel woke, we walked to the pool and stared at the edge of the still and glassy water. He pulled off his shirt. He had a rectangular insulin pump attached to his abdomen; this vulnerable detail tugged on some mysterious thread inside me. He unhooked his pump, and turned to me, arms outstretched, and let me push him in. When he came up from the blue, he grabbed my ankle and pulled me in with him. We circled each other, my clothes floating weightlessly around my body. Only when I got out of the pool an hour later did I realize what I’d done: the fabric was soaked, slightly bleached, heavy as lead. After we got back to the States, I would drive to church after school and just sit in his office for hours. He kept the door closed.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It’s like in America when you go visit someone to see how they are, you know.’ Choo opened his front door. ‘You wanted to see how I am?’ This too was true, but Levi now acknowledged that it sounded a little weird. How to explain it? He wasn’t sure himself. Simply: Choo had been on his conscience. Because . . . because Choo wasn’t  On Beauty like the other guys in the team. He didn’t travel with the pack, didn’t screw around or go dancing, and he seemed, by contrast, lonely, isolated. Basically, Levi figured that Choo was just plain smarter than all the people around him, and Levi, who lived with people similarly cursed, felt that his own experience in this area (as a carer of smart folk) made him especially qualified to help Choo out. And then the book on Haiti had conspired in Levi’s mind with the little he had surmised about Choo’s personal life. The tatty clothes he wore, the way he never bought a sub or a can of Coke like the others. His raggedy hair. His unfriendliness. That scar along his arm. ‘Yeah . . . basically . . . I was thinking, well, we down , ain’t we? I mean, I know you don’t talk too much when we be working, but . . . you know, I consider you my friend. I do. And brothers look out for each other. In America.’ For what felt like an awful long time, Levi thought Choo was about to kick his ass. Then he began to chuckle and put his hand heavily on Levi’s shoulder. ‘You have nothing to do, I think. You need to be more busy.’ They came into a reasonably sized room, but now Levi noted that the kitchen units, the bed and the table were all compressed into this one space. It was cold and it stank of marijuana. Levi slipped off his rucksack. ‘I brought you some stuff, man.’ ‘Stuff ?’ Choo picked up a fat joint from his ashtray and relit it. He offered Levi the only chair and took for himself the corner of the bed. ‘Like, food.’ ‘ NO ,’ said Choo indignantly, cutting the air with his hand. ‘I’m not starving. Forget about charity. I worked this week – I don’t need help.’ ‘No, no, it ain’t like that – I just . . . it’s like, when you go see someone, you bring something. In America – that’s how we do. Like a muffin. My mom always takes muffins or pie.’