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29 Emotional Geography and Emotional History Anna Karenina begins with a rift in a family.1 Dolly Oblonsky has discovered that her husband has been having an affair. One morning, a few days after the initial quarrel, Stiva Oblonsky, the husband, wakes up alone in his study. For a moment, he does not remember the rift, or even his own precise location in the home. For a moment he is content, tacitly imagining his ordinary life, his ordinary bed. But then he remembers. “All the details” come rushing back, but they are not uniform. He particularly recalls “the first moment when, on coming back cheerful and satisfied” he “saw her . . . holding the unlucky note that had revealed everything” (2).2 He goes on to reflect on the entire “event,” feeling particular torment over the “silly smile” with which he greeted his wife’s reproaches and the way, seeing this, “Dolly shuddered as though in physical pain” (3). He begins to feel “despair,” unable to answer the question “What is there to do?” In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger draws a valuable distinction between the uniform, objective time of clocks and the subjective temporality of human experience; this is parallel with a distinction between the objective space of maps and the subjective spatiality of human activity .3 The opening of Anna Karenina brings home this distinction sharply. Spatiality is perhaps the more obvious here. In themselves, rooms are simply organizations of space. Objectively, Stiva’s location is just a matter of a physical body located at a particular point relative to other physical bodies. But the spatial experience of Stiva is quite different from this. Stiva understands his location by contrast with where he should be, where he would like to be, where he would be if everything were right. Jean-Paul Sartre refers to this experience as nothingness. Stiva’s location is not only a matter of where he is, but equally of where he is not. My first contention here is that spatiality, the “existential” experience of location, is fundamentally an emotional experience. As my characterBefore Stories Emotional Time and Anna Karenina 1 30 Before Stories ization of Stiva’s place already suggests, nothingness—the judgment of where one is not but should be or should have been—is first of all a function of what one feels about locations. In this case, there are two aspects to the feeling. The first is not precisely emotion per se, but rather forms the baseline from which emotions arise. This is normalcy. More often than not, emotions are a response to changes in what is routine, habitual, expected. We anticipate normalcy unreflectively. When our anticipations are violated, attentional focus is triggered (see, for example, Frijda 272–73, 318, and 386) and a sort of pre-emotional arousal occurs, an arousal that often prepares for a particular emotion (see, for instance, Simpson et al. 692). It is just when Stiva puts down his feet toward the expected slippers and reaches out toward the expected robe, the moment when he finds the nothingness where the slippers and the robe should be, that his attention is focused. In this case, the focus is recollective; it is a matter of memory—and that increased attention carries in its train the entire sequence of happenings that pushed this body from his wife’s bed to the couch in the study. This leads to the second aspect of feeling that bears on our experience of space. Our experience of the world is not uniform. It is focused on particular areas. The center toward which we tend, and against which we experience all other places, is home. I am not simply referring here to the building we call “home,” as when we “go home” at the end of the day. Rather, I am referring to the location that, paradigmatically, both is home (in the sense of the origin and end point of journeys) and, so to speak, “feels like home.” Thus it is a point of cognitive orientation (“Where is the restaurant?” “About a five-minute drive from your home”) and a point of emotional ease and security. The idea is not merely phenomenological. There are neurobiological reasons for “place attachment,” as it is called. Indeed, the same subcortical structures appear to be involved in place attachment as in attachment to persons, leading the affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp to suggest that perhaps “the ancient mechanisms of place attachment provided a neural impetus for the emergence of social attachments...

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