Anxiety

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 Birthday Girl (2018)

  Pero creo que sé lo que iba a decir. Cuando me enteré que iba a ser padre. Pike Lawson no se ve lo suficiente mayor para ser padre de un hijo adulto, así que tuvo que haber sido muy joven cuando Cole nació. No más de dieciocho o diecinueve años. ¿Lo que lo pondría en unos treinta y ocho? ¿Más o menos? —Simplemente no podía comprender el hecho de que estaba renunciando a siete años de mi vida —continúa—. Pero siete años fueron y vinieron muy rápido. Asegurar un buen futuro requiere de una inversión y un compromiso, Cole, pero vale la pena. —¿Lo valió para ti? —cuestiona su hijo, arrancando un trozo de la hamburguesa, presionando ligeramente el costado de mi muslo. Es un gesto sutil que de hecho me gusta, a pesar de la tensión creciente en la habitación. Es su forma de hacerme saber que puede estar enojado, pero no lo está conmigo, y odia que probablemente me sienta incómoda en este momento. El padre de Cole toma un sorbo de su botella y la deja calmadamente en la mesa, su tono ahora es más duro. —Bueno, he tenido el dinero para pagar tu fianza de la cárcel —indica—. La última vez. Y la vez antes de esa. La mano de Cole se tensa alrededor de mi muslo, y mi cuello está tan caliente de repente que desearía tener una liga para mi cabello. Miles de preguntas dan vueltas en mi cabeza. ¿Por qué no se llevan bien? ¿Qué sucedió? El padre de Cole parece bueno, por lo poco que sé de él, pero Cole ha levantado un muro entre ellos, y su papá tiene casi tan mal genio como su hijo. Con la hamburguesa en mano, Cole aparta su plato y echa la silla hacia atrás, soltando mi pierna. —Voy a comer afuera —dice, soltando mi pierna—. Ven con nosotros si quieres, nena. Y deja los platos. Los lavaré en un rato. Abro la boca para hablar, pero me detengo, apretando los dientes. Bueno, esto será divertido. Cole se da vuelta y sale de la habitación, y momentos después escucho la puerta principal cerrarse de un golpe. Se escuchan voces amortiguadas desde afuera, y suena un claxon por la calle, pero de repente hace tanto silencio en la cocina que dejo de respirar. Con suerte Pike Lawson se olvidará que estoy aquí. ¿Cómo se supone que viva aquí? No puedo tomar un lado si van a hacer esto. Pero Pike habla, suavizando su voz. —Está bien —asegura, y lo veo mover su cabeza hacia mí por el rabillo del ojo—. Puedes ir con él si quieres. Giro mi cabeza, me encuentro con su mirada y le enseño una sonrisa tensa mientras me encojo de hombros. —Hace calor afuera —contesto. Ya estoy ardiendo con la tensión de aquí. Además, los amigos de Cole no son mis amigos, y afuera no será mejor.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I took my clothes off, not facing him, facing away. Quickly I got under the covers. He went into the bathroom, he came out wearing pajamas. He turned the light out. I close my eyes.... I felt him sit on my bed. Somewhere beyond the window, someone was laughing.... A car honked.... Over it all I can hear the private murmuring of the ocean... the lowpitched whistling of the wind. I feel his hand on my leg over the cover. Suddenly I wish I hadnt come here.... And yet will there always be the perversity?—because I keep thinking with crazy excitement: This is the first time hes done this! Hurriedly, he draws the cover from my body, bends over me— as if driving himself! I think—and the thought blots all the perverse excitement of his newness. “Dont you want me to?” he asks me. “Do you want to?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. 2 It was Sunday. I woke up, and the glare of the sun on the ocean was flooding the room through the slanted blinds. The man was sitting propped on one elbow on his bed looking at me. Several times during the night I had wakened, wondering apprehensively what his reaction would be in the morning. Immediately after—last night—he had sat smoking in the dark, and I had pretended to fall asleep. Throughout the night, he would sit up, light a cigarette.... Now I see him smiling at me. “You want to sleep some more?—it’s still very early,” he said. “Or you want to drive somewhere and have breakfast?... How about Arrowhead?” I had been there not too long ago with Dave—whom I pushed more and more from the immediate presence of my mind, but, even now, when I saw someone who might be him, I would panic. But it was never him. He seemed to avoid the places where we had gone. We drove to Arrowhead, early that morning—to the lake there and the beach, almost like a New England Village: imitation-cottage buildings, small logged shops. Today, there was no uncomfortable silence between us. My decision, from the beginning, to ease the usual street role had proved a right one.... There was an easy communication between us which the other scene would have strained. Usually, the appeal of the jivetalking street-hustler is stronger for the more jaded, in direct proportion, it seems, to the time they have actually been sexhunters.... When he paid at the places we went to, this man did so without the flashy display of the score. It was not in payment for companionship that he did it—it was as if indeed I were his friend and he had money to share with me. Too, when he spoke about his job in advertising, there was not the usual note of many of the others I had known who pick you up and try to put you down by flaunting their real or imagined Position.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Simplemente no la quiero aquí, porque sé que Mick la quiere, ella necesita dinero, y esta noche hice que su situación en mi casa se sintiera inestable. Está molesta, ¿y si comienza a pensar que necesita mudarse? ¿Qué pasa si toma unas copas y decide que necesita ganar un dinero extra? Paso mi mano por mi cabello, sintiendo el gel que puse en él y recordando cómo me limpié para ella, incluso me cambié de ropa. Echo un vistazo al traje azul marino que compré el año pasado para la graduación de Cole, pero esta noche dejé fuera la corbata. Solo una camisa blanca abierta en el cuello, y unos zapatos negros. No sé por qué me lo puse, porque ahora me siento estúpido, pero creo que solo quiero que sepa que no soy un libro abierto, puedo ser diferente, aún puedo sorprenderla. Retrocedo para irme, rezando para que no me haya visto, pero la multitud en el club vitorea y brama, y mi atención se dirige al escenario donde un grupo de chicas están de pie en una fila. Están vestidas con cualquier cosa, desde jeans hasta faldas y tangas, con aspecto nervioso pero riendo y jugando. Un par de mujeres ya han comenzado el concurso, y parece que la voluntad de ganar trescientos dólares ahora exige medidas más extremas que en mi época. Dos mujeres ya están mojadas, una mujer mayor viene y les arroja jarras de agua mientras se meten las camisas empapadas y agitan sus pechos y luego se dan la vuelta, sentadas a horcajadas sobre el piso mientras mueven sus culos para la multitud rugiente. Vierten más agua en sus espaldas. Las cabezas de cabello mojado vuelan, y bien pueden estar jodidamente desnudas. Prácticamente lo están. Algunos de los chicos tienen sus teléfonos con cámara, y estoy bastante seguro que no está permitido, pero a nadie le importa. Estas mujeres no son principiantes, ¿verdad? Jordan no puede hacer esa mierda. ¿Puede? Justo en ese momento, un grupo de mujeres arrastra a una joven rubia al escenario y veo a Jordan resistirse, riéndose pero sacudiendo la cabeza con nerviosismo. Qué dem... No puedo escucharla, pero veo sus labios articular no una y otra vez mientras clava los talones e intenta alejar sus brazos de su hermana. Alguien por detrás se estira frente a ella y baja la cremallera de su pequeña sudadera blanca, y me lanzo hacia adelante, pero luego vierten una jarra de agua sobre su pecho, y me detengo, momentáneamente congelado. Sus ojos y boca se abren, y se ve como si estuviera conmocionada por el agua fría, indudablemente, mientras permanece allí con las manos extendidas y la sudadera colgando de sus brazos desnudos. Las puntas de su cabello están mojadas, pero sus capas largas y sensuales se revuelven alrededor de su rostro, y el agua fluye por su estómago, haciendo que su piel brille.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But in opposing Darwin on religious grounds, Hodge was a lone voice. Most Christians, unable to appreciate the full implications of natural selection, were still willing to accommodate evolution. Darwin was not yet the bogeyman that he would later become. During the late nineteenth century, conservative Christians were far more troubled by an entirely different issue. In 1860, the year after the publication of Origin, seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews, a series of articles that made the German Higher Criticism of the Bible available to the unsuspecting general public, who now learned to their astonishment that Moses had not written the first five books of the Bible, King David was not the author of the Psalms, and biblical miracles were little more than a literary trope. At this time, German clerics were far better educated than their counterparts in Britain and America, who were ill-equipped either to follow German scholarship themselves or to explain it to their flocks.47 But by the 1850s, British nonconformists, who were not allowed to study at either Oxford or Cambridge, had started to attend German universities, and they brought the Higher Criticism back home with them. There had already been clashes between these “Germanized” scholars and their colleagues in colleges and seminaries. Essays and Reviews caused a sensation. It sold twenty-two thousand copies in two years (more than Origin in the first twenty years of its publication), went through thirteen editions in five years, and inspired some four hundred books and articles in response.48 Three of the authors belonged to a circle of progressive clergymen and scientists at Oxford and Cambridge who kept one another abreast of developments in their fields:49 Baden Powell, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford; Benjamin Jowett, classicist and later master of Balliol College; and Mark Pattison, rector of Lincoln College. The essays were of variable quality: they discussed the nature of predictive prophecy, the interpretation of miracle stories, and the authorship of Genesis. But by the far the most important article was Jowett’s essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” which argued that the Bible should be subjected to the same rigorous scholarship as any other ancient text. Evangelical Protestants, who had been taught to look for the plain sense of scripture and had in the process lost any understanding of the nature of mythology, found these ideas deeply disturbing. In 1888, the English novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, which told the story of a clergyman whose faith was destroyed by the Higher Criticism. At one point his wife complains: “If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.”50 The novel became a best seller, indicating that many readers shared her dilemma.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Dont you really?” he said delightedly. “How marvelous!” He calls the bartender and orders two drinks. “Dont be annoyed,” he said, pushing the drink toward me like the momentary bribe it is. “I merely want to be friendly.” He changes the conversation: “How long have you been in our fair San Francisco?... Are you working?... Where are you staying?...” He is trying to determine how aware I am of the scene and whether Im here to score. “You intrigue me,” he said, his eyes flirtatious—and the more he speaks, the more effeminately coy he becomes. “Well, of course, a large part of it is that Ive not seen you before—and one grows oh so bored with the same tired nelly faces trying so hard—and so unsuccessfully—to look butch in leather.... But there is something else—... I wonder,” he says cautiously, “if youd care to join me at my home for a drink. I have a bar there,” he says to impress me. “We can talk—better—and I would like that.” Seeing me hesitating, he says, waving his hand dismissing it impatiently, “Oh, dont worry. Ill make it worth your while.” We sit now on Russian Hill, in his apartment, which, like him, is impeccable. If I stand by the wide window, I can see the city, fog-covered tonight: tiny pinpoints of smothered lights trying to penetrate the mist. Distrusting his Grand Show, I have asked for the money first—which he gives me unquestioningly. “You really didnt know why I drew that sketch for you?” he asked me. “Or why I suggested thats what you should wear?” “No,” I said, but of course, vaguely, I did. He went into another room. When he returned, hes holding a black jacket, high boots, black belt—the same items he had drawn so adoringly in the sketch. “Try them on,” he said. I remember the man on Times Square. But I know that this time I will not be expected to walk around the streets in this man’s clothes. “Please,” he coaxed, extending the clothes toward me. A disturbing note—almost a whine—is creeping into his voice. “I’d rather not,” I said. He shrugs. “Suit yourself. You will eventually. If not with me, with someone else. Remember that.” And then burying his finger into the collar of his shirt to exhibit a tiny chain on which dangles an “M,” he announced proudly: “Do you know what this means? It means Im a masochist. It means I adore pain.” He spoke with alarming aloofness. “It excites me because I really do believe youre new to this—to this aspect of it,” he adds. “And the best experiences Ive had are with such people.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Chuck: “Darlin Dolly, huccome you ain got no makeup on this afternoon?” Darling Dolly sighing: “Sweetheart, the fuzz just aint as Tolerant as you are, God Bless You.... Have you seen Trudi? No? My God!—the poor girl’s in a State of Nerves. Skipper has disappeared—Again!” “That ain new,” said Chuck, “he disappears all the time.” Darling Dolly Dane, adjusting her collar so it sticks up higher. “Of course it aint new—but Trudi worries each time like it is—and the way Skipper’s been drinking lately!... And this time she aint seen him for More Than Three Weeks. Now you know how he stays with her, and goes away, and comes back—but he dont stay away that long. And! Poor Trudi’s even checked the joint, and those nasty hulls there and all! (And, babies, this is The Real Truth, I cross my heart: One of the bulls thought Trudi was real fish—she went in drag, and you know how Real she looks—and one of them, he tried to put the make on her, and Trudi said, ‘Fuck off, fuzz!’)... And Trudi says they told her, no, Skipper aint been busted.... Poor Trudi—my God!—youd have to look Far and Wide to find a more Loyal Woman!... Well, honeys,” says Darling Dolly, “your baby sister’s gonna be on her way now.... Honestly, if the fuzz dont stop bugging us, there just aint gonna be a Decent place where a Respectable Queen can go to in the afternoons.... Why, we’ll just have to start cruising the tearooms, and then theyll call us a menace.... And By The Way!” planting her hands indignantly on her hips, “have you seen that Buddy?!” “Whats he done to you this time?” said Chuck. “Do You Know What He Done?” Shes dragging out the obvious for dramatic effect. “Again?” asked Chuck. “Yes.” “Well,” said Chuck, “I bet he clipped your dragclothes an hocked em.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Off Las Palmas, along—but on the opposite side of—the outdoor newsstand—where professional existentialists with or without sandals leaf through a paperback book and the fairies cruise each other by the physique books, while the lady from, say, Iowa (who will sigh Ahhhhhh as the Premiere searchlights screw the sky), here to attend a PTA convention at the Biltmore, buys a moviebook—off Las Palmas, on Saturday nights especially, the oldman graduate of Pershing Square writes Bible inscriptions on the street: in chalk; neat, incredibly beautiful letters. The young highschool delinquents with flattops proclaiming their Youth heckle him cruelly in merciless teenage fashion while he dashes out his prophecies of not-unlikely Doom: the booming words like the musicless theme of this street.... The fairies, half-listening momentarily to his shouting threats of imminent Judgment (while surveying the crowd for someone Cute), cross the street on their way, perhaps to the Green bar (where Miss Ana Mae—in Congenial Surroundings—will drown those echoing Threats as she plays her organ coyly), and they may say bitchily about the judging prophet: “My dear! Isnt she Too Much?—she should get a Man and settle down”—and swish on giggling—hoping for a Man to settle down with—wondering nervously does tonight’s sexnervousness show beneath the giggles (and this can easily ruin a girl), and will they make it tonight and if so will it be someone Nice and early please God so they wont have to add to the shadows on Selma. And Selma Street is a dark purgatory to which those who havent made it in the bars or on the lighted Boulevard sentence themselves in the desperate hours after midnight Along a distance of about four blocks on that street, throughout the late night and into the first morning hours, male ghostforms haunt Selma along the apartment houses and the outlined trees (all appropriately flimsy in the night like movieprops); stand waiting for a car to stop, for someone to ask them what theyre looking for: If what you want is what hes willing to give, you go; if not, you wait for someone else to emerge out of the shadows.... Faces stare out of dark parked cars you think at first are empty, until a match, lighted suddenly, erupts, revealing a pair of staring eyes in the match-shadowed face.... But Coolly: The plainclothes detectives also cruise this street....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But if I was complacent, I was also dissatisfied. I had seen beyond the powder and the strut; it was terribly hard to have to sit with common audiences as she sang, and have no more of her than they. I burned to visit her again - yet also feared to. She had invited me, but she hadn’t named a time; and I, in those days, was terribly anxious and shy. So though I went as often as I was able to my box at the Palace, and watched and applauded her as she sang, and received those secret looks and tokens, it was a full week before I made my way again back stage, and presented myself, all pale, sweating and uncertain, at her dressing-room door. But when I did so, she received me with such kindness, and chided me so sincerely for having left her unvisited so long; and we fell again to chatting so easily about her life in the theatre, and mine as an oyster-girl in Whitstable, that all my old qualms quite left me. Persuaded at last that she liked me, I visited her again - and then again, and again. I went nowhere else that month but to the Palace; saw no one else - not Freddy, not my cousins, not even Alice, hardly - but her. Mother had begun to frown about it; but when I went home and said that I had gone back stage at Miss Butler’s invitation, and been treated by her like a friend, she was impressed. I worked harder than ever at my kitchen duties; I filleted fish, washed potatoes, chopped parsley, thrust crabs and lobsters into pans of steaming water - and all so briskly I barely had breath for a song to cover their shrieks with. Alice would say rather sullenly that my mania for a certain person at the Palace made me dull; but I didn’t speak to Alice much these days. Now every working day ended, for me, with a lightning change, and a hasty supper, and a run to the station for the Canterbury train; and every trip to Canterbury ended in Kitty Butler’s dressing-room. I spent more time in her company than I did watching her perform upon the stage, and saw her more often without her make-up, and her suit, and her footlight manner, than with them. For the friendlier we grew the freer she became, and the more confiding. ‘You must call me “Kitty”,’ she said early on, ‘and I shall call you - what? Not “Nancy”, for that is what everyone calls you. What do they call you at home? “Nance”, is it?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I finished my drink with a gulp - it was, I suppose, my sixth or seventh glass - and slipped from the stage. I made my way first to the lavatory, then headed downstairs to the change-room. This had been opened tonight only so that the ladies should have a place to hang their coats, and it was cold and empty and rather dim; but it had a looking-glass: and it was to this that I now stepped, squinting and tugging at my dress to pull it straight. I had been there for no longer than a minute when there came the sound of footsteps in the passageway beyond, and then a silence. I turned my head to see who was there, and found that it was Kitty. She had her shoulder against the doorframe and her arms folded. She wasn’t standing as one normally stands - as she usually stood - in an evening gown. She was standing as she did when she was on stage, with her trousers on - rather cockily. Her face was turned towards me and I couldn’t see her rope of hair, or the swell of her breasts. Her cheeks were very pale; there was a stain upon her skirt where some champagne had dripped upon it from an over-spilling glass. ‘Wot cheer, Kitty,’ I said. But she did not return my smile, only watched me, levelly. I looked uncertainly back to the glass, and continued working at my sash. When she spoke at last, I knew at once that she was rather drunk. ‘Seen something you fancy?’ she said. I turned to her again in surprise, and she took a step into the room. ‘What?’ ‘I said, “Seen something you fancy, Nancy?” Everybody else here tonight seems to have. Seems to have seen something that has rather caught their eye.’ I swallowed, unsure of what reply to make to her. She walked closer, then stopped a few paces from me, and continued to fix me with the same even, arrogant gaze. ‘You were very fresh with that horn-player, weren’t you?’ she said then. I blinked. ‘We were just having a bit of a lark.’ ‘A bit of a lark? His hands were all over you.’ ‘Oh Kitty, they weren’t!’ My voice almost trembled. It was horrible to see her so savage; I don’t believe that, in all the weeks that we had spent together, she had ever so much as raised her voice to me in impatience. ‘Yes they were,’ she said. ‘I was watching - me and half the party. You know what they’ll be calling you soon, don’t you?’ “Miss Flirt”.’ Miss Flirt!

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Lying in front of the wounded beast is a man, drawn in a far more rudimentary style than the animals, with arms outstretched, phallus erect, and wearing what seems to be a bird mask; his staff, which lies on the ground nearby, is also topped by a bird’s head. This seems to be an illustration of a well-known legend and could have been the founding myth of the sanctuary. The same scene appears on an engraved reindeer horn at nearby Villars and on a sculpted block in a cliff shelter at Roc de Sers near Limoges, which is five thousand years older than the Lascaux painting. 7 Fifty-five similar images in the other caves and three more Palaeolithic rock drawings in Africa have been found, all showing men confronting animals in a state of trance with upraised arms. 8 They are probably shamans. We know that shamanism developed in Africa and Europe during the Palaeolithic period and that it spread to Siberia and thence to America and Australia, where the shaman is still the chief religious practitioner among the indigenous hunting peoples. Even though they have inevitably been influenced by neighboring civilizations, many of the original structures of these societies, which were arrested at a stage similar to that of the Palaeolithic, remained intact until the late nineteenth century. 9 Today there is a remarkable continuity in the descriptions of the shaman’s ecstatic flight all the way from Siberia, through the Americas to Tierra del Fuego: 10 he swoons during a public séance and believes that he flies through the air to consult the gods about the location of game. In these traditional societies, hunters do not feel that the species are distinct or permanent categories: men can become animals and animals human. Shamans have bird and animal guardians and can converse with the beasts that are revered as messengers of higher powers. 11 The shaman’s vision gives meaning to the hunting and killing of animals on which these societies depend. The hunters feel profoundly uneasy about slaughtering the beasts, who are their friends and patrons, and to assuage this anxiety, they surround the hunt with taboos and prohibitions. They say that long ago the animals made a covenant with humankind and now a god known as the Animal Master regularly sends flocks from the lower world to be killed on the hunting plains, because the hunters promised to perform the rites that will give them posthumous life. Hunters often abstain from sex before an expedition, hunt in a state of ritual purity, and feel a deep empathy with their prey. In the Kalahari Desert, where wood is scarce, the Bushmen have to rely on light weapons that can only graze the skin, so they anoint their arrows with a lethal poison that kills the animal very slowly. A tribesman has to remain with his victim, crying when it cries and participating symbolically in its death throes.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I remembered how near the crowd could seem, from a stage in a small hall, when you stepped out of the limes; and in my coat and my bow-tie, of course, I would be conspicuous. How terrible it would be, to have Kitty see me as I watched her — to have her fix her eyes on mine, as she sang to Walter! So I went up to the gallery. The stairs were narrow: when I turned a corner and found a couple there, spooning, I had to step around them, very close. Like the girl in the booth, they gazed at my suit and, as she had done, they tittered. I could hear the thumping of the orchestra through the wall. As I climbed to the door at the top of the staircase and the thumps grew louder, my own heart seemed to beat against my breast, in time to them. When I passed into the hall at last — into the lurid half-light, and the heat and the smoke and the reek of the calling crowd — I almost staggered. On the stage was a girl in a flame-coloured frock, twitching her skirts so her stockings showed. She finished one song while I stood there, clutching at a pillar to steady myself; and then she started on another. The crowd seemed to know it. There were claps, and whistles; and before these had quite died down, I made my way along the aisle to an empty seat. It turned out to be at the end of a line of boys - a bad choice, for, of course, when they saw me there in my opera suit and my flower, they nudged each other, and sniggered. One coughed into his hand - only the cough came out as Toff! I turned my face from them, and looked hard at the stage. Then, after a moment, I took out a cigarette and lit it. As I struck the match, my hand trembled. The Cockney Chanteuse finished her set at last. There were cheers, then a brief delay, marked by shouts and shuffling and rustling, before the orchestra struck up with its introduction for the next act - a tinkling, Chinese melody, which made a boy in the line along from me stand up, and call out, ‘Ninkypoo!’ Then the curtain rose on a magician and a girl, and a black japanned cabinet - a cabinet not unlike the one that sat in Diana’s bedroom.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  He noted that scientists had become so immersed in the study of nature that they believed only in natural causes and did not appreciate that religious truth was also factual and must be respected as such. 44 Hodge could see what would happen to Christian faith once scientists no longer accepted God as the ultimate explanation. He was correct to announce that religion, as he knew it, “has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men.” 45 But this would not have been the case had not Christians allowed themselves to become so dependent upon a scientific method that was entirely alien to it. Hodge himself took issue with Darwin on supposedly scientific grounds. Stuck in the early modern model of scientific procedure, he still saw science as the systematic collection of facts and did not understand the value of hypothetical thinking. He concluded that because Darwin had not proved his theory, it was unscientific. For Hodge it was impossible “to any ordinarily constituted mind” to believe that the intricate structure of the eye, for example, was not the result of design. 46 But in opposing Darwin on religious grounds, Hodge was a lone voice. Most Christians, unable to appreciate the full implications of natural selection, were still willing to accommodate evolution. Darwin was not yet the bogeyman that he would later become. During the late nineteenth century, conservative Christians were far more troubled by an entirely different issue. In 1860, the year after the publication of Origin , seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews , a series of articles that made the German Higher Criticism of the Bible available to the unsuspecting general public, who now learned to their astonishment that Moses had not written the first five books of the Bible, King David was not the author of the Psalms, and biblical miracles were little more than a literary trope. At this time, German clerics were far better educated than their counterparts in Britain and America, who were ill-equipped either to follow German scholarship themselves or to explain it to their flocks. 47 But by the 1850s, British nonconformists, who were not allowed to study at either Oxford or Cambridge, had started to attend German universities, and they brought the Higher Criticism back home with them. There had already been clashes between these “Germanized” scholars and their colleagues in colleges and seminaries.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Matthew would always laugh, delighted to find himself caught up in these adventures. He’d sit up straighter in bed. He’d beg for more, more. When Matthew was asleep, Penny and I would talk about the day. She’d often ask what we were going to do if it all went south. I’d say, “I can always fall back on accounting.” I did not sound sincere, because I wasn’t. I was not delighted to be caught up in these adventures. Eventually Penny would look away, watch TV, resume her needlepoint, or read, and I’d retreat to my recliner, where I’d administer the nightly self-catechism. What do you know? I know Onitsuka can’t be trusted. What else do you know? I know my relationship with Kitami can’t be salvaged. What does the future hold? One way or another, Blue Ribbon and Onitsuka are going to break up. I just need to stay together as long as possible while I develop other supply sources, so I can manage the breakup. What’s Step One? I need to scare off all the other distributors Onitsuka has lined up to replace me. Blast them right out of the water, by firing off letters threatening to sue if they breach my contract. What’s Step Two? Find my own replacement for Onitsuka. I flashed on a factory I’d heard about, in Guadalajara, the one where Adidas had manufactured shoes during the 1968 Olympics, allegedly to skirt Mexican tariffs. The shoes were good, as I recalled. So I set up a meeting with the factory managers. EVEN THOUGH IT was in central Mexico, the factory was called Canada. Right away I asked the managers why. They chose the name, they said, because it sounded foreign, exotic. I laughed. Canada? Exotic? It was more comic than exotic, not to mention confusing. A factory south of the border named for a country north of the border. Oh well. I didn’t care. After looking the place over, after taking inventory of their present line of shoes, after surveying their leather room, I was impressed. The factory was big, clean, well run. Plus, it was Adidas-endorsed. I told them I’d like to place an order. Three thousand pairs of leather soccer shoes, which I planned to sell as football shoes. The factory owners asked me about the name of my brand. I told them I’d have to get back to them on that. They handed me the contract. I looked at the dotted line above my name. Pen in hand, I paused. The question was now officially on the table. Was this a violation of my deal with Onitsuka? Technically, no. My deal said I could import only Onitsuka track and field shoes, no others; it said nothing about importing someone else’s football shoes. So I knew this contract with Canada wouldn’t violate the letter of my Onitsuka deal. But the spirit?

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  It was an all-consuming mania, a recognizable psychological disorder, to care so much about insoles and outsoles, linings and welts, rivets and vamps. But I understood. The average person takes seventy-five hundred steps a day, 274 million steps over the course of a long life, the equivalent of six times around the globe—shoe dogs, it seemed to me, simply wanted to be part of that journey. Shoes were their way of connecting with humanity. What better way of connecting, shoe dogs thought, than by refining the hinge that joins each person to the world’s surface? I felt an unusual sympathy for such sad cases. I wondered how many I might have met in my travels. The shoe market just then was flooded with knockoff Adidas, and it was Senter who’d unleashed the flood. He was the knockoff king, apparently. He also knew everything worth knowing about Asia’s legitimate shoe trade—factories, importing, exporting. He’d helped set up a shoe division for Mitsubishi, Japan’s largest trading company. Nissho couldn’t hire Senter himself, for various reasons, so they’d hired Senter’s protégé, a man named Sole. “Really?” I said. “A shoe guy named Sole?” Before meeting Sole, before going any further with Nissho, I considered if I was walking into another trap. If I partnered with Nissho, I’d soon be into them for a lot of money. If they also became the source of all our footwear, I would then be even more vulnerable to them than I had been to Onitsuka. And if they turned out to be as aggressive as Onitsuka, it would be lights out. At Bowerman’s suggestion I talked it over with Jaqua, and he saw the conundrum. Quite a pickle, he said. He didn’t know what to advise. But he knew someone who would. His brother-in-law, Chuck Robinson, was CEO of Marcona Mining, which had joint ventures all over the world. Each of the big eight Japanese trading companies was a partner in at least one of Marcona’s mines, so Chuck was arguably the West’s leading expert on doing business with these guys. I finagled a meeting with Chuck at his office in San Francisco and found myself wildly intimidated from the moment I walked in the door. I was agog at his office’s size—bigger than my house. And at its view—windows overlooking all of San Francisco Bay, with enormous tankers gliding slowly to and from the world’s great ports. And lining the walls were scale models of Marcona’s tanker fleet, which supplied coal and other minerals to every corner of the globe. Only a man of enormous power, and brains, could command such a redoubt. I stammered through my presentation, but Chuck still managed to quickly get the drift. He boiled my complicated situation down to a compelling précis. “If the Japanese trading company understands the rules from the first day,” he said, “they will be the best partners you’ll ever have.” Reassured, emboldened, I went back to Sumeragi and told him the rules.

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  Ask. If you are on the phone and ordering from a reputable place (see the list of seminar-preferred establishments in the Sources section at the back of this book), they should walk you through the options before you purchase. Good Vibrations out of San Francisco provides the benchmark for this type of customer service. An editor at Glamour who was doing a story on vibrators said, “I’ve told my friends that buying a dildo from GV is like buying a sweater from J. Crew. Simple, straightforward, and excellent product knowledge by the phone sale staff.” And what if you’re in an adult store? It can feel intimidating. Often, people won’t establish eye contact and tend to move furtively from area to area. Needless to say, this behavior can make you feel uncomfortable asking about the various toys on display or how to use them. Remember, these stores sell products they are very comfortable with; try to ignore the nervous onlookers and approach a sales clerk directly. Most will be courteous and helpful. Keep in mind that some toys are not intended for use, but are rather purchased as novelties, to be used maybe once or given as gifts. And as my anonymous manufacturing source said, “Honestly, I don’t know one manufacturer that uses these things themselves—including me.” He further commented that the majority of manufacturers spend their money on the packaging and advertising, not on the research and development of the actual product. Secret from Lou’s Archives Over twenty years ago, in Redbook’s sex survey of 100,000 women, one out of five said they used some “device” during their lovemaking and for more than half of those women that device was a vibrator. Treasures for the Adult Toy ChestDILDO OR VIBRATOR These very versatile toys have been around for ages. Technically there is a difference between the two. According to Good Vibrations, dildos are “nonvibrating toys used for insertion—they fill the vagina or rectum, creating a sensation of fullness and pressure that many find highly pleasurable.” A vibrator also resembles a penis in shape, but is usually made of a hard plastic material and is battery run. A vibrator’s main purpose is to produce vibration wherever the operator wishes it. With the current off, a vibrator can act like a dildo, depending on its shape. For those who are worried that a vibrator will make you unresponsive to your male partner, do not worry. If you are able to orgasm other ways, manually, orally, or with water, know that this is just another way—often a faster and more intense way. It won’t replace your man. Nothing will ever replace men.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  There is no record that the VA conducted a psychological assessment of Hubbard. Throughout his life, however, questions would arise about his sanity. Russell Miller, a British biographer, tracked down an ex-lover of Hubbard’s, who described him as “a manic depressive with paranoid tendencies.” The woman, whom Miller called “Barbara Kaye” (her real name was Barbara Klowden), later became a psychologist. She added, “He said he always wanted to found a religion like Moses or Jesus.” A man who later worked in the church as Hubbard’s medical officer, Jim Dincalci, listed his traits: “Paranoid personality. Delusions of grandeur. Pathological lying.” Dr. Stephen Wiseman, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, who has been a prominent critic of Scientology, speculated that a possible diagnosis of Hubbard’s personality would be “malignant narcissism,” which he characterizes as “a highly insecure individual protecting himself with aggressive grandiosity, disavowal of any and every need from others, antisocial orientation, and a heady and toxic mix of rage/anger/aggression/violence and paranoia.” And yet, if Hubbard was paranoid, it was also true that he really was often pursued, first by creditors and later by grand juries and government investigators. He may have had delusions of grandeur, as so many critics say, but he did in fact make an undeniable mark on the world, publishing many best sellers and establishing a religion that endures decades after his death. Grandiosity might well be a feature of a personality that could accomplish such feats. A fascinating glimpse into Hubbard’s state of mind during this time is found in what I am calling his secret memoir. The church claims that the document is a forgery. It was produced by the former archivist for the Church of Scientology, Gerald Armstrong, in a 1984 suit that the church brought against him. Armstrong read some portions of them into the record over the strong objections of the church attorneys; others later found their way onto the Internet. The church now maintains that Hubbard did not write this document, although when it was entered into evidence, the church’s lawyers made no such representation, saying that the papers were intensely private, “constitute a kind of self-therapy,” and did not reflect Hubbard’s actual condition. This disputed document has been called the Affirmations, or the Admissions, but it is rather difficult to define. In part, the thirty pages constitute a highly intimate autobiography, dealing with the most painful episodes in Hubbard’s life. Many of the references to people and events made in these pages are supported by other documents. It appears that Hubbard is using techniques on himself that he would later develop into Dianetics. He explores memories that pose impediments in his mental and spiritual progress, and he prescribes affirmations or incantations to counter the psychological influence of these events. These statements would certainly be the most revealing and intimate disclosures Hubbard ever made about himself.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1972 E verything depended on Chicago. Our every thought, our every conversation at the start of 1972, began and ended with Chicago, because Chicago was the site of the National Sporting Goods Association Show. Chicago was important every year. The sporting goods show was where sales reps from across the nation got their first look at all the new athletic products, from all the different companies, and voted up or down, via the sizes of their orders. But this 1972 show was going to be more than important. It was going to be our Super Bowl and our Olympics and our Bar Mitzvah, because it was where we’d decided to introduce the world to Nike. If sales reps liked our new shoe, we’d live to see another year. If not, we wouldn’t be back for the 1973 show. Onitsuka, meanwhile, was eyeing Chicago, too. Days before the start of the show, without a word to me, Onitsuka gave the Japanese press an announcement trumpeting their “acquisition” of Blue Ribbon. The announcement set off shock waves everywhere, but especially at Nissho. Sumeragi wrote me, asking, in essence, “What the—?” In my impassioned two-page reply I told him that I had nothing to do with Onitsuka’s announcement. I assured him that Onitsuka was trying to bully us into selling, but they were our past, and Nissho, like Nike, was our future. In closing I confessed to Sumeragi that I hadn’t yet mentioned any of this to Onitsuka, so mum’s the word. “I ask that you keep the above information in strict confidence for obvious reasons. In order to maintain our present distribution system for future Nike sales, it’s important that we have about one or two more months of shipments from Onitsuka, and if these shipments were cut off it would be very harmful.” I felt like a married man caught in a tawdry love triangle. I was assuring my lover, Nissho, that it was only a matter of time before I divorced my spouse, Onitsuka. Meanwhile, I was encouraging Onitsuka to think of me as a loving and devoted husband. “I do not like this way of doing business,” I wrote Sumeragi, “but I feel it was thrust upon us by a company with the worst possible intentions.” We’ll be together soon, darling. Just have patience. Right before we all left for Chicago, a wire came from Kitami. He’d thought up a name for “our” new company. The Tiger Shoe Company. He wanted me to unveil it in Chicago. I wired back that the name was beautiful, lyrical, sheer poetry—but alas it was too late to unveil anything at the show. All the signs and promotional literature had been printed already. ON DAY ONE of the show I walked into the convention center and found Johnson and Woodell already busy arranging our booth. They’d stacked the new Tigers in neat rows, and now they were stacking the new Nikes in pyramids of orange shoe boxes.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Our cozy apartment was now completely inappropriate. We’d have to buy a house, of course. But could we afford a house? I’d just started to pay myself a salary. And in which part of town should we buy? Where were the best schools? And how was I supposed to research real estate prices and schools, plus all the other things that go into buying a house, while running a start-up company? Was it even feasible to run a start-up company while starting a family? Should I go back to accounting, or teaching, or something more stable? Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die. WE FOUND A house in Beaverton. Small, only sixteen hundred square feet, but it had an acre of land around it, and a little horse corral, and a pool. There was also a huge pine tree in the front and a Japanese bamboo out back. I loved it. More, I recognized it. When I was growing up my sisters asked me several times what my dream house would look like, and one day they handed me a charcoal pencil and a pad and made me draw it. After Penny and I moved in, my sisters dug out the old charcoal sketch. It was an exact picture of the Beaverton house. The price was thirty-four thousand dollars, and I popped my shirt buttons to discover that I had 20 percent of that in savings. On the other hand, I’d pledged those savings against my many loans at First National. So I went down to talk to Harry White. I need the savings for a down payment on a house, I said—but I’ll pledge the house. “Okay,” he said. “On this one we don’t have to consult Wallace.” That night I told Penny that if Blue Ribbon failed we’d lose the house. She put a hand on her stomach and sat down. This was the kind of insecurity she’d always vowed to avoid. Okay, she kept saying, okaaaay. With so much at stake, she felt compelled to keep working for Blue Ribbon, right through her pregnancy. She would sacrifice everything to Blue Ribbon, even her deeply held goal of graduating from college. And when she wasn’t physically in the office, she would run a mail order business out of the new house. In 1969 alone, despite morning sickness, swollen ankles, weight gain, and constant fatigue, Penny got out fifteen hundred orders. Some of the orders were nothing more than crude tracings of a human foot, sent in by customers in far-flung places, but Penny didn’t care. She dutifully matched the tracing to the correct shoe and filled the order. Every sale counted. AT THE SAME time that my family outgrew its home, so did my business. One room beside the Pink Bucket could no longer contain us.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  About which they still had a maddeningly blasé attitude. Little more days. With Wallace continually acting more like a loan shark than a banker, a little more days could mean disaster. And when the shipments from Onitsuka did finally arrive? They often contained the wrong number of shoes. Often the wrong sizes. Sometimes the wrong models. This kind of disarray clogged our warehouse and rankled our sales reps. Before I left Japan Mr. Onitsuka and Kitami assured me that they were building new state-of-the-art factories. Delivery problems would soon be a thing of the past, they said. I was skeptical, but there was nothing I could do. I was at their mercy. Johnson, meanwhile, was losing his mind. His letters, once mumbly with angst, were becoming shrill with hysteria. The main problem was Bowerman’s Cortez, he said. It was simply too popular. We’d gotten people hooked on the thing, turned them into full-blown Cortez addicts, and now we couldn’t meet the demand, which created anger and resentment up and down the supply chain. “God, we are really screwing our customers,” Johnson wrote. “Happiness is a boatload of Cortez; reality is a boatload of Bostons with steel wool uppers, tongues made out of old razor blades, sizes 6 to 6 ½.” He was exaggerating, but not much. It happened all the time. I’d secure a loan from Wallace, then hang fire waiting for Onitsuka to send the shoes, and when the boat finally docked it wouldn’t contain any Cortezes. Six weeks later, we’d get too many Cortezes, and by then it was too late. Why? It couldn’t just be Onitsuka’s decrepit factories, we all agreed, and sure enough Woodell eventually figured out that Onitsuka was satisfying its local customers in Japan first, then worrying about foreign exports. Terribly unfair, but again what could I do? I had no leverage. Even if Onitsuka’s new factories ended all delivery problems, even if every shipment of shoes hit the water right on time, with all the correct quantities of size 10s, and no size 5s, I’d still face problems with Wallace. Bigger orders would require bigger loans, and bigger loans would be harder to pay off, and in 1970 Wallace was telling me that he wasn’t interested in playing that game anymore. I recall one day, sitting in Wallace’s office. Both he and White were working me over pretty good. Wallace seemed to be enjoying himself, though White kept giving me looks that said, “Sorry, pal, this is my job.” As always I politely took the abuse they dished out, playing the role of meek small business owner. Long on contrition, short on credit. I knew the role backward and forward, but I remember feeling that at any moment I might cut loose a bloodcurdling scream. Here I’d built this dynamic company, from nothing, and by all measures it was a beast—sales doubling every year, like clockwork—and this was the thanks I got? Two bankers treating me like a deadbeat?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Florence saw me, and twitched. ‘I was just about to leave,’ I said. ‘I swear it.’ I looked at the girl called Annie, who nodded. ‘She was,’ she said. ‘She was.’ Florence gazed at me. I stepped out of the pantry and edged past her, into the parlour. She frowned. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ she asked, as I searched for my hat. ‘Why does everything look so strange?’ She picked up a box of matches, and lit the two oil-lamps and then a couple of candles. The light was taken up by a thousand polished surfaces, and she started. ‘You have cleaned the house!’ ‘Only the downstairs rooms. And the yard. And the front step,’ I said, in increasing tones of wretchedness. ‘And I made you supper.’ She gaped at me. ‘Why!’ ‘Your house was dirty. The woman next door said you were famous for it ...’ ‘You met the woman next door?’ ‘She gave me some tea.’ ‘I leave you in my home for one day and you quite transform it. You get yourself in with my neighbours. You’re thick, I suppose, with my best friend. And what has she been telling you?’ ‘I haven’t told her anything, I’m sure!’ called Annie from the kitchen. I pulled at a thread that had come loose at my cuff. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said quietly, ‘to have a tidy house. I thought -’ I had thought that it would make her like me. In Diana’s world, it would have. It, or something similar. ‘I liked my house the way it was,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I replied; and then, when she hesitated, I said - what, I suppose, I had been planning to say to her, all along - ‘Let me stay, Miss Banner! Oh, please let me stay!’ She gave me a bewildered look. ‘Miss Astley, I cannot!’ ‘I could sleep in here, like I did last night. I could clean and cook, like I did today. I could do your washing.’ I was growing more rash and desperate as I spoke. ‘Oh, how I longed to do those things, when I was in the house in St John’s Wood! But that devil I lived with said I must let the servants do it - that it would spoil my hands. But if I stayed here - well, I could look after your little boy while you are at work. I wouldn’t give him laudanum when he cried!’ Now Florence’s eyes were wider than ever. ‘Clean and do my washing? Look after Cyril? I’m sure I couldn’t let you do all those things!’ ‘Why not? I met fifty women in your street today, all doing exactly those things! It’s natural, ain’t it? If I was your wife - or Ralph’s wife, I mean - I should certainly do them then.’