Bewilderment

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 45 of 69 · 20 per page

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Where the very earliest accounts suggest that Moses had actually seen God on Mount Sinai, 46 later authors would declare this to be impossible. When Moses begged to see Yahweh’s “glory” (kavod) , Yahweh told him that no mere mortal could look upon the holiness of God and live. 47 In a scene that would become emblematic, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai to meet with God, a thick cloud and a blanket of impenetrable smoke hung over the summit. There was thunder and lightning and what sounded like deafening trumpet blasts. Moses may have stood in the place where God was, but he had no lucid vision of the divine. 48 The biblical writers made it clear that the kavod of Yahweh was not God himself; it was, as it were, a mere afterglow of God’s presence on earth, essentially and crucially separate from the divine reality itself, which would always be beyond human ken. The Israelites who had been deported to Babylon in 597 were not badly treated. They lived together in communities in the capital or in new settlements beside the canal and were allowed a degree of autonomy. But they were shocked, bewildered, and angry. Some wanted to pay the Babylonians back in kind and dreamed of dashing their children’s heads against a rock. 49 Others felt that Yahweh had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Marduk and was no longer worthy of their loyalty. How could they possibly worship a god who had no cult and no temple? 50 But five years after his deportation, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision of Yahweh’s “glory” beside the Chebar Canal. 51 It was a bewildering theophany, since it was impossible to make out anything clearly in the stormy obscurity of thunder, lightning, smoke, and wind. The trauma of exile had smashed the neat, rationalistic God of the Deuteronomists. Ezekiel’s vision left him stunned for a whole week. But one thing seemed clear. God had chosen to leave Jerusalem and take up residence with the exiles. Henceforth they must live as though the “glory” previously enshrined in the temple was indeed in their midst. But how could they do this?

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

  He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn’t responded to his previous plea for encouragement. I’d always considered myself a conscientious correspondent. (I’d sent countless letters and postcards home during my trip around the world. I’d written faithfully to Sarah.) And I always meant to answer Johnson’s letters. But before I got around to it there was always another one, waiting. Something about the sheer volume of his correspondence stopped me. Something about his neediness made me not want to encourage him. Many nights I’d sit down at the black Royal typewriter in my basement workshop, curl a piece of paper into the roller, and type, “Dear Jeff.” Then I’d draw a blank. I wouldn’t know where to begin, which of his fifty questions to start with, so I’d get up, attend to other things, and the next day there’d be yet another letter from Johnson. Or two. Soon I’d be three letters behind, suffering from crippling writer’s block. I asked Jeanne to deal with the Johnson File. Fine, she said. Within a month she thrust the file at me, exasperated. “You’re not paying me enough,” she said. AT SOME POINT I stopped reading Johnson’s letters all the way to the bottom. But from skimming them I learned that he was selling Tigers part-time and on weekends, that he’d decided to keep his day job as a social worker for Los Angeles County. I still couldn’t fathom it. Johnson just didn’t strike me as a people person. In fact he’d always seemed somewhat misanthropic. It was one of the things I’d liked about him. In April 1965 he wrote to say he’d quit his day job. He’d always hated it, he said, but the last straw had been a distressed woman in the San Fernando Valley. He’d been scheduled to check on her, because she’d threatened to kill herself, but he’d phoned her first to ask “if she really was going to kill herself that day.” If so, he didn’t want to waste the time and gas money driving all the way out to the valley. The woman, and Johnson’s superiors, took a dim view of his approach. They deemed it a sign that Johnson didn’t care. Johnson deemed it the same way. He didn’t care, and in that moment, Johnson wrote me, he understood himself, and his destiny. Social work wasn’t it. He wasn’t put here on this earth to fix people’s problems. He preferred to focus on their feet. In his heart of hearts Johnson believed that runners are God’s chosen, that running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form, is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana. I’d been around runners much of my life, but this kind of dewy romanticism was something I’d never encountered.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  This creates a very interesting irony, precisely because many scholars today think that 2 Thessalonians was not written by Paul. 2 Thessalonians is one of the Deutero-Pauline Epistles. Because of some of its theology, it looks unlike what Paul wrote in his other letters. The reason this is an irony, then, is because if 2 Thessalonians was written by Paul, then we know that there’s a forgery in Paul’s name floating around, a book that Paul did not write. It claims to be written by Paul because of 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2, verse 2. On the other hand, if Paul did not write 2 Thessalonians, then we also know there’s a letter floating around in Paul’s name from that time, namely, 2 Thessalonians itself. Thus, whether Paul wrote a letter or not, we know that there are Pauline forgeries from sometime during the first century. We get similar phenomena in later Christian writings. There’s a very interesting case that comes from the fourth century, the book is called the Apostolic Constitutions. This is a book written in the name of the twelve apostles, and it did give some directions about how the churches ought to be 261 run. In an interesting passage in the Apostolic Constitutions, written in the fourth century, in the name of the twelve apostles, we’re told people should not read books that claim to be written by the twelve apostles but are not. Now, why would somebody say that you shouldn’t read forged documents if the document that you’re reading, itself, is forged? The reason to write a document like that is to throw people off the scent of your own deceit. It was a common technique, and continues to be a common technique among forgers still today. We have seen in this course already some examples of forged documents, or pseudepigrapha. For example, we have considered the Gospel of Thomas, sometimes called the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, because it is written in the Coptic language. Coptic is an Egyptian language. The Gospel of Thomas was originally written Greek, but translated into Coptic. This Coptic Gospel of Thomas was discovered near the village of Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. It contains 114 sayings, allegedly of Jesus. Some of the sayings are very much like what’s in the Gospels of the New Testament, but other sayings support a Gnostic point of view. The reputed author of this Gospel of Thomas is Didymus Judas Thomas, the brother of Jesus, but, of course, that person did not actually write this Gospel. It was written at a much later date, probably in the early second century, and therefore is a pseudepigrapha, a forged writing. One of the most intriguing early forgeries that we now have is a Gospel that was allegedly written by Jesus’s closest disciple, Peter. I want to spend the bulk of this lecture talking about this Gospel of Peter, because it is a very interesting pseudepigrapha from early Christianity.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now—lets see—” He finds a pink one, chooses it “Pink—the color of a young flower....” I was staring fascinated at the enormous buttonround eyes in the incredibly childlike flesh of his face. “I always like to know my angels—intimately,” he went on. “It is so necessary. And I tell them about the others who have preceded them, so that, through them, they may learn to know me—and then, too, they form an angelic fraternity—a kind of angel-crown swirling about me, I like to think in my more poetic moments.” The tape-measure hypnotized me. He kept winding it about his neck, his stomach, he tossed it toward his feet, brought it back, draped it about his shoulders, and he continued to talk, the bulging eyes staring—his voice tumbling on and on, piling words on words, as disheveledly as the objects scattered about the room. “Now the rules,” he says. “Yes, there are always rules: Let me tell you, first, what I—uh—Like—To—Do—and what we will do at the last of each interview.” He giggled coyly, like a young embarrassed girl. “Come here, dear child. I must whisper it to you—not because Im ashamed but because it is so Dear to me that I must keep it close to me by whispering—” I got up from the chair and stood next to the bed. He whispered in my ear, his rubbery lips brushing it “I like to—” He studied my expression as he said it. “And do you know why? Because—” He puckered his lips again. “—because it is: So Nice!... And so you see I ask for very little of My Angels.” I sat back down again. “Now to get to know you,” he went on. “Let me guess your birthplace. Im good at this. You dont talk like an Easterner. Now where would it be likely you would have been raised? Your descent first?” he asked me.... “Oh, yes.... The Southwest! Thats it!... Texas!” And then he blurted the name of the city where I was born. I was tempted to say no, he was so smug, he had embarked on his game with such cock-sureness. Lying there like an enormous doll, he almost appears to me like what God would look like. I nodded, yes. “You see,” he went on with childish pride, “I told you I would guess. Now your age—” He guessed that too. “Your weight—” He was almost exactly right “Your height—” He hit it “Now the physical dimensions are over,” he went on. “Except for one. Let me see your hand—no, the palm up. Now—bring the middle finger down as far as it will go. Mark it with another finger. Thats it Now raise the middle finger and show me.... Fine....

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one. Language has borders that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.” 10 Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. It is “brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression.” 11 Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology. A modern skeptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God.” 12 But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God. We have not been doing our practice and have lost the “knack” of religion. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma “on faith” were their most important activity. This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I had to follow that penetrating glare no matter where it took me. NEIL: Masquerade 1 “WILL YOU HAVE SOME TEA?” The man who has just asked me that question is dressed like this: In black mounting police pants which cling tightly below the hips revealing squat bowlegs; boots which gleam vitreously and rise at least a foot above his ankles—silver studs forming a triangular design on the tip of each boot, then swirling about the upper part like a wayward-leafed clover. “One lump or two?” The belt—futilely trying to squeeze his large stomach (squeezing it—although he was not otherwise excessively fat—to the point where even his breathing has to come in short, sharp gasps) but actually causing it to bulge out insistently over and under it in two sagging, lumpy old tires of flesh—is also black. Looping in waves like a wildly zigzagging snake, the ubiquitous studs (and each silver stud is haloed by tiny gleaming beads) join in front at an enormous buckle at least five inches wide on which is engraved a large malevolently beaked, bead-eyed, spread eagle. “Do you take cream?” Over a dark vinyl shirt, he wore a black leather vest, tied crisscross with a long leather strap from his chest to his stomach. On each lapel of the vest is reproduced the triangular clover-leafed pattern as on the boots (and each silver stud, again, is encircled by the beaded haloes). The vest, the shirt, the legs of the pants are so tightly molded on his stubby body that his movements are restricted. Cautiously, he reaches for the teapot, the sugar, cream—each gesture threatening to burst a seam somewhere. “Perhaps you prefer lemon?” He himself, when you can pull your gaze from the hypnotizing costume in disbelief, is a florid rather short man, in his early 50s. Actually he looks much like what is depicted in American movies as the typical pre-war Bavarian who sits goodhumoredly drinking beer out of a giant stein, bellowing ebulliently in beered-up delight as a blonde-braided girl and a lederhosened man dance to the accompaniment of a merry accordion.... But dressed as he is, he resembles a somber, heavily silverlighted Christmas tree. It is not Halloween. It isnt even New Year’s, and we’re not even at a costume party. No. We’re sitting, instead in the early afternoon, in the living-room of a neat house in a lushly treed area in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. The room is decorated in “antique” style—but of what period, it is impossible to determine. Rather, it seems to have been decorated to suggest an indefinable time somewhere, nebulously, in The Past. Over a bursting metal sun pinned to the wall, are two crossed swords. A shield. A lance. The drapes are wine-purple velvet and droop to the floor in highlighted folds. There is a small replica of a suit of armor by the brick fireplace. An oriental-looking statue of a monkey is poised as if to spring from a small, arch-legged desk....

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Building on Einstein’s breakthrough, Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) developed quantum mechanics, an achievement that contradicted nearly every major postulate of Newtonian physics. So much for the traditional assumption that knowledge would proceed incrementally, as each generation improved on the discoveries of its forebears. In the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics, three-dimensional space and unidimensional time had become relative aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Atoms were not the solid, indestructible building blocks of nature but were found to be largely empty. Time passed at different rates for observers traveling at different speeds: it could go backward or even stop entirely. Euclid’s geometrical laws no longer provided the universal and necessary structure of nature. The planets did not move in their orbits because they were drawn to the sun by gravitational force operating at a distance but because the space in which they moved was actually curved. Subatomic phenomena were particularly baffling because they could be observed as both waves and particles of energy. “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed me,” Einstein recalled. “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under me, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built.” 1 If these discoveries were bewildering to scientists, they seemed utterly impenetrable to the layman. A curved space, finite and yet unbounded; objects that were not things but merely processes; an expanding universe; phenomena that took no definite shape until they were observed—all defied any received presupposition. Newton’s grand certainties had been replaced by a system that was ambiguous, shifting, and indeterminate. Despite Hilbert, we seemed no closer to understanding the universe. Human beings, randomly produced minutiae whose existence was probably ephemeral, still appeared to be cast adrift in a vast, impersonal universe. There was no clear answer as to what had preceded the “big bang” that had given birth to the universe. Even physicists did not believe that the equations of quantum theory described what was actually there; these mathematical abstractions could not be put into words, and our knowledge was confined to symbols that were mere shadows of an indescribable reality. Unknowing seemed built into the human condition. The revolution of the 1920s had overturned traditional scientific orthodoxy, and if that had happened once, it could happen again. Some Christians believed that the new physics was friendly to faith, even though Einstein always insisted that relativity was a scientific theory and had no bearing on religion. They seized eagerly on his famous remark in a debate with Bohr in Brussels (1927) that although quantum mechanics was “certainly imposing,” an “inner voice tells me that it … does not bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

• From Educated (2018)

  Of course I was a freak, and I knew it, but I didn’t understand how they knew it. When the bell rang, Vanessa shoved her notebook into her pack. Then she paused and said, “You shouldn’t make fun of that. It’s not a joke.” She walked away before I could reply. I stayed in my seat until everyone had gone, pretending the zipper on my coat was stuck so I could avoid looking anyone in the eye. Then I went straight to the computer lab to look up the word “Holocaust.” I don’t know how long I sat there reading about it, but at some point I’d read enough. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. I suppose I was in shock, but whether it was the shock of learning about something horrific, or the shock of learning about my own ignorance, I’m not sure. I do remember imagining for a moment, not the camps, not the pits or chambers of gas, but my mother’s face. A wave of emotion took me, a feeling so intense, so unfamiliar, I wasn’t sure what it was. It made me want to shout at her, at my own mother, and that frightened me. I searched my memories. In some ways the word “Holocaust” wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. Perhaps Mother had taught me about it, when we were picking rosehips or tincturing hawthorn. I did seem to have a vague knowledge that Jews had been killed somewhere, long ago. But I’d thought it was a small conflict, like the Boston Massacre, which Dad talked about a lot, in which half a dozen people had been martyred by a tyrannical government. To have misunderstood it on this scale—five versus six million—seemed impossible. I found Vanessa before the next lecture and apologized for the joke. I didn’t explain, because I couldn’t explain. I just said I was sorry and that I wouldn’t do it again. To keep that promise, I didn’t raise my hand for the rest of the semester. —THAT SATURDAY, I SAT at my desk with a stack of homework. Everything had to be finished that day because I could not violate the Sabbath. I spent the morning and afternoon trying to decipher the history textbook, without much success. In the evening, I tried to write a personal essay for English, but I’d never written an essay before—except for the ones on sin and repentance, which no one had ever read—and I didn’t know how. I had no idea what the teacher meant by the “essay form.” I scribbled a few sentences, crossed them out, then began again. I repeated this until it was past midnight. I knew I should stop—this was the Lord’s time—but I hadn’t even started the assignment for music theory, which was due at seven A.M . on Monday. The Sabbath begins when I wake up, I reasoned, and kept working. I awoke with my face pressed to the desk. The room was bright.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  At the end of his life, he recalled an occasion when he was attacked by one of the leading politicians of Athens and said to himself, “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” 27 Instead of being aggressively dogmatic about his ideas, Socrates was profoundly and determinedly agnostic and sought to show those who came to him how little they really knew. This was one of the reasons why he had become impatient with the phusikoi . In a dialogue that Plato set in the prison where Socrates had spent his last days, he makes Socrates explain that as a young man he had been “wonderfully keen” on natural science. He thought it would be splendid to know the causes of everything: “why it comes to be, why it perishes, and why it exists.” 28 He discovered, however, that the naturalists were not interested in these matters but concentrated solely on the material explanation of phenomena. He had been delighted to hear about Anaxagoras’s theories of the cosmic Mind but, to his disappointment, found that “the man made no use of Mind, nor gave it any responsibility for the management of things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things.” This concentration on the purely physical left too much out. It would be like saying that the reason he was sitting in jail was because “my body consists of bones and sinews,” and that the “relaxation of the sinews enables me to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent.” 29 But why were his bones and sinews not safely in Megara or Boeotia, “taken there by my belief as to the best course, if I had not thought it more right and honourable to endure whatever penalty the city ordered rather than escape or run away?” 30 Science should, of course, continue, but Socrates felt that the phusikoi were not asking the really important questions. If you were interested in morality or meaning, you would have to look elsewhere. Like the mystai at Eleusis, the people who came to converse with Socrates did not come to learn anything but to have an experience and a radical change of mind. The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise. The French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot has shown that unlike modern philosophy, which tends to be purely notional, Athenian rationalism derived its insights from practical exercises and a disciplined lifestyle. 31 The conceptual writings of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle were either teaching aids or merely served as a preliminary guide for those looking for a new way of living.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It is only when all these things, names and definitions, visual and other sensations, are rubbed together and subjected to tests in which questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice that finally, when human capacity is stretched to its limit, a spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out and illuminates the subject at issue. 60 If the argument was spiteful and competitive, the initiation would not work. The transcendent insight achieved was as much the product of a dedicated lifestyle as of intellectual striving. It was “not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter.” 61 In The Republic , Plato’s description of an ideal polis, he described the process of philosophical initiation in his famous allegory of the cave. 62 He imagined a group of men who had been chained up all their lives in a cave; turned away from the sunlight, they could see only shadows of objects in the outside world cast on the rocky wall. This was an image of the unenlightened human condition. We are so inured to our deprived vision that, like the prisoners, we assume that the ephemeral shadows we see are the true reality. If the prisoners were taken into the upper world, they would be bewildered and dazzled by its light, brilliance, and vibrancy; they would find it too much and would want to go back to their twilight existence. So they must be initiated gradually into this new mode of being. The sunlight was a symbol of the Good, the highest of the forms, source of knowledge and existence. The Good lay beyond anything we could experience in ordinary life. But at the end of a long apprenticeship, enlightened souls would be able to bask in its light. They would want to linger in the upper world, but had a duty to go back to the cave and enlighten their companions. They would be able to assess the problems of their shadowy world far more clearly now, but they would get no credit for it. Their former companions would probably laugh at them. They might even turn on their liberators and kill them—just, Plato implied, as the Athenians had executed Socrates. Toward the end of Plato’s life, as the political situation in Athens deteriorated, his vision became more elitist and hard-line. In The Laws , his last work, which described another utopian republic, he even introduced an inquisitorial mechanism to enforce a theological orthodoxy that took precedence over ethical behavior. The first duty of the state was to inculcate “the right thoughts about the gods, and then to live accordingly, well or not well.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Obviously the concept of “God” had no meaning at all; indeed, atheism and agnosticism were also incoherent positions, because there was nothing to be agnostic or atheistic about. 15 Like other intellectuals at this time, the logical positivists— as these philosophers became known—were attempting to return to irreducible fundamentals. Their stringent position also revealed the intolerant tendency of modernity that would characterize other types of fundamentalism. Their narrow definition of truth entailed a wholesale dismissal of the humanities and a refusal to entertain any rival view. 16 Yet human beings have always pondered questions that are not capable of definitive solutions: the contemplation of beauty, mortality, and suffering has been an essential part of human experience, and to many it seems not only arrogant but unrealistic to dismiss it out of hand. At the other extreme of the intellectual spectrum, a form of Christian positivism developed that represented a grassroots rebellion against modern rationalism. On April 9, 1906, the first congregation of Pentecostalists claimed to have experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles, convinced that it had descended upon them in the same way as upon Jesus’s disciples on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, when the divine presence had manifested itself in tongues of fire and given the apostles the ability to speak in strange languages. 17 When they spoke in “tongues,” Pentecostalists felt they were returning to the fundamental nub of religiosity that existed beneath any logical exposition of the Christian faith. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States, and the movement had spread to fifty other countries. 18 At first they were convinced that their experience heralded the Last Days: crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into their congregations in the firm belief that Jesus would soon return and establish a more just society. But after the First World War had shattered this early optimism, they saw their gift of tongues as a new way of speaking to God: Had not Saint Paul explained that when Christians found prayer difficult, “the Spirit itself intercedes for us with groans that exist beyond all utterance”? 19 In one sense, this was a distorted version of apophatic spirituality: Pentecostalists were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech. But the classical apophaticism of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Denys, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Eckhart had been suspicious of this type of experiential spirituality. At a Pentecostal service, men and women fell into tranced states, were seen to levitate, and felt that their bodies were melting in ineffable joy. They saw bright streaks of light in the air and sprawled on the ground, felled by a weight of glory. 20 This was a form of positivism, because Pentecostalists relied on the immediacy of sense experience to validate their beliefs.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But there was more to that day than my first sight of death. There was something else, and it also gave me pause. As the afternoon wore on, men started disappearing from our party. One by one their hawks had decided they wanted no more of proceedings, saw no good reason to return to their handlers, and instead sat in trees staring out over acres of fading pasture and wood, fluffed and implacable. At the end of the day we left with three fewer men and three fewer hawks, the former still waiting beneath their hawks’ respective branches. I knew goshawks were prone to sulk in trees: all the books had told me so. ‘No matter how tame and loveable,’ I’d read in Frank Illingworth’s Falcons and Falconry, ‘there are days when a goshawk displays a peculiar disposition. She is jumpy, fractious, unsociable. She may develop these symptoms of passing madness during an afternoon’s sport, and then the falconer is in for hours of annoyance.’ These men didn’t seem annoyed; fatalistic merely. They shrugged their waxed cotton shoulders, filled and lit pipes, waved the rest of us farewell. We trudged on into the gloom. There was something of the doomed polar expedition about it all, a kind of chivalric Edwardian vibe. No, no, you go on. I’ll only slow you down. The disposition of their hawks was peculiar. But it wasn’t unsociable. It was something much stranger. It seemed that the hawks couldn’t see us at all, that they’d slipped out of our world entirely and moved into another, wilder world from which humans had been utterly erased. These men knew they had vanished. Nothing could be done except wait. So we left them behind: three solitary figures staring up into trees in the winter dusk, mist thickening in the fields around them, each trusting that the world would later right itself and their hawk would return. And like the feathers in my pocket, their waiting also tugged at my faintly baffled heart.

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

  They were the first Americans I ever met who loved Japan. Stationed there during the Occupation, they fell under the spell of the culture, the food, the women, and when their hitch was up they simply couldn’t bring themselves to leave. So they’d launched an import magazine, when no one anywhere was interested in importing anything Japanese, and somehow they’d managed to keep it afloat for seventeen years. I told them my Crazy Idea and they listened with some interest. They made a pot of coffee and invited me to sit down. Was there a particular line of Japanese shoes I’d considered importing? they asked. I told them I liked Tiger, a nifty brand manufactured by Onitsuka Co., down in Kobe, the largest city in southern Japan. “Yes, yes, we’ve seen it,” they said. I told them I was thinking of heading down there, meeting the Onitsuka people face to face. In that case, the ex-GIs said, you’d better learn a few things about doing business with the Japanese. “The key,” they said, “is don’t be pushy. Don’t come on like the typical asshole American, the typical gaijin—rude, loud, aggressive, not taking no for an answer. The Japanese do not react well to the hard sell. Negotiations here tend to be soft, sinewy. Look how long it took the Americans and Russians to coax Hirohito into surrendering. And even when he did surrender, when his country was reduced to a heap of ashes, what did he tell his people? ‘The war situation hasn’t developed to Japan’s advantage.’ It’s a culture of indirection. No one ever turns you down flat. No one ever says, straight out, no. But they don’t say yes, either. They speak in circles, sentences with no clear subject or object. Don’t be discouraged, but don’t be cocky. You might leave a man’s office thinking you’ve blown it, when in fact he’s ready to do a deal. You might leave thinking you’ve closed a deal, when in fact you’ve just been rejected. You never know.” I frowned. Under the best of circumstances I was not a great negotiator. Now I was going to have to negotiate in some kind of funhouse with trick mirrors? Where normal rules didn’t apply? After an hour of this baffling tutorial, I shook hands with the ex-GIs and said my good-byes. Feeling suddenly that I couldn’t wait, that I needed to strike quickly, while their words were fresh in my mind, I raced back to my hotel, threw everything into my little suitcase and backpack, and phoned Onitsuka to make an appointment. Later that afternoon I boarded a train south. JAPAN WAS RENOWNED for its impeccable order and extreme cleanliness. Japanese literature, philosophy, clothing, domestic life, all were marvelously pure and spare. Minimalist. Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing—the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook. Spotless.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  As a young man, he had been intensely religious and even considered becoming a Jesuit. When his adolescent ardor faded, Diderot threw in his lot with the philosophes and studied biology, physiology, and medicine, but he had not yet given up on religion. In his Pensées philosophiques , like any good Deist, he sought rational evidence from Descartes and Newton to combat atheism, and was increasingly drawn to microscopic biology, which claimed to find evidence for the existence of God in the minutiae of nature. But he was not wholly convinced. Diderot passionately believed that even our most cherished beliefs must be subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny, and started to attend the lectures of Pigeon’s circle, where he learned of some disturbing new experiments. In 1741, the Swiss zoologist Abraham Trembley discovered that a hydra could regenerate itself if cut in two. In 1745, John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest, found that minute creatures generated spontaneously in putrefying gravy and that a whole world of infinitesimally small organisms inhabited a single drop of water, coming into being and passing away only to be replaced by others within the span of a few minutes. Perhaps, Diderot could not help reflecting, the whole cosmos was like that drop of water, endlessly creating and re-creating itself without the intervention of a Creator. In 1749, Diderot published A Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See , the treatise that put him in prison, which took the form of a fictional dialogue between Nicolas Sanderson, the blind Cambridge mathematician, and Gervase Holmes, an Anglican minister who represented Newtonian orthodoxy. 45 Sanderson is on his deathbed and can find no consolation in Newton’s proof for God’s existence, because he cannot see any of the marvels that so impressed Holmes. Sanderson has been forced to rely on ideas that could be tested mathematically, and this has led him into an outright denial of God’s existence. At the very beginning of time, Sanderson believes, there had been no trace of God—only swirling particles in an empty void. The evolution of our world was probably a good deal more arbitrary and messier than the tidy, purposive process described by Newton. Here, remarkably, Diderot makes Sanderson envisage a process of brutal natural selection. The “design” we see in the universe is simply due to the survival of the fittest. Only those animals survived “whose mechanism was not defective in any important particular and who were able to support themselves,” 46 while those born without heads, feet, or intestines perished.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  No, still no idea. But I needed the book all the same because on the cover was a goshawk. She looked up from under her brows in truculent fury, her plumage scalloped and scaled in a riot of saffron and bronze. Her talons gripped the painted glove so tightly my fingers prickled in numb sympathy. She was beautiful; taut with antipathy; everything a child feels when angry and silenced. As soon as we were home I raced upstairs to my room, jumped onto the bed, lay on my tummy and opened the book. And I remember lying there, propped on my elbows with my feet in the air, reading the opening lines of The Goshawk for the very first time. When I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered in sacking. But he was tumultuous and frightening, repulsive in the same way as snakes are frightening to people who do not know them. It was unusual. It didn’t sound like my other falconry books at all. The eight-year-old girl that was me read on with a frown. It wasn’t anything like them. This was a book about falconry by a man who seemed to know nothing about it. He talked about the bird as if it were a monster and he wasn’t training it properly. I was bewildered. Grown-ups were experts. They wrote books to tell you about things you didn’t know; books on how to do things. Why would a grown-up write about not being able to do something? What’s more, the book was full of things that were completely beside the point. It talked, disappointingly, of things like foxhunting and war and history. I didn’t understand its references to the Holy Roman Empire and Strindberg and Mussolini and I didn’t know what a pickelhaube was, and I didn’t know what any of this was doing in a book that was supposed to be about a hawk.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid thwack of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me. I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all. ‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’ And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth. ‘Why is she doing it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’ I was as bewildered as a child. ‘What should I do?’ There was a long pause, and then a longer sigh. ‘Are you feeding her chicks?’ he said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Stop feeding her chicks! They’re too rich for her at this stage. She’ll be fine, she’s nearly there. Just feed her rabbit. It won’t hurt her, but it’ll stop this problem.’ All the trust I had left in the world rested in the fact that the hawk wanted to fly to me. Now she was scared to land on my fist – she didn’t trust me – and I could not explain to Stuart how awful this felt. I thanked him. I had asked for advice, and he had given it, simply and precisely. This is the problem. This is how you fix it. But I didn’t believe him. It can’t just be the food. I have done something bad, I thought miserably. Something terrible.

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

  He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn’t responded to his previous plea for encouragement. I’d always considered myself a conscientious correspondent. (I’d sent countless letters and postcards home during my trip around the world. I’d written faithfully to Sarah.) And I always meant to answer Johnson’s letters. But before I got around to it there was always another one, waiting. Something about the sheer volume of his correspondence stopped me. Something about his neediness made me not want to encourage him. Many nights I’d sit down at the black Royal typewriter in my basement workshop, curl a piece of paper into the roller, and type, “Dear Jeff.” Then I’d draw a blank. I wouldn’t know where to begin, which of his fifty questions to start with, so I’d get up, attend to other things, and the next day there’d be yet another letter from Johnson. Or two. Soon I’d be three letters behind, suffering from crippling writer’s block. I asked Jeanne to deal with the Johnson File. Fine, she said. Within a month she thrust the file at me, exasperated. “You’re not paying me enough,” she said. AT SOME POINT I stopped reading Johnson’s letters all the way to the bottom. But from skimming them I learned that he was selling Tigers part-time and on weekends, that he’d decided to keep his day job as a social worker for Los Angeles County. I still couldn’t fathom it. Johnson just didn’t strike me as a people person. In fact he’d always seemed somewhat misanthropic. It was one of the things I’d liked about him. In April 1965 he wrote to say he’d quit his day job. He’d always hated it, he said, but the last straw had been a distressed woman in the San Fernando Valley. He’d been scheduled to check on her, because she’d threatened to kill herself, but he’d phoned her first to ask “if she really was going to kill herself that day.” If so, he didn’t want to waste the time and gas money driving all the way out to the valley. The woman, and Johnson’s superiors, took a dim view of his approach. They deemed it a sign that Johnson didn’t care. Johnson deemed it the same way. He didn’t care, and in that moment, Johnson wrote me, he understood himself, and his destiny. Social work wasn’t it. He wasn’t put here on this earth to fix people’s problems. He preferred to focus on their feet. In his heart of hearts Johnson believed that runners are God’s chosen, that running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form, is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana. I’d been around runners much of my life, but this kind of dewy romanticism was something I’d never encountered.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When I was a student I took a paper on Tragedy as part of my English degree. This was not without irony, for I was comprehensively tragic. I wore black, smoked filterless Camels, skulked about the place with kohl-caked eyes and failed to write a single essay about Greek Tragedy, Jacobean Tragedy, Shakespearian Tragedy, or indeed do much at all. I’d like to write Miss Macdonald a glowing report, one of my supervisors noted drily, but as I’ve never seen her and have no idea what she looks like, this I cannot do. But I read all the same. I read a lot. And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom. It was the Tragedy paper that led me to read Freud, because he was still fashionable back then, and because psychoanalysts had their shot at explaining tragedy too. And after reading him I began to see all sorts of psychological transferences in my falconry books. I saw those nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life: wildness, power, virility, independence and strength. By identifying with their hawks as they trained them, they could introject, or repossess, those qualities. At the same time they could exercise their power by ‘civilising’ a wild and primitive creature. Masculinity and conquest: two imperial myths for the price of one. The Victorian falconer assumed the power and strength of the hawk. The hawk assumed the manners of the man. For White, too, falconry involved strange projections, but of very different qualities. His young German goshawk was a living expression of all the dark, discreditable desires within himself he’d tried to repress for years: it was a thing fey, fairy, feral, ferocious and cruel. He had tried for so long to be a gentleman. Tried to fit in, to adhere to all the rules of civilised society, to be normal, to be like everyone else. But his years at Stowe and his analysis and the fear of war had brought him to breaking point. He had refused humanity in favour of hawks, but he could not escape himself. Once again White was engaged in a battle to civilise the perversity and unruliness within himself. Only now he had put those things in the hawk, and he was trying to civilise them there. He found himself in a strange, locked battle with a bird that was all the things he longed for, but had always fought against. It was a terrible paradox. A proper tragedy. No wonder living with Gos brought him nearly to madness.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Her eyelashes were painted arched over round blue coquettish eyes, and of all the queens I will meet in L.A., Trudi has most accurately been able to duplicate the female stance so that, unlike most other queens, she has not become the mere parody of a woman. “Hi, baby,” she says, pursing her lips cutely, “welcome to the snakepit.” She indicates the scene about her as if she had been born to reign over it. “And this is Skipper,” Miss Destiny continues, and as if presenting his credentials adds, in a lower tone for me only—and I can barely hear her over the blasting music: “He used to be a physique model, baby, and he became quite famous in Hollywood once—hes even hustled Officer Morgan—and that’s the truth—but hell tell you all about that, Im sure—” And Skipper is restlessly scrutinizing the familiar scene; almost—it seems at times—in bewilderment—as if looking around him each moment, he is newly aware of where he is. Often he squinted as if to cloud the scene from his mind. He is now—and it will turn out is usually—talking about a plan to hit the Bigtime again. “Hi, jack!” he says, and his eyes rake the bar.... And all at once he doesnt look nearly as young as he first appeared. “And my dear, Dear sistuh Lola—” Miss Destiny is saying (queens calling each other sisters); and Lola is quite possibly “dear, Dear” because undoubtedly shes the ugliest queen in the world, with painted eyes like a silent moviestar, and a black turtleneck sweater running into her coarse shiny black hair so that it seems shes wearing a hood—and has a husky meanman’s voice and looks like nothing but an ugly man in semidrag. “Always room for one more,” she rasps, welcoming me. “And you have of course already met Mistuh Chuck,” Miss Destiny says sighingly, and Chuck tipped his widehat in salutation: “Howdee.” “And this is Tiguh—” Miss Destiny went on. And Tiger (names, you will notice, as obviously emphatically masculine as the queens’ are emphatically obviously feminine and for the same reason: to emphasize the roles they will play) is a heavily tattooed youngman who has precisely that quality you sense in caged tigers glowering savgely through iron bars. “And Darling Dolly—” Miss Destiny said. And Darling Dolly corrects Miss Destiny: “Darling Dolly Dane , Destiny dear.” And Destiny corrects her: “Miss Destiny, Darling Dolly Dane, dear.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  2 Two youngmen near the Bourbon House face each other on the street—one, blackhaired and meanfaced, threatening the other with a large stick; the other, a small blond boy of about 18 (turned-up nose, cleft-chin, blue eyes, masses of blond hair over his forehead—a replica of the current, boyish, blond-faced teenage idols of rock-n-roll), tensely and imminently uncertainly menacing the other with a knife poised gleaming in the blind sun. Behind the dark one hovers a small skinny girl like an anxious vulture. Her painted mouth seems to have been slashed carelessly across her pinched face in a gaping, scarlet gash. The stick and the knife are ready to attack. Eyes starved for violence, the girl shouts malevolently to her dark boyfriend, pushing him forward: “Go, man! Kill the motherfucker!” The two poised malebodies hurl themselves against each other, grapple, separate, lock for a long motionless moment as if in passion. The blond boy staggered back, a bloody slit at his temple. The blackhaired youngman stands looking down in bewilderment at his own hand, ripped at the thumb and the finger so that it opened like the webbed foot of a duck. “Killim!” the girl screamed savagely at the dark one. Someone from the Bourbon House rushed out shouting: “Police! Police!” Like a stone scattering birds, that hollered word disbands the group quickly.