Confusion

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was a fat, gold watch-chain. The waistcoat it swung from was striped and rather flash. And when I looked again at the man’s face - there was light upon it, now, from the lamp at the window - I saw that his whiskers and his hair were gingerish and thick. His eyes were brown, his cheeks rather hollow; but for all that, he looked quite unmistakably like Walter. Like Walter, whom Kitty lay with and kissed. The idea had a peculiar effect on me. I spoke - but it was as if someone else were doing the speaking, not me. I said: ‘All right. I’ll do it. I’ll - touch you; for a sov.’ He grew business-like. When I stepped away I felt him linger a moment at the window, then follow. I went not to my old knocking-shop - I had only the most confused sense of what I was about, but knew I oughtn’t to get stuck in a room with him, and risk having him opt for the Robert after all - but to a little court nearby, where there was a nook, above a grating, which the gay girls used as a lavatory. As I approached it, indeed, a woman emerged, pressing her skirts between her legs to dry herself: she gave me a wink. When she had gone, I stood waiting; and a moment later the man appeared. He had a newspaper shielding the fork of his trousers, and when he took the paper away I saw a bulge there the size of a bottle. I had a moment of panic; but then he came and stood before me, and looked expectant. When I began to pull at his buttons, he closed his eyes. I got his cock out, and studied it: I had never seen one before, so close, and - no disrespect to the gent concerned - it seemed quite monstrous. But there are always jokes about such things in the music hall: I had a pretty good idea of how they worked. Seizing hold of it, I began - very inexpertly, I am sure, though he didn’t seem to mind - to pump it. ‘How thick and long it is,’ I said then - I had heard that it was every man’s ambition to be spoken to thus, at such moments. The fellow gave a sigh, and opened his eyes. ‘Oh, I do wish you would kiss me there,’ he whispered. ‘Your mouth is such a perfect one - quite like a girl’s.’ I slowed my rhythm, and took another look at his straining cock; and again, when I knelt, it was as if it were someone else who was kneeling, not myself. I thought, This is how Walter tastes!

• From Educated (2018)

  Then, just as Dad reaches the end of his lecture and takes a breath to begin again, Tyler slides all three of the flawless tacos into Mother’s juicer, the one she uses to make tinctures, and turns it on. A loud roar howls through the kitchen, imposing a kind of silence. The roar ceases; Dad resumes. Tyler pours the orange liquid into a glass and begins to drink, carefully, delicately, because his front teeth are still loose, still trying to jump out of his mouth. Many memories might be summoned to symbolize this period of our lives, but this is the one that has stayed with me: of Dad’s voice rising up from the floor while Tyler drinks his tacos. As spring turned to summer, Dad’s resolve turned to denial—he acted as if the argument were over and he had won. He stopped talking about Tyler’s leaving and refused to hire a hand to replace him. One warm afternoon, Tyler took me to visit Grandma- and Grandpa-over-in-town, who lived in the same house where they’d raised Mother, a house that could not have been more different from ours. The decor was not expensive but it was well cared for—creamy white carpet on the floors, soft floral paper on the walls, thick, pleated curtains in the windows. They seldom replaced anything. The carpet, the wallpaper, the kitchen table and countertops—everything was the same as it was in the slides I’d seen of my mother’s childhood. Dad didn’t like us spending time there. Before he retired Grandpa had been a mailman, and Dad said no one worth our respect would have worked for the Government. Grandma was even worse, Dad said. She was frivolous. I didn’t know what that word meant, but he said it so often that I’d come to associate it with her—with her creamy carpet and soft petal wallpaper. Tyler loved it there. He loved the calm, the order, the soft way my grandparents spoke to each other. There was an aura in that house that made me feel instinctively, without ever being told, that I was not to shout, not to hit anyone or tear through the kitchen at full speed. I did have to be told, and told repeatedly, to leave my muddy shoes by the door. “Off to college!” Grandma said once we were settled onto the floral-print sofa. She turned to me. “You must be so proud of your brother!” Her eyes squinted to accommodate her smile. I could see every one of her teeth. Leave it to Grandma to think getting yourself brainwashed is something to celebrate, I thought. “I need the bathroom,” I said. Alone in the hall I walked slowly, pausing with each step to let my toes sink into the carpet. I smiled, remembering that Dad had said Grandma could keep her carpet so white only because Grandpa had never done any real work. “My hands might be dirty,” Dad had said, winking at me and displaying his blackened fingernails.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  33 Although Abraham is presented to us as a man of vision, the Genesis narratives show how difficult it is to see or understand the divine as we struggle with life’s cruel dilemmas. There is no clear, consistent image of God in Genesis. In the famous first chapter, the Creator God appears center stage, with no rival, supremely powerful and benign, blessing all the things that he has made. But the rest of Genesis seems to deconstruct this tidy theology. The God who was supremely powerful in chapter 1 has lost control of his creation within two chapters; the utterly fair and equitable God who blessed everything impartially is later guilty of blatant favoritism, and his somewhat arbitrary choices (the chosen ones are rarely paragons) set human beings murderously against each other. At the time of the Flood, the benign creator becomes the cruel destroyer. And finally the God who was such a powerful presence in chapter 1 fades away and makes no further appearances, so that at the end of the book, Joseph and his brothers have to rely on their own dreams and insights—just as we do. Genesis shows that our glimpses of what we call “God” can be as partial, terrible, ambiguous, and paradoxical as the world we live in. As Abraham’s plight on Mount Moriyya shows, it is not easy to “see” what God is, and there are no simple answers to life’s perplexities. The Bible traces the long process whereby this confusing deity became Israel’s only icon of the sacred. 34 Traditionally in the Middle East, it was impossible to confine the holiness of ilam (“divinity”) to a single symbol. Any image of the divine is bound to be inadequate, because it cannot possibly express the all-encompassing reality of being itself. If it is not balanced by other symbols, there is a danger that people will think of the sacred too simplistically. If that symbol is a personalized deity, they could easily start to imagine “him” functioning as if he were a human being like themselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to their own. Idolatry, the worship of a human image of the divine, would become one of the besetting problems of monotheism. In the Bible, we see that the Israelites were deeply vexed by the idolatry of the “foreign nations” ( goyim) , whose gods were merely “gold and silver, products of human skill.”

• From Educated (2018)

  Shopping was forbidden on the Sabbath—I’d never purchased so much as a stick of gum on a Sunday—but Mary casually unpacked eggs, milk and pasta without acknowledging that every item she was placing in our communal fridge was a violation of the Lord’s Commandments. When she withdrew a can of Diet Coke, which my father said was a violation of the Lord’s counsel for health, I again fled to my room. —THE NEXT MORNING, I got on the bus going the wrong direction. By the time I’d corrected my mistake, the lecture was nearly finished. I stood awkwardly in the back until the professor, a thin woman with delicate features, motioned for me to take the only available seat, which was near the front. I sat down, feeling the weight of everyone’s eyes. The course was on Shakespeare, and I’d chosen it because I’d heard of Shakespeare and thought that was a good sign. But now I was here I realized I knew nothing about him. It was a word I’d heard, that was all. When the bell rang, the professor approached my desk. “You don’t belong here,” she said. I stared at her, confused. Of course I didn’t belong, but how did she know? I was on the verge of confessing the whole thing—that I’d never gone to school, that I hadn’t really met the requirements to graduate—when she added, “This class is for seniors.” “There are classes for seniors?” I said. She rolled her eyes as if I were trying to be funny. “This is 382. You should be in 110.” It took most of the walk across campus before I understood what she’d said, then I checked my course schedule and, for the first time, noticed the numbers next to the course names. I went to the registrar’s office, where I was told that every freshman-level course was full. What I should do, they said, was check online every few hours and join if someone dropped. By the end of the week I’d managed to squeeze into introductory courses in English, American history, music and religion, but I was stuck in a junior-level course on art in Western civilization. Freshman English was taught by a cheerful woman in her late twenties who kept talking about something called the “essay form,” which, she assured us, we had learned in high school. My next class, American history, was held in an auditorium named for the prophet Joseph Smith. I’d thought American history would be easy because Dad had taught us about the Founding Fathers—I knew all about Washington, Jefferson, Madison. But the professor barely mentioned them at all, and instead talked about “philosophical underpinnings” and the writings of Cicero and Hume, names I’d never heard. In the first lecture, we were told that the next class would begin with a quiz on the readings.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  2 But Einstein was not referring to the personal God; he had simply used the “Old One” (a medieval Kabbalistic image) to symbolize the impersonal, intelligible, and immanent order of what exists. The British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, however, saw relativity as evidence for the existence of mind in nature; Canon Arthur F. Smethurst regarded it as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit; 3 others saw the new conception of time as validating the after-life; 4 big bang theory was thought to substantiate the Genesis account; 5 and some even managed to see the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics as support for God’s providential control of the world. 6 This type of speculation was ill-conceived. Inured to their need for scientific proof, these apologists were still interpreting the ancient biblical symbols in too literal a manner. Max Planck had a more sage view of the relations between science and religion. The two were quite compatible: science dealt with the objective, material world and religion with values and ethics. Conflict between them was based “on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statement.” 7 After Einstein, it became disturbingly clear that not only was science unable to provide us with definitive certainty but its findings were inherently limited and provisional too. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated the principle of indeterminacy in nuclear physics, showing that it was impossible for scientists to achieve an objective result because the act of observation itself affected their understanding of the object of their investigation. In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906–78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that are not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could be proved or disproved only by input from outside. This completely undercut the traditional assumption of systematic decidability. In his 1929 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that Descartes’ quest for certainty could no longer be the goal of modern philosophy. Heisenberg had liberated us from seventeenth-century mechanics, when the universe had seemed like a giant machine made up of separate components, whereas this new generation of scientists was revealing the deep interconnectedness of all reality. Apparently our brains were incapable of achieving a complete worldview or incontrovertible proof. Our minds were limited, and some problems, it seemed, would remain insoluble.

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

  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? Six months previously I would never have done this. Things were different now. Onitsuka had already broken the spirit of our deal, and my spirit, so I pulled the cap off my pen and signed the contract. I signed the heck out of that Canada contract. Then I went out for Mexican food. Now about that logo. My new soccer-qua-football shoe would need something to set it apart from the stripes of Adidas and Onitsuka. I recalled that young artist I’d met at Portland State. What was her name? Oh, yes, Carolyn Davidson. She’d been in the office a number of times, doing brochures and ad slicks. When I got back to Oregon I invited her to the office again and told her we needed a logo. “What kind?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “That gives me a lot to go on,” she said. “Something that evokes a sense of motion,” I said. “Motion,” she said, dubious. She looked confused. Of course she did, I was babbling. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t an artist. I showed her the soccer-football shoe and said, unhelpfully: This. We need something for this. She said she’d give it a try. Motion, she mumbled, leaving my office. Motion. Two weeks later she came back with a portfolio of rough sketches. They were all variations on a single theme, and the theme seemed to be... fat lightning bolts? Chubby check marks? Morbidly obese squiggles? Her designs did evoke motion, of a kind, but also motion sickness. None spoke to me. I singled out a few that held out some promise and asked her to work with those. Days later—or was it weeks?—Carolyn returned and spread a second series of sketches across the conference table. She also hung a few on the wall. She’d done several dozen more variations on the original theme, but with a freer hand. These were better. Closer. Woodell and I and a few others looked them over. I remember Johnson being there, too, though why he’d come out from Wellesley, I can’t recall. Gradually we inched toward a consensus. We liked... this one... slightly more than the others.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  And … Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail.” 36 He would discuss only those subjects that his conversation partners felt comfortable with. Laches, for example, as a general in the army, thought he understood the nature of courage and was convinced that it was a noble quality. And yet, Socrates pointed out, relentlessly piling up one example after another, a courageous act could seem stupid and foolhardy. When Niceas pointed out that, on the contrary, courage required the intelligence to appreciate terror, Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future and were unknown to us, so we could not separate the knowledge of future evil from our present and past experience. How could we separate courage from the other virtues when a truly valiant person must also be temperate, just, and wise and good? A single virtue like courage must in reality be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation, these veterans of the Peloponnesian War, who had all endured the trauma of battle and should have been experts on the subject, found that they did not have the first idea what courage was. They felt deeply perplexed and rather stupid, as though they were ignorant children who needed to go back to school. Socrates’ dialectic was a rational version of the Indian Brahmodya, which had led participants to a direct appreciation of the transcendent otherness that lay beyond the reach of words. However closely he and his partners reasoned, something always eluded them, so the Socratic dialogue led people to the shocking realization of the profundity of their ignorance. Instead of achieving intellectual certainty, his rigorous logos had uncovered a transcendence that seemed an inescapable part of human experience. But Socrates did not see this unknowing as a handicap. People must interrogate their most fundamental prejudices or they would live superficial, expedient lives. As he explained to the court that condemned him to death: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living.” 37 Socrates was a living summons to the paramount duty of stringent self-examination. He described himself as a gadfly, perpetually stinging people into awareness, forcing them to wake up to themselves, question their every opinion, and attend to their spiritual progress. 38 The important thing was not the solution to a problem but the path that people traveled in search of it. To philosophize was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself. At the end of his unsettling conversation with Socrates, Laches had a “conversion” (metanoia) , literally a “turning around.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  We stand uncertainly under the thatched roof of the pavilion. Behind us is a straggling copse of chestnut and limes and a ditch full of leaves and rainwater. The air about us is mild, still, pointed with tiny flies, the sky dull and flat as unpolished brass. There’s an ill savour to the air. I am not sure I want to be here. On the other side of the pitch is a familiar building, a red-brick Victorian Camelot with crenellated battlements, mullioned windows, and a tiny Gothic tower. My office is up there on the top floor. Books, papers, a desk, a chair, a carpet of dove-coloured wool; air that always smells of sunbaked dust, even in winter when frost burns the glass and makes drop-shadows on the panes. I look at the blank façade and think of the letter I’d sent that morning to a German university telling them I couldn’t accept the job they’d offered me that winter. I told them I was sorry, told them that my father had died and I needed to be here. But I was not sorry, and they were not the reasons for my refusal. I can’t go to Berlin in December, I’d thought, appalled. I have a hawk to fly. Ambitions, life-plans: these were for other people. I could no more imagine the future than a hawk could. I didn’t need a career. I didn’t want one. White doves fly up from the roof. I watch their wings flicker against the sky. Sudden vertigo. Something shifts in my head. Something huge. Then everything I see collapses into something else. I blink. It looks the same. But it isn’t. This is not my college. Nothing about it feels familiar. It doesn’t even feel like a college at all. Just a few acres of buildings, giant collector’s boxes of brick and stone crammed with the detritus of centuries. In the chapel are painted angels whose faces are all the same, uncanny angels with swords and bright pre-Raphaelite plumage. There’s a bronze Benin cockerel in the dining hall, and a skeleton in a cupboard in the Fellows’ cloakroom, a real, yellowed skeleton held together with pins and twisted wire. Beyond my office building are a host of yew trees clipped into absurd wind-blown boulders. A bronze horse on one lawn, and a hare on another, and a metal book held to the ground by a sculpted ball and chain. Everything here is built from things pulled from dreams. A few weeks earlier scores of bay trees in pots were set out all over the college for an Alice In Wonderland-themed Ball; I’d watched students wiring flowers into their branches: soft fabric roses of white and pillarbox red.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I think now that White’s quest for the hawks was his final test of Gos: he was behaving like a fearful man who has finally won someone’s love and, unsure whether that love can be trusted, decides it is safer to obsess about someone else. But when I was small his actions were incomprehensible. ‘WHY?’ I’d howled. ‘Why did he abandon his goshawk? I would never have done that!’ My mother was wiping the bathroom mirror. I could see her face in it, and behind it my own, pale and outraged. It was my first reading of the book. I’d reached the bit about the sparrowhawks and I was too upset to read any more. I’d jumped from my bed and gone looking for reassurance. ‘Is this the Goshawk book you’ve been telling me about?’ ‘Yes! He’s got his hawk ready to fly free but then he starts making traps to try and catch some sparrowhawks and goes off and leaves the hawk behind and it’s stupid.’ A long pause. ‘Maybe he was tired of his hawk,’ she said, the hand with the cloth in it now pressed to the sink. This made no sense at all. ‘But how could he be tired of a hawk?’ And now she saw I was upset, and she put down the cloth and drew me into a hug. ‘I don’t know, Helen. Perhaps he was a silly man.’ Gos’s small feral head, tipped and streaked and patterned like a cat’s, looks about in puzzlement. This is not what normally happens. His sharp black beak opens and closes. He is hungry. He hops along the railing around the well, gripping it tight with toes and claws. Flakes of rust fall. Hungry. He hops further, looking down the long line of the creance and still not finding the man at the end of it where he always is. Where was he? Gos needed vantage to see. So he flew across to the nearest tree. There was a branch just above him. He flew up to it. Hawks hate to sit on a lower perch when a higher one is offered, and so he hopped and scrambled onto the one above him, and then onto another, and another, laddering up the tree, pulling the creance behind him. Soon he sat at the very top of the unclimbable oak, the world offering itself to him; the skies fletched with pigeons, the fields sinking towards Stowe, the roof of the palace and its glittering lakes and all its obelisks and temples and classical avenues, all the lines of sight cut into the landscape by men two hundred years ago, with his small hawkish face looking down upon it as if this view, this perfect view, was the reason it was made.

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

  Also, we had magazine ads slated to run, to coincide with the shipments, and we needed to tell the graphic artists what name to put in the ads. Finally, we needed to file paperwork with the U.S. Patent Office. Woodell wheeled into my office. “Time’s up,” he said. I rubbed my eyes. “I know.” “What’s it going to be?” “I don’t know.” My head was splitting. By now the names had all run together into one mind-melting glob. Falconbengaldimensionsix. “There is… one more suggestion,” Woodell said. “From who?” “Johnson phoned first thing this morning,” he said. “Apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night.” I rolled my eyes. “A dream?” “He’s serious,” Woodell said. “He’s always serious.” “He says he sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and saw the name before him,” Woodell said. “What is it?” I asked, bracing myself. “Nike.” “Huh?” “Nike.” “Spell it.” “N-I-K-E,” Woodell said. I wrote it on a yellow legal pad. The Greek goddess of victory. The Acropolis. The Parthenon. The Temple. I thought back. Briefly. Fleetingly. “We’re out of time,” I said. “Nike. Falcon. Or Dimension Six.” “Everyone hates Dimension Six.” “Everyone but me.” He frowned. “It’s your call.” He left me. I made doodles on my pad. I made lists, crossed them out. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I needed to telex the factory—now. I hated making decisions in a hurry, and that’s all I seemed to do in those days. I looked to the ceiling. I gave myself two more minutes to mull over the different options, then walked down the hall to the telex machine. I sat before it, gave myself three more minutes. Reluctantly, I punched out the message. Name of new brand is… A lot of things were rolling around in my head, consciously, unconsciously. First, Johnson had pointed out that seemingly all iconic brands—Clorox, Kleenex, Xerox—have short names. Two syllables or less. And they always have a strong sound in the name, a letter like “K” or “X,” that sticks in the mind. That all made sense. And that all described Nike. Also, I liked that Nike was the goddess of victory. What’s more important, I thought, than victory? I might have heard, in the far recesses of my mind, Churchill’s voice. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. I might have recalled the victory medal awarded to all veterans of World War II, a bronze medallion with Athena Nike on the front, breaking a sword in two. I might have. Sometimes I believe that I did. But in the end I don’t really know what led me to my decision. Luck? Instinct? Some inner spirit? Yes. “What’d you decide?” Woodell asked me at the end of the day. “Nike,” I mumbled. “Hm,” he said. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Maybe it’ll grow on us,” he said. Maybe.

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

  The Japanese believe climbing Fuji is a mystical experience, a ritual act of celebration, and I was overcome with a desire to climb it, right then. I wanted to ascend into the clouds. I decided to wait, however. I would return when I had something to celebrate. I WENT BACK to Tokyo and presented myself at Importer . The two ex-GIs in charge, thick-necked, brawny, very busy, looked as if they might chew me out for intruding and wasting their time. But within minutes their gruff exterior dissolved and they were warm, friendly, pleased to meet someone from back home. We talked mostly about sports. Can you believe the Yankees won it all again? How about that Willie Mays? None better. Yessir, none better. Then they told me their story. 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?

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

  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? Six months previously I would never have done this. Things were different now. Onitsuka had already broken the spirit of our deal, and my spirit, so I pulled the cap off my pen and signed the contract. I signed the heck out of that Canada contract. Then I went out for Mexican food. Now about that logo. My new soccer-qua-football shoe would need something to set it apart from the stripes of Adidas and Onitsuka. I recalled that young artist I’d met at Portland State. What was her name? Oh, yes, Carolyn Davidson. She’d been in the office a number of times, doing brochures and ad slicks. When I got back to Oregon I invited her to the office again and told her we needed a logo. “What kind?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “That gives me a lot to go on,” she said. “Something that evokes a sense of motion,” I said. “Motion,” she said, dubious. She looked confused. Of course she did, I was babbling. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. I wasn’t an artist. I showed her the soccer-football shoe and said, unhelpfully: This. We need something for this. She said she’d give it a try. Motion, she mumbled, leaving my office. Motion. Two weeks later she came back with a portfolio of rough sketches. They were all variations on a single theme, and the theme seemed to be… fat lightning bolts? Chubby check marks? Morbidly obese squiggles? Her designs did evoke motion, of a kind, but also motion sickness. None spoke to me. I singled out a few that held out some promise and asked her to work with those. Days later—or was it weeks?—Carolyn returned and spread a second series of sketches across the conference table. She also hung a few on the wall. She’d done several dozen more variations on the original theme, but with a freer hand. These were better. Closer. Woodell and I and a few others looked them over. I remember Johnson being there, too, though why he’d come out from Wellesley, I can’t recall. Gradually we inched toward a consensus. We liked… this one… slightly more than the others. It looks like a wing, one of us said. It looks like a whoosh of air, another said. It looks like something a runner might leave in his or her wake.

• From Educated (2018)

  The delusion was deeper, in the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction. In the month that followed, I lived the life of a lunatic. Seeing sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall? Sometimes this skepticism took the form of uncompromising certainty: there were days when the more I doubted my own sanity, the more violently I defended my own memories, my own “truth,” as the only truth possible. Shawn was violent, dangerous, and my father was his protector. I couldn’t bear to hear any other opinion on the subject. In those moments I searched feverishly for a reason to think myself sane. Evidence. I craved it like air. I wrote to Erin—the woman Shawn had dated before and after Sadie, who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen. I told her what I remembered and asked her, bluntly, if I was deranged. She replied immediately that I was not. To help me trust myself, she shared her memories—of Shawn screaming at her that she was a whore. My mind snagged on that word. I had not told her that that was my word. Erin told me another story. Once, when she had talked back to Shawn—just a little, she said, as if her manners were on trial—he’d ripped her from her house and slammed her head against a brick wall so hard she’d thought he was going to kill her. His hands locked around her throat. I was lucky, she wrote. I had screamed before he began choking me, and my grandpa heard it and stopped him in time. But I know what I saw in his eyes . Her letter was like a handrail fixed to reality, one I could reach out and grasp when my mind began to spin. That is, until it occurred to me that she might be as crazy as I was. She was damaged, obviously, I told myself. How could I trust her account after what she’d been through? I could not give this woman credence because I, of all people, knew how crippling her psychological injuries were. So I continued searching for testimony from some other source. Four years later, by pure chance, I would get it. While traveling in Utah for research, I would meet a young man who would bristle at my last name. “Westover,” he would say, his face darkening. “Any relation to Shawn?” “My brother.” “Well, the last time I saw your brother, ” he would say, emphasizing this last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both hands wrapped around my cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall. He would have killed her, if it weren’t for my grandfather.” And there it was. A witness. An impartial account.

• From Educated (2018)

  The lecturer began his presentation. He spoke calmly but moved through the material quickly, as if he assumed we were already familiar with it. This was confirmed by the other students, most of whom were not taking notes. I scribbled down every word. “So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at Oxford. “Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.” I was reminded for a moment of Richard, who had always seemed able to recite with exactness anything he’d ever read. “Very good,” the lecturer said. “And the second?” “Positive liberty,” another student said, “is freedom from internal constraints.” I wrote this definition in my notes, but I didn’t understand it. The lecturer tried to clarify. He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion. I had no idea what it meant to self-coerce. I looked around the room. No one else seemed confused. I was one of the few students taking notes. I wanted to ask for further explanation, but something stopped me—the certainty that to do so would be to shout to the room that I didn’t belong there. After the lecture, I returned to my room, where I stared out my window at the stone gate with its medieval battlements. I thought of positive liberty, and of what it might mean to self-coerce, until my head thrummed with a dull ache. I called home. Mother answered. Her voice rose with excitement when she recognized my weepy “Hello, Mom.” I told her I shouldn’t have come to Cambridge, that I didn’t understand anything. She said she’d been muscle-testing and had discovered that one of my chakras was out of balance. She could adjust it, she said. I reminded her that I was five thousand miles away. “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll adjust the chakra on Audrey and wing it to you.” “You’ll what it to me?” “Wing it,” she said. “Distance is nothing to living energy. I can send the corrected energy to you from here.” “How fast does energy travel?” I asked. “At the speed of sound, or is it more like a jetliner? Does it fly direct, or will it have to lay over in Minneapolis?” Mother laughed and hung up. —I STUDIED MOST MORNINGS in the college library, near a small window. I was there on a particular morning when Drew, a friend from BYU, sent me a song via email. He said it was a classic but I had never heard of it, nor of the singer. I played the song through my headphones. It gripped me immediately.

• From Educated (2018)

  There was one thing I still didn’t understand: Why had federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place? Why had Randy been targeted? I remembered Dad saying it could just as easy be us. Dad was always saying that one day the Government would come after folks who resisted its brainwashing, who didn’t put their kids in school. For thirteen years, I’d assumed that this was why the Government had come for Randy: to force his children into school. I returned to the top of the page and read the whole entry again, but this time I didn’t skip the backstory. According to all the sources, including Randy Weaver himself, the conflict had begun when Randy sold two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent he’d met at an Aryan Nations gathering. I read this sentence more than once, many times in fact. Then I understood: white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool. The government, it seemed, had never been in the habit of murdering people for not submitting their children to a public education. This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else. For one bitter moment, I thought Dad had lied. Then I remembered the fear on his face, the heavy rattling of his breath, and I felt certain that he’d really believed we were in danger. I reached for some explanation and strange words came to mind, words I’d learned only minutes before: paranoia, mania, delusions of grandeur and persecution . And finally the story made sense—the one on the page, and the one that had lived in me through childhood. Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover, who’d been holding the front line in the war with the Illuminati for years. No longer content to read about the brave deeds of others, he had forged himself a helmet and mounted a nag. —I BECAME OBSESSED WITH bipolar disorder. We were required to write a research paper for Psychology and I chose it as my subject, then used the paper as an excuse to interrogate every neuroscientist and cognitive specialist at the university. I described Dad’s symptoms, attributing them not to my father but to a fictive uncle. Some of the symptoms fit perfectly; others did not. The professors told me that every case is different. “What you’re describing sounds more like schizophrenia,” one said. “Did your uncle ever get treatment?” “No,” I said. “He thinks doctors are part of a Government conspiracy.” “That does complicate things,” he said. With all the subtlety of a bulldozer I wrote my paper on the effect bipolar parents have on their children. It was accusative, brutal.

• From Educated (2018)

  The morning of the exam, the professor instructed everyone to take out their blue books. I barely had time to wonder what a blue book was before everyone produced one from their bags. The motion was fluid, synchronized, as if they had practiced it. I was the only dancer on the stage who seemed to have missed rehearsal. I asked Vanessa if she had a spare, and she did. I opened it, expecting a multiple-choice exam, but it was blank. The windows were shuttered; the projector flickered on, displaying a painting. We had sixty seconds to write the work’s title and the artist’s full name. My mind produced only a dull buzz. This continued through several questions: I sat completely still, giving no answers at all. A Caravaggio flickered onto the screen—Judith Beheading Holofernes . I stared at the image, that of a young girl calmly drawing a sword toward her body, pulling the blade through a man’s neck as she might have pulled a string through cheese. I’d beheaded chickens with Dad, clutching their scabby legs while he raised the ax and brought it down with a loud thwack, then tightening my grip, holding on with all I had, when the chicken convulsed with death, scattering feathers and spattering my jeans with blood. Remembering the chickens, I wondered at the plausibility of Caravaggio’s scene: no one had that look on their face—that tranquil, disinterested expression—when taking off something’s head. I knew the painting was by Caravaggio but I remembered only the surname and even that I couldn’t spell. I was certain the title was Judith Beheading Someone but could not have produced Holofernes even if it had been my neck behind the blade. Thirty seconds left. Perhaps I could score a few points if I could just get something—anything—on the page, so I sounded out the name phonetically: “Carevajio.” That didn’t look right. One of the letters was doubled up, I remembered, so I scratched that out and wrote “Carrevagio.” Wrong again. I auditioned different spellings, each worse than the last. Twenty seconds. Next to me, Vanessa was scribbling steadily. Of course she was. She belonged here. Her handwriting was neat, and I could read what she’d written: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. And next to it, in equally pristine print, Judith Beheading Holofernes . Ten seconds. I copied the text, not including Caravaggio’s full name because, in a selective display of integrity, I decided that would be cheating. The projector flashed to the next slide. I glanced at Vanessa’s paper a few more times during the exam but it was hopeless. I couldn’t copy her essays, and I lacked the factual and stylistic know-how to compose my own. In the absence of skill or knowledge, I must have scribbled down whatever occurred to me.

• From Educated (2018)

  You might as well head back to Utah.” The drive to BYU was hypnotic; by the time I arrived, my memories of the previous day had blurred and faded. They were brought into focus when I checked my email. There was a message from Shawn. An apology. But he’d apologized already, in my room. I had never known Shawn to apologize twice. I retrieved my journal and wrote another entry, opposite the first, in which I revised the memory. It was a misunderstanding, I wrote. If I’d asked him to stop, he would have. But however I chose to remember it, that event would change everything. Reflecting on it now I’m amazed by it, not by what happened, but that I wrote what happened. That from somewhere inside that brittle shell—in that girl made vacant by the fiction of invincibility—there was a spark left. The words of the second entry would not obscure the words of the first. Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his . There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the courage to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know. Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. [image "Chapter 23 I’m from Idaho" file=Image00025.jpg] On Sunday, a week later, a man at church asked me to dinner. I said no. It happened a second time a few days later with a different man. Again I said no. I couldn’t say yes. I didn’t want either of them anywhere near me. Word reached the bishop that there was a woman in his flock who was set against marriage. His assistant approached me after the Sunday service and said I was wanted in the bishop’s office. My wrist was still tender when I shook the bishop’s hand. He was a middle-aged man with a round face and dark, neatly parted hair. His voice was soft like satin. He seemed to know me before I even opened my mouth. (In a way he did; Robin had told him plenty.) He said I should enroll in the university counseling service so that one day I might enjoy an eternal marriage to a righteous man. He talked and I sat, wordless as a brick. He asked about my family. I didn’t answer.

• From Educated (2018)

  In the final paragraph, Mother described the birth of Emily’s second child, a daughter, who had been born a month before. Mother had midwifed the child. The birth had taken place at home and, according to Mother, Emily had nearly bled to death before they could get to a hospital. Mother finished the story by testifying: God had worked through her hands that night, she said. The birth was a testament of His power. I remembered the drama of Peter’s birth: how he’d slipped out of Emily weighing little more than a pound; how he’d been such a shocking shade of gray, they’d thought he was dead; how they’d fought through a snowstorm to the hospital in town, only to be told it wasn’t enough, and there were no choppers flying; how two ambulances had been dispatched to McKay-Dee in Ogden. That a woman with this medical history, a woman so obviously high-risk, should be advised to attempt a second birth at home seemed reckless to the point of delusion. If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second? I was still wondering at the birth of my niece when Erin’s response appeared. You are right about Tara, she said. She is lost without faith. Erin told Mother that my doubting myself—my writing to her, Erin, to ask if I might be mistaken, if my memories might be false—was evidence that my soul was in jeopardy, that I couldn’t be trusted: She is building her life on fear. I will pray for her . Erin ended the message by praising my mother’s skill as a midwife. You are a true hero, she wrote. I closed the browser and stared at the wallpaper behind the screen. It was the same floral print from my childhood. For how long had I been dreaming of seeing it? I had come to reclaim that life, to save it. But there was nothing here to save, nothing to grasp. There was only shifting sand, shifting loyalties, shifting histories. I remembered the dream, the maze. I remembered the walls made of grain sacks and ammunition boxes, of my father’s fears and paranoias, his scriptures and prophecies. I had wanted to escape the maze with its disorienting switchbacks, its ever-modulating pathways, to find the precious thing. But now I understood: the precious thing, that was the maze. That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut. Mother was sliding biscuits into the oven when I entered the kitchen. I looked around, mentally searching the house. What do I need from this place? There was only one thing: my memories. I found them under my bed, in a box, where I had left them.

• From Educated (2018)

  Let’s say the twenty-seventh.” “No, I’m not sure.” “No, I don’t have documentation.” “Yes, I’ll hold.” The voices always put Mother on hold when she admitted that she didn’t know my birthday, passing her up the line to their superiors, as if not knowing what day I was born delegitimized the entire notion of my having an identity. You can’t be a person without a birthday, they seemed to say. I didn’t understand why not. Until Mother decided to get my birth certificate, not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I’d been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn’t fall on a Sunday because it’s no fun spending your birthday in church. Sometimes I wished Mother would give me the phone so I could explain. “I have a birthday, same as you,” I wanted to tell the voices. “It just changes. Don’t you wish you could change your birthday?” Eventually, Mother persuaded Grandma-down-the-hill to swear a new affidavit claiming I’d been born on the twenty-seventh, even though Grandma still believed it was the twenty-ninth, and the state of Idaho issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth. I remember the day it came in the mail. It felt oddly dispossessing, being handed this first legal proof of my personhood: until that moment, it had never occurred to me that proof was required. In the end, I got my birth certificate long before Luke got his. When Mother had told the voices on the phone that she thought I’d been born sometime in the last week of September, they’d been silent. But when she told them she wasn’t exactly sure whether Luke had been born in May or June, that set the voices positively buzzing. —THAT FALL, WHEN I was nine, I went with Mother on a birth. I’d been asking to go for months, reminding her that Maria had seen a dozen births by the time she was my age. “I’m not a nursing mother,” she said. “I have no reason to take you. Besides, you wouldn’t like it.” Eventually, Mother was hired by a woman who had several small children. It was arranged; I would tend them during the birth. The call came in the middle of the night. The mechanical ring drilled its way down the hall, and I held my breath, hoping it wasn’t a wrong number. A minute later Mother was at my bedside. “It’s time,” she said, and together we ran to the car. For ten miles Mother rehearsed with me what I was to say if the worst happened and the Feds came. Under no circumstances was I to tell them that my mother was a midwife. If they asked why we were there, I was to say nothing. Mother called it “the art of shutting up.” “You just keep saying you were asleep and you didn’t see anything and you don’t know anything and you can’t remember why we’re here,” she said.

• From Educated (2018)

  About three weeks after the fire, Mother announced that the skin around the edges of the burn had begun to grow back, and that she had hope for even the worst patches. By then Luke was sitting up, and a week later, when the first cold spell hit, he could stand for a minute or two on crutches. Before long, he was thumping around the house, thin as a string bean, swallowing buckets of food to regain the weight he’d lost. By then, the twine was a family fable. “A man ought to have a real belt,” Dad said at breakfast on the day Luke was well enough to return to the junkyard, handing him a leather strap with a steel buckle. “Not Luke,” Richard said. “He prefers twine, you know how fashionable he is.” Luke grinned. “Beauty’s everything,” he said. —FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS I never thought of that day, not in any probing way. The few times my reminiscing carried me back to that torrid afternoon, what I remembered first was the belt. Luke, I would think. You wild dog. I wonder, do you still wear twine? Now, at age twenty-nine, I sit down to write, to reconstruct the incident from the echoes and shouts of a tired memory. I scratch it out. When I get to the end, I pause. There’s an inconsistency, a ghost in this story. I read it. I read it again. And there it is. Who put out the fire? A long-dormant voice says, Dad did. But Luke was alone when I found him. If Dad had been with Luke on the mountain, he would have brought him to the house, would have treated the burn. Dad was away on a job somewhere, that’s why Luke had had to get himself down the mountain. Why his leg had been treated by a ten-year-old. Why it had ended up in a garbage can. I decide to ask Richard. He’s older than I, and has a sharper memory. Besides, last I heard, Luke no longer has a telephone. I call. The first thing Richard remembers is the twine, which, true to his nature, he refers to as a “baling implement.” Next he remembers the spilled gasoline. I ask how Luke managed to put out the fire and get himself down the mountain, given that he was in shock when I found him. Dad was with him, Richard says flatly. Right. Then why wasn’t Dad at the house? Richard says, Because Luke had run through the weeds and set the mountain afire. You remember that summer. Dry, scorching. You can’t go starting forest fires in farm country during a dry summer. So Dad put Luke in the truck and told him to drive to the house, to Mother. Only Mother was gone. Right. I think it over for a few days, then sit back down to write.