Contentment

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

  Again we went to Jade West, but this time I met her there, and I was quite late, arriving from my Eagle Scout review board, for which she gave me much grief. “Eagle Scout? You?” I took this as another good sign. She felt comfortable enough to tease me. At some point during that third date, I noticed we were both much more at ease. It felt nice. The ease continued, and over the next few weeks deepened. We developed a rapport, a feel for each other, a knack for communicating nonverbally. As only two shy people can. When she was feeling shy, or uncomfortable, I sensed it, and either gave her space or tried to draw her out, depending. When I was spaced out, embroiled in some internal debate with myself about the business, she knew whether to tap me lightly on the shoulder or wait patiently for me to reemerge. Penny wasn’t legally old enough to drink alcohol, but we’d often borrow one of my sisters’ driver’s licenses and go for cocktails at Trader Vic’s downtown. Alcohol and time worked their magic. By February, around my thirtieth birthday, she was spending every minute of her free time at Blue Ribbon, and evenings at my apartment. At some point she stopped calling me Mr. Knight. INEVITABLY, I BROUGHT her home to meet my family. We all sat around the dining room table, eating Mom’s pot roast, washing it down with cold milk, pretending it wasn’t awkward. Penny was the second girl I’d ever brought home, and though she didn’t have the wild charisma of Sarah, what she had was better. Her charm was real, unrehearsed, and though the Knights seemed to like it, they were still the Knights. My mother said nothing; my sisters tried in vain to be a bridge to my mother and father; my father asked a series of probing, thoughtful questions about Penny’s background and upbringing, which made him sound like a cross between a loan officer and a homicide detective. Penny told me later that the atmosphere was the exact opposite of her house, where dinner was a free-for-all, everyone laughing and talking over one another, dogs barking and TVs blaring in the background. I assured her that no one would have suspected she felt out of her element. Next she brought me home, and I saw the truth of everything she’d told me. Her house was the opposite. Though much grander than Chateau Knight, it was a mess. The carpets were stained from all the animals—a German shepherd, a monkey, a cat, several white rats, an ill-tempered goose. And chaos was the rule. Besides the Parks clan, and their arkful of pets, it was a hangout for all the stray kids in the neighborhood. I tried my best to be charming, but I couldn’t seem to connect with anyone, human or otherwise. Slowly, painstakingly, I made inroads with Penny’s mother, Dot. She reminded me of Auntie Mame—zany, madcap, eternally young.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  From May to August, when British natives must be left to spawn, the dredging smacks pull down their sails or put to sea in search of other quarry; and oyster-parlours all over England are obliged, in consequence, to change their menus or close their doors. The business that my father did between autumn and spring, though excellent enough, was not so good that he could afford to shut his shop throughout the summer and take a holiday; but, like many Whitstable families whose fortunes depended upon the sea and its bounty, there was a noticeable easing of our labours in the warmer months, a kind of shifting into a slower, looser, gayer key. The restaurant grew less busy. We served crab and plaice and turbot and herrings, rather than oysters, and the filleting was kinder work than the endless scrubbing and shelling of the winter months. We kept our windows raised, and the kitchen door thrown open; we were neither boiled alive by the steam of the cooking-pots, nor numbed and frozen by barrels of oyster-ice, as we were in winter, but gently cooled by the breezes, and soothed by the sound of fluttering canvas and ringing pulleys that drifted into our kitchen from Whitstable Bay. The summer in which I turned eighteen was a warm one, and grew warmer as the weeks advanced. For days at a time Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-and-whelk stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit the Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as no one that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in our stuffy Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or two in gloves and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of Tricky Reeves’s airless music hall, made us gasp and droop and prickle. There are more similarities between a fishmonger’s trade and a music-hall manager’s than you might think. When Father changed his stock to suit his patrons’ dulled and over-heated palates, so did Tricky. He paid half of his performers off, and brought in a host of new artistes from the music halls of Chatham, Margate and Dover; most cleverly of all, he secured a one-week contract with a real celebrity, from London: Gully Sutherland - one of the best comic singers in the business, and a guaranteed hall-filler even in the hottest of hot Kentish summers. Alice and I visited the Palace on the very first night of Gully Sutherland’s week.

• From City of Night (1963)

  When I told Pete about Flip (leaving out that she was actually a dragqueen), she too sounded like a nympho to him. “I gotta meet that chick,” he told me—and later, I took him to her apartment. “We’ll all three make it together,” he said enthusiastically, “it’s Sexier that way.” And although he kept insisting as we stood outside Flip’s door that I should stay, I said I had something else to do. “Just ring the bell,” I told him. “She wont even ask who you are. She’ll just let you in.” I waited on the steps until I saw him ring the bell. The door opened. I heard Flip squeal: “Ooo, you are a zoll!” That night I expected perversely to see an indignant Pete. But when I saw him, he said: “Man!—what a great Lay that chick is!”... I felt very smug—and very surprised. 5 Now the nights began to warm up. It’s that magnificent interlude in New York between winter and spring, when you feel the warmth stirring, and you remember that the dreadful naked trees will inevitably sprout tiny green buds, soon. Everyone rushes into the parks, the streets—and you even forget that, very soon, summer will come scorchingly, dropping from the sky like a blanket of steam.... “I dont feel like fuckin around today,” Pete told me one afternoon. He seemed pensive. “Lets just make the flix, spote—and forget all about trying to score.” We saw a double feature—one, a French movie about Lesbians in a girls’ school. When we got outside, it was dark, the sky beaded wondrously with spring stars. “You really believe two chicks could dig each other that tough?” Pete asked me. I answer, “Sure.” I was wondering what had prompted such amazing, for him, naïveté. “It sure seems strange,” he went on. “Dig: I can see guys making it with each other—sure—for money—but—... Well, it sure seems strange, just digging each other like that—and those two chicks, man, they were both beautiful.” We were standing outside. Even the lights on the signs seemed livelier in the warm air. I didnt have any place to go, but I said, “Later,” to Pete. This is how it had always been before. “No, wait,” he says, “dont split—unless you got something to do.” “Nothing,” I said. “Lets stick together,” he said. “I just dont feel like fuckin around tonight,” he said moodily. We went to a cafeteria on the same block and ate. The drifting youngmen were in there, sitting at the tables sipping coffee, staring at the older men who walked in. “Sometimes this whole scene bugs me,” Pete said. “I guess maybe I should split—leave New York—go somewhere else: L.A., maybe. You wanna know something? I been in the East all my life—New Jersey—New York....” He stared dreamily out the window. “Lets go to Washington Square!” he said abruptly.

• From Educated (2018)

  She kept a bookshelf in the basement, stocked with books on herbalism, along with a few old paperbacks. There were a few textbooks on math, which we shared, and an American history book that I never saw anyone read except Richard. There was also a science book, which must have been for young children because it was filled with glossy illustrations. It usually took half an hour to find all the books, then we would divide them up and go into separate rooms to “do school.” I have no idea what my siblings did when they did school, but when I did it I opened my math book and spent ten minutes turning pages, running my fingers down the center fold. If my finger touched fifty pages, I’d report to Mother that I’d done fifty pages of math. “Amazing!” she’d say. “You see? That pace would never be possible in the public school. You can only do that at home, where you can sit down and really focus, with no distractions.” Mother never delivered lectures or administered exams. She never assigned essays. There was a computer in the basement with a program called Mavis Beacon, which gave lessons on typing. Sometimes, when she was delivering herbs, if we’d finished our chores, Mother would drop us at the Carnegie library in the center of town. The basement had a room full of children’s books, which we read. Richard even took books from upstairs, books for adults, with heavy titles about history and science. Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done. Some of us were more disciplined than others. I was one of the least disciplined, so by the time I was ten, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it. “If the lines are cut, we’ll be the only people in the valley who can communicate,” he said, though I was never quite sure, if we were the only people learning it, who we’d be communicating with. The older boys—Tony, Shawn and Tyler—had been raised in a different decade, and it was almost as if they’d had different parents. Their father had never heard of the Weavers; he never talked about the Illuminati. He’d enrolled his three oldest sons in school, and even though he’d pulled them out a few years later, vowing to teach them at home, when Tony had asked to go back, Dad had let him. Tony had stayed in school through high school, although he missed so many days working in the junkyard that he wasn’t able to graduate. Because Tyler was the third son, he barely remembered school and was happy to study at home. Until he turned thirteen. Then, perhaps because Mother was spending all her time teaching Luke to read, Tyler asked Dad if he could enroll in the eighth grade.

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

  nature I was a loner, but since childhood I’d thrived in team sports. My psyche was in true harmony when I had a mix of alone time and team time. Exactly what I had now. Also, I was doing business with a country I’d come to love. Gone was the initial fear. I connected with the shyness of the Japanese people, with the simplicity of their culture and products and arts. I liked that they tried to add beauty to every part of life, from the tea ceremony to the commode. I liked that the radio announced each day exactly which cherry trees, on which corner, were blossoming, and how much. My reverie was interrupted when a man named Fujimoto sat beside me. Fiftyish, slouch-shouldered, he had a gloomy air that seemed more than middle-age melancholy. Like a Japanese Charlie Brown. And yet I could see that he was making a concerted effort to extend himself, to be cheerful toward me. He forced a big smile and told me that he loved America, that he longed to live there. I told him that I’d just been thinking how much I loved Japan. “Maybe we should trade places,” I said. He smiled ruefully. “Any time.” I complimented his English. He said he’d learned it from the American GIs. “Funny,” I said, “the first things I learned about Japanese culture, I learned from two ex-GIs.” The first words his GIs taught him, he said, were, “Kiss my ass!” We had a good laugh about that. I asked where he lived and his smile disappeared. “Months ago,” he said, “I lose my home. Typhoon Billie.” The storm had completely wiped away the Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu, along with two thousand houses. “Mine,” Fujimoto said, “was one of houses.” “I’m very sorry,” I said. He nodded, looked at the water. He’d started over, he said. As the Japanese do. The one thing he hadn’t been able to replace, unfortunately, was his bicycle. In the 1960s bicycles were exorbitantly expensive in Japan. Kitami now joined us. I noticed that Fujimoto got up right away and walked off. I mentioned to Kitami that Fujimoto had learned his English from GIs, and Kitami said with pride that he’d learned his English all by himself, from a record. I congratulated him, and said I hoped one day to be as fluent in Japanese as he was in English. Then I mentioned that I was getting married soon. I told him a bit about Penny, and he congratulated me and wished me luck. “When is wedding?” he asked. “September,” I said. “Ah,” he said, “I will be in America one month after, when Mr. Onitsuka and I attend Olympics in Mexico City. We might visit Los Angeles.” He invited me to fly down, have dinner with them. I said I’d be delighted.

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

  Sumeragi nodded. All in good time. REELING FROM ALL this drama, I was deeply tired when I returned home each night. But I’d always get a second wind after my six-mile run, followed by a hot shower and a quick dinner, alone. (Penny and Matthew ate around four.) I’d always try to find time to tell Matthew a bedtime story, and I’d always try to find a bedtime story that would be educational. I invented a character called Matt History, who looked and acted a lot like Matthew Knight, and I inserted him into the center of every yarn. Matt History was there at Valley Forge with George Washington. Matt History was there in Massachusetts with John Adams. Matt History was there when Paul Revere rode through the dark of night on a borrowed horse, warning John Hancock that the British were coming. Hard on Revere’s heels was a precocious young horseman from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon... Matthew would always laugh, delighted to find himself caught up in these adventures. He’d sit up straighter in bed. He’d beg for more, more. When Matthew was asleep, Penny and I would talk about the day. She’d often ask what we were going to do if it all went south. I’d say, “I can always fall back on accounting.” I did not sound sincere, because I wasn’t. I was not delighted to be caught up in these adventures. Eventually Penny would look away, watch TV, resume her needlepoint, or read, and I’d retreat to my recliner, where I’d administer the nightly self-catechism. What do you know? I know Onitsuka can’t be trusted. What else do you know? I know my relationship with Kitami can’t be salvaged. What does the future hold? One way or another, Blue Ribbon and Onitsuka are going to break up. I just need to stay together as long as possible while I develop other supply sources, so I can manage the breakup. What’s Step One? I need to scare off all the other distributors Onitsuka has lined up to replace me. Blast them right out of the water, by firing off letters threatening to sue if they breach my contract. What’s Step Two? Find my own replacement for Onitsuka. I flashed on a factory I’d heard about, in Guadalajara, the one where Adidas had manufactured shoes during the 1968 Olympics, allegedly to skirt Mexican tariffs. The shoes were good, as I recalled. So I set up a meeting with the factory managers. EVEN THOUGH IT was in central Mexico, the factory was called Canada. Right away I asked the managers why. They chose the name, they said, because it sounded foreign, exotic. I laughed. Canada? Exotic? It was more comic than exotic, not to mention confusing. A factory south of the border named for a country north of the border. Oh well. I didn’t care. After looking the place over, after taking inventory of their present line of shoes, after surveying their leather room, I was impressed.

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

  Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete. Now he was determined to get this point across to a larger audience. The reading public. “Sounds interesting,” I said, but I thought my old coach had popped a screw. Who in heck would want to read a book about jogging? 1966As I neared the end of my contract with Onitsuka, I checked the mail every day, hoping for a letter that would say they wanted to renew. Or that they didn’t. There would be relief in knowing either way. Of course I was also hoping for a letter from Sarah, saying she’d changed her mind. And as always I was braced for a letter from my bank, telling me my business was no longer welcome. But every day the only letters were from Johnson. Like Bowerman, the man didn’t sleep. Ever. I could think of no other explanation for his ceaseless stream of correspondence. Much of which was pointless. Along with gobs of information I didn’t need, the typical Johnson letter would include several long parenthetical asides, and some kind of rambling joke. There might also be a hand-drawn illustration. There might also be a musical lyric. Sometimes there was a poem. Batted out on a manual typewriter that violently Brailled the onionskin pages, many Johnson letters contained some kind of story. Maybe “parable” is a better word. How Johnson had sold this person a pair of Tigers, but down the road said person might be good for X more pairs, and therefore Johnson had a plan… How Johnson had chased and badgered the head coach at such-and-such high school, and tried to sell him six pairs, but in the end sold him a baker’s dozen… which just went to show… Often Johnson would describe in excruciating detail the latest ad he’d placed or was contemplating placing in the back pages of Long Distance Log or Track & Field News. Or he’d describe the photograph of a Tiger shoe he’d included with the ad. He’d constructed a makeshift photo studio in his house, and he’d pose the shoes seductively on the sofa, against a black sweater. Never mind that it sounded a bit like shoe porn, I just didn’t see the point of placing ads in magazines read exclusively by running nerds. I didn’t see the point of advertising, period. But Johnson seemed to be having fun, and he swore the ads worked, so, fine, far be it from me to stop him.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  As soon as he had disengaged, the charming Emily got up, and we crowded round her with congratulations and other officious little services; for it is to be noted, that though all modesty and reserve were banished from the transaction of these pleasures, good manners and politeness were inviolably observed: there was no gross ribaldry, no offensive or rude behaviour, or ungenerous reproaches to the girls for their compliance with the humours and desires of the men. On the contrary, nothing was wanting to soothe, encourage, and soften the sense of their condition to them. Men know not in general how much they destroy of their own pleasure, when they break through the respect and tenderness due to our sex, and even to those of it who live only by pleasing them. And this was a maxim perfectly well understood by these polite voluptuaries, these profound adepts in the great art and science of pleasure, who never shewed these votaries of theirs a more tender respect than at the time of those exercises of their complaisance, when they unlocked their treasures of concealed beauty, and shewed out in the pride of their native charms, ever more touching surely than when they parade it in the artificial ones of dress and ornament. The frolic was now come round to me, and it being my turn of subscription to the will and pleasure of my particular elect, as well as to that of the company, he came to me, and saluting me very tenderly, with a flattering eagerness, put me in mind of the compliances my presence there authorized the hopes of, and at the same time repeated to me, “that if all this force of example had not surmounted any repugnance I might have to concur with the humours and desires of the company, that though the play was bespoke for my benefit, and great as his own private disappointment might be, he would suffer any thing, sooner than be the instrument of imposing a disagreeable task.” To this I answered, without the least hesitation, or mincing grimace, “that had I not even contracted a kind of engagement to be at his disposal without the least reserve, the example of such agreeable companions would alone determine me, and that I was in no pain about any thing but my appearing to so great a disadvantage after such superior beauties.” And take notice that I thought, as I spoke. The frankness of the answer pleased them all; my particular was complimented on his acquisition, and, by way of indirect flattery to me, openly envied me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took off my coat and hat, and ran my fingers through my hair; and when she saw me do that her brow lifted a little and I hoped that she was thinking, as Annie Page had: Well, Florence has a fancy new uncle, all right!‘What will you have, Nance?’ Florence asked me then. I said I would have whatever she cared for, and she hesitated, then asked for two rum hots. ‘Let’s take them to a stall.’ We stepped across the room - there was sand upon the floorboards, and our boots crunched upon it as we walked — to a table, set between two benches. We sat, across from one another, and stirred sugar into our glasses.‘You were a regular here once, then?’ I asked Flo.She nodded. ‘I haven’t been here for an age...’‘No?’‘Not since Lily died. It’s a bit of a monkey-parade, to tell the truth. I haven’t had the heart for it...’I gazed into my rum. All at once there came a burst of laughter from the stall at my back that made me jump.‘I said,’ came a girl’s voice, “‘I only does that sort of thing, sir, with my friends.” “Emily Pettinger,” he said, “said you let her flat fuck you for an hour and a half” — which is a lie, but anyway, “Flat fucking is one thing, sir,” I said, ‘and this quite another. If you want me to - her” ’ - here she must have made a gesture - “ ‘you shall have to pay me for it, rather dear.” ’‘And did he, then?’ came another voice. The first speaker paused, perhaps to take a sip from her glass; then, ‘Swipe me!’ she said, ‘if the bastard didn’t put his hand in his pocket and pull out a sov, and lay it on the table-top, all cool as you like...’I looked at Florence, and she smiled. ‘Gay girls,’ she said. ‘Half the girls who come in here are gay. Do you mind it?’ How could I mind it, when I had been a gay girl - well, a gay boy - once, myself? I shook my head.‘Do you mind it?’ I asked her.‘No. I’m only sorry that they must do it...’I didn’t listen: I was too taken with the gay girl’s story. She was saying now: ‘We flat fucked for a half-an-hour; then tipped the velvet while the gent looked on. Then Susie took a pair of vampers, and -’I looked again at Florence, and frowned. ‘Are they French, or what?’ I asked. ‘I can’t understand a thing they’re saying.’ And indeed, I could not; for I had never heard such words before, in all my time upon the streets.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Because the gods themselves were produced by chance combinations of atoms, they could not affect our destiny, so it was pointless to be afraid of them. 78 When they contemplated the vastness of empty space with its swirling particles, Epicureans felt they had achieved a godlike perspective. Your own life span may be short, Metrodorus, a disciple of Epicurus, told his pupils, “yet you have risen, through contemplation of nature, to the infinity of space and time, and you have seen all the past and the future.” 79 Stoics also discovered that meditating on the immensity of the cosmos revealed the utter insignificance of human affairs, and that this gave them a saner perspective. They saw the whole of reality as animated by a fiery vaporous breath that Zeno called Logos (“Reason”), Pneuma (“Spirit”), and God. Instead of railing against his fate, the philosopher must align his life to this Spirit and surrender his entire being to the inexorable world process. Thus he himself would become an embodiment of Logos. The philosophers may have been critical of popular religion, but their way of life required an act of faith ( pistis ) that had to be renewed every day. This did not, of course, mean that they had to “believe” blindly in the doctrines of their school, whose truth became evident only in the context of its spiritual and moral disciplines. Pistis meant “trust,” “loyalty,” “engagement,” and “commitment.” Against all the depressing evidence to the contrary, the philosopher trusted that the cosmos was indeed rational, engaged himself in the exacting regimen prescribed by the sages, and committed daily to the heroic endeavor of living a truly philosophical life in the hope that he would one day achieve the peace of ataraxia and intellectual enlightenment. The rationalism of ancient Greece was not opposed to religion; indeed, it was itself a faith tradition that evolved its own distinctive version of the principles that guided most of the religious systems. Philosophia was a yearning for transcendent wisdom; it had a healthy respect for the limitations of logos and held that the highest wisdom was rooted in unknowing. Its insights were the result of practical meditative exercises and a disciplined lifestyle. In their dealings with others, the Greeks had developed their own form of kenosis and compassion, seeing the achievement of enlightenment as a joint, communal activity that must be conducted with kindness, gentleness, and consideration . The God of Aristotle could not be more different from Yahweh, but even though many Jews were hostile to the Hellenistic culture that was beginning to infiltrate the Near East, some were inspired by these Greek ideas, which they used to help them refine their understanding of God.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  How much cleaning could you do in eight hours? I had no idea: it was generally Alice who had helped Mother out at home; I had hardly cleaned a thing before in my life; lately I had had servants to do my cleaning for me. But I felt inspired, now, to tidy this house - this house where I had been, albeit briefly, so content. It would be a kind of parting gift, I thought, for Ralph and Florence. I would be like a girl in a fairy story, sweeping out the dwarves’ cottage, or the robbers’ cave, while the dwarves or the robbers were at work.I believe I laboured, that day, harder than I had ever laboured over anything before; and I have wondered since, thinking back to the industry of those hours, whether the thing that I was really washing was not my own tarnished soul. I began by lighting a bigger fire in the range, to heat more water with. Then I found that I had used up all the water in the house: I had to limp up and down Quilter Street with two great buckets, looking for a stand-pipe; and when I found one I also found a line of women at it, and had to wait amongst them for half-an-hour, until the tap - which ran no faster than a trickle, and sometimes only spluttered and choked - was free. The women looked me up and down, rather - they looked at my eye, and more especially at my head, for I had placed a cap of Ralph’s upon it in lieu of my damp hat, and they could see where the hair was shorn and razored beneath. But they were not at all unfriendly. One or two, who had seen me leave the house, asked me, ‘Was I lodging with the Banners?’ and I answered that I was only passing through. They seemed happy enough with that, as if people passed through, in this district, very frequently.When I had staggered home with the water, set it warming on the stove, and wrapped myself in a great, crusty apron I found hanging on the back of the pantry door, I began on the parlour. First I wiped down all the dim and sooty things with a wet cloth; then I washed the window, and then the skirting-boards. The rugs I carried out into the yard: here I hung them over the wash-line, and beat them until my arm ached. As I did so, the back door of the neighbouring house was pulled open and a woman, her sleeves rolled up like mine and her own cheeks flushed, emerged to stand upon the step. When she saw me she nodded, and I nodded back.‘A fine job you’ve taken on,’ she said, ‘cleaning the Banners’ place.’ I smiled, glad of the rest, and wiped the sweat from my brow and lip.‘Are they known for their dirt, then?’‘They are,’ she said, ‘in this street.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Maybe another strategy for you,” he said. He gripped my wrist a different way—the way an attacker might, he said. He taught me how to break the hold, where the fingers were weakest and the bones in my arm strongest, so that after a few minutes I could cut through even his thick fingers. He taught me how to throw my weight behind a punch, and where to aim to crush the windpipe. The next morning, the trailer was unloaded. We climbed into the truck, picked up a new load and drove for another two days, watching the white lines disappear hypnotically beneath the hood, which was the color of bone. We had few forms of entertainment, so we made a game of talking. The game had only two rules. The first was that every statement had to have at least two words in which the first letters were switched. “You’re not my little sister,” Shawn said. “You’re my sittle lister.” He pronounced the words lazily, blunting the t ’s to d ’s so that it sounded like “siddle lister.” The second rule was that every word that sounded like a number, or like it had a number in it, had to be changed so that the number was one higher. The word “to” for example, because it sounds like the number “two,” would become “three.” “Siddle Lister,” Shawn might say, “we should pay a-eleven-tion. There’s a checkpoint ahead and I can’t a-five-d a ticket. Time three put on your seatbelt.” When we tired of this, we’d turn on the CB and listen to the lonely banter of truckers stretched out across the interstate. “Look out for a green four-wheeler,” a gruff voice said, when we were somewhere between Sacramento and Portland. “Been picnicking in my blind spot for a half hour.” A four-wheeler, Shawn explained, is what big rigs call cars and pickups. Another voice came over the CB to complain about a red Ferrari that was weaving through traffic at 120 miles per hour. “Bastard damned near hit a little blue Chevy,” the deep voice bellowed through the static. “Shit, there’s kids in that Chevy. Anybody up ahead wanna cool this hothead down?” The voice gave its location. Shawn checked the mile marker. We were ahead. “I’m a white Pete pulling a fridge,” he said. There was silence while everybody checked their mirrors for a Peterbilt with a reefer. Then a third voice, gruffer than the first, answered: “I’m the blue KW hauling a dry box.” “I see you,” Shawn said, and for my benefit pointed to a navy-colored Kenworth a few cars ahead. When the Ferrari appeared, multiplied in our many mirrors, Shawn shifted into high gear, revving the engine and pulling beside the Kenworth so that the two fifty-foot trailers were running side by side, blocking both lanes. The Ferrari honked, weaved back and forth, braked, honked again. “How long should we keep him back there?” the husky voice said, with a deep laugh.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Unlike Marduk, Elohim did not have to fight to the death to create an ordered cosmos; instead he simply issued a series of commands: “Let there be light!” “Let the earth sprout forth with sprouting growth!” “Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night” and each time, without any struggle at all, “it was so.” 69 Yahweh had no competition and was the sole power in the universe. 70 But there was no stridency in P’s polemic. On the last day of his creation, Elohim “saw everything that he had made and here: it was exceedingly good.” 71 P knew that some of the exiles routinely cursed the Babylonians, but, he implied, this was not the way to go because God had blessed everything that he had made. Everybody should be like Elohim, resting calmly on the Sabbath and blessing all his creatures without exception—even, perhaps, the Babylonians. This was emphatically not intended as a literal account of the physical origins of life. P was saying something much more relevant to the exiles. If J’s creation story had been a myth of Solomon’s temple, P’s was the myth of the virtual temple he was encouraging the exiles to build by means of the new rituals of separation. Yahweh’s creation of the cosmos had been an important theme in the cult of Solomon’s temple, and in the Near East a temple was widely regarded as a symbolic replica of the cosmos. Temple building thus enabled human beings to participate in the gods’ ordering of the universe. With this in mind, P’s creation hymn was deliberately linked to his elaborate description of the construction of the tent shrine. 72 After God has issued his very detailed instructions for the tabernacle, we have a laborious and repetitive description of Moses carrying them out, point by point. At each stage, Moses “saw all the work” and “blessed” the people, just as Yahweh had “seen” all he had made and “blessed” it at the end of each day of creation. The sanctuary was built on the first day of the first month of the year; Bezalel, its architect, was blessed by the “rushing-spirit” of God that had brooded over the primal waters, and both the creation hymn and the Tabernacle Document emphasized the importance of the Sabbath rest. 73 The temple, the Israelites’ replica of the divinely ordered cosmos, was in ruins; their world had been annihilated, but they could build a symbolic temple in the wilderness of exile that brought order to their dislocated lives.

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

  Jaqua then told Kitami that he hoped something could still be worked out. A lawsuit would be highly damaging to both companies. Peace was prosperity. But Kitami was in no mood for peace. He stood, motioned to his lawyer and Iwano to follow. When he got to the door, he stopped. His face changed. He was about to say something conciliatory. He was preparing to offer an olive branch. I felt myself softening toward him. “Onitsuka,” he said, “like to continue use Mr. Bowerman… as consultant.” I pulled on my ear. Surely I hadn’t heard him correctly. Bowerman shook his head and turned to Jaqua, who said that Bowerman would henceforth consider Kitami a competitor, aka a sworn enemy, and would help him in no way whatsoever. Kitami nodded. He asked if someone could please drive him and Iwano to the airport. I TOLD JOHNSON to get on a plane. “What plane?” he said. “The next plane,” I said. He arrived the following morning. We went for a run, during which neither of us said anything. Then we drove to the office and gathered everyone into the conference room. There were about thirty people there. I expected to be nervous. They expected me to be nervous. On any different day, under any other circumstances, I would have been. For some reason, however, I felt weirdly at peace. I laid out the situation we faced. “We’ve come, folks, to a crossroads. Yesterday, our main supplier, Onitsuka, cut us off.” I let that sink in. I watched everyone’s jaw drop. “We’ve threatened to sue them for damages,” I said, “and of course they’ve threatened to file a lawsuit of their own. Breach of contract. If they sue us first, in Japan, we’ll have no choice but to sue them here in America, and sue fast. We’re not going to win a lawsuit in Japan, so we’ll have to beat them to the courthouse, get a quick verdict here, to pressure them into withdrawing. “Meanwhile, until it all sorts out, we’re completely on our own. We’re set adrift. We have this new line, Nike, which the reps in Chicago seemed to like. But, well, frankly, that’s all we’ve got. And as we know, there are big problems with the quality. It’s not what we hoped. Communications with Nippon Rubber are good, and Nissho is there at the factory at least once a week, trying to get it all fixed, but we don’t know how soon they can do it. It better be soon, though, because we have no time and suddenly no margin for error.”

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

  Where is the world going?” Or: “Where are the new entrepreneurs?” Or: “Are we doomed as a society to a worse future for our children?” I tell them about the devastated Japan I saw in 1962. I tell them about the rubble and ruins that somehow gave birth to wise men like Hayami and Ito and Sumeragi. I tell them about the untapped resources, natural and human, that the world has at its disposal, the abundant ways and means to solve its many crises. All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can. Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle. I TURN OUT the lights, walk upstairs to bed. Curled up with a book beside her, Penny has drifted off. That chemistry, that in-sync feeling from Day One, Accounting 101, remains. Our conflicts, such as they are, have centered mostly on work versus family. Finding a balance. Defining that word “balance.” At our most trying moments, we’ve managed to emulate those athletes I most admire. We’ve held on, pressed through. And now we’ve endured. I slide under the covers, gingerly, so as not to wake her, and I think of others who’ve endured. Hayes lives on a farm in the Tualatin Valley, 108 rolling acres, with a ridiculous collection of bulldozers and other heavy equipment. (His pride and joy is a John Deere JD-450C. It’s bright school-bus yellow and as big as a one- bedroom condo.) He has some health problems, but he bulldozes ahead. Woodell lives in central Oregon with his wife. For years he flew his own private airplane, giving the middle finger to everyone who said he’d be helpless. (Above all, flying private meant he never again had to worry about an airline losing his wheelchair.) He’s one of the best storytellers in the history of Nike. My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said. If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust? When he retired from Nike, Woodell became head of the Port of Portland, managing all the rivers and the airports. A man immobilized, guiding all that motion. Lovely. He’s also the leading shareholder and director of a successful microbrewery. He always did like his beer. But whenever we get together for dinner, he tells me, of course, his greatest joy and proudest accomplishment is his college-bound son, Dan. Woodell’s old antagonist, Johnson, lives slap in the middle of a Robert Frost poem, somewhere in the wilderness of New Hampshire. He’s converted an old barn into a five-story mansion, which he calls his Fortress of Solitude.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There’s a complicated sky of cold-front ragged cloud under swathes of high cirrostratus, and a headwind that sends larks up like chaff as we walk through the fields. Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn’t here. It is late winter and I’m back at my mother’s house. Things are better now, I know, and I’ve been coming here more often, but each time I forget how hard it will be. The winter fields are shorn, yellowed into stalky, rabbit-grazed sward spotted with foraging rooks. I can hawk with Mabel all the way across this land until it ends in a slumpy hedge so wide it’s almost a wood, furrily iced with old-man’s-beard. Beyond it is someone else’s land; a terra incognita, holding the suppressed fascination we all have for places just beyond where we know, or are supposed to be. I stand at the top of the field, change her jesses, remove her leash, thread the swivel onto it, double back the leash, and stuff it deep into my pocket. I hold my arm high, wait for her to look about, and cast her off my fist into the gusty wind. She glides down to the far hedge and swings up into a small ash, shaking her tail. I follow her down and we start hawking proper, looking for rabbits in a tangle of broken, open woodland. This line of trees is not designed for human thoroughfare. There are elder bushes, green twigs and branches starred with lichen. There are fallen oaks, clumps of vicious brambles, screens of hazel, and ivy clambering and covering stumps and extending a hand up to the trees above to scramble into the light, so the whole place is umbrous and decorated with shiny scales of ivy leaves. The air tastes of humus and decay. Each footfall breaks twigs and has that slightly uncertain, oddly hollow quality of walking on thick woodland soil. Mabel is being extraordinary. I’ve mostly flown her in open country before. She has grasped how woodland hawking works, and is hugely attentive. More than attentive. Flying a goshawk in a scape of obstacles and broken sight-lines makes the connection between us hugely manifest. She breaks through twigs to come down to my fist when I whistle, and she follows me as I walk, moving above me like a personal angel whenever I’m out of sight. I look up and see her crouching, staring at me with round eyes, pupils dilated with excitement and attention, crayon-yellow toes gripping dead ash branches. Or floating above me, above the branches, flickering through, sending submarine ripples behind her.

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

  He riffled through his card catalog and found the address of a local customer, another high school track star. He drove to the kid’s house, knocked at the door, unannounced. The kid wasn’t there, but his parents said Johnson was more than welcome to come in and wait. When the kid got home he found his shoe salesman sitting at the dining room table eating dinner with the whole family. The next day, after they went for a run, Johnson got from the kid a list of names—local coaches, potential customers, likely contacts—and a list of what neighborhoods he might like. Within days he’d found and rented a little house behind a funeral parlor. Claiming it in the name of Blue Ribbon, he also made it his home. He wanted me to go halfsies on the two-hundred-dollar rent. In a PS he said I should buy him furniture also. I didn’t answer. 1968I was putting in six days a week at Price Waterhouse, spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life—and wholly content. My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn’t care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance. Or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I’d never been a multitasker, and I didn’t see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play. I wanted to quit Price Waterhouse. Not that I hated it; it just wasn’t me. I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time. But it wasn’t possible. Blue Ribbon simply couldn’t support me. Though the company was on track to double sales for a fifth straight year, it still couldn’t justify a salary for its cofounder. So I decided to compromise, find a different day job, one that would pay my bills but require fewer hours, leaving me more time for my passion. The only job I could think of that fit this criterion was teaching. I applied to Portland State University, and got a job as an assistant professor, at seven hundred dollars a month. I should have been delighted to quit Price Waterhouse, but I’d learned a lot there, and I was sad about leaving Hayes. No more after-work cocktails, I told him. No more Walla Walla. “I’m going to focus on my shoe thing,” I said. Hayes frowned, grumbled something about missing me, or admiring me. I asked what he was going to do. He said he was going to ride it out at Price Waterhouse. Lose fifty pounds, make partner, that was his plan. I wished him luck.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  53 You can’t see the Seer who does the seeing. You can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving. This Self within the All [Brahman] is this atman of yours. 54 Like the Brahmodya, any discussion of the atman in the Upanishads always ended in silence, the numinous acknowledgment that the ultimate reality was beyond the competence of language. Authentic religious discourse could not lead to clear, distinct, and empirically verified truth. Like the Brahman, the atman was “ungraspable.” You could define something only when you saw it as separate from yourself. But “when the Whole [Brahman] has become a person’s very self, then who is there for him to see and by what means? Who is there for me to think of and by what means?” 55 But if you learned to “realize” the truth that your most authentic “Self” was identical with Brahman, you understood that it too was “beyond hunger and thirst, sorrow and delusion, old age and death.” 56 You could not achieve this insight by rational logic. You had to acquire the knack of thinking outside the ordinary “lowercase” self, and like any craft or skill, this required long, hard, dedicated practice. One of the principal technologies that enabled people to achieve this self-forgetfulness was yoga. 57 Unlike the yoga practiced in Western gyms today, it was not an aerobic exercise but a systematic breakdown of instinctive behavior and normal thought patterns. It was mentally demanding and, initially, physically painful. The yogin had to do the opposite of what came naturally. He sat so still that he seemed more like a plant or a statue than a human being; he controlled his respiration, one of the most automatic and essential of our physical functions, until he acquired the ability to exist for long periods without breathing at all. He learned to silence the thoughts that coursed through his mind and concentrate “on one point” for hours at a time. If he persevered, he found that he achieved a dissolution of ordinary consciousness that extracted the “I” from his thinking. To this day, yogins find that these disciplines, which have measurable physical and neurological effects, evoke a sense of calm, harmony, and equanimity that is comparable to the effect of music.

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

  In all Woodell spent a few days with Bork, smoothing his feathers, going over the operation. He discovered that Bork was stressed, too. Though the retail store was thriving, the back room, which had basically become our national warehouse, was in shambles. Boxes everywhere, invoices and papers stacked to the ceiling. Bork couldn’t keep pace. When Woodell returned he gave me the picture. “I think Bork’s back in the fold,” he said, “but we need to relieve him of that warehouse. We need to transfer all warehouse operations up here.” Moreover, he added, we needed to hire Woodell’s mother to run it. She’d worked for years in the warehouse at Jantzen, the legendary Oregon outfitter, so it wasn’t nepotism, he said. Ma Woodell was perfect for the job. I wasn’t sure I cared. If Woodell was good with it, I was good with it. Plus, the way I saw it: The more Woodells the better.

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

  “Well,” I said, tapping my watch, snapping my rubber bands, “it’s late, I’d better be going.” Her mother looked at a clock on the wall. “It’s only nine o’clock,” she said. “Some hot date.” JUST AFTER OUR second date Penny went with her parents to Hawaii for Christmas. She sent me a postcard, and I took this as a good sign. When she returned, her first day back at the office, I asked her again to dinner. It was early January 1968, a bitterly cold night. Again we went to Jade West, but this time I met her there, and I was quite late, arriving from my Eagle Scout review board, for which she gave me much grief. “Eagle Scout? You?” I took this as another good sign. She felt comfortable enough to tease me. At some point during that third date, I noticed we were both much more at ease. It felt nice. The ease continued, and over the next few weeks deepened. We developed a rapport, a feel for each other, a knack for communicating nonverbally. As only two shy people can. When she was feeling shy, or uncomfortable, I sensed it, and either gave her space or tried to draw her out, depending. When I was spaced out, embroiled in some internal debate with myself about the business, she knew whether to tap me lightly on the shoulder or wait patiently for me to reemerge. Penny wasn’t legally old enough to drink alcohol, but we’d often borrow one of my sisters’ driver’s licenses and go for cocktails at Trader Vic’s downtown. Alcohol and time worked their magic. By February, around my thirtieth birthday, she was spending every minute of her free time at Blue Ribbon, and evenings at my apartment. At some point she stopped calling me Mr. Knight. INEVITABLY, I BROUGHT her home to meet my family. We all sat around the dining room table, eating Mom’s pot roast, washing it down with cold milk, pretending it wasn’t awkward. Penny was the second girl I’d ever brought home, and though she didn’t have the wild charisma of Sarah, what she had was better. Her charm was real, unrehearsed, and though the Knights seemed to like it, they were still the Knights. My mother said nothing; my sisters tried in vain to be a bridge to my mother and father; my father asked a series of probing, thoughtful questions about Penny’s background and upbringing, which made him sound like a cross between a loan officer and a homicide detective. Penny told me later that the atmosphere was the exact opposite of her house, where dinner was a free-for-all, everyone laughing and talking over one another, dogs barking and TVs blaring in the background. I assured her that no one would have suspected she felt out of her element. Next she brought me home, and I saw the truth of everything she’d told me. Her house was the opposite.