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 Educated (2018)

  Dad, his fervor kindled, would drone for an hour or more, reciting the same lines over and over, fueled by some internal passion that burned long after the rest of us had been lectured into a cold stupor. Grandma had a memorable way of laughing at the end of these sermons. It was a sort of sigh, a long, drawn-out leaking of breath, that finished with her eyes rolling upward in a lazy imitation of exasperation, as if she wanted to throw her hands in the air but was too tired to complete the gesture. Then she’d smile—not a soothing smile for someone else but a smile for herself, of baffled amusement, a smile that to me always seemed to say, Ain’t nothin’ funnier than real life, I tell you what . —IT WAS A SCORCHING AFTERNOON, so hot you couldn’t walk barefoot on the pavement, when Grandma took me and Richard for a drive through the desert, having wrestled us into seatbelts, which we’d never worn before. We drove until the road began to incline, then kept driving as the asphalt turned to dust beneath our tires, and still we kept going, Grandma weaving higher and higher into the bleached hills, coming to a stop only when the dirt road ended and a hiking trail began. Then we walked. Grandma was winded after a few minutes, so she sat on a flat red stone and pointed to a sandstone rock formation in the distance, formed of crumbling spires, each a little ruin, and told us to hike to it. Once there, we were to hunt for nuggets of black rock. “They’re called Apache tears,” she said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small black stone, dirty and jagged, covered in veins of gray and white like cracked glass. “And this is how they look after they’ve been polished a bit.” From her other pocket she withdrew a second stone, which was inky black and so smooth it felt soft. Richard identified both as obsidian. “These are volcanic rock,” he said in his best encyclopedic voice. “But this isn’t.” He kicked a washed-out stone and waved at the formation. “This is sediment.” Richard had a talent for scientific trivia. Usually I ignored his lecturing but today I was gripped by it, and by this strange, thirsty terrain. We hiked around the formation for an hour, returning to Grandma with our shirtfronts sagging with stones. Grandma was pleased; she could sell them. She put them in the trunk, and as we made our way back to the trailer, she told us the legend of the Apache tears. According to Grandma, a hundred years ago a tribe of Apaches had fought the U.S. Cavalry on those faded rocks. The tribe was outnumbered: the battle lost, the war over. All that was left to do was wait to die. Soon after the battle began, the warriors became trapped on a ledge.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The other scene would have been too complicated for him to hassle.... And I had never heard even the scores and queens, who would often in bitchiness claim that “today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition,” say it about Chuck. “Not that I got anything against anyone swinging on a joint, dig?—if they wanna—” he was going on. There was little he condemned, little he didnt accept—even to being rousted by the cops.... Once, weeks before, sitting with him at Hooper’s coffee-and-donuts after two in the morning, we had been picked up at random from the other faces there by two cops. Chuck had remained lackadaisically cool, almost Philosophical. He told me: “Shoot, unless they really want you for something, we will be back here in jes a few minutes. On weekends, man, this late, they got too many in the joint already.... But we are gonna take a little trip to the glasshouse,” he predicted—and he was right—the glasshouse being where they interrogate you, fingerprint you without booking you: an illegal L.A. cop-tactic to scare you from hanging around... (I remember: As we were being taken to be fingerprinted, along with five others out of Hooper’s—one of the night typists at the station, a pretty roundfaced girl, said to the one next to her: “Thats a cute bunch they got there.” And Chuck called to her: “What time you get off, honey?” She answered saucily: “When do you get out?” —just as the cop, Meanly, stormed back to squelch the Romance....) Along the walks in the park, the hunters and watchers slowly thickened. I noticed three malehustlers standing a few feet from us. I can hear snatches of their conversation: “—I rolled him for a C, man—...” “Man, I didnt even let im touch me an I scored 20 bills...” The preaching has increased. The angelsisters are marching solemnly to Their Corner—led by the sinister deacon old man.... A man is now standing inches before the howling Negro woman, and as she bumps, he puts his hands behind his neck and thrusts his pelvis lewdly at her, shouting: “Go!”—while she continued howling: “Lawd! Don lure me wid da Debil! Lawd! Ah done seed Yuh in all Yuh Glory! Lawd!” as if playing hide-and-seek with God.... A tattered gray old man, drunk, passes by, mumbling: “Goddamn! God-Jesus-damn!”... Chuck is staring at all this. He shakes his head. I wait curiously for whatever comment hes about to make. What he said was: “Man, dig those birds.” Before us, two pigeons were cooing romantically at each other. “Now ain they something? They make it with each other in Broad Daylight, an nobody busts them for indecent exposure....

• From Educated (2018)

  I rushed into the passenger seat, displacing a toolbox and welding gloves, while Grandma told Dad about my not washing. Dad listened, sucking on his cheeks while his right hand fiddled with the gearshift. A laugh was bubbling up inside him. Having returned to my father, I felt the power of his person. A familiar lens slid over my eyes and Grandma lost whatever strange power she’d had over me an hour before. “Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said. Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.” [image "Chapter 6 Shield and Buckler" file=Image00008.jpg] The winter after Tyler left, Audrey turned fifteen. She picked up her driver’s license from the county courthouse and, on her way home, got a job flipping burgers. Then she took a second job milking cows at four A.M . every morning. For a year she’d been fighting with Dad, bucking under the restraints he put on her. Now she had money; she had her own car; we hardly saw her. The family was shrinking, the old hierarchy compressing. Dad didn’t have enough of a crew to build hay sheds, so he went back to scrapping. With Tyler gone, the rest of us were promoted: Luke, at sixteen, became the eldest son, my father’s right hand, and Richard and I took his place as grunts. I remember the first morning I entered the junkyard as one of my father’s crew. The earth was ice, even the air felt stiff. We were in the yard above the lower pasture, which was overrun by hundreds of cars and trucks. Some were old and broken down but most had been wrecked and they looked it—bent, arched, twisted, the impression they gave was of crumpled paper, not steel. In the center of the yard there was a lake of debris, vast and deep: leaking car batteries, tangles of insulated copper wire, abandoned transmissions, rusted sheets of corrugated tin, antique faucets, smashed radiators, serrated lengths of luminous brass pipe, and on and on. It was endless, a formless mass. Dad led me to its edge. “You know the difference between aluminum and stainless steel?” he said. “I think so.” “Come here.” His tone was impatient. He was used to dictating to grown men. Having to explain his trade to a ten-year-old girl somehow made us both feel small. He yanked out a chunk of shimmering metal. “This here’s aluminum,” he said. “See how it shines? Feel how light it is?” Dad put the piece into my hand. He was right; it was not as heavy as it looked. Next Dad handed me a dented pipe. “This here’s steel,” he said. We began to sort the debris into piles—aluminum, iron, steel, copper—so it could be sold. I picked up a piece of iron. It was dense with bronze rust, and its jagged angles nibbled at my palms.

• From Educated (2018)

  At church my first week, my new bishop greeted me with a warm handshake, then moved on to the next newcomer. I reveled in his disinterest. If I could just pretend to be normal for a little while, maybe it would feel like the truth. It was at church that I met Nick. Nick had square glasses and dark hair, which he gelled and teased into neat spikes. Dad would have scoffed at a man wearing hair gel, which is perhaps why I loved it. I also loved that Nick wouldn’t have known an alternator from a crankshaft. What he did know were books and video games and clothing brands. And words. He had an astonishing vocabulary. Nick and I were a couple from the beginning. He grabbed my hand the second time we met. When his skin touched mine, I prepared to fight that primal need to push him away, but it never came. It was strange and exciting, and no part of me wanted it to end. I wished I were still in my old congregation, so I could rush to my old bishop and tell him I wasn’t broken anymore. I overestimated my progress. I was so focused on what was working, I didn’t notice what wasn’t. We’d been together a few months, and I’d spent many evenings with his family, before I ever said a word about mine. I did it without thinking, casually mentioned one of Mother’s oils when Nick said he had an ache in his shoulder. He was intrigued—he’d been waiting for me to bring them up—but I was angry at myself for the slip, and didn’t let it happen again. —I BEGAN TO FEEL poorly toward the end of May. A week passed in which I could hardly drag myself to my job, an internship at a law firm. I slept from early evening until late morning, then yawned through the day. My throat began to ache and my voice dropped, roughening into a deep crackle, as if my vocal cords had turned to sandpaper. At first Nick was amused that I wouldn’t see a doctor, but as the illness progressed his amusement turned to worry, then confusion. I blew him off. “It’s not that serious,” I said. “I’d go if it were serious.” Another week passed. I quit my internship and began sleeping through the days as well as the nights. One morning, Nick showed up unexpectedly. “We’re going to the doctor,” he said. I started to say I wouldn’t go, but then I saw his face. He looked as though he had a question but knew there was no point in asking it. The tense line of his mouth, the narrowing of his eyes. This is what distrust looks like, I thought. Given the choice between seeing an evil socialist doctor, and admitting to my boyfriend that I believed doctors were evil socialists, I chose to see the doctor. “I’ll go today,” I said. “I promise.

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

  And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In what format do I want to say all this? A memoir? No, not a memoir. I can’t imagine how it could all fit into one unified narrative. Maybe a novel. Or a speech. Or a series of speeches. Maybe just a letter to my grandkids. I peer into the dark. So maybe there is something on my bucket list after all? Another Crazy Idea. Suddenly my mind is racing. People I need to call, things I need to read. I’ll have to get in touch with Woodell. I should see if we have any copies of those letters from Johnson. There were so many! Somewhere in my parents’ house, where my sister Joanne still lives, there must be a box with my slides from my trip around the world. So much to do. So much to learn. So much I don’t know about my own life. Now I really can’t sleep. I get up, grab a yellow legal pad from my desk. I go to the living room and sit in my recliner. A feeling of stillness, of immense peace, comes over me. I squint at the moon shining outside my window. The same moon that inspired the ancient Zen masters to worry about nothing. In the timeless, clarifying light

• From Educated (2018)

  I worked through the Old Testament next, then I read Dad’s books, which were mostly compilations of the speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language was of the nineteenth century—stiff, winding, but exact—and at first I understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began to feel at home with those fragments of my people’s history: stories of pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study. In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand. —BY THE TIME THE SNOW on the mountain began to melt, my hands were thickly callused. A season in the junkyard had honed my reflexes: I’d learned to listen for the low grunt that escaped Dad’s lips whenever he tossed something heavy, and when I heard it I hit the dirt. I spent so much time flat in the mud, I didn’t salvage much. Dad joked I was as slow as molasses running uphill. The memory of Tyler had faded, and with it had faded his music, drowned out by the crack of metal crashing into metal. Those were the sounds that played in my head at night now—the jingle of corrugated tin, the short tap of copper wire, the thunder of iron. I had entered into the new reality. I saw the world through my father’s eyes. I saw the angels, or at least I imagined I saw them, watching us scrap, stepping forward and catching the car batteries or jagged lengths of steel tubing that Dad launched across the yard. I’d stopped shouting at Dad for throwing them. Instead, I prayed. I worked faster when I salvaged alone, so one morning when Dad was in the northern tip of the yard, near the mountain, I headed for the southern tip, near the pasture. I filled a bin with two thousand pounds of iron; then, my arms aching, I ran to find Dad. The bin had to be emptied, and I couldn’t operate the loader—a massive forklift with a telescopic arm and wide, black wheels that were taller than I was. The loader would raise the bin some twenty-five feet into the air and then, with the boom extended, tilt the forks so the scrap could slide out, raining down into the trailer with a tremendous clamor. The trailer was a fifty-foot flatbed rigged for scrapping, essentially a giant bucket. Its walls were made of thick iron sheets that reached eight feet from the bed.

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

  In the 1980s, whenever I went to Tokyo, Hayami would invite me for the weekend to his beach house, near Atami, the Japanese Riviera. We’d always leave Tokyo late Friday, by rail, and have a cognac along the way. Within an hour we’d be at the Izu Peninsula, where we’d stop at some marvelous restaurant for dinner. The next morning we’d play golf, and Saturday night we’d have a Japanese-style barbecue in his backyard. We’d solve all the world’s problems, or I’d give him my problems and he’d solve them. On one trip we ended the evening in Hayami’s hot tub. I recall, above the foaming water, the sound of the distant ocean slapping the shore. I recall the cool smell of the wind through the trees—thousands and thousands of coastal trees, dozens of species not found in any Oregon forest. I recall the jungle crows cawing in the distance as we discussed the infinite. Then the finite. I complained about my business. Even after going public, there were so many problems. “We have so much opportunity, but we’re having a terrible time getting managers who can seize those opportunities. We try people from the outside, but they fail, because our culture is so different.” Mr. Hayami nodded. “See those bamboo trees up there?” he asked. “Yes.” “Next year… when you come… they will be one foot higher.” I stared. I understood. When I returned to Oregon I tried hard to cultivate and grow the management team we had, slowly, with more patience, with an eye toward more training and more long-term planning. I took the wider, longer view. It worked. The next time I saw Hayami, I told him. He merely nodded, once, hai, and looked off. ALMOST THREE DECADES ago Harvard and Stanford began studying Nike, and sharing their research with other universities, which has created many opportunities for me to visit different colleges, to take part in stimulating academic discussions, to continue to learn. It’s always a happy occasion to be walking a campus, but also bracing, because while I find students today much smarter and more competent than in my time, I also find them far more pessimistic. Occasionally they ask in dismay: “Where is the U.S. going? 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.

• From City of Night (1963)

  What happened to that guy?” he said abruptly—and always he would speak out whatever had formed in his mind, as if expecting that others were following his thinking identically. One moment he could be consumed almost childishly with glee—and like a child dazzled by sights of spinning ferris wheels and rollercoasters, the next moment he could shift his interest easily to something else. “Which guy?” “Oh, you know, man—the score you was with that time—the one that wanted pod so bad.” Sometime ago, on Main Street, I had met a man from out of town who was almost breathlessly intrigued by what he called “the lowlife”—and particularly with what for him was its ultimate manifestation: smoking marijuana. I told him I could get the weed for him and we’d get high. He was so completely square that I figured—correctly—I could get him to pay as much as two bucks for each joint—which at that time was four bits a stick but which I could score for free from a queen from San Francisco. That night, I couldnt find her anywhere. I tried to pick up at Dora’s—a junk bar—but the heat was on, and the twitching pusher who hung out there—talking to you in the sinister, evil-smelling mazelike head downstairs where he made all his transactions—told me he couldnt get anything that night—“not even a benny.” At Ji-Ji’s, Dad’o hadnt even shown up—nor the pusher with the prophet-like face.... Then we ran into Chuck in the park, and while the score stood wide-eyed digging the “low-life” scene, I told Chuck what I was looking for—and why. He conceived a plot: He would split, get some ordinary cigarettes, remove the tobacco, and re-roll them in brown paper. I’d meet him in a few minutes and he would give them to me, playing a real “lowlife” scene for the score. It worked.... Later, in a ratty rented room—which I was sure the score had chosen for “lowlife atmosphere”—the score gagged on the faked joints; said: “This is sure powerful stuff you got us, boy.” After smoking about two of the ordinary cigarettes, he was convinced he was Heavenly High.... “You sure are getting high,” I told him, “just look at your pupils, theyre about to explode!” “Is that how you can tell?” “Sure!”... “Yeah,” he said, rushing to the mirror to look at his lowlife pupils, “I Sure Am High. Powerful stuff, powerful!” Now, I told Chuck how it had turned out. “Great, man,” he said. “An dig: No one got hurt—he got his kicks, same as if he had smoked the real stuff.... An what the hell, if it hadda been the real stuff, it wouldda been his luck to get busted or something. Maybe he’dda become a real strong head, even!” And now he smiles and said: “I even used some of that there men-tho-lated tobacco.” And so, for Chuck, the scene had been the Good Deed of a Boy Scout.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Why hassle moren you got to?” Then, squinting at the sun, he added philosophically: “Theres jes two kindsa people that don gotta work: Those that got all the money, an those that ain got none.... An me,” he said happily, “I ain got nothin.” I sat next to him on the railing. In my mind, later, Chuck, like that statue, would become a part of my memory of Pershing Square: Chuck, sitting there complacently in the lazy afternoons, in the same spot, shoulders hunched, hands holding on to the railing, balancing himself—long, lanky legs locked loosely under the bar by booted toes as if on a fence, on a ranch; sandy hair jutting out from the widehat over long sideburns—as he looks at the passing scene of Pershing Square with what I would usually think was amusement—but wonder, occasionally, Is it more like bewilderment?... When something unusual—unusual in the sense of Pershing Square—happened within the area of his vision—or, rather, of his consciousness, since the two seemed at times to be completely separated—he would shout: “Yippee!” with more energy than he would muster for anything else—as he might have at a rodeo—or at the movies rooting in child-excitement for The Rangers. Others in that restless, nervous world came and went, suddenly disappearing altogether. But Chuck seemed always to be here. And unlike the other youngmen hustling the park, he seldom even moved about hunting for scores. Not because of vanity or self-confidence, I am sure, but because he preferred to move as little as possible, he waits for someone to come to him. And, usually, they did: In that world of downtown Los Angeles, Chuck was one of its best-liked citizens—as much by the scores as by other hustlers—perhaps because, with him, everything always seemed to be going right... He moved effortlessly from day to day as if taking a necessary journey which he must make as easily as possible. “You know what I mean about hassling a gig, don you?” he asked me. “I mean, crazy if you dig what youre doing an thats what you want—but jes workin—! Hell, I would jes as soon hang aroun here,... Hell, I made a few bucks in that there parkin lot—an—dig—I bought me these here boots.” He raises one gaudy-booted foot for inspection. “Tough, huh?” he asked. “I wanted some with Red on em—but they didn have none.” I nodded yes on both counts: I understood about working—and the boots were “tough.” “So: I hang aroun here an make it jes as good,” he said.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  In the imagination, everything can be restored, everything mended, wounds healed, stories ended. White could not trap his lost hawk, but as Merlyn he does, with a ring of upturned feathers and a fishing line, and brings it in triumph back to the castle with the Wart. And thus White gives himself a new pupil to train: not a hawk, but the boy who will be king. He will educate him in the morality of power, inspire him to found the Round Table, to fight, always, for Right over Might. ‘A good man’s example always does instruct the ignorant and lessens their rage, little by little through the ages, until the spirit of the waters is content,’ says the grass snake to the king at the end of The Book of Merlyn. For a little boy who stood in front of a toy castle convinced he would be killed, being Merlyn is the best dream of all. He will wait, he will endure, and one day he will be able to stop the awful violence before it ever started. 27 The new world It is Christmas Eve. Outside my window is an icy tidal river. Everything not fringed with silver and limned lamp-black is white or Prussian blue. Those moving dots are wintering ducks and a loon slides past them on a low, submarine-profile cruise to the sea. Everything is heavy with snow. I’m stuffed to the gills with pancakes and maple bacon and I’m feeling quiet inside, quieter now than at any time since my father died. It is a deep and simple hush. My mother is asleep in the room next door, my brother is home with his in-laws, and Mabel is at Stuart and Mandy’s, three thousand miles away. Mum and I are spending Christmas in America through the kindness of my friend Erin and his parents Harriet and Jim, who run a bed-and-breakfast inn on the coast of southern Maine. I met Erin years ago when I worked breeding falcons in Wales; a young surfer and falconer, he’d turned up at Carmarthen station looking wildly out of place, like a clean-shaven Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. He’d been drawn to Britain by dreams of flying falcons, only to be put to work jetwashing aviaries in driving rain. But he survived the gloom, and we became friends. Proper friends. The kind people say you only make once, twice in a life. I’ve visited him many times over the years, and through him I’ve met a crowd of wonderful Mainers. They’re not much like my Cambridge friends. They’re fishermen, hunters, artisans, teachers, innkeepers, guides. They make furniture, decoys, exquisite ceramic pots. They cook, they teach, they fish for lobster, take tourists out to catch striped bass. And most of them hunt.

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

  In the meantime Blue Ribbon had outgrown my apartment. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it had taken over. The place was now the equal of Johnson’s bachelor pad. All it needed was a violet light and a baby octopus. I couldn’t put it off any longer, I needed a proper office space, so I rented a large room on the east side of town. It wasn’t much. A plain old workspace with a high ceiling and high windows, several of which were broken or stuck open, meaning the room was a constant, brisk fifty degrees. Right next door was a raucous tavern, the Pink Bucket, and every day at 4:00 p.m., promptly, the jukebox would kick in. The walls were so thin, you could hear the first record drop and feel every thumping note thereafter. You could almost hear people striking matches, lighting cigarettes, clinking glasses. Cheers. Salud. Mud in your eye. But the rent was cheap. Fifty bucks a month. When I took Woodell to see it, he allowed it had a certain charm. Woodell needed to like it, because I was transferring him from the Eugene store to this office. He’d shown tremendous skills at the store, a flair for organizing, along with boundless energy, but I could use him better in what I would be calling “the home office.” Sure enough, on Day One he came up with a solution to the stuck windows. He brought in one of his old javelins to hook the window latches and push them shut. We couldn’t afford to fix the broken glass in the other windows, so on really cold days we just wore sweaters. Meanwhile, in the middle of the room I erected a plywood wall, thereby creating warehouse space in the back and retail-office space up front. I was no handyman, and the floor was badly warped, so the wall wasn’t close to straight or even. From ten feet away it appeared to undulate. Woodell and I decided that was kind of groovy. At an office thrift store we bought three battered desks, one for me, one for Woodell, one for “the next person stupid enough to work for us.” I also built a corkboard wall, to which I pinned different Tiger models, borrowing some of Johnson’s décor ideas in Santa Monica. In a far corner I set up a small sitting area for customers to try on shoes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Martin Bucer, the chief Reformer of the city, was the embodiment of a generous and comprehensive catholicity, and gave it expression in the Tetrapolitan Confession, which was presented at the diet of Augsburg in 1530.497 He afterwards brought about, in the same irenic spirit, the Wittenberg Concordia (1536), which was to harmonize the Lutheran and Zwinglian theories on the Lord’s Supper, but conceded too much to Luther (even the participation of the body and blood of Christ by unworthy communicants), and therefore was rejected by Bullinger and the Swiss Churches. He wrote to Bern in June, 1540, that next to Wittenberg no city in Germany was so friendly to the gospel and so large-hearted in spirit as Strassburg. He ended his labors in the Anglican Church as professor of theology in the University of Cambridge in 1551. Six years after his death his body was dug up, chained upright to a stake and burned, under Queen Mary; but his tomb was rebuilt and his memory honorably restored under Queen Elizabeth. His colleague Fagius shared the same fate. The Zürichers, in a letter to Calvin, call Strassburg "the Antioch of the Reformation;" Capito, "the refuge of exiled brethren;" the Roman Catholic historian, Florimond de Raemond, "the retreat and rendezvous of Lutherans and Zwinglians under the control of Bucer, and the receptacle of those that were banished from France."498 Among the distinguished early refugees from France were Francis Lambert, Farel, Le Févre, Roussel, and Michel d’Arande. Unfortunately, Strassburg did not long occupy this noble position, but became a battlefield of bitter sectarian strife and, for some time, the home of a narrow Lutheran orthodoxy. The city was conquered by Louis XIV. and annexed to Roman Catholic France in 1681, to the detriment of her Protestant character, but was reconquered by Emperor William I. and incorporated with united Germany as the capital of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. The university was newly organized and better equipped than ever before.499 Calvin arrived at Strassburg in the first days of September, 1538.500 He spent there three years in useful labors. He was received with open arms by Bucer, Capito, Hedio, Sturm, and Niger, the leading men in the Church, and appointed by the Council professor of theology, with a moderate salary. He soon felt at home, and in the next summer bought the citizenship, and joined the guild of the tailors.501

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

  I said simply: “How did you do it?” I thought I saw the corners of his mouth flicker. A smile? Maybe? He thought. And thought. “I was,” he said, “a professor of the jungle.” THOUGHTS OF ASIA always lead back to Nissho. Where on earth would we have been without Nissho? And without Nissho’s former CEO, Masuro Hayami. I got to know him well after Nike went public. We couldn’t help but bond: I was his most profitable client, and his most avid pupil. And he was perhaps the wisest man I ever knew. Unlike many other wise men, he drew great peace from his wisdom. I depended on that peace. In the 1980s, whenever I went to Tokyo, Hayami would invite me for the weekend to his beach house, near Atami, the Japanese Riviera. We’d always leave Tokyo late Friday, by rail, and have a cognac along the way. Within an hour we’d be at the Izu Peninsula, where we’d stop at some marvelous restaurant for dinner. The next morning we’d play golf, and Saturday night we’d have a Japanese-style barbecue in his backyard. We’d solve all the world’s problems, or I’d give him my problems and he’d solve them. On one trip we ended the evening in Hayami’s hot tub. I recall, above the foaming water, the sound of the distant ocean slapping the shore. I recall the cool smell of the wind through the trees—thousands and thousands of coastal trees, dozens of species not found in any Oregon forest. I recall the jungle crows cawing in the distance as we discussed the infinite. Then the finite. I complained about my business. Even after going public, there were so many problems. “We have so much opportunity, but we’re having a terrible time getting managers who can seize those opportunities. We try people from the outside, but they fail, because our culture is so different.” Mr. Hayami nodded. “See those bamboo trees up there?” he asked. “Yes.” “Next year... when you come... they will be one foot higher.” I stared. I understood. When I returned to Oregon I tried hard to cultivate and grow the management team we had, slowly, with more patience, with an eye toward more training and more long-term planning. I took the wider, longer view. It worked. The next time I saw Hayami, I told him. He merely nodded, once, hai, and looked off. ALMOST THREE DECADES ago Harvard and Stanford began studying Nike, and sharing their research with other universities, which has created many opportunities for me to visit different colleges, to take part in stimulating academic discussions, to continue to learn. It’s always a happy occasion to be walking a campus, but also bracing, because while I find students today much smarter and more competent than in my time, I also find them far more pessimistic. Occasionally they ask in dismay: “Where is the U.S. going?

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

  I love to close my eyes and remember us storming through the entrance, scattering all other patrons. Or making friends of them. We’d buy drinks for the house, then commandeer a corner and continue laying into each other about some problem or idea or harebrained scheme. Say the problem was midsoles not getting from Point A to Point B. Round and round we’d go, everyone speaking at once, a chorale of name-calling and finger-pointing, all made louder, and funnier, and somehow clearer, by the booze. To anyone in the Owl’s Nest, to anyone in the corporate world, it would have looked inefficient, inappropriate. Even scandalous. But before the bartender gave last call, we’d know full well why those midsoles weren’t getting from Point A to Point B, and the person responsible would be contrite, and put on notice, and we’d have ourselves a creative solution. The only person who didn’t join us in these late-night revels was Johnson. He’d typically go for a head-clearing run, then retreat to his room and read in bed. I don’t think he ever set foot in the Owl’s Nest. Or knew where it was. We’d always have to spend the first part of the next morning updating him on what we’d decided in his absence. In the Bicentennial Year alone we were struggling with a number of unusually stressful problems. We needed to find a larger warehouse on the East Coast. We needed to transfer our sales-distribution center, from Holliston, Massachusetts, to a new forty-thousand-square-foot space in Greenland, New Hampshire, which was sure to be a logistical nightmare. We needed to hire an advertising agency to handle the increasing volume of print ads. We needed to either fix or shut our underperforming factories. We needed to smooth out glitches in our Futures Program. We needed to hire a director of promotions. We needed to form a Pro Club, a sort of reward system for our top NBA stars, to cement their loyalty and keep them in the Nike fold. We needed to approve new products, like the Arsenal, a soccer-baseball cleat with leather upper and vinyl poly-foam tongue, and the Striker, a multipurpose cleat good for soccer, baseball, football, softball, and field hockey. And we needed to decide on a new logo. Aside from the swoosh, we had a lowercase script name, nike , which was problematic—too many people thought it was like , or mike. But it was too late in the day to change the name of the company, so making the letters more readable seemed a good idea. Denny Strickland, creative director at our advertising agency, had designed a block-lettered NIKE, all caps, and nested it inside a swoosh. We spent days considering it, debating it. Above all, we needed to decide, once and for all, this “going public” question. In those earliest Buttfaces, a consensus began to form. If we couldn’t sustain growth, we couldn’t survive.

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

  Suddenly my mind is racing. People I need to call, things I need to read. I’ll have to get in touch with Woodell. I should see if we have any copies of those letters from Johnson. There were so many! Somewhere in my parents’ house, where my sister Joanne still lives, there must be a box with my slides from my trip around the world. So much to do. So much to learn. So much I don’t know about my own life. Now I really can’t sleep. I get up, grab a yellow legal pad from my desk. I go to the living room and sit in my recliner. A feeling of stillness, of immense peace, comes over me. I squint at the moon shining outside my window. The same moon that inspired the ancient Zen masters to worry about nothing. In the timeless, clarifying light of that moon, I begin to make a list. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI’ve spent a fair portion of my life in debt. As a young entrepreneur I became distressingly familiar with that feeling of going to sleep each night, waking up each day, owing many people a sum far greater than I could repay. Nothing, however, has made me feel quite so indebted as the writing of this book. Just as there’s no end to my gratitude, there seems no proper, logical place to begin to express it. And so. At Nike, I wish to thank my assistant, Lisa McKillips, for doing everything—I mean everything—perfectly, cheerfully, and always with her dazzling smile; old friends Jeff Johnson and Bob Woodell for making me remember, and being patient when I remembered it different; historian Scott Reames for deftly sifting facts from myths; and Maria Eitel for applying her expertise to weightiest matters. Of course, my biggest and most emphatic thanks to the 68,000 Nike employees worldwide for their daily efforts and their dedication, without which there would be no book, no author, no nothing. At Stanford, I wish to thank the mad genius and gifted teacher Adam Johnson for his golden example of what it means to be a working writer and a friend; Abraham Verghese, who instructs as he writes—quietly, effortlessly; and numberless graduate students I met with while sitting in the back row of writing classes—each inspired me with his or her passion for language and craft. At Scribner, thanks to the legendary Nan Graham for her steadfast support; Brian Belfiglio, Roz Lippel, Susan Moldow, and Carolyn Reidy for their bracing, energizing enthusiasm; Kathleen Rizzo for keeping production moving smoothly forward while always maintaining a sublime calm; above all, thanks to my supremely talented and razor-sharp editor, Shannon Welch, who gave me the affirmation I needed, when I needed it, without either of us fully appreciating how much I needed it. Her early note of praise and analysis and precocious wisdom was everything.

• From Educated (2018)

  It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama. In the valley, Faye tried to stop her ears against the constant gossip of a small town, whose opinions pushed in through the windows and crept under the doors. Mother often described herself as a pleaser: she said she couldn’t stop herself from speculating what people wanted her to be, and from contorting herself, compulsively, unwillingly, into whatever it was. Living in her respectable house in the center of town, crowded by four other houses, each so near anyone could peer through the windows and whisper a judgment, Faye felt trapped. I’ve often imagined the moment when Gene took Faye to the top of Buck’s Peak and she was, for the first time, unable to see the faces or hear the voices of the people in the town below. They were far away. Dwarfed by the mountain, hushed by the wind. They were engaged soon after. —MOTHER USED TO TELL a story from the time before she was married. She had been close to her brother Lynn, so she took him to meet the man she hoped would be her husband. It was summer, dusk, and Dad’s cousins were roughhousing the way they did after a harvest. Lynn arrived and, seeing a room of bowlegged ruffians shouting at each other, fists clenched, swiping at the air, thought he was witnessing a brawl straight out of a John Wayne film. He wanted to call the police. “I told him to listen,” Mother would say, tears in her eyes from laughing. She always told this story the same way, and it was such a favorite that if she departed in any way from the usual script, we’d tell it for her. “I told him to pay attention to the actual words they were shouting. Everyone sounded mad as hornets, but really they were having a lovely conversation. You had to listen to what they were saying, not how they were saying it. I told him, That’s just how Westovers talk!” By the time she’d finished we were usually on the floor. We’d cackle until our ribs hurt, imagining our prim, professorial uncle meeting Dad’s unruly crew. Lynn found the scene so distasteful he never went back, and in my whole life I never saw him on the mountain. Served him right, we thought, for his meddling, for trying to draw Mother back into that world of gabardine dresses and cream shoes. We understood that the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration of ours. The two could not exist together. Only one could have her. Mother never told us that her family had opposed the engagement but we knew. There were traces the decades hadn’t erased. My father seldom set foot in Grandma-over-in-town’s house, and when he did he was sullen and stared at the door.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But though she ate the suppers I cooked; though she handed me Cyril to wash and dress and cradle; and though, when a month had passed, she had agreed that I might stay if I still cared to, and sent Ralph into the attic to bring me down a little truckle-bed, which she said would be cosier, in the parlour, than the two armchairs - though she did all these things, she never did them as if she really did them for me. She did them because the suppers and the baby-minding gave her more hours to devote to her other causes. She had given me work, as a lady might give work to a shiftless girl, come fresh from prison. I should not have been myself, if her indifference had not rather piqued me. I had spent eighteen months at Felicity Place, shaping my behaviour to the desires of lustful ladies until I was as skilled and as subtle at it as a glove-maker: I could not throw those skills over now, just because I also learned the blacking of a grate. On Florence, however, the skills proved useless. ‘She really can’t be a tom,’ I would say to myself - for, if she never flirted with me, then there were plenty of other girls who passed through our parlour, and I never saw her flirt with a single one of them, not once. But then, I never saw her flirting with a fellow, either. At last, I supposed she was too good to fall in love with anyone. And, after all, I had not come to Quilter Street to flirt; I had come to be ordinary. And knowing there was no one’s eye to charm or set smarting only made me more ordinary still. My hair - which had lost its military sharpness after a week or two, anyway - I let grow; I even began to curl it at the ends. My pinching boots became less stiff, the more I walked in them; but I traded them in, at a second-hand clothes stall, for a pair of shoes with bows on.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  So then it was only Florence and me. We walked quickly, because it was so cold, and Florence linked her hands around my arm and held me very close. When we reached the end of Quilter Street we stopped, as I had done on my first journey there, to gaze for a moment at the dark and eerie towers of Columbia Market, and to peer up at the starless, moonless, fog- and smoke-choked London sky. ‘I don’t believe Annie will catch us up, after all,’ murmured Florence, looking back towards Shoreditch. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe she will ...’ The house, when we entered it, seemed hot and stuffy enough; we soon grew chilled, however, once we had taken our coats off and visited the privy. Ralph had left my truckle-bed made up for me, and fixed a note to the mantel to say there was a pot of tea for us inside the oven. There was: it was as thick and brown as gravy, but we drank it anyway - carrying our mugs back into the parlour, where the air was warmest, and holding our hands before the last few glowing coals in the ashy hearth. The chairs had been pushed back to make room for my bed, so now, rather shyly, we sat upon it, side by side: as we did so, it moved a little on its castors, and Florence laughed. There was a lamp turned low upon the table but, apart from that, the room was very dim. We sat, and sipped our tea, and gazed at the coals: now and then the ash would shift a little in the grate, and the coal give a pop. ‘How still it seems,’ said Florence quietly, ‘after the Boy!’ I had drawn my knees to my chin - the bed was very low upon the rug - and now turned my cheek upon them, and smiled at her. ‘I’m glad you took me there,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had such a pleasant night since - well, I cannot say.’ ‘Can’t you?’ ‘I can’t. For half my pleasure, you know, was seeing you so gay...’ She smiled, then yawned. ‘Didn’t you think Miss Raymond very handsome?’ she asked me. ‘Pretty handsome.’ Not as handsome as you, I wanted to say, looking again at all the features I had once thought plain. Oh Flo, there’s no one as handsome as you! But I didn’t say it. And meanwhile, she had smiled. ‘I remember another girl Annie courted once. We let them stay with us, because Annie was sharing with her sister then. They slept in here, and Lilian and I were upstairs; and they were so noisy, Mrs Monks came round to ask, “Was someone poorly?” We had to say that Lily had the toothache - when in fact, she had slept through it all, with me beside her...’ Her voice grew quiet.

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

  Frisbee’s office window glinted off his rimless glasses and into my eyes. Like the sun off the Ganges. “Phil,” he said, “those are all bad ideas.” “Sir?” “I don’t think you should do any of those things.” “Oh.” “Everyone, but everyone, changes jobs at least three times. So if you go to work for an investment firm now, you’ll eventually leave, and then at your next job you’ll have to start all over. If you go work for some big company, son, same deal. No, what you want to do, while you’re young, is get your CPA. That, along with your MBA, will put a solid floor under your earnings. Then, when you change jobs, which you will, trust me, at least you’ll maintain your salary level. You won’t go backward.” That sounded practical. I certainly didn’t want to go backward. I hadn’t majored in accounting, however. I needed nine more hours to even qualify to take the exam. So I quickly enrolled in three accounting classes at Portland State. “ More school?” my father grumbled. Worse, the school in question wasn’t Stanford or Oregon. It was puny little Portland State. I wasn’t the only school snob in the family. AFTER GETTING MY nine hours I worked at an accounting firm, Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery. It was one of the Big Eight national firms, but its Portland branch office was small. One partner, three junior accountants. Suits me, I thought. Smallness meant the firm would be intimate, conducive to learning. And it did start out that way. My first assignment was a Beaverton company, Reser’s Fine Foods, and as the solo man on the job I got to spend quality time with the CEO, Al Reser, who was just three years older than me. I picked up some important lessons from him, and enjoyed my time poring over his books. But I was too overworked to fully enjoy it. The trouble with a small satellite branch within a big accounting firm is the workload. Whenever extra work came rolling in, there was no one to take up the slack. During the busy season, November through April, we found ourselves up to our ears, logging twelve-hour days, six days a week, which didn’t leave much time to learn. Also, we were watched. Closely. Our minutes were counted, to the second. When President Kennedy was killed that November I asked for the day off. I wanted to sit in front of the TV with the rest of the nation and mourn. My boss, however, shook his head. Work first, mourn second. Consider the lilies of the field… they neither toil nor spin. I had two consolations. One was money. I was earning five hundred dollars a month, which enabled me to buy a new car. I couldn’t justify another MG, so I bought a Plymouth Valiant. Reliable, but with some pizzazz. And a dash of color. The salesman called it sea-foam green. My friends called it vomit green.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I can’t sit still. I go for a walk round the fair. It is not very big, but it is full of surprising things. Smoke from an oil-drum barbecue curling through drying chestnut leaves. Beneath the tree an ancient wooden cider press pouring apple juice into cups. The crushed apples fall into mounds of oxidising pulp beside it and the man working the mechanism is shouting something to the craggy plantsman on the next stand with stripling trees for sale. I find a cake stand, a face-painting stand, a stand of vivaria full of snakes, spiders and stick insects the size of your hand. A stall of orange pumpkins by an ice-cream van. A boy kneeling by a hutch staring at a rabbit under a paper sign that says MY NAME IS FLOPSEY. ‘Hello, Flopsey,’ he says, bringing his hand up to the wire. I walk into a white marquee, and inside, in dim green shade, find trestle-tables displaying hundreds of apple varieties. Some are the size of a hen’s egg; some are giant, sprawling cookers you’d need two hands to hold. Each variety sits in a labelled wooden compartment. I walk slowly along the apples, glorying in their little differences. Soft orange, streaked with tiger-spots of pink. Charles Ross. Berkshire pre 1890. Dual use. A little one with bark-like blush markings over a pale green ground. Coronation. Sussex 1902. Dessert. Miniature green boulders, the side in shadow deep rose. Chivers Delight. Cambridgeshire 1920. Dessert. Huge apple, deep yellow with hyperspace-spotting of rich red. Peasgood’s Nonsuch. Lincolnshire 1853. Dual use. The apples cheer me. The stalls have too. I decide the fair is a wonderful thing. I wander back to my chair, and as Mabel relaxes, so do I. I wolf down a burger, gossip with my falconer friends. Stories are told, jokes are made, old grievances aired, the qualities and abilities and flights of various hawks discussed in minute detail. It strikes me suddenly how much British falconry has changed since the days of Blaine and White. Back then it was the secretive, aristocratic sport of officers and gentlemen. In Germany, falconry had fed into the terrible dreams of an invented Aryan past. Yet here we are now in all our variousness. A carpenter ex-biker, a zookeeper ex-soldier, two other zookeepers, an electrician and an erstwhile historian. Four men, two women, two eagles, three falcons and a goshawk. I swig from a bottle of cider and this company is suddenly all I’d ever wished for. ‘Excuse me? Is that a goshawk?’ He’s in his forties, with glasses. A thickset, cheerful man holding a wriggling toddler. ‘Hang on, Tom,’ he says. ‘We’re going to get an ice-cream. I just want to talk to this lady for a second.’ I grin. I know how it feels to hold onto a creature who wants to be somewhere else. And then my heart falters, just a little. No father, no partner, no child, no job, no home.