Despair

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 The Pisces (2018)

  Apparently, in a blackout, I talked to Steve about suicide. I wasn’t threatening to do it, just discussing its merits as a practical solution for the problems of life. I spent the remainder of the trip on good behavior. I used the bums to triangulate, inquiring about them often, giving them money. I thought that in the light of the bums I wouldn’t look so bad. I made up a game, “billionaire or bum,” in which I would ask Steve to place a bet on which one he thought a straggly-looking bohemian was. Apparently he was offended. She continued to invite me out there, especially once they got Dominic, but I always told her “soon.” I didn’t invite her to see my world. Now it was the bums, especially the kids who ran away out here, who kept Venice from becoming a total Google campus—at least so far. They graffitied the palm trees, made sure the drugs were still flowing. I felt drawn to them, particularly the younger ones, how they just let everything go. How they were able to do that. Palm trees in pristine locations depressed me. But with a little grit they were sexy against the setting sun. “Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees. When I was on Abbot Kinney, the long yuppie strip of contemporary blondewood-and-metal shops that cut across Venice diagonally, I felt out of place, more aligned with the homeless. Here were so many beautiful women: ombre-headed twentysomethings in boho-chic dresses, minimalist French women clad in black leather with angular jewelry, models even, who made me look at my toe hair and fuzzy legs in disgust. I had stopped shaving since the breakup. My hair, which had always been frizzy, was now even more coarse thanks to an infestation of gray. I was no longer even using henna. The cottage cheese on my hips stood out against my skinny legs. I had stopped giving a fuck. Looking at these women now, I thought, What if I could get really hot while I was here? What if I became the old me, or the very old me, or someone entirely new? When I get back home, maybe Jamie would want me again. What would I do? Maybe dye my hair auburn, start wearing lipstick again, wax my vagina into some sort of formation. I had always been more of a natural woman, and I assumed that Megan the scientist was low maintenance in the pubic realm, but how natural was too natural? I had gotten so natural that I was naturally dead. 8. There was one place on Abbot Kinney that gave me solace, and that was the Mystic Journeys bookstore. I looked in the window and saw the rows of rose quartz crystals.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Widely viewed as a disorder of the positive emotional system, depression smothers the sparks of positivity and positivity resonance like a heavy, wet blanket thrown over a waning campfire. It flattens people’s emotional experiences. Do you know the feeling of the lead apron the dental assistant drapes over you before an X-ray? Well, imagine all your clothes were made of that leaded material. How sluggish would that make you? How unmotivated to move? Your biggest wish when feeling depressed can be just to curl up alone in your bed. Sleep may be the only relief in sight. Now imagine caring for a newborn in this depressed state. Sure, you’d muster up the energy to change diapers and provide necessary feedings. But studies show that what a depressed caregiver does not do well is synchronize. Depression itself slows down your body movements and speech output. For the infant in your care, this translates into less behavioral contingency between the two of you, and less predictability. When synchrony does emerge, odds are it’s laced not with positivity, but negativity—be it anger or indifference. Depression, then, not only impairs your ability to experience and express your own positive emotions but also impairs your ability to connect with the preverbal being in your care. With the two key scaffolds of positivity and connection missing, positivity resonance—so badly needed for both of you—simply can’t emerge. The damages done to the developing child have been duly cataloged by developmental scientists. The list includes long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond, first, in their use of symbols and other early forms of cognitive reasoning that undergird successful academic performance, and next, in their abilities to take other people’s perspectives and empathize, skills vital to developing supportive social relationships. More generally, behavioral synchrony between infant and caregiver sets the stage for children’s development of self-regulation, which gives them tools for controlling and channeling their emotions, attention, and behaviors, tools vital to success in all domains of life. The range of lifelong benefits that lovingly reared infants extract from the recurrent micro-moments of positivity resonance they share with attentive caregivers shines a spotlight on the immense value of these fleeting and subtle states. Although the typical springboards for the loving moments you share with intimates are surely different from the peekaboo games infants play with their caregivers, this painstaking infant research underscores that a deep or complex understanding of the other is hardly necessary for love. Any moment of positivity resonance that ripples through the brains and bodies of you and another can be health- and life-giving, regardless of whether you share history together. Studies of successful marriages also bear this out. Couples who regularly make time to do new and exciting things together—like hiking, skiing, dancing, or attending concerts and plays—have better- quality marriages.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But this would bring no liberation. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus showed that the abolition of God required a lifelong and hopeless struggle that it was impossible to rationalize. In his passion for life and hatred of death, Sisyphus, king of ancient Corinth, had defied the gods, and his punishment was to spend eternity engaged in a futile task: each day he had to roll a boulder up a mountainside; but when he reached the summit, the rock rolled downhill, so the next day he had to begin all over again. This was an image of the absurdity of human life, from which even death offered no release. Can we be happy in the knowledge that we are defeated before we even begin? If we make a heroic effort to create our own meaning in the face of death and absurdity, Camus concludes that happiness is possible: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. 72 By the middle of the twentieth century, many found it impossible to imagine that getting rid of God would lead to a brave new world; there was no serene Enlightenment optimism in the rationality of human existence. Camus had embraced the state of unknowing. He did not know for certain that God did not exist; he simply chose to believe this. We have to live with our ignorance in a universe that is silent in the face of our questioning. Within a decade of Camus’ death, though, the world had drastically changed. There was a rebellion against the ethos of modernity; new forms of religiosity, a different kind of atheism, and, despite the fact that unknowing seemed built into our condition, a strident lust for certainty. Reason A t about the same time as P was writing his creation story, a handful of philosophers in the thriving Greek colony of Miletus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor had begun to think about the cosmos in an entirely different way.

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

  “Vixie—didn’t you get them?” Vixie looked perplexed. “Yes, I got them.” Bowerman took off his ball cap, put it back on, took it off. “Yeah, well,” he grumbled, “but you didn’t send the outer soles.” Johnson’s face reddened. “I sent those, too! Vixie?” “Yes,” Vixie said, “we got them.” Now we all turned to Bowerman, who was pacing, or trying to. There was no room. The office was dark, but I could still tell that my old coach’s face was turning red. “Well... we didn’t get them on time!” he shouted, and the tines of the rakes trembled. This wasn’t about uppers and outer soles. This was about retirement. And time. Like Pre, time wouldn’t listen to Bowerman. Time wouldn’t slow down. “I’m not going to put up with this bullshit anymore,” he huffed, and stormed out, leaving the door swinging open. I looked at Johnson and Vixie and Hollister. They all looked at me. It didn’t matter if Bowerman was right or wrong, we’d just have to find a way to make him feel needed and useful. If Bowerman isn’t happy, I said, Nike isn’t happy. A FEW MONTHS later, muggy Montreal was the setting for Nike’s grand debut, our Olympic coming-out party. As those 1976 Games opened, we had athletes in several high-profile events wearing Nikes. But our highest hopes, and most of our money, were pinned on Shorter. He was the favorite to win gold, which meant that Nikes, for the first time ever, were going to cross an Olympic finish line ahead of all other shoes. This was an enormous rite of passage for a running-shoe company. You really weren’t a legitimate, card-carrying running-shoe company until an Olympian ascended to the top medal stand in your gear. I woke up early that Saturday—July 31, 1976. Right after my morning coffee I took up my position in my recliner. I had a sandwich at my elbow, cold sodas in the fridge. I wondered if Kitami was watching. I wondered if my former bankers were watching. I wondered if my parents and sisters were watching. I wondered if the FBI was watching. The runners approached the starting line. With them I crouched forward. I probably had as much adrenaline in my system as Shorter had in his. I waited for the pistol, and for the inevitable close-up of Shorter’s feet. The camera zoomed in. I stopped breathing. I slid out of my recliner onto the floor and crawled toward the TV screen. No, I said. No, I cried out in anguish. “No. NO!” He was wearing... Tigers. I watched in horror as the great hope of Nike took off in the shoes of our enemy. I stood, walked back to my recliner, and watched the race unfold, talking to myself, mumbling to myself. Slowly the house grew dark. Not dark enough to suit me. At some point I drew the curtains, turned off the lights. But not the TV.

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

  We owed him a cool half million dollars, and he wanted to let us know that he was boarding a plane and coming to Oregon to get it. The second was Bill Manowitz, head of Mano International, a trading company in New York. We owed him one hundred thousand dollars, and he, too, was coming to Oregon to force a showdown. And to cash out. After the summit adjourned I was the last to leave. Alone, I staggered out to my car. In my lifetime I had finished many races on sore legs, gimpy knees, zero energy, but that night I wasn’t altogether sure I had the strength to drive home.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I could think only of my own sorry plight; and when I rang the bell and no one came, I thought: Well, I will sit upon the step, Mrs Milne is never out for long; and if I grow numb from the cold, it will serve me right... But then I pressed my face to the glass beside the door and peered into the hall beyond, and I saw that the walls - that used to have Gracie’s pictures on them, the Light of the World and the Hindoo idol, and the others - I saw that they were bare; that there were only marks upon them, where the pictures had been fastened. And at that, I trembled. I caught hold of the door-knocker and banged it, in a kind of panic; and I called into the letter-box: ‘Mrs Milne! Mrs Milne!’ and ‘Gracie! Grace Milne!’ But my voice sounded hollow, and the hall stayed dark. Then there came a shout, from the tenement behind. ‘Are you looking for the old lady and her daughter? They have gone, dear - gone a month ago!’ I turned, and looked up. From a balcony above the street a man was calling to me, and nodding to the house. I went out, and gazed miserably up at him, and said, Where had they gone to? He shrugged. ‘Gone to her sister’s, is what I heard. The lady was took very bad, in the autumn; and the girl being a simpleton - you knew that, did you? - they didn’t think it clever to leave the pair of them alone. They have took all the furniture; I daresay that the house will come up for sale ...’ He looked at my cheek. ‘That’s a lovely black eye you have,’ he said, as if I might not have noticed. ‘Just like in the song - ain’t it? Except you only have one of ‘em!’ I stared at him, and shivered while he laughed. A little fair-haired girl had appeared on the balcony beside him, and now gripped the rail and put her feet upon the bars. I said, ‘Where does the lady live - the sister they’ve gone to?’ and he pulled at his ear and looked thoughtful. ‘Now, I did know, but have forgotten it ...

• From The Case for God (2009)

  As their faith ebbed, many Victorians sensed the void that it left behind. When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, there, but as yet very few people were aware of this. 79 In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: “I seek God!” In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. “Where has God gone?” the madman demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!” 80 The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God—the fact that the Christian God had become incredible—was “beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” The tiny minority who were able to understand the implications of this unprecedented event were already finding that “some sun seems to have set and profound trust has been turned to doubt.” 81 By making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves. Like the Jewish Marranos, Europeans were beginning to experience religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and lifeless. The madman longed to believe in God but he could not. The unthinkable had happened: everything that the symbol of God had pointed to— absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice—was being slowly but surely eliminated from European culture. Morality would no longer be measured by reference to an ultimate value that transcended human interests but simply by the needs of the moment. For Marx the death of God had been a project—something to be achieved in the future; for Nietzsche it had already occurred: it was only a matter of time before “God” would cease to be a presence in the scientific civilization of the West. Unless a new absolute could be found to take its place, everything would become unhinged and relative: “What were we about when we uncoupled this earth from the sun?” the madman demanded. “Where is the earth moving to now? Are we falling continuously? And backwards and sideways and forwards in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?” 82 Nietzsche was, of course, familiar with the philosophical and scientific arguments for the denial of God, but he did not bother to rehearse them. God had not died because of the critique of Feuerbach, Marx, Vogt, and Buchner. There had simply been a change of mood. Like the ancient Sky God, the remote modern God was retreating from the consciousness of his former worshippers. The century that had begun with a conviction of boundless possibility was giving way to a nameless dread.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said. ‘A guinea is as fair a price as you will get, tonight.’ He sniffed again. ‘I daresay they are hot enough.’ ‘They ain’t hot at all,’ said Zena. ‘But the guinea will do; and if you’ll chuck in a couple of ladies’ niceties and a pair of hats with bows on, call it a pound.’ The drawers and stockings he gave us were yellowed with age; the hats were terrible; and we were both, of course, still in need of stays. But Zena, at least, seemed satisfied with the deal. She pocketed the money, then led me to a baked-potato stall, and we had a potato each, and a cup of tea between us. The potatoes tasted of mud. The tea was really tinted water. But at the stall there was a brazier, and this warmed us. Zena, as I have said, seemed very changed since our expulsion from the house. She did not tremble - it was I who trembled now - and she had an air of wisdom and authority about her, a way of passing through the streets, as if she were quite at her ease upon them. I had been at ease upon them once; now, I think that, if she had let me hold her hand, I would have done it - as it was, I could only stumble at her heels, saying wretchedly, ‘What shall we do next, Zena?’ and ‘Oh, Zena, how cold it is!’ and even ‘What do you suppose they are doing now, Zena, at Felicity Place? Oh, can you believe that she has really cast me from her!’ ‘Miss,’ she said to me at last, ‘don’t take it the wrong way; but if you don’t shut up, I really shall be obliged to hit you, after all.’ I said: ‘I’m sorry, Zena.’ In the end she fell into conversation with a gay girl who had also come to stand beside the brazier; and from her she got the details of a lodging-house nearby, that was said to take people in, all through the night. It turned out to be a dreadful place, with one chamber for the women and another for the men; and everyone who slept there had a cough. Zena and I lay two in a bed - she keeping her dress on, for the sake of the warmth, but me still fretting over the creases in mine, and so placing it beneath the foot of the mattress in the hope that it would press flat overnight.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Jamey, who had left the room before Dean came in, walked in at the wrong time: “My God,” he says, “I was almost Raped in the powder-room.” But no one laughed. It was as if someone had coughed during the crucial moment of a drama. “Whats happened?” he said, and then he saw Dean and Lance staring tensely at each other. And Jamey squints his eyes victoriously. Dean marched past Lance, past the staring eyes—into the bedroom. Lance is behind him, gliding past the stares knifing him brutally, ready to repay him now for his beauty, for the anarchy of that beauty. Chick steps quickly before Lance, whispers frantically: “Lance!—dont go after him!— theyre watching you!” But Lance brushes him aside and follows Dean into the bedroom. The door closes. From behind that closed door come voices, alternately raised, lowered. Now the door of the bedroom swings open, and Dean walks out, his clothes thrown carelessly over his arm. Lance stands momentarily at the door. And now he will do what will delight all of you who have hated him for his unquestioned reign: Lance will follow Dean.... He catches up with him, pulls on the clothes draped over the youngman’s arms. The clothes spill on the floor: Lance’s façade crumbles before us. “Dean—dont—go—” he pleads. (And is he pleading as much for his life as for Dean? I wonder.) “I have to talk to you—come back into the bedroom—I—” The pressure of Lance’s hand noticeably becomes heavier on Dean’s shoulder. Dean jerks viciously away from him. And he lashes: “Dont touch me, you fuckin faggot!” And the door, slammed by Dean, refuses stubbornly to close—swings open, wide open, admitting the coming night. The whispering has not yet been unleashed. Lance must admit his fall—with a look, a word. He stands before the door, his back toward us, facing the night.... And what is he staring at beyond the door? Is he looking at the disappearing figure of Dean? Or is he staring past the youngman? Does the same ghost that had hovered that afternoon on the beach, that night on the cliff, loom now at that door?... Lance doesnt move. Perhaps he cant face the buzzing bees behind him yet. Or is he acknowledging at last the old, old man who has waited patiently for his revenge?... And in anticipation of the crushed look which will bring down the curtain on the reign of Lance O’Hara, Chick rushes crying into the next room; and Jamey sighs: “Well!’ and that sighed word really means: “At last!” Now Lance will turn to face you, and the look of defeat will confirm the news that the reign of Lance O’Hara is over—that the charmed life has ended.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And while the preachers dash out their damning messages, the winos storm Heaven on cheap wine; hungry-eyed scores with money (or merely with a place to offer the homeless youngmen they desire) gather about the head hunting the malehustlers and wondering will they get robbed if— ...Pickpockets station themselves strategically among the crowds as if listening in rapt attention to the Holy Messages. And male-hustlers (“fruithustlers”/“studhustlers”: the various names for the masculine young vagrants) like flitting birds move restlessly about the park—fugitive hustlers looking for lonely fruits to score from, anything from the legendary $20-up to a pad at night and breakfast in the morning and whatever you can clinch or clip.... And the heat in their holy cop uniforms, holy because of the Almighty Stick and the Almightier Vagrancy Law; the scattered junkies, the smalltime pushers, the teaheads, the sad panhandlers, the occasional lonely exiled nymphos haunting the entrance to the men’s head; more fruits with hungry eyes—the young ones searching for a mutual, unpaid-for partner; the tough teenage girls making it with the lost hustlers.... And—but mostly later at night, youll find, when the shadows will shelter them—queens in colorful shirt-blouses—dressed as much like women as The Law allows that particular moment—will dish each other like jealous bitchy women, commenting on the desirability or otherwise of the stray youngmen they may offer a place for the night. And they giggle constantly in pretended happiness. And on the benches along the inside ledges, the pensioned old men and women sit serenely daily in the sun like retired judges separated now stoically from the world they once judged.... All!—all amid the incongruous music of the Welkian-Lombardian school of corn, piped periodically from somewhere along the ledges! All amid the flowers!—the twin fountains which will gush rainbowcolored verypretty at night.... The world of Lonely-Outcast America squeezed into Pershing Square, of the Cities of Terrible Night, downtown now trapped in the City of Lost Angels.... And the trees hang over it all like some apathetic fate . 4 Destiny’s place is two ugly tight rooms with naileddown windowshades and a head. You climb two narrow stairways and then make your way through a maze of cramped halls lighted just enough by greasy lightbulbs to reveal the cobwebs and the dirt—long narrow corridors like in the movie-serial when we were kids: And the Dragon Lady put Terry and the Pirates in a narrow hallway and she punched a button and the walls kept coming closer... threatening to crrrrrrush! everyone to... death!! Miss Destiny opened the door and turned on the light. The light screamed in our pupiled eyes, transforming the cobwebs on the ceiling into long nooselike shadows. Darling Dolly Dane was curled up on a couch, and Lola and a seedy-looking soldier were carrying on on another—this is the kitchen but it has two bed-couches. Lola hollers in her ugly man’s voice turn the fucking lights off. “Put out thy own dam lights, as the stunning Desdemona said,” Miss Destiny answered.

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

  The only person who wasn’t depressed about the Tailwind was Bowerman. In fact, its catastrophic debut helped pull him out of the slump in which he’d been mired since retiring. How he loved being able to tell me, to tell us all, “Told you so.” OUR FACTORIES IN Taiwan and Korea were humming along, and we opened new ones that year in Heckmondwike, England, and Ireland. Industry watchers pointed to our new factories, and our sales, and said we were unstoppable. Few imagined we were broke. Or that our head of marketing was wallowing in a depression. Or that our founder and president was sitting in a giant baseball mitt with a long face. The burnout spread around the office like mono. And while we were all burning out, our man in Washington was flaming out. Werschkul had done everything we’d asked of him. He’d buttonholed politicians. He’d petitioned, lobbied, pleaded our cause with passion, if not always with sanity. Day after day he’d run up and down the halls of Congress, handing out free pairs of Nikes. Swag, with a side of swoosh. (Knowing that representatives were legally bound to report gifts worth more than $35, Werschkul always included an invoice for $34.99.) But every pol told Werschkul the same thing. Give me something in writing, son, something I can study. Give me a breakdown of your case. So Werschkul spent months writing a breakdown—and in the process suffered a breakdown. What was supposed to be a summary, a brief, had ballooned into an exhaustive history, The Decline and Fall of the Nike Empire, which ran to hundreds of pages. It was longer than Proust, longer than Tolstoy, and not a fraction as readable. It even had a title. Without a shred of irony Werschkul called it: Werschkul on American Selling Price, Volume I. When you thought about it, when you really thought about it, what really scared you was that Volume I. I sent Strasser back east to rein in Werschkul, check him into a psych ward if necessary. Just calm the kid down, I said. That first night they went to a local pub in Georgetown for a cocktail or three, and at the end of the night Werschkul wasn’t any calmer. On the contrary. He got up on a table and delivered his stump speech to the patrons. He went full Patrick Henry. “Give me Nike or give me death!” The patrons were ready to vote for the latter. Strasser tried to coax Werschkul down off the chair, but Werschkul was just getting warmed up. “Don’t you people realize,” he shouted, “that freedom is on trial here? FREEDOM! Did you know that Hitler’s father was a customs inspector?” On the plus side, I think Werschkul scared Strasser straight. He seemed like the old Strasser when he returned and told me about Werschkul’s mental condition.

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

  He marched out of my office and I immediately reached for the phone. I dialed our retail store in Los Angeles. Bork answered. “John, our old friend Kitami is coming to town! I’m sure he’ll come by your store! Hide the Nikes!” “Huh?” “He knows about Nike, but I told him it isn’t in stores!” “What you’re asking of me,” Bork said, “I don’t know.” He sounded frightened. And irritated. He didn’t want to do anything dishonest, he said. “I’m asking you to stash a few pairs of shoes,” I cried, then slammed down the phone. Sure enough, Kitami showed up that afternoon. He confronted Bork, badgered him with questions, shook him down like a cop with a shaky witness. Bork played dumb—or so he told me later. Kitami asked to use the bathroom. A ploy, of course. He knew the bathroom was somewhere in the back, and he needed an excuse to snoop back there. Bork didn’t see the ploy, or didn’t care to. Moments later Kitami was standing in the stockroom, under a bare lightbulb, glowering at hundreds of orange shoe boxes. Nike, Nike, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Bork phoned me after Kitami left. “Jig’s up,” he said. “What happened?” I asked. “Kitami forced his way into the stockroom—it’s over, Phil.” I hung up, slumped in my chair. “Well,” I said, out loud, to no one, “I guess we’re going to find out if we can exist without Tiger.” We found out something else, too. Soon after that day, Bork quit. Actually, I don’t remember if he quit or Woodell fired him. Either way, not long after that, we heard Bork had a new job. Working for Kitami. I SPENT DAYS and days staring into space, gazing out windows, waiting for Kitami to play his next card. I also watched a lot of TV. The nation, the world, was agog at the sudden opening of relations between the United States and China. President Nixon was in Beijing, shaking hands with Mao Zedong, an event nearly on a par with the moon landing. I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, a U.S. president in the Forbidden City, touching the Great Wall. I thought of my time in Hong Kong. I’d been so close to China, and yet so far. I thought I’d never have another chance. But now I thought, One day? Maybe? Maybe. At last Kitami made his move. He returned to Oregon and asked for a meeting, at which he requested that Bowerman be present. To make that easier for Bowerman, I suggested Jaqua’s office down in Eugene as the site. When the day came, as we were all filing into the conference room, Jaqua grabbed my arm and whispered, “Whatever he says, you say nothing.” I nodded. On one side of the conference table were Jaqua, Bowerman, and I. On the other side were Kitami and his lawyer, a local guy, who didn’t look like he wanted to be there.

• From Educated (2018)

  But there was no Buck’s Peak. During the day, Buck’s Peak was all there was—that and the site in Blackfoot. Shawn and I spent the better part of a week making purlins to finish the barn roof. We used a machine the size of a mobile home to press them into a Z shape, then we attached wire brushes to grinders and blasted away the rust so they could be painted. When the paint was dry we stacked them next to the shop, but within a day or two the wind from the peak had covered them in black dust, which turned to grime when it mixed with the oils on the iron. Shawn said they had to be washed before they could be loaded, so I fetched a rag and a bucket of water. It was a hot day, and I wiped beads of sweat from my forehead. My hairband broke. I didn’t have a spare. The wind swept down the mountain, blowing strands in my eyes, and I reached across my face and brushed them away. My hands were black with grease, and each stroke left a dark smudge. I shouted to Shawn when the purlins were clean. He appeared from behind an I-beam and raised his welding shield. When he saw me, his face broke into a wide smile. “Our N—r’s back!” he said. —THE SUMMER SHAWN AND I had worked the Shear, there’d been an afternoon when I’d wiped the sweat from my face so many times that, by the time we quit for supper, my nose and cheeks had been black. That was the first time Shawn called me “N—r.” The word was surprising but not unfamiliar. I’d heard Dad use it, so in one sense I knew what it meant. But in another sense, I didn’t understand it as meaning anything at all. I’d only ever seen one black person, a little girl, the adoptive daughter of a family at church. Dad obviously hadn’t meant her. Shawn had called me N—r that entire summer: “N—r, run and fetch those C-clamps!” or “It’s time for lunch, N—r!” It had never given me a moment’s pause. Then the world had turned upside down: I had entered a university, where I’d wandered into an auditorium and listened, eyes wide, mind buzzing, to lectures on American history. The professor was Dr. Richard Kimball, and he had a resonant, contemplative voice. I knew about slavery; I’d heard Dad talk about it, and I’d read about it in Dad’s favorite book on the American founding. I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care. That had made sense to me. The day Dr. Kimball lectured on slavery, he filled the overhead screen with a charcoal sketch of a slave market. The screen was large; as in a movie theater it dominated the room. The sketch was chaotic.

• From Educated (2018)

  We got more than we can spend!” Because his health was fragile, my father took the bed. I had purchased an air mattress, which I gave to Mother. I slept on the tile floor. Both my parents snored loudly, and I lay awake all night. When the sun finally rose I stayed on the floor, eyes closed, breathing slow, deep breaths, while my parents ransacked my mini fridge and discussed me in hushed tones. “The Lord has commanded me to testify,” Dad said. “She may yet be brought to the Lord.” While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family. My father wanted to visit the Sacred Grove in Palmyra, New York—the forest where, according to Joseph Smith, God had appeared and commanded him to found the true church. We rented a car and six hours later entered Palmyra. Near the grove, off the highway, there was a shimmering temple topped by a golden statue of the angel Moroni. Dad pulled over and asked me to cross the temple grounds. “Touch the temple,” he said. “Its power will cleanse you.” I studied his face. His expression was stretched—earnest, desperate. With all that was in him, he was willing me to touch the temple and be saved. My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite. We looked at each other. He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhinged old man, literally disfigured by his beliefs. And yet, triumphant. I remembered the words of Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor. When I reflect on that moment now, the image blurs, reconstituting itself into that of a zealous knight astride a steed, charging into an imaginary battle, striking at shadows, hacking into thin air. His jaw is set, his back straight. His eyes blaze with conviction, throwing sparks that burn where they lay. My mother gives me a pale, disbelieving look, but when he turns his gaze on her they become of one mind, then they are both tilting at windmills. I crossed the grounds and held my palm to the temple stone. I closed my eyes and tried to believe that this simple act could bring the miracle my parents prayed for. That all I had to do was touch this relic and, by the power of the Almighty, all would be put right. But I felt nothing. Just cold rock. I returned to the car. “Let’s go,” I said.

• From Educated (2018)

  When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? In the days that followed, I wrote that passage everywhere—unconsciously, compulsively. I find it now in books I was reading, in my lecture notes, in the margins of my journal. Its recitation was a mantra. I willed myself to believe it—to believe there was no real difference between what I knew to be true and what I knew to be false. To convince myself that there was some dignity in what I planned to do, in surrendering my own perceptions of right and wrong, of reality, of sanity itself, to earn the love of my parents. For them I believed I could don armor and charge at giants, even if I saw only windmills. We entered the Sacred Grove. I walked ahead and found a bench beneath a canopy of trees. It was a lovely wood, heavy with history. It was the reason my ancestors had come to America. A twig snapped, my parents appeared. They sat, one on either side of me. My father spoke for two hours. He testified that he had beheld angels and demons. He had seen physical manifestations of evil, and had been visited by the Lord Jesus Christ, like the prophets of old, like Joseph Smith had been in this very grove. His faith was no longer a faith, he said, but a perfect knowledge. “You have been taken by Lucifer,” he whispered, his hand on my shoulder. “I could feel it the moment I entered your room.” I thought of my dorm room—of the murky walls and frigid tiles, but also of the sunflowers Drew had sent, and of the textile wall hanging a friend from Zimbabwe had brought from his village. Mother said nothing. She stared at the dirt, her eyes glossy, her lips pursed. Dad prodded me for a response. I searched myself, reaching deep, groping for the words he needed to hear. But they were not in me, not yet. Before we returned to Harvard, I convinced my parents to take a detour to Niagara Falls. The mood in the car was heavy, and at first I regretted having suggested the diversion, but the moment Dad saw the falls he was transformed, elated. I had a camera. Dad had always hated cameras but when he saw mine his eyes shone with excitement. “Tara! Tara!” he shouted, running ahead of me and Mother. “Get yourself a picture of this angle. Ain’t that pretty!” It was as if he realized we were making a memory, something beautiful we might need later. Or perhaps I’m projecting, because that was how I felt. There are some photos from today that might help me forget the grove, I wrote in my journal. There’s a picture of me and Dad happy, together. Proof that’s possible. —WHEN WE RETURNED TO HARVARD, I offered to pay for a hotel. They refused to go. For a week we stumbled over one another in my dorm room.

• From Educated (2018)

  Every morning my father trudged up a flight of stairs to the communal shower in nothing but a small white towel. This would have humiliated me at BYU, but at Harvard I shrugged. I had transcended embarrassment. What did it matter who saw him, or what he said to them, or how shocked they were? It was his opinion I cared about; he was the one I was losing. Then it was their last night, and still I had not been reborn. Mother and I shuffled around the shared kitchen making a beef and potato casserole, which we brought into the room on trays. My father studied his plate quietly, as if he were alone. Mother made a few observations about the food, then she laughed nervously and was silent. When we’d finished, Dad said he had a gift for me. “It’s why I came,” he said. “To offer you a priesthood blessing.” In Mormonism, the priesthood is God’s power to act on earth—to advise, to counsel, to heal the sick, and to cast out demons. It is given to men. This was the moment: if I accepted the blessing, he would cleanse me. He would lay his hands on my head and cast out the evil thing that had made me say what I had said, that had made me unwelcome in my own family. All I had to do was yield, and in five minutes it would be over. I heard myself say no. Dad gaped at me in disbelief, then he began to testify—not about God, but about Mother. The herbs, he said, were a divine calling from the Lord. Everything that happened to our family, every injury, every near death, was because we had been chosen, we were special. God had orchestrated all of it so we could denounce the Medical Establishment and testify of His power. “Remember when Luke burned his leg?” Dad said, as if I could forget. “That was the Lord’s plan. It was a curriculum. For your mother. So she would be ready for what would happen to me.” The explosion, the burn. It was the highest of spiritual honors, he said, to be made a living testament of God’s power. Dad held my hands in his mangled fingers and told me that his disfiguration had been foreordained. That it was a tender mercy, that it had brought souls to God. Mother added her testimony in low, reverent whispers. She said she could stop a stroke by adjusting a chakra; that she could halt heart attacks using only energy; that she could cure cancer if people had faith. She herself had had breast cancer, she said, and she had cured it. My head snapped up. “You have cancer?” I said. “You’re sure? You had it tested?” “I didn’t need to have it tested,” she said. “I muscle-tested it. It was cancer. I cured it.” “We could have cured Grandma, too,” Dad said. “But she turned away from Christ.

• From Educated (2018)

  —I STOPPED GOING TO my French group, then to my sketching class. Instead of reading in the library or attending lectures, I watched TV in my room, working my way through every popular series from the past two decades. When one episode ended, I would begin the next without thinking, the way one breath follows another. I watched TV eighteen or twenty hours a day. When I slept I dreamed of home, and at least once a week I awoke standing in the street in the middle of the night, wondering if it was my own cry that I’d heard just before waking. I did not study. I tried to read but the sentences meant nothing. I needed them to mean nothing. I couldn’t bear to string sentences into strands of thought, or to weave those strands into ideas. Ideas were too similar to reflection, and my reflections were always of the expression on my father’s stretched face the moment before he’d fled from me. The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy . Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital. By December I was so far behind in my work that, pausing one night to begin a new episode of Breaking Bad, I realized that I might fail my PhD. I laughed maniacally for ten minutes at this irony: that having sacrificed my family to my education, I might lose that, also. After a few more weeks of this, I stumbled from my bed one night and decided that I’d made a mistake, that when my father had offered me the blessing, I should have accepted it. But it wasn’t too late. I could repair the damage, put it right. I purchased a ticket to Idaho for Christmas. Two days before the flight, I awoke in a cold sweat. I’d dreamed I was in a hospital, lying on crisp white sheets. Dad was at the foot of the gurney, telling a policeman I had stabbed myself. Mother echoed him, her eyes panicked. I was surprised to hear Drew’s voice, shouting that I needed to be moved to another hospital. “He’ll find her here,” he kept saying. I wrote to Drew, who was living in the Middle East. I told him I was going to Buck’s Peak. When he replied his tone was urgent and sharp, as if he was trying to cut through whatever fog I was living in. My dear Tara, he wrote. If Shawn stabs you, you won’t be taken to a hospital. You’ll be put in the basement and given some lavender for the wound.

• From Educated (2018)

  It took her and Dad most of the evening to cut away the dead flesh. Luke tried not to scream, but when they pried up and stretched bits of his skin, trying to see where the dead flesh ended and the living began, he exhaled in great gusts and tears slid from his eyes. Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe. She was good with burns—they were a specialty of hers—but I could tell she was worried. She said she’d never seen one as bad as Luke’s. She didn’t know what would happen. —MOTHER AND I STAYED by Luke’s bed that first night. He barely slept, he was so delirious with fever and pain. For the fever we put ice on his face and chest; for the pain we gave him lobelia, blue vervain and skullcap. This was another of Mother’s recipes. I’d taken it after I’d fallen from the scrap bin, to dull the throbbing in my leg while I waited for the gash to close, but as near as I could tell it had no effect. I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God, but if I’d had morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke. The pain robbed him of breath. He lay propped up in his bed, beads of sweat falling from his forehead onto his chest, holding his breath until he turned red, then purple, as if depriving his brain of oxygen was the only way he could make it through the next minute. When the pain in his lungs overtook the pain of the burn, he would release the air in a great, gasping cry—a cry of relief for his lungs, of agony for his leg. I tended him alone the second night so Mother could rest. I slept lightly, waking at the first sounds of fussing, at the slightest shifting of weight, so I could fetch the ice and tinctures before Luke became fully conscious and the pain gripped him. On the third night, Mother tended him and I stood in the doorway, listening to his gasps, watching Mother watch him, her face hollow, her eyes swollen with worry and exhaustion. When I slept, I dreamed. I dreamed about the fire I hadn’t seen. I dreamed it was me lying in that bed, my body wrapped in loose bandages, mummified. Mother knelt on the floor beside me, pressing my plastered hand the way she pressed Luke’s, dabbing my forehead, praying. Luke didn’t go to church that Sunday, or the Sunday after that, or the one after that. Dad told us to tell people Luke was sick. He said there’d be trouble if the Government found out about Luke’s leg, that the Feds would take us kids away. That they would put Luke in a hospital, where his leg would get infected and he would die.

• From Educated (2018)

  I was so tempted, the pain in my jaw so savage, that I must have held it for ten seconds before passing it back. —I HAD A JOB at the campus creamery, flipping burgers and scooping ice cream. I got by between paydays by neglecting overdue bills and borrowing money from Robin, so twice a month, when a few hundred dollars went into my account, it was gone within hours. I was broke when I turned nineteen at the end of September. I had given up on fixing the tooth; I knew I would never have fourteen hundred dollars. Besides, the pain had lessened: either the nerve had died or my brain had adjusted to its shocks. Still, I had other bills, so I decided to sell the only thing I had of any value—my horse, Bud. I called Shawn and asked how much I could get. Shawn said a mixed breed wasn’t worth much, but that I could send him to auction like Grandpa’s dog-food horses. I imagined Bud in a meat grinder, then said, “Try to find a buyer first.” A few weeks later Shawn sent me a check for a few hundred dollars. When I called Shawn and asked who he’d sold Bud to, he mumbled something vague about a guy passing through from Tooele. I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars. I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of terror—of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal—not from real interest in my classes. In December, after my last paycheck of the month, I had sixty dollars in my account. Rent was $110, due January 7. I needed quick cash. I’d heard there was a clinic near the mall that paid people for plasma. A clinic sounded like a part of the Medical Establishment, but I reasoned that as long as they were taking things out, not putting anything in, I’d be okay. The nurse stabbed at my veins for twenty minutes, then said they were too small. I bought a tank of gas with my last thirty dollars and drove home for Christmas. On Christmas morning, Dad gave me a rifle—I didn’t take it out of the box, so I have no idea what kind. I asked Shawn if he wanted to buy it off me, but Dad gathered it up and said he’d keep it safe. That was it, then. There was nothing left to sell, no more childhood friends or Christmas presents. It was time to quit school and get a job. I accepted that. My brother Tony was living in Las Vegas, working as a long-haul trucker, so on Christmas Day I called him.

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

  I got up several times, went to the window, watched the ships bobbing on Kobe’s dark purple bay. Beautiful place, I thought. Too bad all beauty is beyond me. The world is without beauty when you lose, and I was about to lose, big-time. I knew that in the morning Morimoto would tell me he was sorry, nothing personal, it was just business, but they were going with the Marlboro Man. At 9:00 a.m. the phone by the bed rang. Morimoto. “Mr. Onitsuka… himself… wishes to see you,” he said. I put on my suit and took a taxi to Onitsuka headquarters. In the conference room, the familiar conference room, Morimoto pointed me to a chair in the middle of the table. The middle this time, not the head. No more kei . He sat across from me and stared at me as the room slowly filled with executives. When everyone was there, Morimoto nodded to me. “Hai,” he said. I plunged in, essentially repeating what I’d said to him the previous morning. As I built to my crescendo, as I prepared to close, all heads swiveled toward the door, and I stopped midsentence. The temperature of the room dropped ten degrees. The founder of the company, Mr. Onitsuka, had arrived. Dressed in a dark blue Italian suit, with a head of black hair as thick as shag carpet, he filled every man in the conference room with fear. He seemed oblivious, however. For all his power, for all his wealth, his movements were deferential. He came forward haltingly, with a shuffling gait, giving no sign that he was the boss of all bosses, the shogun of shoes. Slowly he made his way around the table, making brief eye contact with each executive. Eventually he came to me. We bowed to each other, shook hands. Now he took the seat at the head of the table and Morimoto tried to summarize my reason for being there. Mr. Onitsuka raised a hand, cut him off. Without preamble he launched into a long, passionate monologue. Some time ago, he said, he’d had a vision. A wondrous glimpse of the future. “Everyone in the world wear athletic shoes all the time,” he said. “I know this day come.” He paused, looking around the table at each person, to see if they also knew. His gaze rested on me. He smiled. I smiled. He blinked twice. “You remind me of myself when I am young,” he said softly. He stared into my eyes. One second. Two. Now he turned his gaze to Morimoto. “This about those thirteen western states?” he said. “Yes,” Morimoto said. “Hm,” Onitsuka said. “Hmmmm.” He narrowed his eyes, looked down. He seemed to be meditating. Again he looked up at me. “Yes,” he said, “all right. You have western states.” The Marlboro Man, he said, could continue selling his wrestling shoes nationwide, but would limit his track shoe sales to the East Coast. Mr.