Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  Also, the previous year I’d been flanked by Jaqua and Bowerman; this year both men were busy. I was alone. Half an hour into my pitch, with thirty horrified faces staring at me, I suggested we break for lunch. The previous year I’d handed out Blue Ribbon’s financial statements before lunch. This year I decided to wait until after. It didn’t help. Even on a full stomach, with a chocolate chip cookie, the numbers looked bad. Despite $3.2 million in sales, we showed a net loss of $57,000. Several clusters of investors now began private conversations while I was trying to talk. They were pointing at this troubling number—$57,000—and repeating it, over and over. At some point I mentioned that Anne Caris, a young runner, had just made the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing Nikes. We’re breaking through, people! No one heard. No one cared. They cared only about the bottom line. Not even the bottom line, but their bottom line. I came to the end of my presentation. I asked if anyone had a question. Thirty hands went up. “I’m very disappointed in this,” said one older man, rising to his feet. “Any more questions?” Twenty-nine hands went up. Another man called out, “I’m not happy .” I said I sympathized. My sympathy only served to annoy them. They had every right. They’d put their confidence in Bowerman and me, and we’d failed. We never could have anticipated Tiger’s betrayal, but nonetheless, these people were hurting, I saw it in their faces, and I needed to take responsibility. To make it right. I decided it was only fair to offer them a concession. Their stock had a conversion rate, which went up every year. In the first year the rate was $1.00 a share, in the second year it was $1.50, and so on. In light of all this bad news, I told them, I’ll keep the conversion rate the same for the full five years you own your stock. They were placated, mildly. But I left Eugene that day knowing they had a low opinion of me, and Nike. I also left thinking I’d never, ever, ever take this company public. If thirty people could cause this kind of acid stomach, I couldn’t imagine being answerable to thousands of stockholders. We were better off financing through Nissho and the bank. THAT IS, IF there was anything to finance. As feared, Onitsuka had filed suit against us in Japan. So now we had to file quickly against them in the United States, for breach of contract and trademark infringement. I put the case in the hands of Cousin Houser. It wasn’t a tough call. There was the trust factor, of course. Kinship, blood, so on. Also, there was the confidence factor. Though he was only two years older, Cousin Houser seemed vastly more mature. He carried himself with remarkable assurance. Especially before a judge and jury.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  79. Bellarmine to Foscarini, 12 April 1615, ibid., 12:171–72; Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” pp. 120–21. 80. Galileo, Opere , 5:668–70; Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” p. 122. 81. Ernan McMullin, “Galileo on Science and Scripture,” in Peter Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), p. 285; Buckley, “The New Science,” pp. 9–10. 82. McMullin, “Galileo on Science and Scripture,” p. 317. 83. Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” p. 127. 84. Ibid., pp. 128–30. 85. Galileo, Opere, 1 :489; Shea, “Galileo and the Church,” pp. 130–31. 86. Yovel, Marrano of Reason , pp. 54–57. 87. Ibid., p. 53. 88. Isaac Orobio de Castro, prologue, Epistola invecta contra Prado , ibid., pp. 51–52. 89. Yovel, Marrano of Reason , pp. 42–51. 90. Ibid., pp. 57–73. EIGHT Scientific Religion 1. John Donne, An Anatomie of the World , “The First Anniversary,” lines 213–14, in Sir Herbert Grierson, ed., Donne: Poetical Works (Oxford, 1933). 2. Ibid., lines 212, 251–60. 3. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990), pp. 47–55. 4. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1987), pp. 40–56; Michael J. Buckley, “A Dialectical Pattern in the Emergence of Atheism,” in Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2004), pp. 30–32. 5. De providentia numinis et animi immortalitate 1 .2.16–19, translated into English as Rawleigh His Ghost, Or, A Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh, to a friend of his, for the translating into English, the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man) entitled De providentia numinis, et animi immortalitate: written against Atheists, Polititians of these days (hereafter RG) , trans. “A. B.” (1631), in vol. 349 of English Recusant Literature, 1558-1640 , ed. D. M. Rogers (London, 1977), pp. 325–28. 6. Donne, “The First Anniversary,” line 213. 7. RG , pp. 328–29. 8. P. J. S. Whitmore, The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century France (The Hague, 1967), pp. 71–72; Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1971), p. 165. 9. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism , pp. 56–66; Buckley, “A Dialectical Pattern,” pp. 32–33; William B. Ashworth Jr., “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986), pp. 138–39. 10. Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mechanisme (Paris, 1971), pp. 380–82; Whitmore, The Order of Minims , pp. 144–47. 11. Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method 2.18. All quotations from Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy are taken from Elizabeth J. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Enrique Chávez-Arvizo, Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings (Ware, U.K., 1997). 12. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism , p. 73. 13. Descartes, Discourse on Method , 4.32. 14. Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism , pp. 85–87. 15.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  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. [image file=image_rsrc4V1.jpg] Death of God?During the 1960s, Europe experienced a dramatic loss of faith. After a rise in religious observance during the austerity years immediately after the Second World War, for example, British people stopped going to church in unprecedented numbers and the decline has steadily continued.1 A recent poll has estimated that only about 6 percent of Britons attend a religious service regularly. In both Europe and the United States, sociologists proclaimed the triumph of secularism. In 1965, The Secular City, a best seller by the American theologian Harvey Cox, claimed that God was dead and that henceforth religion must center on humanity rather than a transcendent deity; if Christianity failed to absorb these new values, the churches would perish. The decline of religion was just one sign of major cultural change during this decade, when many of the institutional structures of modernity were pulled down: censorship was relaxed, abortion and homosexuality were legalized, divorce became easier, the women’s movement campaigned for gender equality, and the young railed against the modern ethos of their parents. They called for a more just and equal society, protested against the materialism of their governments, and refused to fight in their nation’s wars or to study in its universities. They created an “alternative society” in revolt against the mainstream. Some saw the new wave of secularism as the fulfillment of the rational ethos of the Enlightenment. Others saw the 1960s as the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment project and the start of “postmodernity.”2 Truths hitherto regarded as self-evident were called into question: the teachings of Christianity, the subordination of women, and the structures of social and moral authority. There was a new skepticism about the role of science, the modern expectation of continuous progress, and the Enlightenment ideal of rationality. The modern dualities of mind/body; spirit/matter, and reason/emotion were challenged. Finally, the “lower orders,” who had been marginalized and even subjugated during the modern period— women, homosexuals, blacks, indigenous populations, colonized peoples—were demanding and beginning to achieve liberation.

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

  One of Puma’s sales reps even got thrown in jail. (There were rumors that Adidas had framed him.) He was married to a female sprinter, and Bowerman joked that he’d only married her to secure her endorsement. Worse, it didn’t stop at mere payouts. Puma had smuggled truckloads of shoes into Mexico City, while Adidas cleverly managed to evade Mexico’s stiff import tariffs. I heard through the grapevine they did it by making a nominal number of shoes at a factory in Guadalajara. Bowerman and I didn’t feel morally offended; we felt left out. Blue Ribbon had no money for payouts, and therefore no presence at the Games. We’d had one meager booth in the Olympic Village, and one guy working it—Bork. I didn’t know if Bork had been sitting there reading comic books, or just hadn’t been able to compete with the massive presence of Adidas and Puma, but either way his booth generated zero business, zero buzz. No one stopped by. Actually, one person did stop by. Bill Toomey, a brilliant American decathlete, asked for some Tigers, so he could show the world that he couldn’t be bought. But Bork didn’t have his size. Nor the right shoes for any of his events. Plenty of athletes were training in Tigers, Bowerman reported. We just didn’t have anybody actually competing in them. Part of the reason was quality; Tigers just weren’t good enough yet. The main reason, however, was money. We had not a penny for endorsement deals. “We’re not broke,” I told Bowerman, “we just don’t have any money.” He grunted. “Either way,” he said, “wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to pay athletes? Legally?” Lastly, Bowerman told me he’d bumped into Kitami at the Games. He didn’t much care for the man. “Doesn’t know a damn thing about shoes,” Bowerman grumbled. “And he’s a little too slick. Little too full of himself.” I was starting to have the same inklings. I’d gotten a sense from Kitami’s last few wires and letters that he might not be the man he’d seemed, and that he wasn’t the fan of Blue Ribbon he’d appeared to be when I was last in Japan. I had a bad feeling in my bones. Maybe he was getting ready to jack up our prices. I mentioned this to Bowerman, and told him I was taking measures to protect us. Before hanging up I boasted that, though I didn’t have enough cash or cachet to pay athletes, I did have enough to buy someone at Onitsuka. I had a man on the inside, I said, a man acting as my eyes and ears and keeping tabs on Kitami. I sent out a memo saying as much to all Blue Ribbon employees. (By now we had around forty.) Though I’d fallen in love with Japanese culture—I kept my souvenir samurai sword beside my desk—I also warned them that Japanese business practices were thoroughly perplexing.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It made the idea of God as “easy” as Newton believed that it should be: it was not difficult to understand; it gave a clear, rational explanation; and the vision of a universe operating as regularly as clockwork was a comforting antidote to the terrifying tales of the French Revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century, Natural Theology was required reading for Cambridge undergraduates and was accepted as normative by leading British and American scientists for over fifty years. The young Charles Darwin (1809–82) found it deeply persuasive. But it did not please everybody. The Romantic movement had already started to rebel against Enlightenment rationalism. The English poet, mystic, and engraver William Blake (1757–1827) believed that human beings had been damaged during the Age of Reason. Even religion had gone over to the side of a science that alienated people from nature and from themselves. Newtonian science had been exploited by the establishment, who used it to support a social hierarchy that suppressed the “lower orders,” and in Blake’s poetry Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization, and exploitation of the modern state. 62 The true prophet of the industrial age was the poet, not the scientist. He alone could recall human beings to values that had been lost during the scientific age, which had tried to master and control the whole of reality: Calling the lapsed Soul And weeping in the evening dew That might controll The starry pole And fallen, fallen light renew. 63 The Enlightenment had created a God of “fearful symmetry,” like the Tyger, remote from the world in “distant deeps and skies.” 64 The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis , return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus, 65 and become one with humanity. 66 In 1812, the revolutionary young aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing an atheistic tract, but “The Necessity of Atheism” simply argued that God was not a necessary consequence of the material world. Shelley did not want to get rid of the divine altogether. Like his older contemporary William Wordsworth (1770–1850), he had a strong sense of a “Spirit,” an “unseen Power” that was integral to nature and inherent in all its forms. 67 Unlike the philosophes, the Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Desearía estar más enfadada con él. Mayormente, solo estoy decepcionada. —¿Ha estado sucediendo durante un tiempo? —pregunto. Baja sus ojos y asiente con solemnidad. —Desde tu fiesta de cumpleaños. ¿Quieres decir a la que no fui? Respira profundamente y cuadra los hombros, saliendo de la piscina y envolviendo una toalla alrededor de su cintura. —Te he conocido durante un largo tiempo —dice—, y ambos nos necesitábamos mucho el uno del otro cuando esto comenzó, pero tú ibas a seguir adelante. Lo sabes. —¿Entonces por qué vine aquí? —le pregunto—. ¿Por qué mantenerme cerca? Podría hacerme las mismas preguntas. Ambos éramos débiles, aferrándonos a lo único bueno que teníamos. E ignoramos cómo al estar juntos lo estábamos arruinando. Lo quiero. Era mi amigo. ¿Cómo pudo humillarme de esta manera? —No se suponía que fueras como él —le digo, mis ojos se llenan de lágrimas de nuevo. Levanta la mirada, sabiendo exactamente de quién estoy hablando. Jay era un pedazo de mierda. Cole no. Cole sabía por lo que pasé. ¿Estaba intentando hacerme daño? —Fuiste mi amigo primero —continúo. Se supone que un amigo sea bueno contigo. Pero no dice nada. No hay nada que decir. No es culpa suya que terminara. Solo es su culpa terminarlo de una forma tan mala. —¿También en nuestra cama? —pregunto—. ¿En las noches que estaba trabajando? Su silencio me dice que tengo razón y una ola de furia se apodera repentinamente de mí. ¿Pike sabía que Cole la traía aquí? ¿O tal vez a otras chicas? Pero no... me detengo, los nudos en mi estómago se deshacen un poco. Parecía tan sorprendido como yo en este momento. Asiento, también dándome cuenta de que Cole tampoco se encontraba con Elena a solas. Se veía con ella en las fiestas, sin duda. —Y todos tus amigos lo sabían —digo, la traición volviéndose perfectamente clara. Ahora estoy por mi cuenta. Aparte de Cam y las chicas en el bar, he perdido a mi último amigo. Se acerca, deteniéndose frente a mí. —Voy a quedarme con Elena por un tiempo —dice—. Quédate aquí hasta que puedas... —Vete a la mierda. —Levanto mis ojos, diciéndolo con la misma indiferencia como “de nada”. Volviendo a la casa, no me detengo para comprobar si Elena se ha ido o si está esperando fuera junto al auto de Cole. Tomo mi bolsa y me dirijo al dormitorio, sacando mi teléfono y deslizándome hasta el suelo contra la puerta cerrada. Llamo, responden al cuarto tono y limpio una lágrima silenciosa mientras endurezco mi voz: —Hola, papá.

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

  You must.” Okay, I said wearily. Okay. Whatever you dummies think best. WE WERE ON track in 1979 for sales of $140 million. Better yet, our quality was rising apace. People in the trade, industry insiders, were writing articles, praising us for “finally” putting out a better shoe than Adidas. Personally, I thought the insiders were late to the party. Other than a few early stumbles, our quality had been tops for years. And we’d never lagged in innovation. (Plus, we had Rudy’s air soles in the pipeline.) Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape. Which seemed like saying: Aside from being on death row, life was grand. Another good sign. We kept outgrowing our headquarters. We moved again that year, to a forty-thousand-square-foot building all our own, in Beaverton. My private office was sleek, and huge, bigger than our entire first headquarters next to the Pink Bucket. And utterly empty. The interior decorator decided to go Japanese minimalist—with one touch of the absurd that everyone found hilarious. She thought it would be a hoot to set beside my desk a leather chair that was a giant baseball mitt. “Now,” she said, “you can sit there every day and think about your… sports things.” I sat in the mitt, like a foul ball, and looked out the window. I should have reveled in that moment, savored the humor and the irony. Getting cut from my high school baseball team had been one of the great hurts of my life, and now I was sitting in a giant mitt, in a swank new office, presiding over a company that sold “sports things” to professional baseball players. But instead of cherishing how far we’d come, I saw only how far we had to go. My window looked onto a beautiful stand of pines, and I definitely couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I didn’t understand what was happening, in the moment, but now I do. The years of stress were taking their toll. When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout. I OPENED THE final Buttface of 1978 with a rah-rah speech, trying to fire up the troops, but especially myself. “Gentlemen,” I said, “our industry is made up of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! And next year… finally… one of the dwarfs is going to get into Snow White’s pants!” As if the metaphor needed further explanation, I explained that Adidas was Snow White. And our time, I thundered, is coming! But first we needed to start selling clothes. Aside from the plain numerical fact that Adidas sold more apparel than shoes, apparel gave them a psychological edge. Apparel helped them lure bigger athletes into sweeter endorsement deals. Look at all we can give you, Adidas would say to an athlete, pointing to their shirts and pants and other gear.

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

  For instance, she was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, trying to solve some problem or construct some plan. I often didn’t hear what she said, and if I did hear I didn’t remember it minutes later. She was learning that I was absentminded, that I would drive to the grocery store and come home empty-handed, without the one item she’d asked me to buy, because all the way there and all the way back I’d been puzzling over the latest bank crisis, or the most recent Onitsuka shipping delay. She was learning that I misplaced everything, especially the important things, like wallets and keys. Bad enough that I couldn’t multitask, but I insisted on trying. I’d often scan the financial pages while eating lunch—and driving. My new black Cougar didn’t remain new for long. As the Mr. Magoo of Oregon, I was forever bumping into trees and poles and other people’s fenders. She was learning that I wasn’t housebroken. I left the toilet seat up, left my clothes where they fell, left food on the counter. I was effectively helpless. I couldn’t cook, or clean, or do even the simplest things for myself, because I’d been spoiled rotten by my mother and sisters. All those years in the servants’ quarters, I’d essentially had servants. She was learning that I didn’t like to lose, at anything, that losing for me was a special form of agony. I often flippantly blamed Bowerman, but it went way back. I told her about playing Ping-Pong with my father when I was a boy, and the pain of never being able to beat him. I told her that my father would sometimes laugh when he won, which sent me into a rage. More than once I’d thrown down my paddle and run off crying. I wasn’t proud of this behavior, but it was ingrained. It explained me. She didn’t really get it until we went bowling. Penny was a very good bowler—she’d taken a bowling class at Oregon State—so I perceived this as a challenge, and I was going to meet the challenge head-on. I was determined to win, and thus everything other than a strike made me glum.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  4 We no longer understand Greek theoria as the activity of “contemplation” but as a “theory,” an idea in our heads that has to be proved. This neatly demonstrates our modern understanding of religion as something that we think rather than something that we do. In the past, religious people were open to all manner of different truths. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars were ready to learn from pagan Greeks who had sacrificed to idols, as well as from one another. It is simply not true that science and religion were always at daggers drawn: in England, the Protestant and Puritan ethos were felt to be congenial to early modern science and helped its advance and acceptance. 5 Mersenne, who belonged to a particularly austere branch of the Franciscan order, took time off from his prayers to conduct scientific experiments, and his mathematical ideas are still discussed today. The Jesuits encouraged the young Descartes to read Galileo and were fascinated by early modern science. Indeed, it has been said that the first scientific collective was not the Royal Society but the Society of Jesus. 6 But as modernity advanced, confidence dimmed and attitudes hardened. Thomas Aquinas had taught Aristotelian science when it was controversial to do so and had studied Jewish and Muslim philosophers while most of his contemporaries reflexively supported the Crusades. But the defensive post-Tridentine Church interpreted his theology with a rigidity that he would have found repugnant. The modern Protestant doctrine of the literal infallibility of scripture was first formulated by Hodge and Warfield in the 1870s, when scientific methods of biblical criticism were undermining “beliefs” held to be factually true. Like the new and highly controversial Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, defined in 1870, it expressed a yearning for absolute certainty at a time when this was proving to be a chimera. Today, when science itself is becoming less determinate, it is perhaps time to return to a theology that asserts less and is more open to silence and unknowing. Here, perhaps, dialogue with the more thoughtful Socratic forms of atheism can help to dismantle ideas that have become idolatrous. In the past, people were often called “ atheists” when society was in transition from one religious perspective to another: Euripides and Protagoras were accused of “atheism” when they denied the Olympian gods in favor of a more transcendent theology; the first Christians and Muslims, who were moving away from traditional paganism, were persecuted as “atheists” by their contemporaries.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In 1615, the learned Carmelite friar Paolo Foscarini arrived in Rome to make a calm but forceful plea for the heliocentric universe. In the Bible, Foscarini argued, God revealed only those truths that could not be discovered by natural reason and had left the rest to human beings. When Bellarmine read his treatise, he replied that as far as he knew there was no definitive proof of the Copernican theory. If there were, it would be a different matter: “Then we would have to use great care in explaining the passages of scripture that seem contrary. … But I cannot believe that there is such a demonstration until someone shows it to me.” 79 Galileo immediately pointed out that the Council of Trent upheld the authority of the Bible only in matters of faith and morals and that heliocentric theory fell under neither category. It did not seem to have occurred to him that it was probably unwise to correct Bellarmine, the principal spokesman of reformed Catholicism, about the Council’s rulings. He then further muddied the waters by overstating his case, arguing that his experiments had provided the definitive proof that Bellarmine declared to be missing. 80 But this was not the case: Galileo’s observations on sunspots, the phases of Venus, and the tides were suggestive but not conclusive. On both sides, there was a clash of misplaced certainty. 81 Galileo was right to argue that poetical remarks in the Bible should not be read as definitive scientific observations; this had been standard exegetical practice in the West since the time of Augustine, and in failing to recognize this, Bellarmine was theologically at fault. But Galileo had not been able to meet his own high standards of scientific verification and had not fully appreciated the importance of hypothetical and probable reasoning in science. In mixing science and religion, he had violated his own principles and entered the now dangerous minefield of scriptural interpretation. 82 If he had presented his view as the probable theory it actually was, he could have remained at peace with the Church. Instead, he insisted that he was in possession of a proof that he had not achieved. In 1616, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and Foscarini’s treatise were put on the Index. Galileo himself was not threatened, and Bellarmine even gave him a certificate stating that he had not been asked to recant any of his theories. 83 But in 1623, Galileo entered the lists again when his old friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. When they met in Rome, Urban feted Galileo and agreed that he could write what he chose about heliocentric theory, as long as he presented his theories as hypothetical in the usual way. Galileo returned to Florence to work on his Dialogues on the Two World Systems . But after this promising beginning, two of Galileo’s patrons were implicated in Spanish political intrigues at the papal court and were disgraced, and Galileo was damaged by association.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I could be Sappho, unafraid of Eros, calling Aphrodite to her shrine. But as soon as I saw him coming, I thought, Oh God no. He sort of looked like his picture, but more the monkey aesthetic than the hot one. Also, he had an additional werewolf essence that the photo had not captured. It wasn’t just his jagged teeth, the scruffy goatee, but something else that was distinctly werewolf. He waved to me, and I waved back, cursing through my teeth, already disappointed. When he crossed the street I tried not to let it show, to be warm, though I wasn’t sure why I cared what he thought. I guess I felt bad about rejecting someone without even knowing him. I felt sort of ashamed that I was judging him for his looks, but with an alley make-out what other attributes could there be? It figured. Of course this werewolf-monkey creature was the best that I could do. He might have been disappointed in what I looked like too, but he didn’t show it. “You’re really cute,” he said, as though assuring both me and himself. “You look a lot younger than forty. A lot younger.” “I’m thirty-eight,” I said. “Not that I don’t like older women. I love older women. You’ve got seasoning. But you look like a young older woman. Or an old younger woman—” “Okay,” I said, relieving him of having to speak. “I got it.” “So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want to stay here and have a drink or do you want to go for a walk?” “Let’s have a drink first,” I said. “God, you’re really cute,” he said. We turned in to a little dive. I ordered myself a vodka tonic. Rarely did I drink liquor anymore but I felt that the situation called for it. I needed to be less lucid than I was. He didn’t offer to pay for my drink. But he got two tequila shots, offering me one, and a Jack and Coke. I declined, laughing. “So what have you been reading lately?” he asked, after toasting me with one of his two shots. I had told him over the Internet that I was a librarian, and he loved that. He had asked me to wear my glasses, but I didn’t wear glasses. “I’m almost always reading the Greeks,” I said. “I’m doing a project on the poet Sappho that I’ve been working on for a number of years. Trying to finish it this summer.” “Oh yeah, I read him in high school,” he said. “I’m really into the Beats right now. Do you like the Beats?”

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

  “Just what we need,” he said, “another accountant.” He had me there. I did seem to hire nothing but accountants. And lawyers. It wasn’t that I had some bizarre affection for accountants and lawyers, I just didn’t know where else to look for talent. I reminded Hayes, not for the first time, that there’s no shoe school, no University of Footwear from which we could recruit. We needed to hire people with sharp minds, that was our priority, and accountants and lawyers had at least proved that they could master a difficult subject. And pass a big test. Most had also demonstrated basic competence. When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn’t predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything. And the typical business school graduate? He or she didn’t want to start out with a bag selling shoes. Plus, they all had zero experience, so you were simply rolling the dice based on how well they did in an interview. We didn’t have enough margin for error to roll the dice on anyone. Besides, as accountants went, Nelson was a standout. He’d become a manager in just five years, which was ridiculously fast. And he’d been valedictorian at his high school. (Alas, we didn’t find out until later that he went to high school in eastern Montana; his class had five people.) On the minus side of the ledger, because he’d become an accountant so fast, Nelson was young. Maybe too young to handle something as big as the launch of an apparel line. But I told myself that his youth wouldn’t be a critical factor, because starting an apparel line was relatively easy. After all, there wasn’t any technology or physics involved. As Strasser had once quipped, “There’s no such thing as air shorts.” Then, during one of my first meetings with Nelson, right after I’d hired him, I noticed... he had absolutely no sense of style. The more I looked him over, up and down, side to side, the more I realized that he might have been the worst dresser I’d ever met. Worse than Strasser. Even Nelson’s car, I noticed one day in the parking lot, was a hideous shade of brown. When I mentioned this to Nelson, he laughed. He had the nerve to brag that every car he’d ever owned had been the same brown. “I might have made a mistake with Nelson,” I confided to Hayes. I WAS NO fashion plate. But I knew how to wear a decent suit. And because my company was launching an apparel line, I now started paying closer attention to what I wore, and what those around me wore. On the second front I was appalled.

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

  It looks like a wing, one of us said. It looks like a whoosh of air, another said. It looks like something a runner might leave in his or her wake. We all agreed it looked new, fresh, and yet somehow—ancient. Timeless. For her many hours of work, we gave Carolyn our deepest thanks and a check for thirty-five dollars, then sent her on her way. After she left we continued to sit and stare at this one logo, which we’d sort of selected, and sort of settled on by default. “Something eye-catching about it,” Johnson said. Woodell agreed. I frowned, scratched my cheek. “You guys like it more than I do,” I said. “But we’re out of time. It’ll have to do.” “You don’t like it?” Woodell said. I sighed. “I don’t love it. Maybe it will grow on me.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth. 41 It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, Ingersoll, or Mill, these new atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice, and humiliation that have inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the means of creating a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work. Dawkins argues that we are moral beings because the virtuous behavior of our ancestors probably helped to ensure their survival. Altruism was, therefore, not divinely inspired but simply the result of an accidental genetic mutation that programmed our forebears to behave more generously and cooperatively than others. But, he continues, there are many such “blessed” evolutionary misfirings in human behavior, one of which is “the urge to kindness—to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity.” 42 Many theologians would have no difficulty with this view. It is surely characteristic of our humanity to take something basic and instinctual and transform it in such a way that it transcends the purely pragmatic. Cooking, for example, probably began as a useful survival skill, but we have gone on to develop haute cuisine. We acquired the ability to run and jump in order to get away from predators, and now we have ballet and athletics. We cultivated language as a useful means of communication and have created poetry. The religious traditions have done something similar with altruism. As Confucius pointed out, they have found that when they practiced it “all day and every day,” it elevated human life to the realm of holiness and gave practitioners intimations of transcendence. In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists. The ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach; Bultmann, Tillich, and Rahner were all influenced by Heidegger. 43 But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens because their theology is so rudimentary. We should, however, take careful note of what we might call the Dawkins phenomenon. The fact that these intemperate antireligious tracts have won such wide readership not only in secular Europe but also in religious America suggests that many people who have little theological training have problems with the modern God.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  This militant religiosity, which would emerge in every region where a secular, Western-style government had separated religion and politics, is determined to drag God and/or religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in modern culture and back to center field. It reveals a widespread disappointment in modernity. Whatever the pundits, intellectuals, or politicians thought, people all over the world were demonstrating that they wanted to see religion more clearly reflected in public life. This new form of piety is popularly known as “fundamentalism,” but many object to having this Christian term foisted on their reform movements. They do not in fact represent an atavistic return to the past. These are essentially innovative movements and could have taken root at no time other than our own. Fundamentalisms too can be seen as part of the postmodern rejection of modernity. They are not orthodox and conservative; indeed, many are actually anti-orthodox and regard the more conventional faithful as part of the problem.6 These movements have mushroomed independently, and even those that have emerged within the same tradition do not have an identical vision. However, they bear what has been called a “family resemblance,” and seem instinctively to follow the pattern set by American Protestant fundamentalism, the earliest of these movements. All are initially defensive movements rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, which causes them to develop a paranoid vision of the “enemy.” They begin as intrafaith movements, and only at a secondary stage, if at all, do they direct their attention to a foreign foe.

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

  Customers were returning the shoe to stores, in droves, complaining that the thing was blowing up, falling apart. Autopsies on the returned shoes revealed a fatal design flaw. Bits of metal in the silver paint were rubbing against the shoe’s upper, acting like microscopic razors, slicing and shredding the fabric. We issued a recall, of sorts, and offered full refunds, and half of the first generation of Tailwinds ended up in recycling bins. What began as a morale booster ended up being a body blow to everyone’s confidence. Each person reacted in his own way. Hayes drove in frantic circles on a bulldozer. Woodell stayed longer each day at the office. I toggled dazedly between my baseball mitt and my recliner. In time we all agreed to pretend it was no big deal. We’d learned a valuable lesson. Don’t put twelve innovations into one shoe. It asks too much of the shoe, to say nothing of the design team. We reminded each other that there was honor in saying, “Back to the drawing board.” We reminded each other of the many waffle irons Bowerman had ruined. Next year, we all said. You’ll see. Next year. The dwarf is going to get Snow White. But Strasser couldn’t get past it. He started drinking, showing up late to work. His mode of dress was now the least of my problems. This might have been his first real failure, ever, and I’ll always remember those dreary winter mornings, seeing him shamble into my office with the latest bad news about his Tailwind. I recognized the signs. He, too, was approaching burnout. 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.

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

  I would watch, all two hours and ten minutes, to the bitter end. I’m still not sure I know exactly what happened. Apparently, Shorter became convinced that his Nike shoes were fragile and wouldn’t hold up for the whole twenty-six miles. (Never mind that they’d performed perfectly well at the Olympic Trials.) Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it was superstition. He wanted to use what he’d always used. Runners are funny that way. In any case, at the last moment he switched back to the shoes that he wore when he won the gold in 1972. And I switched from soda to vodka. Sitting in the dark, clutching a cocktail, I told myself it was no big deal, in the grand scheme of things. Shorter didn’t even win. An East German surprised him and took the gold. Of course I was lying to myself, it was a very big deal, and not because of the disappointment or the lost marketing opportunity. If watching Shorter go off in shoes other than mine could affect me so deeply, it was now official: Nike was more than just a shoe. I no longer simply made Nikes; Nikes were making me. If I saw an athlete choose another shoe, if I saw anyone choose another shoe, it wasn’t just a rejection of the brand alone, but of me. I told myself to be reasonable, not everyone in the world was going to wear Nike. And I won’t say that I became upset every time I saw someone walking down the street in a running shoe that wasn’t mine. But it definitely registered. And I didn’t care for it. At some point that night I phoned Hollister. He was devastated, too. There was raw anger in his voice. I was glad. I wanted people working for me who would feel that same burn, that same gut-punch rejection. Happily, there were fewer such rejections all the time. At the close of fiscal 1976 we doubled our sales—$14 million. A startling number, which financial analysts noted, and wrote about. And yet we were still cash-poor. I kept borrowing every nickel I could, plowing it into growth, with the explicit or tacit blessing of people I trusted. Woodell, Strasser, Hayes. In early 1976 the four of us had talked tentatively about going public, and tabled the idea. Now, at the close of 1976, we took up the idea again, more seriously. We analyzed the risks, weighed the cons, considered the pros. Again we decided: No.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She seized his arm and waved it. ‘Shake hands with Aunty Nancy, like a proper little gent!’ He jerked at her hip, like some great swollen pistol that at any second might go off; but I dutifully took his fingers in my own, and squeezed them. Of course, he snatched his hand away at once, and only wailed the louder. Everybody laughed. George caught the baby up and swung him high, so that his hair brushed the cracked and yellowed plaster of the ceiling. ‘Who’s a little soldier, then?’ he cried. I looked at Alice, and she glanced away. The baby quietened at last; the room grew warmer. I saw Rhoda lean towards my brother and whisper, and when he nodded, she coughed. She said, ‘Nancy, you won’t have heard our bit of good news.’ I looked at her properly. She had her jacket off and her feet, I noticed, were bare but for a pair of woollen stockings. She seemed very much at home. Now she held out her hand. On the second finger from the left there was a narrow strip of gold, with a tiny stone - sapphire or diamond, it was too small to tell - mounted upon it. An engagement ring. I blushed - I don’t know why - and forced a smile. ‘Oh, Rhoda! I am glad. Davy! How nice for you.’ I was not glad; it was not nice; the thought of having Rhoda as a sister-in-law - of having any kind of sister-in-law! - was peculiarly horrible. But I must have sounded pleased enough, for they both grew pink and smug. Then Aunt Rosina nodded towards my own hand. ‘No sign of a ring on your finger yet, Nance?’ I saw Alice shift in her seat, and shook my head: ‘Not yet, no.’ Father opened his mouth to speak; I could not bear, however, for the conversation to run down that particular road. I got up, and retrieved my bags. ‘I’ve bought you all some things,’ I said, ‘from London.’ There were murmurs and little interested ‘Oh’s at that. Mother said I shouldn’t have, but reached for her spectacles and looked expectant. I went to my Aunt, first, and handed her a bag full of packages. ‘These are for Uncle Joe, and Mike and the girls. This is for you.’ George next: I had bought him a silver hip-flask. Then Liza, and the baby ... I went all around the crowded room, and finished up at Alice: ‘This is for you.’ Her parcel - a hat, in a hat box - was the biggest. She took it from me with the smallest, straightest, stiffest smile you ever saw, and began slowly and self-consciously to pull at its ribbons. Now everybody had a gift but me. I sat and watched as they tore at their packages, chewing at my knuckle and smiling into my hand.

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

  By the time I graduated I hoped never again to see Grelle’s back. Years later, when Grelle won the 1,500 in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium, I was wearing an army uniform, sitting on a couch in the day room at Fort Lewis. I pumped my fist at the screen, proud of my fellow Oregonian, but I also died a little at the memory of the many times he’d bested me. Now I began to see Adidas as a second Grelle. Chasing them, being legally checked by them, irritated me to no end. It also drove me. Hard. Once again, in my quixotic effort to overtake a superior opponent, I had Bowerman as my coach. Once again he was doing everything he could to put me in position to win. I often drew on the memory of his old prerace pep talks, especially when we were up against our blood rivals Oregon State. I would replay Bowerman’s epic speeches, hear him telling us that Oregon State wasn’t just any opponent. Beating USC and Cal was important, he said, but beating Oregon State was (pause) different . Nearly sixty years later it gives me chills to recall his words, his tone. No one could get your blood going like Bowerman, though he never raised his voice. He knew how to speak in subliminal italics, to slyly insert exclamation marks, like hot keys against the flesh. For extra inspiration I’d sometimes think back to the first time I saw Bowerman walking around the locker room and handing out new shoes. When he came to me, I wasn’t even sure I’d made the team. I was a freshman, still unproven, still developing. But he shoved a new pair of spikes straight into my chest. “Knight,” he said. That was all. Just my name. Not a syllable more. I looked down at the shoes. They were Oregon green, with yellow stripes, the most breathtaking things I’d ever seen. I cradled them, and later I carried them back to my room and put them gingerly on the top shelf of my bookcase. I remember that I trained my gooseneck desk lamp on them. They were Adidas, of course. By the tail end of 1967 Bowerman was inspiring many people besides me. That book he’d been talking about, that silly book about jogging, was done, and out in bookstores. A slight one hundred pages, Jogging preached the gospel of physical exercise to a nation that had seldom heard that sermon before, a nation that was collectively lolling on the couch, and somehow the book caught fire. It sold a million copies, sparked a movement, changed the very meaning of the word “running.” Before long, thanks to Bowerman and his book, running was no longer just for weirdos. It was no longer a cult. It was almost—cool? I was happy for him, but also for Blue Ribbon. His bestseller would surely generate publicity and bump our sales. Then I sat down and read the thing. My stomach dropped.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was Mrs Macey, of the Women’s Cooperative Guild. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I must congratulate you! What a really splendid address! They tell me you were an actress, once ... ?’ ‘Do they?’ I said. ‘Yes, I was.’ ‘Well, we cannot afford to have such talents in our ranks, you know, and let them lie unused. Do say that you will speak for us another time. One really charismatic speaker can work wonders with an indecisive crowd.’ ‘I’ll gladly speak for you,’ I said. ‘But you, you know, must write the speech ...’ ‘Of course! Of course!’ She clasped her hands together and raised her eyes. ‘Oh! I foresee rallies and debates, even - who knows? - a lecture tour!’ At that, I gazed at her for a second in real alarm; then I felt my attention sought by a figure at my side, and turned to find Emma Raymond’s sister, Mrs Costello, looking flushed and excited. ‘What a wonderful address!’ she said shyly. ‘I felt moved almost to tears by it.’ Her lovely face was indeed pale and grave, her eyes large and blue and lustrous. I thought again what I had thought before - what a shame it was that she was not a tom ... But then I remembered what Annie had said about her: how she had lost her gentle husband, and sought another. ‘How kind you are,’ I said earnestly. ‘But, you know, it’s really Mr Banner who deserves your praises, for he composed the entire speech himself.’ As I said it I reached for Ralph, and pulled him over. ‘Ralph,’ I said, ‘this is Mrs Costello, Miss Raymond’s widowed sister. She very much enjoyed your address.’ ‘I did,’ said Mrs Costello. She held out her hand, and Ralph took it, then gazed blinking into her face. ‘I have always found the world to be so terribly unjust,’ she went on, ‘but felt only powerless, before today, to change it ...’ They still held hands, but had not noticed. I left them to it, and rejoined Annie and Miss Raymond, and Florence. Annie put her hand upon my shoulder. ‘A lecture tour, eh?’ she said. ‘My word!’ Then she turned to Flo: ‘And how should you like that?’ Florence had not smiled at me since I had stepped from the stage; and she did not smile now. When she spoke at last, her expression was sad and grave and almost bewildered - as if astonished at her own bitterness. ‘I should like it very much,’ she said, ‘if I thought that Nancy really meant her speeches, and wasn’t just repeating them like a - like a dam’ parrot!’ Annie looked uneasily at Miss Raymond, then said, ‘Oh Florrie, for shame ...’ I did not say anything, but gazed hard at Florence for a second, then looked away - my pleasure at the speech, at the shouts of the crowd, all dimmed, and my heart all heavy.