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 The Case for God (2009)

  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. Some believers are still able to work creatively with this symbol, but others are obviously not. They get little help from their clergy, who may not have had an advanced theological training and whose worldview may still be bounded by the modern God. Modern theology is not always easy reading. Theologians should try to present it in an attractive, accessible way to enable congregants to keep up with the latest discussions and the new insights of biblical scholarship, which rarely reach the pews. Our world is already dangerously polarized, and we do not need another divisive ideology. The history of fundamentalism shows that when these movements are attacked, they nearly always become more extreme. The atheist assault is likely to drive the fundamentalists to even greater commitment to creationism, and their contemptuous dismissal of Islam is a gift to Muslim extremists, who can use it to argue that the West is indeed intent on a new Crusade. 44 Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well as on reason. The physicist Paul Dirac has argued that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” 45 The mathematician Roger Penrose believes that the creative mind “breaks through” into a Platonic realm of mathematical and aesthetic forms: “Rigorous argument is usually the last step! Before that, one has to make many guesses, and for these aesthetic convictions are enormously important.”

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

  I was transitioning him from legal to marketing, moving him out of his comfort zone, as I liked to do with everyone now and then, to prevent them from growing stale. Tailwind was Strasser’s first big project, so he felt like Midas. “Nailed it,” he kept saying, and who could begrudge him a bit of chest-thumping. After its wildly successful debut, Tailwind became a sales monster. Within ten days we thought it might have a chance of eclipsing the waffle trainer. Then the reports began to trickle in. 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.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  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. 84 To make matters worse, he had added a final paragraph to the Dialogues. “Simplicio,” the character who represented the new Aristotelian orthodoxy and performed throughout the dialogue as the “fall guy,” argued that Copernican theory was “neither true nor conclusive” and that it “would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the divine power and wisdom to one particular fancy of his own.” 85 These words were a direct quotation of published remarks by Urban himself, who would not have been pleased to see them on the lips of Simplicio, whose name was an insult in itself. On April 12, 1633, Galileo was summoned to the Holy Office and was judged guilty of disobedience. On June 22, he was forced to recant on his knees, and returned to Florence, where he was confined to his country estate. When Copernicus had presented his ideas in the Vatican, the pope had given his approval; ninety years later, De revolutionibus was placed on the Index. In 1605, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England, had declared that there could be no conflict between science and religion. But that openness was giving way to dogmatism and suspicion. There would soon be no place in the new Europe for the skepticism of Montaigne or the psychological agnosticism of Shakespeare. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the notion of truth had begun to change. Thomas Aquinas would not have recognized his theology in its post-Tridentine guise. His apophatic delight in unknowing was being replaced by a strident lust for certainty and a harsh dogmatic intolerance. The spirituality of silence was giving way to wordy debate; the refusal to define (a word that literally means “to set limits upon”) was being superseded by aggressive definitions of ineffable dogma. Faith was beginning to be identified with “belief” in man-made opinions—and that would, eventually, make faith itself difficult to maintain. The first modern Western atheists, however, were not Christians who had been alienated by the terrible convictions of their clergy but Jews living in the most liberal country in Europe. Their experience tells us a good deal about our current religious predicament. By the early seventeenth century, while the rest of Europe was in the grip of severe economic recession, the Dutch were enjoying a golden age of prosperity and expansion. They did not share the new sectarian dogmatism. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some of the Marrano Jews had been permitted to leave Portugal and migrated to Venice, Hamburg, London, and, above all, Amsterdam, which became their New Jerusalem.

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

  1973 Like his coach, Pre just wasn’t himself after the 1972 Olympics. He was haunted and enraged by the terrorist attacks. And by his performance. He felt he’d let everyone down. He’d finished fourth. No shame in being the world’s fourth-best at your distance, we told him. But Pre knew he was better than that. And he knew he’d have done better if he hadn’t been so stubborn. He showed no patience, no guile. He could have slipped behind the front runner, coasted in his wake, stolen silver. That, however, would have gone against Pre’s religion. So he’d run all out, as always, holding nothing back, and in the final hundred yards he tired. Worse, the man he considered his archrival, Lasse Viren, of Finland, once more took the gold. We tried to lift Pre’s spirits. We assured him that Oregon still loved him. City officials in Eugene were even planning to name a street after him. “Great,” Pre said, “what’re they gonna call it—Fourth Street?” He locked himself in his metal trailer on the banks of the Willamette and he didn’t come out for weeks. In time, after pacing a lot, after playing with his German shepherd puppy, Lobo, and after large quantities of cold beer, Pre emerged. One day I heard that he’d been seen again around town, at dawn, doing his daily ten miles, Lobo trotting at his heels. It took a full six months, but the fire in Pre’s belly came back. In his final races for Oregon he shone. He won the NCAA three-mile for a fourth straight year, posting a gaudy 13:05.3. He also went to Scandinavia and crushed the field in the 5,000, setting an American record: 13:22.4. Better yet, he did it in Nikes. Bowerman finally had him wearing our shoes. (Months into his retirement, Bowerman was still coaching Pre, still polishing the final designs for the waffle shoe, which was about to go on sale to the general public. He’d never been busier.) And our shoes were finally worthy of Pre. It was a perfect symbiotic match. He was generating thousands of dollars of publicity, making our brand a symbol of rebellion and iconoclasm—and we were helping his recovery. Pre began to talk warily with Bowerman about the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. He told Bowerman, and a few close friends, that he wanted redemption. He was determined to capture that gold medal that eluded him in Munich. Several scary stumbling blocks stood in his path, however. Vietnam, for one. Pre, whose life, like mine, like everyone’s, was governed by numbers, drew a horrible number in the draft lottery. He was going to be drafted, there was little doubt, as soon as he graduated. In a year’s time he’d be sitting in some fetid jungle, taking heavy machine-gun fire. He might have his legs, his godlike legs, blown out from under him. Also, there was Bowerman.

• 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)

  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.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  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. Some believers are still able to work creatively with this symbol, but others are obviously not. They get little help from their clergy, who may not have had an advanced theological training and whose worldview may still be bounded by the modern God. Modern theology is not always easy reading. Theologians should try to present it in an attractive, accessible way to enable congregants to keep up with the latest discussions and the new insights of biblical scholarship, which rarely reach the pews. Our world is already dangerously polarized, and we do not need another divisive ideology. The history of fundamentalism shows that when these movements are attacked, they nearly always become more extreme. The atheist assault is likely to drive the fundamentalists to even greater commitment to creationism, and their contemptuous dismissal of Islam is a gift to Muslim extremists, who can use it to argue that the West is indeed intent on a new Crusade.44

• From The Case for God (2009)

  He had no time for theologians, who were “bogged down in their interminable questionings”; 82 motivated solely by “vanity,” these people should be called “Fool” rather than “Doctor.” 83 Rolle regularly insulted anybody who uttered the slightest criticism of his eccentric way of life with a stridency that jars with his lush descriptions of God’s love. This emphasis on sensation was strangely parallel to the tendency of the late scholastic theologians, who were increasingly skeptical about the mind’s ability to transcend sense data. 84 This new “mysticism” translated the traditionally symbolic discourse of interiority into a literal exploration of observable, quantifiable psychological states, which had become an end in themselves. 85 Rolle made a great impression on his contemporaries, but many of them were disturbed by this emotional piety, which contravened cardinal principles about the nature of religious experience. As we have seen, contemplatives were supposed to rise above their feelings in order to explore the deeper regions of the psyche. Rolle refused to have a spiritual director who could have instructed him in the special techniques and carefully cultivated attitudes that would enable him to transcend his normal modes of perception. The traditions all insist that a mystic must integrate his spirituality healthily with the demands of ordinary life. Zen practitioners insist that meditation makes them more alert and responsive to their surroundings. But in his writings Rolle alternates between excitable, almost manic exultation and crushing depression. He developed a stammer and found that a job that would once have taken him thirty minutes now took a whole morning. His younger contemporary Catherine of Siena once fell into the fire in an ecstatic swoon while cooking a meal. This unbalanced behavior would become increasingly admired in certain circles. Like Rolle, Catherine refused to submit to spiritual direction that could have helped her to negotiate this perilous psychic hinterland. Elevated feelings were never supposed to be the end of the spiritual quest: Buddhists insist that after achieving enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings. This was also true of Christian monks and nuns, who had to serve their communities; even anchorites often acted as counselors for the local laity, who came to them with secular as well as spiritual problems. But Rolle vehemently refused to engage with his fellows, and his contemplation did not lead to kindly consideration and kenotic respect for others—the test of authentic religious experience in all the major faiths. But as the rift between spirituality and theology developed, a flood of pleasurable and consoling emotion would be seen by more and more people as a sign of God’s favor. The Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327) was uneasy about this development. 86 Whatever mystics like Rolle believed, the feeling self could not be the end of the religious quest, because when reason fulfills itself in intellectus , it has left self behind.