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)

  It’s just not for us, I said, and we said. No way. Never. Meeting adjourned. So we set about casting for other ways to raise money. One way found us. First State Bank asked us to apply for a million-dollar loan, which the U.S. Small Business Administration would then guarantee. It was a loophole, a way for a small bank to gently expand its credit line, because their guaranteed-loan limits were greater than their direct-loan limits. So we did it, mainly to make their life easier. As is always the case, the process turned out to be more complicated than it first appeared. First State Bank and the Small Business Administration required that Bowerman and I, as majority shareholders, both personally guarantee the loan. We’d done that at First National and at Bank of California, so I didn’t see a problem. I was in hock up to my neck, what was one more guarantee? Bowerman, however, balked. Retired, living on a fixed income, dispirited after the traumas of the last few years, and greatly weakened by the death of Pre, he didn’t want any more risk. He feared losing his mountain. Rather than give his personal guarantee, he offered to give me two-thirds of his stake in Blue Ribbon, at a discounted price. He was bowing out. I didn’t want this. Never mind that I didn’t have the money to buy his stake, I didn’t want to lose the cornerstone of my company, the anchor of my psyche. But Bowerman was adamant, and I knew better than to argue. So we both went to Jaqua and asked him to help broker the deal. Jaqua was still Bowerman’s best friend, but I’d come to think of him as a close friend, too. I still trusted him completely. Let’s not fully dissolve the partnership, I said to him. Though I reluctantly agreed to buy Bowerman’s stake (low payments, spread over five years), I begged him to retain a percentage, stay on as a vice president and member of our small board. Deal, he said. We all shook hands. WHILE WE WERE busy moving around stakes and dollars, the dollar itself was hemorrhaging value. It was all at once in a death spiral against the Japanese yen. Coupled with rising Japanese labor rates, this was now the most imminent threat to our existence. We’d increased and diversified sources of production, we’d added new factories in New England and Puerto Rico, but we were still doing nearly all our manufacturing in volatile Japan, mostly at Nippon Rubber. A sudden, crippling shortage of supply was a real possibility. Especially given the spike in demand for Bowerman’s waffle trainer. With its unique outer sole, and its pillowy midsole cushion, and its below-market price ($24.95), the waffle trainer was continuing to capture the popular imagination like no previous shoe. It didn’t just feel different, or fit different—it looked different. Radically so. Bright red upper, fat white swoosh—it was a revolution in aesthetics.

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

  The meeting took place at the Valley River Inn in Eugene. It was thirty men and women crammed into the conference room, with me at the head of a long conference table. I wore a dark suit and tried to project an air of confidence as I delivered the bad news. I gave them the same speech I’d given Blue Ribbon employees a year before. We’ve got them right where we want them. But this group wasn’t buying any pep talks. These were widows and widowers, retirees and pensioners. 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.

• 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.

• From Educated (2018)

  I don’t recall whether we were asked to evaluate Judith Beheading Holofernes, but if we were I’m sure I would have given my impressions: that the calm on the girl’s face didn’t sit well with my experience slaughtering chickens. Dressed in the right language this might have made a fantastic answer—something about the woman’s serenity standing in powerful counterpoint to the general realism of the piece. But I doubt the professor was much impressed by my observation that, “When you chop a chicken’s head off, you shouldn’t smile because you might get blood and feathers in your mouth.” The exam ended. The shutters were opened. I walked outside and stood in the winter chill, gazing up at the pinnacles of the Wasatch Mountains. I wanted to stay. The mountains were as unfamiliar and menacing as ever, but I wanted to stay. I waited a week for the exam results, and twice during that time I dreamed of Shawn, of finding him lifeless on the asphalt, of turning his body and seeing his face alight in crimson. Suspended between fear of the past and fear of the future, I recorded the dream in my journal. Then, without any explanation, as if the connection between the two were obvious, I wrote, I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child. The results were handed back a few days later. I had failed. —ONE WINTER, WHEN I was very young, Luke found a great horned owl in the pasture, unconscious and half frozen. It was the color of soot, and seemed as big as me to my child eyes. Luke carried it into the house, where we marveled at its soft plumage and pitiless talons. I remember stroking its striped feathers, so smooth they were waterlike, as my father held its limp body. I knew that if it were conscious, I would never get this close. I was in defiance of nature just by touching it. Its feathers were soaked in blood. A thorn had lanced its wing. “I’m not a vet,” Mother said. “I treat people .” But she removed the thorn and cleaned the wound. Dad said the wing would take weeks to mend, and that the owl would wake up long before then. Finding itself trapped, surrounded by predators, it would beat itself to death trying to get free. It was wild, he said, and in the wild that wound was fatal. We laid the owl on the linoleum by the back door and, when it awoke, told Mother to stay out of the kitchen. Mother said hell would freeze over before she surrendered her kitchen to an owl, then marched in and began slamming pots to make breakfast. The owl flopped about pathetically, its talons scratching the door, bashing its head in a panic. We cried, and Mother retreated. Two hours later Dad had blocked off half the kitchen with plywood sheets. The owl convalesced there for several weeks.

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

  ON DAY ONE of the show I walked into the convention center and found Johnson and Woodell already busy arranging our booth. They’d stacked the new Tigers in neat rows, and now they were stacking the new Nikes in pyramids of orange shoe boxes. In those days shoe boxes were either white or blue, period, but I’d wanted something that would stand out, that would pop on the shelves of sporting goods stores. So I’d asked Nippon Rubber for boxes of bright neon orange, figuring it was the boldest color in the rainbow. Johnson and Woodell loved the orange, and loved the lowercase “nike,” lettered in white on the side of the box. But as they opened the boxes and examined the shoes themselves, both men were shaken up. These shoes, the first wave produced by Nippon Rubber, didn’t have the quality of Tigers, nor of the samples we’d seen earlier. The leather was shiny, and not in a good way. The Wet-Flyte looked literally wet, as if covered with cheap paint or lacquer that hadn’t dried. The upper was coated with polyurethane, but apparently Nippon was no more proficient than Bowerman at working with that tricky, mercurial substance. The logo on the side, Carolyn’s wing-whoosh thingamajig, which we’d taken to calling a swoosh, was crooked. I sat down and put my head in my hands. I looked at our orange pyramids. My mind went to the pyramids of Giza. Only ten years before I’d been there, riding a camel like Lawrence of Arabia across the sands, free as a man could be. Now I was in Chicago, saddled with debt, head of a teetering shoe company, rolling out a new brand with shoddy workmanship and crooked swooshes. All is vanity. I gazed around the convention center, at the thousands of sales reps swarming the booths, the other booths. I heard them oohing and aahing at all the other shoes being introduced for the first time. I was that boy at the science fair who didn’t work hard enough on his project, who didn’t start until the night before. The other kids had built erupting volcanoes, and lightning machines, and all I had was a mobile of the solar system made with mothballs stuck to my mother’s coat hangers. Darn it, this was no time to be introducing flawed shoes. Worse, we had to push these flawed shoes on people who weren’t our kind of people. They were salesmen. They talked like salesmen, walked like salesmen, and they dressed like salesmen—tight polyester shirts, Sansabelt slacks. They were extroverts, we were introverts. They didn’t get us, we didn’t get them, and yet our future depended on them. And now we’d have to persuade them somehow that this Nike thing was worth their time and trust—and money.

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad took it as an apology. He disapproved of my going to Cambridge. “Our ancestors risked their lives to cross the ocean, to escape those socialist countries. And what do you do? You turn around and go back?” Again, I said nothing. “I’m looking forward to your graduation,” he said. “The Lord has a few choice rebukes for me to give them professors.” “You will not,” I said quietly. “If the Lord moves me, I will stand and speak.” “You will not,” I repeated. “I won’t go anywhere that the Lord’s spirit isn’t welcome.” That was the conversation. I hoped it would blow over, but Dad was so hurt that I hadn’t mentioned homeschooling in my interviews that this new wound festered. There was a dinner the night before my graduation where I was to receive the “most outstanding undergraduate” award from the history department. I waited for my parents at the entrance, but they never appeared. I called Mother, thinking they were running late. She said they weren’t coming. I went to the dinner and was presented with a plaque. My table had the only empty seats in the hall. The next day there was a luncheon for honors graduates, and I was seated with the college dean and the director of the honors program. Again, there were two empty seats. I said my parents had had car trouble. I phoned my mother after the luncheon. “Your father won’t come unless you apologize,” she said. “And I won’t, either.” I apologized. “He can say whatever he wants. But please come.” They missed most of the ceremony; I don’t know if they saw me accept my diploma. What I remember is waiting with my friends before the music began, watching their fathers snap pictures and their mothers fix their hair. I remember that my friends were wearing colorful leis and recently gifted jewelry. After the ceremony I stood alone on the lawn, watching the other students with their families. Eventually I saw my parents. Mother hugged me. My friend Laura snapped two photos. One is of me and Mother, smiling our forced smiles; the other is of me wedged between my parents, looking squeezed, under pressure. I was leaving the Mountain West that night. I had packed before graduation. My apartment was empty, my bags by the door. Laura had volunteered to drive me to the airport, but my parents asked if they could take me. I expected them to drop me at the curb, but Dad insisted that they walk with me through the airport. They waited while I checked my bags, then followed me to the security gate. It was as if Dad wanted to give me until the last second to change my mind. We walked in silence. When we arrived at security I hugged them both and said goodbye. I removed my shoes, laptop, camera, then I passed through the checkpoint, reassembled my pack, and headed for the terminal.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven’t thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech—and something of Dickens’ love for bravura—have something to do with me today; but I wouldn’t stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.) One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I don’t mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there are only two—For or Against—and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of view I am perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all. But it is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost a lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro oppression written in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the oppression they decry.) Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin —like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds. But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth? But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own. This so suddenly affirmative student is but changing the fashion of his innocence, nothing being more improbable than that he is now prepared, as he insists, to embrace his Responsibilities—the very word, in the face of his monumental aversion to experience, seems to shrink to the dimensions of a new, and rather sinister, frivolity. The student, homeward bound, has only chosen, however, to flee down the widest road. Of those who remain here, the majority have taken roads more devious, and incomparably better hidden—so well hidden that they themselves are lost. One very often finds in this category that student whose adaptation to French life seems to have been most perfect, and whose studies—of French art, or the drama, the language, or the history—give him the greatest right to be here. This student has put aside chewing gum forever, he eschews the T-shirt, and the crew cut, he can only with difficulty be prevailed upon to see an American movie, and it is so patent that he is actually studying that his appearance at the café tables is never taken as evidence of frivolity, but only as proof of his admirable passion to study the customs of the country. One assumes that he is living as the French live—which assumption, however, is immediately challenged by the suspicion that no American can live as the French live, even if one could find an American who wanted to. This student lives, nevertheless, with a French family, with whom he speaks French, and takes his meals; and he knows, as some students do not, that the Place de la Bastille no longer holds the prison. He has read, or is reading, all of Racine, Proust, Gide, Sartre, and authors more obscure—in the original, naturally. He regularly visits the museums, and he considers Arletty to be the most beautiful woman and the finest actress in the world. But the world, it seems, has become the French world: he is unwilling to recognize any other. This so severely cramps the American conversational style, that one looks on this student with awe, and some shame—he is so spectacularly getting out of his European experience everything it has to give.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  At this point, too, it may be suggested, the legend of Paris has done its deadly work, which is, perhaps, so to stun the traveler with freedom that he begins to long for the prison of home—home then becoming the place where questions are not asked. It is at this point, precisely, that many and many a student packs his bags for home. The transformation which can be effected, in less than a year, in the attitude and aspirations of the youth who has divorced himself from the crudities of main street in order to be married with European finesse is, to say the very least, astounding. His brief period of enchantment having ended, he cannot wait, it seems, to look again on his native land—the virtues of which, if not less crude, have also become, abruptly, simple , and vital . With the air of a man who has but barely escaped tumbling headlong into the bottomless pit, he tells you that he can scarcely wait to leave this city, which has been revealed to the eye of his maturity as old, dirty, crumbling, and dead. The people who were, when he arrived at Le Havre, the heirs of the world’s richest culture, the possessors of the world’s largest esprit , are really decadent, penurious, self-seeking, and false, with no trace of American spontaneity, and lacking in the least gratitude for American favors. Only America is alive, only Americans are doing anything worth mentioning in the arts, or in any other field of human activity: to America, only, the future belongs. Whereas, but only yesterday, to confess a fondness for anything American was to be suspected of the most indefensible jingoism, to suggest today that Europe is not all black is to place oneself under the suspicion of harboring treasonable longings. The violence of his embrace of things American is embarrassing, not only because one is not quite prepared to follow his admirable example, but also because it is impossible not to suspect that his present acceptance of his country is no less romantic, and unreal, than his earlier rejection. It is as easy, after all, and as meaningless, to embrace uncritically the cultural sterility of main street as it is to decry it. Both extremes avoid the question of whether or not main street is really sterile, avoid, in fact—which is the principal convenience of extremes—any questions about main street at all. What one vainly listens for in this cacophony of affirmation is any echo, however faint of individual maturity.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I saw the good humor leave my mother’s face, just as I knew it would. She looked at me coldly and I looked coldly back at her. The subject of bicycles turned us into enemies. Our problem was that I wanted a bike and she didn’t have enough money to buy me one. She had no money at all. She had explained this to me many times. I understood perfectly, but not having a bike seemed too hard a thing to bear in silence. Gil mugged disbelief. He looked from me to my mother and back to me. “No bike? A boy with no bike?” “We’ll discuss this later,” my mother told me. “I just said—” “I know what you said.” She frowned and looked away. “Hold on!” Gil said. “Just hold on. Now what’s the story here, Mom? Are you seriously telling me that this boy does not have a bicycle?” My mother said, “He’s going to have to wait a little longer, that’s all.” “Boys can’t wait for bikes, Rosemary. Boys need bikes now!” My mother shrugged and smiled tightly, as she usually did when she was cornered. “I don’t have the money,” she said quietly. The word money left a heavy silence in its wake. Then Gil said, “Judd, let’s have another round. See if there’s some ginger ale for the slugger.” Judd rose and left the room. Gil said, “What kind of bicycle would you like to have, Jack?” “A Schwinn, I guess.” “Really? You’d rather have a Schwinn than an English racer?” He saw me hesitate. “Or would you rather have an English racer?” I nodded. “Well then, say so! I can’t read your mind.” “I’d rather have an English racer.” “That’s the way. Now what kind of English racer are we talking about?” Judd brought the drinks. Mine was bitter. I recognized it as Collins mix.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Wonderful! Two whole days away from college! But then I stopped short: why was I so delighted? For the last couple of months I had been telling myself how lucky I was to have landed this job, but now, as I stood on the crowded platform, I asked myself: Is this it, then? Was this what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life? Of course, it was all very . . . pleasant. That was the word that continually came to mind when I tried to describe my new life. But it seemed wrong somehow. “Pleasant” sounded so insipid, so bland. They had been wrong at St. Anne’s, I thought. I can do this job, very easily indeed. Perhaps it was too easy? Had that entire struggle, all that striving led to something that was merely pleasant? Of course, I enjoyed it all. It was fun gossiping with Richard and Jackie. Moreover, I was hugely privileged to have a job that was pleasant, for heaven’s sake. And it wasn’t as though there was anything else that I wanted to do. There was no other profession for which I was remotely qualified. But somehow I had always thought that life should be more than merely pleasant. I tried to push the thought away. I am doing a useful job of work, I told myself firmly as I boarded the train and stood crammed against other bodies, swaying in unison with them through the dark subterranean tunnels. But was I? Only that afternoon, I had been giving a tutorial on the Romantic period to three students. They had been quiet, docile, and attentive, carefully noting down my every word—even the jokes—but had not seemed at all excited by Coleridge’s poetry. None of them had asked me anything, except how to spell a word or to repeat a date. But then, who was I to talk? I knew what it was like to feel tongue-tied in class, to have nothing to say. But these students had worried me. However empty and numb I may have felt, I had always been caught up intellectually in what I was studying. I always wanted to find out more, to see things clearly. And once an idea had been suggested to me, I got real pleasure from it—even if I could rarely come up with ideas of my own. But these three might as well have been studying quantum mechanics. “What do you want to do next week?” I had asked at the end of the hour. They gazed at me blankly. “Dunno,” one of the boys eventually volunteered. “You must have some idea,” I had said, a little testily. Silence. “What about Keats?” “Oh no,” the girl groaned. “Oh no—anything but Keats.” “What have you got against Keats?” I demanded.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  When we stood for the creed, Jacob looked around expectantly, hoping for more incense. I listened to the familiar words: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . . in Jesus Christ . . . begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. . . .” The congregation repeated these extraordinary propositions without surprise, as I had done so often in the past, but now I felt that I could not longer join them. I remembered a Jesuit telling us once during a retreat that faith was not really an intellectual assent but an act of will. Christians could accept their essentially incredible tradition only by making a deliberate choice to believe. You could not prove or disprove these doctrines, but you could consciously decide to take them on trust. They might even turn out to be true. But somewhere along the line, I had given up. I could no longer summon up the emotional or spiritual energy to make that choice. I felt tired out, drained, and slightly repelled by it all. I was finished with God; and God—if he existed at all—had long ago finished with me. “Karen! Will you bring me to Blackfriars again next week?” Jacob asked as we crossed St. Giles and hurried past the Lamb and Flag. He had had a wonderful morning. After Mass, I had taken him into the coffee room, and again he had behaved beautifully, standing quietly beside me with his cup and listening as usual with averted face to the people who had come over to say hello. Geoffrey Preston had made a point of talking to Jacob and had asked him if he would like to serve on the altar one day. That had seemed a little too ambitious to me, but as Geoffrey pointed out, Bernard, who had Down’s syndrome, regularly assisted at Mass and carried the cross at the head of the procession. Jacob did not answer Geoffrey directly, of course, but he looked thoughtful and smiled to himself. He clearly felt at ease in Blackfriars, and the community there had generously taken him in . “Karen!” Jacob tugged at my arm and put his face close to mine, so that our noses almost touched. I smiled at him. “Karen, we will be going to Blackfriars again next week, won’t we?” It seemed that Jacob’s religious life was beginning as mine was ending. And if I didn’t take him to Mass, nobody would. “Of course we’ll be going!”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This reflected badly on the university, which had approved the subject, and the faculty was furious. Now, apparently, when it was too late, the Academic Board was also incensed that I had not had an internal examiner, and insulted by what they regarded as Courtney’s arrogant brevity. They wrote back, I was told, telling him that he had failed as an examiner on eleven points and that it would be a long time before he was invited to examine for Oxford again. But what were they going to do with me? For five months, the faculty discussed my fate. In any other university, I expect that the thesis could have been reexamined, but Oxford was a law unto itself. There had not been a case like this before (though a few dons darkly recalled something similar happening fifteen years earlier in the History Faculty), and many felt that reexamination would create a dangerous precedent. Any student could demand the right to get a better result. To my surprise, I found that I had powerful champions. Some of the most distinguished members of the board pleaded my cause and argued for me with passion, and this I found consoling: not everybody, apparently, thought I was a fool and a failure. Some remembered my very nice undergraduate degree and were outraged by what had happened. For months there was deadlock. I had very little hope of a favorable outcome, and knew that whatever happened, there would always be something questionable about me in academic circles. In any event, in July 1975, Dame Helen, the chairman of the board, settled the matter. An injustice had been done, she told the dean of graduate studies, who was staunchly on my side. She was very sorry for Miss Armstrong, but the sanctity of the Oxford doctorate could only be impaired by reexamination. So that was that. To this day, some of my friends—even those who did not know me at the time—insist that I could still have reversed this decision. I cannot imagine what they think I could have done. Chained myself to the railings outside the Examination Schools? Picketed the Dame’s house? Prostrated myself in front of the Sheldonian Theatre and stopped the traffic? Gone on hunger strike? It was quite clear to me and my supporters that the game was up. I found it very comforting that there had been such a row, that people had fought on my behalf, and that I had not gone quietly. I was glad that I wasn’t simply an ordinary failure, though there was something disturbing about all the notoriety. There seemed to be something irremediably odd and freakish about me. I tried to behave with dignity, but I still experienced the final decision as a body blow.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Warde. David’s account all but ignores him until nearly the end of the trip, when his position during all this is perhaps given some illumination. Things now began to go steadily worse. They got into an argument with the manager of the Y, who objected to their rehearsing, and moved to a private home, for which the Party paid 75¢ per man per day; and the Party, which was, one gathers, furiously retrenching, arranged for them to eat at Fraziers’ Cafe, a Negro establishment on Hunter Street, for $1.25 per man per day. My correspondent notes that they had no choice of meals—“they served us what they liked”—which seems to have been mainly limp vegetables—and “we were as hungry when we walked out as we were when we walked in.” On the other hand, they were allowed to choose their beverage: tea or coffee or soda pop. Heaven only knows what prompted Mrs. Branson Price to give a party at this point. Perhaps the campaign was going extraordinarily well; perhaps Fraziers’ Cafe, where the party was held, was in need of a little extra revenue as well as the knowledge that its adoption of the Party would help to bring about a better world; perhaps Mrs. Price merely longed to be a gracious hostess once again. In any case, on a Sunday night she gave a party to which everyone was invited. My brother, who at this point was much concerned with food, observed glumly, “We had ice-cream.” The quartet sat at a table by itself, robbed, however, of the presence of Mr. Warde, who was invited to sit at Mrs. Price’s table: “she said it would be an honor,” my correspondent notes, failing, however, to say for whom. “There was a man there called a folk -singer,” says David with venom, “and, naturally, everybody had to hear some folk songs.” Eventually, the folksy aspect of the evening was exhausted and the quartet was invited to sing. They sang four selections, apparently to everyone’s delight for they had to be quite adamant about not singing a fifth. The strain of continual singing in the open air had done their voices no good and it had made one of them extremely hoarse. So they refused, over loud protests, and apologized. “This displeased Mrs. Price.” Indeed, it had. She was not in the least accustomed to having her suggestions, to say nothing of her requests, refused. Early Monday morning she called Mr. Warde to her office to inquire who those black boys thought they were? and determined to ship them all back that same day in a car.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I certainly could not lay it all at the door of the nuns. “There was something in me—in my temperament, my genes, whatever— which was antipathetic to that kind of training. Antipathetic to religion, come to that,” I added gloomily. “What do you mean?” Jane was immediately interested. “I couldn’t make religion work for me,” I explained. “I really tried. I tried to pray, to meditate, but I never got anywhere. Oh yes, I know the ritual was wonderful—I remember how much it meant to you—but don’t you see? That was just an aesthetic response. The real test is when you try to find God on your own, without props, without beautiful music, singing, and spectacle—when there is just you on your knees. And I could never do that.” “Have you lost your faith, then?” Jane asked sharply. “I don’t know that I ever had any faith, not true faith. I wanted to believe it all; I wanted to have an encounter with God. But I never did. God was never a reality for me, never a genuine presence in my life as he was for the other sisters.” “And what about now?” Jane went on. “I mean, suicide’s a mortal sin, right? Are you feeling guilty?” “No,” I said slowly. “No. Of course, I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I’m not feeling guilty because I’ve offended God. No. I just don’t believe that God is there. ” “Join the club.” Jane smiled dourly. “If there is a God, he’s doing a spectacularly bad job of running the world, that’s all I can say. But anyway”—she seemed mentally to shake herself back into a more positive frame of mind—“I really think you should reconsider this mad idea of going back to the convent. And I think you’re wrong about the Harts. I’m certain they would have you back. They’re awfully fond of you, in their own way, you know—though they’d rather die than admit it. Jenifer rang up the hospital this morning to find out how you were.” “That was kind.” I was touched, but determined. “No. I just can’t roll up tomorrow at Manor Place as though nothing had happened. I just can’t.” As it turned out, Jane need not have worried. When I rang up Cherwell Edge and spoke to the superior, she at first sounded genuinely pleased to hear from me. She had replaced Mother Praeterita, with whom I had clashed so stridently during my last year in the religious life, and was a kindly woman, whom I had known distantly in Sussex. But when I told her my story, she retreated at once. What I had done was truly terrible; she would have to take advice, and pray about it, but she really didn’t think that the community could accept this responsibility.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It will force me to finish the damn thesis.” “And then what?” I pursued. I had recently been discovering feminism, which as yet was only of academic interest to me. So far men had scarcely impinged upon my life, though I could see that in the future, when I would have to compete with men for jobs, my gender would count against me. We entered Holywell Manor and climbed the stairs leading to Jane’s apartment. It did seem unjust that Jane, who was by far the abler of the two, should sacrifice her career for Mark’s. “Then what? God knows!” Jane shrugged. We entered the lovely modern flat that had come with her prestigious junior fellowship. “The outlook is fairly bleak. I told Dorothy Bednarowska the news yesterday, and she just said: ‘Oh Jane, I am so sorry!’ Not exactly a ringing endorsement for the plan! But there is a university at Lancaster—and if I got a job there I could commute, I suppose.” She put on the kettle for coffee. “If not, it’ll be me and the kitchen sink—not forgetting the sheep, of course.” She looked thwarted. And indeed, what became of highly educated women who married men less clever than themselves? I didn’t know what I should do, if ever I were in Jane’s position. I knew that I would resent any man who would take that kind of sacrifice for granted, and I did not envy Mark. Jane was a powerful lady and I did not fancy his chances if she were cooped up in an isolated manor house for too long. Now, my sister, Lindsey, was quite different. She had called in to see me a few days earlier to tell me that she was emigrating to Canada. I began to tell Jane the story as we sat down with our coffee. “Your sister—the famous actress?” Jane asked with raised eyebrows. “I thought she was starring in Crossroads. What’s she doing in Canada?” Lindsey had trained as an actress, rather to my parents’ dismay. For a time they had had the dubious pleasure of saying that they had two daughters: one was an actress and the other a nun. We did not meet very often, since we had such different lives and interests. Lindsey led a highly precarious life in London, doing odd typing and waitressing jobs while “resting” between plays. She had grown up tall, sexy, and glamorous and always made me feel an ugly duckling that had no hope of turning into a swan.