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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I didn’t know what it was, and 2. I didn’t care to learn, and 3. I never really excelled at small talk. My mom, however, can talk small for hours, and so she extended the awkwardness by asking them about their rehearsal schedule, and how the show had gone, and whether it was a success. “I guess it was,” Marie said. “A lot of people came, I guess.” Marie was the sort of person to guess a lot. Finally, Will said, “Well, we just dropped by to say good-bye. I’ve got to get Marie home by six. Have fun at boarding school, Miles.” “Thanks,” I answered, relieved. The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people. They left, and so I sat with my parents and stared at the blank TV and wanted to turn it on but knew I shouldn’t. I could feel them both looking at me, waiting for me to burst into tears or something, as if I hadn’t known all along that it would go precisely like this. But I had known. I could feel their pity as they scooped artichoke dip with chips intended for my imaginary friends, but they needed pity more than I did: I wasn’t disappointed. My expectations had been met. “Is this why you want to leave, Miles?” Mom asked. I mulled it over for a moment, careful not to look at her. “Uh, no,” I said. “Well, why then?” she asked. This was not the first time she had posed the question. Mom was not particularly keen on letting me go to boarding school and had made no secret of it. “Because of me?” my dad asked. He had attended Culver Creek, the same boarding school to which I was headed, as had both of his brothers and all of their kids. I think he liked the idea of me following in his footsteps. My uncles had told me stories about how famous my dad had been on campus for having simultaneously raised hell and aced all his classes. That sounded like a better life than the one I had in Florida. But no, it wasn’t because of Dad. Not exactly. “Hold on,” I said. I went into Dad’s study and found his biography of François Rabelais. I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais) I’d never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (“NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,” my dad had told me a thousand times. But how else are you supposed to find what you’re looking for?). “So this guy,” I said, standing in the doorway of the living room. “François Rabelais.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Bucher was put before a mock firing squad in order to obtain his confession, which he refused to make. He was then told his crew would be executed, one by one, until he acknowledged American guilt—which he finally did. After American officials signed a confession and apology, the North Koreans agreed to release the crew. “The big news right now,” Carr radioed to the spacecraft, “…is that all eighty-two crewmen of the Pueblo have been returned. They walked across the Bridge of Freedom Monday night.” “Wonderful!” Borman replied. Anders had a different reaction. He was happy for the Americans who’d been released, but he couldn’t help but compare the incident to the one his father had endured. Arthur Anders had defended the USS Panay from an unprovoked Japanese air attack in 1937, refusing to give up his ship, manning guns and returning fire even as he was gravely wounded. By contrast, the Pueblo hadn’t even fought back. There were good reasons for that—the crew hadn’t been trained well for combat, were not well armed, had been taken by surprise, and were outnumbered. But all that had been true of the Panay, too. It was hard for Anders not to wonder whether the crew of the Pueblo might have tried a little harder, as his father had. Out his window, Anders looked toward Earth, now 165,000 miles away. From here, it was hard to pick out North Korea, or South Korea, or any countries at all. —The astronauts continued to sleep in fits and starts as the flight neared its two-day mark. In Houston, the wives maintained their squawk box vigils, listening for telltale signals in their husbands’ voices—the subtle cues they first learned to hear when the men were teenagers—that would reveal how they really felt. So far, everyone seemed to sound good, though Susan, Valerie, and Marilyn each wondered if her husband was getting enough to eat. At nearly forty-seven hours into the flight, Lovell provided a status report to Mission Control. Each of the men today had ingested between 40 and 60 ounces, or “clicks,” of water (so called for the squirt gun contraption that dispensed it), along with some rehydrated and solid foods. By now, the crew had discarded NASA’s feeding plan as completely as it had the sleeping plan. They were supposed to eat four meals a day, but it was clear that Lovell’s appetite was biggest and that each man preferred some foods to others. The crew took to swapping—Anders would trade almost anything for apricot cubes, Lovell for bacon squares. No one could give away his beef and egg bites, which left a pasty coating on the tongue. Much of the food had to be reconstituted, either by injecting water into pouches or by mushing it with saliva in one’s mouth. At Mission Control, the doctors were not yet convinced that Borman, or even his crewmates, were operating at full strength.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell recalled his childhood, when he’d dreamed of an opportunity like this. “It seems like I’ve been here forever,” he said. “You know,” Anders remarked, “it really isn’t all that…anywhere near as interesting as I thought it was going to be. It’s all beat up.” “The things that I saw that were interesting were the new craters,” Lovell said. He liked the idea that the Moon remained alive in the heavens, that it was still changing, still becoming. A few minutes later, the spacecraft slid again behind the lunar far side. Apollo 8 had now been at the Moon for about ten hours and was halfway through its ten orbits. Just ten more hours remained until Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, the maneuver designed to get Apollo 8 out of lunar orbit and on its way back home. Nothing worried Kraft, and many others at NASA, more than TEI. So much could go wrong, and with such dire consequences. The men back in Houston tried to remain optimistic. Around the time Apollo 8 disappeared behind the Moon (about three o’clock in Houston), a message lit up on one of Mission Control’s large data panels. In red, white, and blue letters, it read MERRY CHRISTMAS APOLLO 8 . —By the time Apollo 8 launched, NASA was considering just two possible sites for a future landing mission. Both were located in the Sea of Tranquillity, to the right side of the full Moon as seen from America and other places in Earth’s northern hemisphere. NASA wanted to land during the lunar morning, when temperatures were moderate and low Sun angle would create long shadows that would help a commander discern a smooth spot on which to set down. But those conditions shifted every day on the Moon. By choosing two sites, twelve degrees apart, NASA ensured that if it had to delay launch by a day, the lunar module would still have an optimal landing site when it arrived. Both sites also satisfied other important NASA criteria for the first lunar landing. They were accessible to a spacecraft flying a free-return trajectory—a NASA safety requirement—and they existed in areas with ample level terrain, which meant a lunar module wouldn’t have to expend an undue amount of propellant hovering and maneuvering to avoid boulders and slopes before setting down. Among Apollo 8’s tasks were to confirm that its own trajectory could be used by future spacecraft to reach these landing sites, and to get a close-up view of the areas under the same lighting conditions as the future landing mission would encounter. As Apollo 8 coasted over the first of these sites during its sixth pass over the near side, Lovell described it for Houston. Even the shadows, a critical element to judging shape, depth, and distances, looked excellent to him. “I have a beautiful view of it.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  added a pairing of words, ‘perils and dangers’, in place of the Latin insidias for ‘snares’ – and crucially, at the end, he has enriched the Trinitarian idea with the word ‘love’: Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.41 Anglican Evensong has proved such a dignified and compelling approach to the divine that it has brought spiritual consolation way beyond the borders of the Anglican Communion, to Protestant and Roman Catholic alike. There is some paradox in its use today, because Cranmer did little to hide his contempt for both cathedrals and elaborate church music, yet nowadays Evensong is most characteristically encountered sung by the choirs of Anglican cathedrals, and draws on a rich five-centuries-old inheritance of specially composed anthems and settings. It is possible that Cranmer’s quiet sense of humour might make him appreciate this strange outcrop of his attempt to provide England with a decently Reformed vehicle for the worship of God. Yet this English experimentation abruptly ended when Edward, after a healthy and assertive childhood in which he bade fair to be as over-life-size as his formidable father, died young in 1553.42 With dramatic speed, England rejected Edward’s chosen Protestant successor, his cousin Jane Grey. Against the expectations of English politicians and foreign ambassadors alike, widespread popular fury challenged the deal done in Westminster, more decisively than at any other moment in the Tudor age. Armed demonstrations across south-eastern England forced the kingdom’s leaders to accept the claim to the throne made by the dead king’s Catholic half-sister, the Lady Mary.43 Although Mary’s status as King Henry’s daughter probably mattered to the kingdom more than her religion, once she had thrust aside Queen Jane, she embarked on as great an experiment as that of Edward, but in mirror-image. She returned an entire kingdom to Roman obedience and the possibility of innovations in Catholic reform. In the process she burned at the stake some of the leading English Protestant reformers, Thomas Cranmer included. She also overcame the objections of English politicians to her marriage plans to King Philip II of Spain, which promised to bind the future of her kingdom to the most powerful Catholic monarchy in Europe (see pp. 671–5). The hopes for asserting God’s word seemed doomed through most of Europe. The Last Days had not arrived; many had rejected the message. What could be done? The man who led Protestantism out of stagnation in the 1550s was an exiled French humanist legal scholar who had wandered Italy and Switzerland and

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  came from Spain. Spirituali and Jesuits now faced a crisis. Contarini’s peace- making efforts gained warm backing from the Holy Roman Emperor, but the Cardinal failed to clinch an ambitious scheme of reconciliation proposed in discussions with Protestant leaders (a ‘colloquy’) around the Imperial Diet at Regensburg (Ratisbon) in 1541. Within a year Contarini died a bitterly disappointed man under house arrest. After that, some of the more exposed leaders of the Spirituali fled north to shelter with Protestants. Valdés avoided the emergency, having died in 1541, but Ochino and Vermigli led the stampede, their departure causing a huge sensation – Ochino was by then General of the Capuchin Order. Prominent among other defectors were wealthy merchants, more able to relocate their assets than either humble adherents or members of the nobility; soon they and the intellectuals they financed were bringing a remarkable variety of religious views and free-thinking to the Reformed lands of eastern and northern Europe, with momentous long-term consequences (see pp. 640–42 and 778–9).Gian Pietro Carafa’s hour had come. The conciliators had not merely failed to land a result from the Regensburg Colloquy (an enterprise which he had consistently denounced), but many of their brightest stars were revealed as traitors to the Church, and tainted all their associates who stayed. Now Carafa could persuade the Pope to set up a Roman Inquisition, modelled on the Spanish Inquisition founded seventy years before, with Carafa himself as one of the Inquisitors-General. One of its functions (a function which remains to the present day in the Roman Inquisition’s rather more bland guise as the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) was to determine what the norm for theology was within the Catholic Church. It usurped this role from the Sorbonne in Paris, a venerable academic institution, but inconveniently beyond the pope’s control. There was much less incentive now for remaining Spirituali to feel any commitment to the traditional Church. Cardinal Pole, who always tried to avoid closing options or drawing clear boundaries, did what he could to protect his dependants, who included some of Valdés’s former admirers, and to keep them faithful to the Church. His friend Cardinal Giovanni Morone held the Inquisition at bay in his religiously turbulent diocese of Modena by an extensive campaign of swearing leading citizens to a Formulary of Faith which Contarini had designed to persuade truculent evangelicals back into the fold. Some persisted within the Church. The most influential work of Italian spirituality in these years, the Beneficio di Cristo, was published in 1543 under Pole’s patronage and apparently sold in tens of thousands before being translated into other European languages. Originally written by a Benedictine monk, Benedetto da Mantova, drawing on Benedictine devotional themes, it was

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the ‘Iron Curtain’ enclosing the Soviet Union’s satellites, outside the continuing authoritarian and Catholic dictatorships of Spain and Portugal. But Pius’s own conservative instincts mirrored Europe’s widespread longing to find comfort in the past. In 1950 he used papal infallibility to define the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, a move which infuriated Protestant, Orthodox and Eastern Churches alike, and which did not please those Catholic theologians who cared about the doctrine’s lack of justification in the Bible or in early Church tradition. Something like the Modernist campaign of Pius X gathered momentum against those whom Pius XII regarded as dissenters against Catholic truth. In his last years, the ailing Pope presented an increasingly pitiable figure, as he tried ever more frantically to be a universal teacher: Vicar of the Encylopaedia Britannica rather than Vicar of Christ. Symptomatic of his conscientious but inept effort to remain in dialogue with the contemporary world was his proclamation just before his death in 1958 that St Francis’s associate St Clare of Assisi was now to be the patron saint of television. This was because, on her deathbed, she had been able to attend Christmas Mass in the neighbouring basilica in the form of a vision, a miraculous medieval outside broadcast.76 Catholic activity in the 1950s ran in parallel to but had very little contact with the proliferation and diversification of global Protestantism. Over the previous half-century, Protestantism had developed in two different new directions which themselves had increasingly little to do with each other: on the one hand, there was a self-consciously liberal exploration of faith and social activism, and on the other, a host of newly founded Churches, many of which identified themselves as Pentecostal, and whose congregations expressed themselves in full-blooded extrovert Evangelical style. Both these Protestant impulses in fact had a common root in anglophone Evangelicalism. Eventually it may be inappropriate to see them as polarities, but that is how it seemed in the twentieth century. Between them, there remained a great spectrum of Evangelical Protestant belief, much of which, in reaction to the liberals, increasingly took to itself the label ‘conservative’. Liberal Protestantism after 1900 chose a very different path from either the Holiness/Keswick styles of the conservatives, or the proliferation of identities in the new Churches. Increasingly it seemed to dominate most of the older Protestant Churches – Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Methodist – while the Baptists tended to be more resistant. This new liberalism was a wider phenomenon than the liberal Protestantism whose stronghold had been in nineteenth-century Germany. It could include within its ranks such formidable critics of Schleiermacher and the older German theology as Karl Barth, whose approach to the Bible owed much to the continuing progress of critical biblical

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Half a million American troops were in country; since 1965, when official combat units arrived, nearly twenty thousand American lives had been lost in the fighting against North Vietnamese Communist and guerrilla forces. Still, President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, promised the public that the war was going well and that victory was on the horizon. On January 21, fifteen days after the operation, the heart transplant recipient in California died despite having made it through “a fantastic galaxy of complications,” according to his surgeon. Just after midnight on the final day of January, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong guerrillas launched a coordinated attack on nearly every major city and town in South Vietnam. The action came as a surprise to American troops, who were honoring a two-day cease-fire with the enemy during Tet, the country’s sacred holiday. By sunrise, over 120 population centers and military bases had been assailed by more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, an attack now being called the Tet Offensive. For the first time, Americans were able to watch news coverage of combat without government control of images or information, thanks to reporters and cameramen embedded with the troops. The United States was supposed to be on its way to victory—the president and his generals had sworn to it—and yet here was an enemy that had stormed the American embassy and damaged nearly every stronghold in the south. Night after night, the evening news showed graphic footage from the battle; often, 90 percent of the telecast was devoted to the war. One image sank especially deeply into the American psyche. In a still photograph and on film, it showed a North Vietnamese prisoner, hands tied behind his back, being executed by a single pistol shot to the head, delivered from a distance of a few inches by a South Vietnamese national police chief. There had been no charges, no trial, no last words—just the raising of the gun and a single shot to the temple. The photo ran on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America on the first day of February; no one who saw it, or watched the film of the shooting on the evening news, knew that the prisoner himself had executed, in cold blood, an entire family. All that America knew was that this terrible war was more ugly and brutal than they’d imagined, and that the clean and quick ending they had been promised seemed very far away. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, a bowling alley remained one of the few local businesses to refuse service to black patrons, despite civil rights laws prohibiting such discrimination. In early February, black students at South Carolina State University began to protest, first by sitting at the lunch counter at the bowling alley, then by gathering in larger numbers and demonstrating outside.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  support for the family had not envisaged that it might be a competitor for rather than a mainstay of Church life. An unexpected result was beginning to be felt in the United Kingdom even amid the post-war boom in churchgoing. A perceptive curate in the English Midlands, for instance, noted in 1947 that parents on his newly built housing estate in Dudley were not sending their children along to Sunday School, reluctant ‘to interfere with the freedom of young people’s choice’. Elsewhere in the same district, a Free Church magazine complained seventeen years later, ‘Many of the newly married couples on the estates [are] concerned first and foremost with their pay-packets, their housing comforts, their interior decorations … their standing in the eyes of their workmates and neighbours.’ There were cars for Sunday family jaunts instead of morning church; there was television around which the whole family could sit after tea instead of evening church.39 These findings could endlessly be reproduced through European society from the early 1960s. In particular, that mainstay of Protestant Church practice from the eighteenth century, the children’s Sunday School, melted away. In 1900, 55 per cent of British children attended Sunday School; the figure was still 24 per cent in 1960, but 9 per cent in 1980 and 4 per cent in 2000.40 Around the family, other shifts occurred. ‘Companionate’ marriage created high expectations which were all too frequently disappointed. In the 1970s, divorce rates began rising across Europe, and against furious protests from the Roman Catholic Church, the possibility of divorce was introduced into the law codes of Catholic countries where it had previously been outlawed – in Italy, for instance, in 1970. That was a remarkable shift from the moment in 1947 when the constitution of the new Italian Republic had only missed affirming the indissolubility of marriage by three votes in the Constituent Assembly.41 Rates of extramarital births soared: in the nations already cited over four decades from 1960, twentyfold in Ireland, sixteenfold in the Netherlands and thirteenfold in Norway.42 Taboos around abortion broke down, in the face of the reality of death and physical damage in clandestine illegal abortions. In country after country there was legislation to legalize abortion, most famously in the United States through a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1973, Roe v. Wade. Homosexuality became less a subject of public paranoia. The first stage was its decriminalization in law, a measure not designed to make homosexuality acceptable or moral in the eyes of Christians, simply to remove a major catalyst for blackmail or suicide. It is often forgotten that in Britain, in contrast to the European-wide Catholic opposition to changes in divorce legislation, change came about in the highly contentious field of homosexuality largely through the Church. Elite liberal

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  At the end, doctors failed him—or rather, his body—for having a bit too much bilirubin, a pigment produced by the liver and found in bile. They didn’t think the level dangerous, but that didn’t matter; what they seemed to demand was physical perfection. “You’re finished,” they told Lovell, and no matter how forcefully he explained their mistake, the doctors wouldn’t reconsider. “I could spell ‘rocket’ before these guys ever heard the term,” Lovell muttered as he walked away. Back at Pax River, Marilyn couldn’t remember having seen her husband so discouraged. A short time later, Lovell received orders to report to the next phase of astronaut testing. He knew he’d been rejected, and that the orders had been issued by mistake, but he seized his chance to get back in the game, even if by clerical error. He flew to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and took the last bed in quarters. The next morning, just as the miracle seemed complete, an Air Force test pilot named Gus Grissom showed up and apologized for being late. Lovell was again heading back home with nothing to show for his dreams but a little extra pigment in his liver. For the next three years, Lovell continued testing aircraft and teaching students at Pax River. It was there that the nickname Shaky was bestowed upon him, not just because no decent pilot would want such a moniker, but because the easygoing Lovell was among the least shaky men around. By 1962, Project Mercury was nearing its end and NASA needed new astronauts. That summer, the Navy asked if Lovell would like to apply. No one seemed to remember that he’d been medically disqualified, and Lovell could find no good reason to remind them. Again, Lovell went through the testing. As a teenager, he’d seen the engine of a Nazi V-2 rocket designed by Wernher von Braun. As a young pilot, he’d watched von Braun tell the nation how America would go to the Moon. After what seemed like forever, Deke Slayton called and asked if Lovell would like to ride the great engineer’s newest rockets for himself, and Lovell’s answer could be heard all the way to Milwaukee. He was officially one of NASA’s New Nine. —Lovell was introduced to NASA’s eight other new astronauts at the Rice Hotel in Houston. After dinner, he gave his first comment as a spaceman, telling his hometown newspaper, the Milwaukee Sentinel, that America would be first to the Moon, “and I want to be on the first team.” In Houston, Lovell took up residence in old World War II barracks at Ellington Air Force Base, where residents lived four to a unit and had bedsheets for walls. His family soon followed and before long, Marilyn found a house to rent in a nearby suburb.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Dejected, he chose to go to the Air Force Special Weapons Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to work on a radiation shielding project and instruct pilots in jet aircraft. While in Albuquerque, Valerie gave birth to the family’s fourth child, Gregory. All the while, Bill waited for an opening at the test pilot school. Valerie took an astronomy course at the University of New Mexico, just out of fascination with the subject, a baby on her hip. In June 1963, Anders was driving in his Volkswagen Microbus when he heard a news broadcast on the radio. The announcer said that NASA had decided to add a third group of astronauts. Anders met every one of the agency’s requirements: age limit thirty-five, two thousand hours flying time in advanced jets, maximum height six feet. “Must also be a test pilot,” the man said. Anders’s heart sank. “Or the applicant must possess an advanced degree.” Anders wondered if he’d heard the last part correctly. He pulled over to the side of the road and waited, through twelve minutes of commercials and bad music, for the next newscast. He had heard correctly—one needn’t be a test pilot to apply. He wrote down NASA’s address. He’d been interested in astronauts since the Mercury 7, the United States’ first group of astronauts, had arrived on the scene four years earlier, but space travel had never seemed possible for mere fighter pilots. Now, things had changed. It would be his dream job in many ways. Joining NASA would give Anders the intellectual stimulation he craved, the chance to fly the most advanced machines ever built, and the opportunity to become an explorer, a space-age version of Charles Lindbergh or Vasco da Gama, the New World voyagers he’d always admired. And he could bring back unknown rocks from his journeys to the Moon. And there was another benefit, one that resonated with a man whose father had fought back against America’s attackers, even when the United States wasn’t formally at war: He could do more in space than anywhere else to help defeat the Soviet Union. That night, Anders drafted a letter to NASA describing his qualifications: world’s greatest pilot; can solve all space radiation problems; jet instructor; great guy. Valerie typed version after version. They sent the final copy, by certified mail, the next day. It arrived with four thousand other letters penned by astronaut hopefuls. To Anders’s amazement, he was asked to report, along with about a hundred others, to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for a physical. There, he was put through a battery of tests, not just physical but psychological. Near the end of the process, only twenty-eight finalists remained. Anders had to appear before the so-called Murder Board, a group of final interviewers that included current astronauts, Chris Kraft, and a doctor. He had little trouble with the questions from the space people. The doctor was another matter. “Well, Captain Anders,” the man said, “your record looks pretty good.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “Okay,” Borman said, moving the thruster, “we’re rolling around to a good view of the Earth, and as soon as we get to the good view of the Earth we’ll stop and let you look out the window at the scene that we see. Jim Lovell’s down in the Lower Equipment Bay preparing lunch, and Bill is holding a camera here for us both.” Anders swung around for a view of Lovell, who was working upside down. A bag floated in the cabin nearby. Borman continued to swivel the spacecraft with the rotation thrusters. “Okay, now we are coming up on the view we really want you to see, that’s the view of the Earth, and if you’ll break for just a minute, Bill’s going to put on the large lens. So we’ll be right back with you.” A few moments passed as Anders changed lenses and repositioned the camera. His job was made tougher by the fact that he had no monitor to show him what he was capturing—this was strictly a point-and-hope affair. “Houston, we are now showing you a view of the Earth through the telephoto lens,” Borman announced. But viewers saw nothing but a test pattern of vertical gray bars. For nearly four minutes, Anders and Borman wrestled with lenses and settings. Finally, an image emerged of a bright round object out the window—Earth!—but to viewers it looked featureless and indistinct, more like the Sun. Something was preventing the telephoto lens from getting the shot. Borman switched back to a shot of the cabin, where Lovell grabbed a bag of chocolate pudding that was floating by. Nearby, Anders made his toothbrush dance and tried catching it with his teeth. Borman, who’d argued against these broadcasts, now couldn’t hide his disappointment at being unable to share his breathtaking view of the world with the world. “I certainly wish we could show you the Earth,” he said. “It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds…” At their homes, the astronauts’ wives wished they could see more of their husbands, or even just a little color in their faces. Ten-year-old Glen Anders thought his floating father looked weird. Anders moved in for a close-up shot of Lovell. “Bill, you can let everyone see he has already outdistanced us in the beard race,” Borman said. “Jim has got quite a beard going already.” Lovell turned to the camera with a big smile. “Happy birthday, Mother!” he said. Blanch Lovell had turned seventy-three that day, and Lovell hadn’t forgotten. Watching on television at home in Edgewater, Florida, Blanch was stunned that Jim would remember her birthday at a time like this. A few seconds later, Borman told his audience he needed to put his ship back into barbecue mode in order to prevent overheating. There was nothing he could do to provide a better view of Earth, at least for now. “Goodbye from Apollo 8,” he said, waving a hand.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Before going to Washington, Anders had made a deal with NASA that permitted him to keep using the agency’s T-38 airplanes for as long as he worked in government. The move allowed him to stay connected with high-performance jets and kept him sharp, just in case NASA extended Apollo into the future and changed its mind about keeping Anders in the command module pilot’s seat. Anders was still at the Space Council when he and Valerie welcomed their sixth child, daughter Diana. Soon after, he was appointed by President Nixon to the five-person Atomic Energy Commission (a move that made sense, given that Anders was a nuclear engineer), and two years later, in 1975, he was named the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In six years of service in Washington, Anders had proved himself serious and nonpartisan. In 1976, a White House staffer reached out to Anders to see if he’d be interested in becoming an ambassador. Anders talked it over with Valerie, who expressed an interest in a country she’d found especially beautiful during a family visit. President Gerald Ford approved, and in 1976, Bill Anders became the United States ambassador to Norway. While working in Oslo, Anders received a package from the International Astronomical Union, the organization in charge of naming surface features of planets. The IAU was pleased to announce it had named six lunar craters for Americans—the crews of Apollo 8 and Apollo 11—and six for Soviet cosmonauts. Included was a photograph of the craters. Anders was displeased: For starters, his crater wasn’t the one that he’d named for his family during the Apollo 8 flight. Second, the astronauts’ craters were in an area past the horizon that couldn’t be seen. Third, the cosmonauts hadn’t even been to the Moon (Anders joked that as atheists, they wouldn’t even pass the Moon on their way to Heaven). He called the organization and argued the astronauts’ case, to no avail. The explorer’s prerogative—to name the places one discovered—didn’t seem to apply. Anders, however, wouldn’t forget it. Years later, he would still be pushing the IAU to make things right. In 2018, fifty years after the flight of Apollo 8, the IAU officially named two lunar craters to honor the mission, “Anders Earthrise” and “8 Homeward.” Both can be seen in the famous Earthrise photo taken by Anders during the flight. Anders finally left government service in 1977, joining General Electric as vice president of its Nuclear Products Division. Two years later, the company sent him to the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School; when he returned, he became the general manager of GE’s Aircraft Equipment Division, a multi-billion-dollar business. Over the next several years, Anders improved the division, all while absorbing the management style of GE’s young new CEO, Jack Welch, who pushed to consolidate, simplify, move fast, and stay only in businesses in which his company could rank first or second in the industry.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  them in the same league as the myths of other world religions. This attitude was given wide publicity by a young Lutheran pastor and lecturer at the University of Tübingen, David Friedrich Strauss. Before Strauss, most critical reassessment of the biblical text had concentrated on the Old Testament. Strauss, enthusiastic for Hegel’s symbolic approach to Christianity, wanted to apply his analytical skills to the New Testament as well. In 1835 he published the result, usually known by its shortened German title Leben Jesu, or in the English translation made by the freethinking novelist Marian Evans or ‘George Eliot’, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. The Jesus Strauss portrayed was a great Jewish teacher whose followers had retold the story of his life in the best way they knew by borrowing themes from Old Testament stories and fitting their hero’s life into them. No conscious deception was involved, but the New Testament narratives were works of theological symbolism rather than historic fact. Much of my own survey of the life of Jesus (see Chapter 3) has drawn on these insights, which have become fundamental to Western biblical scholarship, but at the time the public shock was profound. Strauss’s job in Tübingen came to an end; when he was proposed for a chair in Zürich, there were riots on the streets, and it was impossible to appoint him. We should not feel too sorry for him, since he was paid his professorial salary for the rest of his life, but he gradually moved further and further from Christianity in his disillusionment. For many, he had destroyed faith. Friedrich Engels started on his journey away from Lutheran Christianity through his enthusiasm for the Hegelianism of the Leben Jesu. Much else followed from that scrutiny; Tübingen’s transforming role in biblical scholarship did not stop with Strauss. Ferdinand Christian Baur took the treatment of the Bible as a historical document to the point where he argued that the whole New Testament was a product of violent conflicts between the continuing commitment to Judaism of Peter and the older disciples against the Gentile mission strategy of Paul. The search had begun for a ‘historical Jesus’, a figure in whom the Church could believe despite the huge gap separating thought-forms and assumptions of the first Christians from those of the nineteenth century. In 1906 the theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, son of a Lutheran pastor in Alsace, wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which argued that this preoccupation of liberal scholarship was misguided. The historical Christ Schweitzer saw in the Gospels was a man who believed that the end of the world was coming immediately, and had gone on to offer up his life in Jerusalem, to hasten on the time of tribulation. His career had therefore been built round a mistake. If there was a historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels, he was a figure of failure and tragedy who could only speak of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  identities during the nineteenth century, in the process also overturning ancient political structures. Their rhetoric of national resistance in turn provided a model for the twentieth-century struggles of non-European colonial peoples against the rule of those same nation-states. Alongside nationalism was an economic revolution, which brought the struggle of a new elite against an old. The industrial revolutions were as important as the French Revolution in challenging aristocracies whose wealth and power were based mainly on land and agriculture. Even in pre-industrial France, the main impulse to overthrow the ancien régime had come from groups outside the landed class: lawyers, journalists, businesspeople, urban workers with specialist skills – what is clumsily but unavoidably called the middle class. In the more decorous politics of Britain as much as in mainland Europe, middle- class groups now sought to legislate into being political institutions to give themselves voices in national affairs appropriate to their wealth and talent, at least to share power with the landed aristocracy. They aimed to create structures designed to reward ability and personal achievement rather than birth, and to gain the right to express their political and religious opinions as they wished. This was the politics of liberalism. Liberals looked to the Revolution’s rhetoric of liberty and equality. It was not enough. The early nineteenth century was chastened by the memory of what had happened when Enlightenment ideals were put into practice, and that led to a general shift in mood among western Europeans towards what was styled romanticism. People who cared about the restructuring of Europe in the wake of events from 1789 to 1815 respected the rationalism of the Enlightenment less than a new expression of emotion and a search for individual fulfilment. Romanticism became a major colouring for political movements in Europe, whether looking to the past or to the future. In a chastened age after Napoleon’s fall, it provided multiple opportunities for Europeans to posture. Fraternity, the third element of the revolutionary trinity, became the watchword of groups who envisaged a brotherhood of all oppressed people against both old and new oppression, confronting both Europe’s surviving monarchical pattern and the newly wealthy elites of the industrial revolution. Quite suddenly in the 1830s, radical politics in Britain and France acquired a new word: ‘socialism’. ‘Socialists’ asserted that without the distortions of inequality or poverty, people would naturally behave to one another as brothers (once more, sisters were not then greatly considered). This was a restatement of Enlightenment optimism, but socialists often sought to co-opt the love ethic of Jesus Christ and occasionally even of his Church, though generally in the face of deep lack of sympathy from Church hierarchies.84 Robert Owen, one of the chief

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  publication. Rome had given so little consideration to providing an autonomous future for Catholicism in the vast Belgian territory that an indigenous hierarchy of bishops was only hastily established in the months between the King of Belgium announcing imminent independence in 1959 and the actual handover. The political authorities had shown no more forethought than the Church. This short-sightedness was the prelude to immeasurable human misery in the self- styled Democratic Republic of the Congo which has not yet ceased.26 Elsewhere, it seemed that more potential existed for a delivery of state machines into the hands of responsible politicians. The precedent was the independence won by the British Gold Coast as Ghana only three years before the Belgian Congo, but after infinitely more careful local preparation. The British government, despite major blunders like its brutally inept and demoralizing handling of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya through the 1950s, was generally prepared to listen to anglophone Christian missionary organizations which understood the realities of anti-colonial movements and saw positive possibilities. Max Warren, an exceptionally able secretary of the Church Missionary Society and in many ways the successor to J. H. Oldham as an international Protestant statesman, played an important role as a mediator between British officialdom and the new leadership, especially in the CMS’s long-standing areas of activity in East and West Africa.27 Some observers in Europe and in nationalist circles in Africa confidently expected that Africans would think Christianity too closely associated with colonialism to let it flourish in the newly independent states. This was the reverse of the truth.28 As we have seen (see pp. 963–5), beyond the European- initiated Churches there was now an extraordinary variety of African-initiated Christian practice which made Christianity even beyond its ancient north-eastern African heartlands at least as indigenous a religion as the great alternative, Islam. Moreover, the political institutions left by colonial powers at independence produced widespread disappointment. Artificially created chunks of colonial territory had been set up with democratic forms, civil services and judiciaries. Even in European society, these worked only when sustained by widespread prosperity and painfully acquired consensual norms and national identities. They rarely functioned effectively in Africa, and the generation of liberation politicians who became rulers at independence frequently succumbed to the corruption of power. People let down by government turned to the Churches for their welfare, self-expression and a chance to exercise control over their own lives. Nowhere was this more true than in the one region which did not readily succumb to decolonization, the Portuguese and British southern territories dominated by the Union of South Africa.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  29: The Fourfold Pattern and other disasters: Including exposure to a “Dutch book,” which is a set of gambles that your incorrect preferences commit you to accept and is guaranteed to end up in a loss. puzzle that Allais constructed: Readers who are familiar with the Allais paradoxes will recognize that this version is new. It is both much simpler and actually a stronger violation than the original paradox. The left-hand option is preferred in the first problem. The second problem is obtained by adding a more valuable prospect to the left than to the right, but the right-hand option is now preferred. sorely disappointed: As the distinguished economist Kenneth Arrow recently described the event, the participants in the meeting paid little attention to what he called “Allais’s little experiment.” Personal conversation, March 16, 2011. estimates for gains: The table shows decision weights for gains. Estimates for losses were very similar. estimated from choices: Ming Hsu, Ian Krajbich, Chen Zhao, and Colin F. Camerer, “Neural Response to Reward Anticipation under Risk Is Nonlinear in Probabilities,” Journal of Neuroscience 29 (2009): 2231–37. parents of small children: W. Kip Viscusi, Wesley A. Magat, and Joel Huber, “An Investigation of the Rationality of Consumer Valuations of Multiple Health Risks,” RAND Journal of Economics 18 (1987): 465–79. psychology of worry: In a rational model with diminishing marginal utility, people should pay at least two-thirds as much to reduce the frequency of accidents from 15 to 5 units as they are willing to pay to eliminate the risk. Observed preferences violated this prediction. not made much of it: C. Arthur Williams, “Attitudes Toward Speculative Risks as an Indicator of Attitudes Toward Pure Risks,” Journal of Risk and Insurance 33 (1966): 577–86. Howard Raiffa, Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices under Uncertainty (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1968). shadow of civil trials: Chris Guthrie, “Prospect Theory, Risk Preference, and the Law,” Northwestern University Law Review 97 (2003): 1115–63. Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, “Gains, Losses and the Psychology of Litigation,” Southern California Law Review 70 (1996): 113–85. Samuel R. Gross and Kent D. Syverud, “Getting to No: A Study of Settlement Negotiations and the Selection of Cases for Trial,” Michigan Law Review 90 (1991): 319–93. the frivolous claim: Chris Guthrie, “Framing Frivolous Litigation: A Psychological Theory,” University of Chicago Law Review 67 (2000): 163–216.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On October 20, almost five years after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy became Jackie O. Everyone seemed to have an opinion—mostly negative—of the surprise wedding between the former First Lady and the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, a man twenty-three years her senior. It was a match far from Camelot. To many, it seemed that Kennedy had traded her quiet dignity and near-saintly virtue for a life with a crude, short, cigarette-smoking man who appeared to offer little more than money. And it seemed a break with a more innocent time, one when fairy-tale stories still happened in America. As October bled into November, and with America just days away from electing a new leader, Jimi Hendrix’s new cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” rang out from cars and college campuses and protests, his guitar making a sound no guitar had ever quite made before, a black man singing a white man’s song with the opening lyric, “There must be some kind of way out of here,” and a reminder, in the midst of one of America’s most volatile years, that “the hour is getting late.” — Polling at 15 percent, independent presidential candidate George Wallace controlled millions of votes, most in the deep South. At a time when many in the country were offended by what they perceived to be a disregard for decorum and civility, Wallace made no secret of his contempt for the unkempt. “You got some folks out here who know a lot of four-letter words,” he said when interrupted by hecklers. “But there are two four-letter words they don’t know: W-O-R-K and S-O-A-P.” When the election results were tallied, Nixon received 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7 percent, and Wallace 13.5 percent. More than 73 million votes had been cast; Nixon’s total exceeded Humphrey’s by just 499,704—about the size of the population of Atlanta. For the first time in more than a century, a new president would not have his party control either the Senate or the House of Representatives. As with most everything in 1968, America seemed split in two. — In late November, the Beatles released their first double album. Officially

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  worked. He would also be in charge of photography, chronicling the flight on still and movie film. To this end, Anders fought to bring a 250 millimeter Zeiss Sonnar telephoto lens aboard. It was giant and heavy, but he had a feeling he’d need it. Anders had come to change his thinking about Apollo 8’s new mission in the weeks since it had been conceived. He’d been disappointed when told his crew would go to the Moon but wouldn’t land there, given that it required him to give up his training as a lunar module pilot and become a command module specialist instead. On future missions, he’d probably be the guy who stayed behind in the orbiting spacecraft while his two crewmates walked on the Moon. For a man who dreamed of collecting rocks from the lunar surface, that packed a wallop. But then he’d gotten to thinking: Flying on Apollo 8 meant that he, Lovell, and Borman would be the first human beings ever to leave Earth, and the first to arrive at the Moon. And the first to see its far side. That was like being another Christopher Columbus, and what more could a curious man hope for than that? The astronauts weren’t the only ones under the gun. Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft and others began constructing a detailed flight plan, one that accounted for every hour of the six-day journey; even a wasted minute would be unacceptable, given the risk and opportunity. Kraft also began his own study of the spacecraft and flight support systems; Kraft wanted to understand the ship better than the astronauts did, so if anything faltered, he’d already have been through the emergency and worked out every possible solution in his mind. Nearly everyone involved in Apollo 8 had to coordinate with other departments, linking arms across NASA and industry to form a massive, cohesive whole. The agency and private industry needed to work together to prepare the command module, mate the spacecraft to the Saturn V rocket, and move it all to the Cape. Mission Control in Houston had to coordinate with the Cape to work out countdowns and launch windows, with the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville to determine the rocket’s maneuvers and trajectories, and with the contractors and universities that would help make complex calculations. It also had to make sure every part and every system was built to specification and on schedule. Computers and software had to be built and updated, electrical

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  paradise. Its leaders saw the Pacific hosting no primeval Edens but rather sinks of ancient corruption needing urgent Protestant remedy – not least for relaxed sexual mores, homosexuality included, qualities which to other European observers seemed so attractive.30 So the Society planned an ambitious and imaginative project with its first voyage to Tahiti and elsewhere in 1796. An entire community of thirty-plus hardworking practical English people embarked not exactly to colonize, as Puritans had done in New England, but to set the degraded islanders a good Protestant example as a mission community whose intentions emulated the communal ideal of the Moravians. On board were all the respectable characters of a large English village (with the exception of the squire, who might bring his own sort of European corruption): besides four clergy, there were weavers, tailors, shoemakers, a gardener. They had no doubt that they would spread the useful arts and better moral aspects of European civilization along with the good news of Christianity.31 The results from the settlements planted in this voyage of the Duff were disappointing in the extreme; the colonists exhibited some spectacular backsliding from godly ways, and the LMS did not repeat the experiment. Instead it fell back on a model of activity equally prone to chance but less in need of elaborate infrastructure: the single male who, with luck, training and prayer, would impress and motivate local leaders, who would then order their people to become Christians. It was, after all, the pattern which had worked well in bringing Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England twelve centuries before, and many missionary organizations followed suit. There were casualties: several missionaries themselves suffered Captain Cook’s fate as some initially promising local situation soured, but far more numerous were native deaths, particularly as other Europeans arrived with a greater and more exciting range of Western amenities, including alcohol and its handmaid, sexually transmitted disease. As in the earlier American experience of European-borne epidemics, demographic disaster undermined faith in traditional religion and lent plausibility to those respected local leaders who decided to give the new religion their backing. Quite early, some local converts became Christian prophets who promised that their flock would be rewarded with the whole panoply of desirable objects brought by Europeans, an anticipation of the ‘cargo cults’ which still flourish in Melanesia.32 Alongside such local adaptations of their message, missionaries did not forget the LMS’s first emphasis on practical skills, so much continued to be on offer from the European arrivals, and not merely in trade goods. Throughout the region, a consistent pattern developed from the example of Tahiti, the first large-scale success in founding Christian communities in the

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  But viewers saw nothing but a test pattern of vertical gray bars. For nearly four minutes, Anders and Borman wrestled with lenses and settings. Finally, an image emerged of a bright round object out the window—Earth!—but to viewers it looked featureless and indistinct, more like the Sun. Something was preventing the telephoto lens from getting the shot. Borman switched back to a shot of the cabin, where Lovell grabbed a bag of chocolate pudding that was floating by. Nearby, Anders made his toothbrush dance and tried catching it with his teeth. Borman, who’d argued against these broadcasts, now couldn’t hide his disappointment at being unable to share his breathtaking view of the world with the world. “I certainly wish we could show you the Earth,” he said. “It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds...” At their homes, the astronauts’ wives wished they could see more of their husbands, or even just a little color in their faces. Ten-year-old Glen Anders thought his floating father looked weird. Anders moved in for a close-up shot of Lovell. “Bill, you can let everyone see he has already outdistanced us in the beard race,” Borman said. “Jim has got quite a beard going already.” Lovell turned to the camera with a big smile. “Happy birthday, Mother!” he said. Blanch Lovell had turned seventy-three that day, and Lovell hadn’t forgotten. Watching on television at home in Edgewater, Florida, Blanch was stunned that Jim would remember her birthday at a time like this. A few seconds later, Borman told his audience he needed to put his ship back into barbecue mode in order to prevent overheating. There was nothing he could do to provide a better view of Earth, at least for now. “Goodbye from Apollo 8,” he said, waving a hand. And with that, the first broadcast from the first men on their way to the Moon went dark. — About ninety minutes after the telecast ended, Anders began to tire, yet