Excitement

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 Action (2014)

  Okay! Let’s say all’s swell, you’ve hung out and established a mutual attraction, and are now hoping to abscond to the bone zone (wherever that may be for you—your place, theirs, the backseat of someone’s Buick, etc.). When you feel the time is right, phrase your proposal by framing it as an offer of a different breed—saying “Let’s go home and fuck” can work (and has for me before), but much like tempering your initial approach with a bit of discretion, you’d do better to posit the idea that you should share a trip to your next immediate locale (read: BONE-A-ZONA) for a more innocuous purpose. None of these propositions, if accepted, guarantee sex (because not-nothin’ does that besides verbalized consent), but the honey in question is likely intelligent enough to pick up the subtext of what these suggestions mean. Depending on what you’ve been up to, say, “Do you want to go listen to records/have a glass of wine/make some coffee/smoke a joint at [X SEX LOCALE]?” See what unfolds from there. The above proviso works beautifully for one-night stands, which can easily turn into longer courtships/extended engagements if you’re both so inclined. However, though I do not buy the idea that someone forsakes the prospect that you are a person of value that incites prolonged interest if you deign to submit thine precious flesh upon first meeting them, I like to attenuate the mystery if I want to see somebody again. I don’t recommend dishonesty, but it’s worth noting that the majority of the romantic relationships I’ve ever had, successful or otherwise, have come from waiting for at least one more rendezvous before getting more physical than making out. Instead of inviting a new person straight over, I’ll agree to share a cab, but depart alone at my destination instead of continuing a dual ride home or asking them up. I’ll flirt back a bit less aggressively or otherwise insert some distance when a person thinks for sure that they’ve got me in the bag (and when I’m like, “BUT THEY DO—AM I KIDDING MYSELF? THEY ARE A BASTION OF PERFECTION,” I remember that anyone can literally bone any flirtation-mate they want—“leagues” don’t exist as long as you behave like they don’t).

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

  untamed wildernesses unsullied by ancient European sins. It was an exhilarating idea which bound those in its grip to begin activist efforts to improve society in a great variety of ways, and it suggested a special destiny for the thirteen colonies. Despite Isaac Watts’s dry comment on his fellow Congregationalist’s excitement, ‘I think his reasonings on America want force’, the mood has never fully left America.76 The Great Awakenings thus shaped the future of American religion. They destroyed the territorial communality which was still the assumption of most religious practice back in Europe. Religious practice, like conversion, became a matter of choice. Charismatic ministers who lacked the scruples of Gilbert Tennent or Jonathan Edwards ignored traditional boundaries in setting out to win souls — but in turn, if they were successful in setting up a new congregation which hearkened to their message, they found themselves prisoners or servants of their enthusiasts who were their means of support. Freelance preachers are not unnaturally often much concerned with financial survival, which can be an unhealthy preoccupation. Priorities in worship changed in the Awakenings. Renewal was experienced as renewal of enthusiasm rather than performance of an unchanging liturgy; Protestant Churches which did not adapt, and which based themselves on traditional European models, suffered. The Anglicans, strongly linked to the Church of England, which was struggling at the same time with the Methodist and Evangelical Revivals, were even more resistant than the Congregationalist Churches of New England to the style of the Awakenings. They did little missionizing on the ever-expanding frontiers, and they lost out as a result. In 1700, they served roughly a quarter of the colonial population; in 1775, even after rapid population growth, roughly a ninth.77 Coalescing out of the welter of new gatherings came new denominations. In the south, a Church called the Separate Baptists was virtually created by the Awakenings, and the Methodists, after suffering setbacks for their British loyalism during the Revolution, soon took off once more; so two of the most influential strands within American Protestantism owe their prominence to the first Awakenings period. The sense of common American heritage among different Protestant denominations was much strengthened by this experience. That would have a considerable effect on politics. Moreover, the Awakenings enjoyed huge success among enslaved people. In 1762, one Anglican missionary calculated sadly that of around 46,000 enslaved in South Carolina, only five hundred were Christians.78 That reflected the fact that many plantation owners were reluctant to allow their human property Christianity, but it is possible that he really meant that only five hundred were Anglicans, because he was writing amid the religious fervour of the Awakenings sweeping through the colonies.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  The opposing team’s cheerleaders tried to answer our cheers with “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! Hell is in your future if you give in to desire,” but we could always do them one better. “Buy!” “SELL!” “Trade!” “BARTER!” “YOU’RE MUCH BIGGER, BUT WE ARE SMARTER!” When the visitors shoot a free throw on most every court in the country, the fans make a lot of noise, screaming and stomping their feet. It doesn’t work, because players learn to tune out white noise. At Culver Creek, we had a much better strategy. At first, everyone yelled and screamed like in a normal game. But then everyone said, “Shh!” and there was absolute silence. Just as our hated opponent stopped dribbling and prepared for his shot, the Colonel stood up and screamed something. Like: “For the love of God, please shave your back hair!” Or: “I need to be saved. Can you minister to me after your shot?!” — Toward the end of the third quarter, the Christian-school coach called a time-out and complained to the ref about the Colonel, pointing at him angrily. We were down 56–13. The Colonel stood up. “What?! You have a problem with me!?” The coach screamed, “You’re bothering my players!” “THAT’S THE POINT, SHERLOCK!” the Colonel screamed back. The ref came over and kicked him out of the gym. I followed him. “I’ve gotten thrown out of thirty-seven straight games,” he said. “Damn.” “Yeah. Once or twice, I’ve had to go really crazy. I ran onto the court with eleven seconds left once and stole the ball from the other team. It wasn’t pretty. But, you know. I have a streak to maintain.” The Colonel ran ahead of me, gleeful at his ejection, and I jogged after him, trailing in his wake. I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails. one hundred eight days before THE NEXT DAY, Dr. Hyde asked me to stay after class. Standing before him, I realized for the first time how hunched his shoulders were, and he seemed suddenly sad and kind of old. “You like this class, don’t you?” he asked. “Yessir.” “You’ve got a lifetime to mull over the Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness.” He spoke every sentence as if he’d written it down, memorized it, and was now reciting it. “But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present.

• From Action (2014)

  • Use a camcorder. This seems laughably quaint—hey! why not just go the extra mile and make one of those classic peephole flip-books of your butt-nudes?—but if you want to make a private, one-edition-only memento (and what feels more lurid than secreted-away analog porno? You have to find a HIDING PLACE for it, just the thought of which is devastating me with hotness), dig the VCR and camcorder out of storage, or cop them for a dollar each at just about any yard or sidewalk sale, then take turns maneuvering the camera’s point of view back and forth with your person. • If you’re using a phone: Handheld cameras are some of my favorite sex toys, and their perspectives and angles, as seen after they’re recorded, are the most reminiscent of what fucking is actually like. • If you’re more likely to be distracted or made self-conscious by a camera all blatantly up in your face, set up a computer on a surface above the one where you’ll be having sex. Keeping it on the bed with you can work, but a relaxed attitude toward the positioning can also leave you with a work of film like one that an old boyfriend and I made. The best part of making porn is watching it right after, and as we reviewed that one, we saw our sex lives as we never had before: The laptop had shifted around alongside our bodies, eventually settling on a tight shot of our two stomachs clapping against one another. It wasn’t quite the movie we had intended to auteur, but it was a better comedy than most of what you’d pay to see in a theater, based on how hard it made us laugh. ON FETISHES [image file=image_912.jpg] Fetishes are another avenue for experiences you typically do not have and identifying new selves as you go along with the kinky shit at hand. For a solid hunk of last year, I had sex with Jaskov, a brilliant rapper. I discovered that the only time he ever seemed withdrawn while talking to me—he was a world-class yammerer—was when, after we’d been boning for a fortnight, we started talking about whether we had any offbeat sexual proclivities. “I have this… one thing,” he admitted, sitting on top of my desk at 5 a.m. (my personal fetish: fellow nocturnes). He was so reluctant to vocalize his secret outright that he had me guess it. I tried in earnest for a while, but quickly cycled through the exceedingly common BDSM and gender-flipping stuff to no avail.

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

  Low and others from Houston made their pitch to send Apollo 8 into lunar orbit on a flight scheduled for December. Spirited discussions broke out, ricocheting from man to man, about the benefits and dangers of flying such an audacious mission, and about how to solve all its unsolvable problems. Finally, it came time to take a poll of the men in the room. The groups from Houston, Washington, and Cape Kennedy agreed: Apollo 8 would be the most difficult and dangerous mission NASA had ever flown. But with unprecedented effort—and a good dose of luck—it might be done. It was worth the risk, these men thought, to keep Apollo on track. And it escaped the notice of no one that there would be a history-changing bonus to flying in December: If Apollo 8 made the lunar journey, America might beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. That left the group from Huntsville, and the matter of the rocket. Neither von Braun nor anyone else in the meeting needed to be reminded of the Saturn V’s recent problems. And yet the mission was impossible unless the rocket could be made ready. The Moon hung on von Braun’s verdict. He thought for a moment, then spoke. In terms of distance traveled, von Braun said, the Saturn V did not know or care how far the spacecraft went. Like all thoroughbreds, it was built to be pushed to the limit, and in this case the limit was the Moon. And so he did have a verdict. “You don’t give us much time,” he said. “But it’s a great idea. We just have to see if we can get everything together. But we will try.” The matter settled, the group agreed to adjourn, but not before making a pact. First, they would take a few days to study the myriad risks and challenges of changing Apollo 8’s mission, smoking out any “showstoppers”—problems that could not be solved in time for a December lunar orbit mission. Any of those, and the new plan for Apollo 8 would be off. Second, they would not breathe a word of this to anyone. It would be hard enough to convince Webb—not to mention Congress and the president—that rushing to the Moon was a good, or even a sane, idea. If word leaked before they ruled out any seemingly insurmountable roadblocks, Washington was sure to bring down the hammer on the plan before it got started. They would talk again in five days. If all looked good then, they would go to NASA’s boss for the go-ahead. —And that’s how things stood a day later, when Slayton got down to choosing a crew. He might have given the new mission to Jim McDivitt, who was currently assigned to command Apollo 8. But McDivitt’s crew had more experience with the lunar module than did Borman’s, so Slayton decided to keep McDivitt ready for when the troubled module was finally flightworthy.

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

  I don’t know if I’ve ever had a thrill like that—envisioning an Apollo astronaut going into orbit so he could finish my book. For hours, Lovell told me about Apollo 8, his childhood growing up in Milwaukee, attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even better, he agreed to meet with me again, and passed along contact information for Borman and Anders. Soon I was in Montana, spending several days with Borman, and in Washington State, on an extended stay to interview Anders and his wife, Valerie, then back to Montana. In Chicago, I began a series of interviews with Lovell and his wife, Marilyn, at their home, where I got to see astonishing space memorabilia and pet their golden retriever, Toby, while asking my questions. All of the men, and their wives, were extraordinarily generous with their time. (Susan Borman was too ill during my visits to Montana to sit for interviews.) And all of them were excellent storytellers, forthcoming and vivid in their recall. It was lucky for me that each of the astronauts understood how to explain even the most technical information in a way that a layperson could understand. As informative as the astronauts were during my visits, they were equally down to earth and kind. Borman and Anders each took me for a ride in their small airplanes; I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a feeling like I got while being flown over the American countryside by the first men to see Earth from another world. (By the time I met Lovell, he’d given up flying for health reasons.) And it was moving to hear, through my headset, the admiration paid to Borman by a young flight controller in Montana, who seemed in awe that he was giving clearance to the first man who’d ever reached the Moon. On my behalf, Borman called Chris Kraft, one of the titans of NASA, and a man as responsible as anyone for the success of the American space program. A few weeks later, I was in Houston meeting with Kraft, already in his nineties and possessing enough energy to go back and run Mission Control (which he invented). Kraft gave me two full days of interviews, and helped me reach other NASA veterans who lived in and around Houston. My week there was immensely rewarding in the company of these pioneers. On my last day in Houston, I took my thirteen-year-old son to the Johnson Space Center to see the Saturn V rocket, still the most powerful machine ever built. Everyone I’d spoken to, from astronauts to NASA personnel to technical experts, warned that the immensity of the Saturn V couldn’t quite be described, that one had to be in its presence to believe it. We paid our admission, admired the Space Shuttle, took turns in a simulator that twisted and shook. Then, we found the rocket. It was laid on its side, 363 feet long end-to-end, bursting out of its own building.

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

  Holy Land itself.36 It was Gregory VII who first sought to turn Western indignation about the Holy Land into practical action. He tried and failed to launch a crusade to the Holy Land in 1074; no one believed his claim to have already gathered an army of 50,000 men, for it was not at all clear where they were all assembled.37 His successor Urban II was a good deal more tactful and respectful of lay rulers than Gregory and did better – this despite the fact that there was no great immediate crisis to rally the West against Muslim aggression; in Spain, warfare continued to flicker on the frontier of the two religions, but that was nothing new. What Urban did have was a direct appeal for military help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos. It was by no means the first such request from Alexios, but now the Pope seized on it as an excuse for action. At a council of churchmen and magnates called to Clermont in France and in a flurry of papal letters accompanying it around 1095, Urban described renewed but completely imaginary atrocities against Christian pilgrims by Muslims in Jerusalem, so that he could arouse appropriate horror and action would follow. The effect was sensational: noblemen present hastened to raise their tenants to set out on a mission to avenge Christian wrongs in the East. In this state of heightened excitement, the Pope took time to consecrate the high altar of his old monastery of Cluny, dedicating the final enlargement of that gargantuan building; so the culmination of Cluny’s glory can never be separated from the launch of the Crusades (see Plate 29).38 A great momentum had by now developed behind the papacy’s assertions of its power. Noblemen and humble folk alike flocked on the proclaimed crusade because they were excited by the Pope’s promise that this was a sure road to salvation. Urban made it clear that to die on crusade in a state of repentance and confession would guarantee immediate entry to Heaven, doing away with any necessity of penance after death: papal grants associated with this promise were the origins of the system of indulgences, later to cause such problems for the Western Church (see pp. 555–7). Not all the armies were led by kings or nobles, although that was generally the case with the forces which genuinely had the organization to make it to the Middle East. The Pope’s message was now riding on currents of apocalyptic excitement which even the papacy could not control. The mainstream armies which he inspired did not behave as bestially as those raised by a charismatic preacher called Peter the Hermit. As they gathered in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, they perpetrated Christianity’s first large-scale massacres of Jews, since this was an identifiable group of non-Christians more accessible than Muslims to Western Europeans spoiling for a fight, and generally not able to put up much resistance. It would not be the last time that recruiting

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

  were seen again, sweeping congregations past their ministers’ expectations in wordless but often highly noisy expressions of apparent liturgical nihilism. Crowds gathered for communion in the frontier ‘camp meeting’ tradition stretching back to seventeenth-century Scotland and Ulster, but now they were running, singing, even barking in what were significantly termed ‘exercises’. Protestantism was rediscovering physicality and spontaneity after its two-century diet of preachers’ words and planned music, and the discovery came within an Evangelical mode which generally valued a common fervent style and proclamation of sin and redemption more than confessional background or history. Revivalism was firmly in Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian culture already, so not only could they happily accommodate all this, but as ministers grappled to harness their congregations’ startling releases of emotional energy, it was not worth worrying too much about denominational labels. In one of the first of these devotional explosions at Gasper River in Kentucky in 1800, a Presbyterian was host minister, but the preacher stirring the fire was a Methodist – Reformed and Arminian side by side in front of the wailing crowd, Amazing Grace indeed to astonish Calvin or Melanchthon.99 The voices of deist Founding Fathers seemed far away. Urban elites in Washington, Philadelphia and Boston would have to start taking notice of these people, because after all an increasing number of the menfolk among them had votes. American politicians have done well to keep an eye on the Evangelical constituency ever since. Now among a proliferation of joyfully jerry-built churches, witnessing to new birth and discipline amid harsh and lawless farmscapes, with a dread of some very angry dispossessed Native Americans lurking on the horizon, there developed increasingly original forms of Christian experience. It was predictable that American Evangelical excitement should again look to the Last Days – if crowded and crapulous Regency England could produce apocalyptic fervour, how much more could a pure and open frontier? Surely America and not Old Europe was to be the setting for God’s final drama: had not the great Jonathan Edwards given his blessing to that thought? One of those who gave an answer emphatically in the affirmative, William Miller, was himself a one-man exemplar of Protestant America’s spiritual trajectory: rejecting his Baptist upbringing for the reasonable faith of deism in Vermont’s remote New England farming country, moving into revivalism via his anxious search for evidence of the Last Days in his King James Bible (noting Archbishop Ussher’s dates in its margins), ordained by the Baptists, preaching his startling message through the nation that the Advent of Christ was due in 1843 – much excitement – then 1844 – even more excitement – and then followed the Great Disappointment. For true apocalypticists there is no giving up hope, although Miller, now

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

  missions, a Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, a (Congregational-based) London Missionary Society in 1795, an (Anglican Evangelical) Church Missionary Society in 1799, a British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804, an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810.This activity had a complementary relationship with that feature of British Protestantism unique in Europe, its large sector of Churches separate from the established Churches. Their century of vigorous growth in the United Kingdom now marched in step with the growth of British missionary activity. The creation of institutions was presaged by a decade of thought and planning, so that between 1783 and 1792 public interest was generated with manifestos for missions in Africa and British India and the Caribbean by leaders as prominent as John Wesley as well as the then lesser-known Anglican chaplain in Calcutta David Brown and the downright obscure and uneducated Baptist shoemaker William Carey.24 Equal excitement was aroused by the voyages of Captain James Cook in the Pacific Ocean, which Cook assiduously promoted by publishing the journals of his admittedly extraordinary feats of exploration and mapping. His dramatic death in the Hawaiian islands on his third voyage in 1779 only added to his celebrity. But the 1790s added a new urgency. The events of the French Revolution suggested that a century of Evangelical expectations for the coming end might at last be fulfilled. Joanna Southcott’s sensational public career (see pp. 828–9), which began in the year that the Baptist Missionary Society was founded, was just one symptom of the mood – she was a fierce and vocal opponent of the Revolution.25 In 1798–9 the French revolutionaries’ imprisonment of the Pope and his death in exile were icing on the apocalyptic cake. As is usually the case with such fervour, the passing of 1800 with relatively little obvious divine intervention did not dampen enthusiasm. It was clear that Evangelicalism was making great strides among Protestant Christians; the new propensity for the expression of emotion in Romanticism did nothing to lower the devotional temperature. By 1830, it has been plausibly suggested, around 60 per cent of British Protestants were involved in some variety of Evangelical religious practice, while between 1800 and 1840 a hundred books were published in English discussing the signs of the times, eagerly debated in a new crop of periodicals with titles like The Morning Watch, organizations like the Prophecy Investigation Society and regular Evangelical conferences.26 Apocalyptic excitement was no longer common among the hierarchy of the established Church, so English bishops persisted in showing themselves almost as reluctant to get involved in missionary activity as they were resistant to invitations to open Joanna Southcott’s box. It was not until 1841 that the Archbishop of Canterbury,

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

  They would run the flight for the next eight hours until their replacements, the Black Team, took over. After that, it would be back to the Green Team, and so on. Thirty minutes later, Apollo 8 prepared for another of its critical maneuvers. Until now, the spacecraft had flown with one of its sides exposed to the Sun and the other side facing away. But that arrangement couldn’t last much longer without damaging the ship by broiling one side and freezing the other. To solve the problem, NASA had developed a procedure called passive thermal control, in which the commander slowly rotated the ship on its long axis, making one full revolution every hour as the craft journeyed through space. In that way, temperatures would become evenly distributed as the spacecraft turned on its invisible rotisserie spit. The maneuver had earned the nickname “barbecue mode” at NASA, and as Borman tapped a thruster, Apollo 8 became the first to use it in space. So slow was the roll that the crew hardly sensed it. Now, as they continued to streak toward the Moon, the astronauts prepared for emancipation. More than eight hours and 45,000 miles into their mission, the time had come for the men to slip out of their bulky space suits. They had been wearing them since long before launch in order to breathe pure oxygen. Doing so helped to purge nitrogen from their bodies, and that had been critical during launch. As expected, the cabin’s internal air pressure dropped rapidly as the spacecraft ascended. If the crew had not purged the nitrogen from their systems, the sudden drop in pressure could have caused the nitrogen to form bubbles in their tissues that could press on nerves, lungs, spine, even the brain—a painful and potentially deadly condition common to deep-water scuba divers who surface too quickly, and known as the bends. Once in space, the astronauts had been so busy with equipment checks and the translunar injection burn that they hadn’t had a chance to remove the suits. Until now. The crew doffed their suits and stowed them in bags under their seats, where they would remain for the duration of the flight. Suddenly unbound, Anders was free to test his new superpower: weightlessness. A breath of a touch, just enough to light an elevator button, propelled him to any destination inside the cabin. If there were twists and turns in his way, he simply bent or hunched or corkscrewed to conform to the openings, flowing through them like water. Using his fingertips for thrusters, Anders visited navigation instruments, storage areas, labyrinths of valves. His lightweight coveralls, made of fire-resistant Teflon beta cloth, were perfectly white except for a large American flag patch sewn onto the right shoulder, the Lovell-designed figure eight mission patch on his left shoulder, and a red and blue NASA patch on his right breast. They made for a perfect flying skin, cinched at the waist and tight enough to keep his body slender.

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

  On display, close enough to touch, was the spent engine of a captured V-2 German rocket, the one designed by Wernher von Braun and used by the Nazis to attack European cities at the end of World War II. The rocket could travel 200 miles, carry a ton of explosives, reach an altitude of 50 miles, and attain speeds of more than 3,300 miles per hour. Electrified by the encounter, Jim wrote to the American Rocket Society, which had already existed for twenty years, and asked for advice on careers. They replied with a friendly letter telling him that universities didn’t yet offer majors in rocket technology, but that he’d be well served to take college courses in thermodynamics, aerodynamics, and mathematics. To that end, the society advised, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology would make excellent choices. Jim had no money for college. His mother encouraged him to apply to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, from which his uncle had graduated in 1913, and Jim did that, but the best the Navy could offer was a position as a third alternate on the admissions waitlist. The Navy, however, did need pilots. To get them, they were willing to pay for a student to go to college. If that student did well, the Navy would make him a military aviator. All of it would be paid for by Uncle Sam. The idea of being in command of his own aircraft thrilled Jim. He signed up for the Navy program and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he loaded up on mechanical engineering courses and saved most of his fifty-dollar-a-month stipend for weekends when Marilyn came to visit. After two years in Madison, Lovell moved to Pensacola for flight training. Halfway through the preflight segment, he received orders to report to the Naval Academy; a few days later, Lovell was just another plebe at Annapolis. None of his credits from Wisconsin was eligible for transfer. He was starting from scratch. In November, Lovell invited Marilyn to the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia. By that time, he knew he wanted to marry Marilyn, and he asked her to move out east near the Naval Academy. At the time, Marilyn was attending a teacher’s college at home in Milwaukee, but she pulled up stakes and moved to Washington, D.C., where she enrolled at George Washington University and took a job at Garfinckel’s Department Store. And started dating a medical student. Lovell could hardly blame her. He was so busy at Annapolis he hardly had a chance to call, let alone take out, his girl, and even when midshipmen got liberty for a night on the town, there were curfews and other style-cramping rules. Still, the med student didn’t last long; he didn’t like it when Marilyn wore Lovell’s class crest on her sweater one night. Things got easier for Lovell and Marilyn in his third year, when the Academy allowed him more liberty.

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

  William Howley, an aged High Churchman of distinctly old-fashioned type, finally accepted an ex-officio relationship with the Church Missionary Society, thirteen years into his archiepiscopate. By then it would have been foolish in the extreme for the Primate of All England to ignore the anglophone worldwide mission, which paralleled Britain’s political and economic position in the world. With its navy’s global reach and a network of commerce feeding its then unequalled capacity in industrial production and engineering, Britain was at the height of its power – long before its territorial empire had reached its greatest extent, which was in fact not until the 1920s, in an age when Britain’s real power was on the wane. There was a complex relationship between mission and this imperial expansion. In recent years, it has been common among some of the historians who know the subject best to play down the links between missionary work and colonial expansion, particularly in the British imperial story.27 Certainly a majority of British missionaries were members of Dissenting Churches or Methodists, and they were unlikely to have an automatic sympathy with the aims of the British Establishment. Almost everywhere missionaries of whatever denomination preceded Crown colonial interventions by several decades, and Anglicans as much as others might resent official interference threatening the delicate web of local relationships which they had built up.28 Yet the fact remains that almost everywhere where British missions flourished, British official hegemony eventually followed. The classic case of colonial rule following missions is provided by the first major area of Christian success, the Pacific Ocean (Oceania), where in the end virtually everywhere fell under the rule of either European powers or the United States. Stirred by the triumphs and quasi-martyrdom of Captain Cook, the London Missionary Society made Pacific islands its especial priority straight away in the 1790s. Here missionary concerns were very close to the Enlightenment: the primarily Congregational leadership was from that intellectually lively Dissent which threw its enthusiasm into the scientific advances of its day, moving in the same circles as Anglican Enlightenment figures like Captain Cook’s naturalist colleague and fellow explorer Joseph Banks or the agricultural writer Arthur Young. It was not a problem to combine a theology of nature, in which the believer could delight in the wonderful works of the Creator, with expectation of the approaching millennium, for which one could prepare by exploring those wonders: a form of purposeful meditation on the Last Days.29 Nevertheless the London Missionary Society’s Evangelical outlook gave it a different perspective from Banks’s fascination with an apparent oceanic

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

  She stole out the back gate and headed for the garage but was greeted in her driveway by an ocean of reporters and bursting flashbulbs. The next day, photographs ran across the country showing Eric in his mother’s arms, sucking his thumb, along with the caption THUMBS UP FOR DAD ! Valerie loved the photo, but she knew it meant she would be a captive in her own home from that moment forward. On December 20, the day before the flight, the Soviets let the world know what they thought about Apollo 8. “It is not important to mankind who will reach the Moon first and when he will reach it,” said cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man ever to orbit Earth. Not many in the Soviet Union were worried. Even with the American countdown clock at T minus 24 hours, few Soviets believed NASA would be crazy enough to launch. That afternoon, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, joined the astronauts in Florida for lunch. Anders suspected the visit to be a public relations stunt arranged by NASA, but he changed his mind after hearing the passion in Lindbergh’s questions about Apollo 8. After a few minutes, the four men—and Anne, also a pilot—were immersed in conversation about flying. Not one of the astronauts resented the imposition on his time. By now, there wasn’t any sense in cramming more pages from a flight manual or checklist; with twenty hours to go until launch, you either knew your stuff or you didn’t. The conversation turned to spacewalking, and how it compared to the old barnstorming stunt of wing-walking. The Lindberghs were interested to hear that one’s sensation of altitude decreased as one flew higher, until it hardly seemed to register in space (where the familiar scenery that helped people judge distance from the ground all but disappeared), and to learn that in space there was no up or down. The astronauts were equally interested to learn of a conversation Lindbergh once had in the 1930s with Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket engineering. It was theoretically possible, Goddard had told Lindbergh, to design a rocket powerful enough to reach the Moon, but the money required to build it—as much as a million dollars—would likely keep such a wonder in the realm of science fiction. The astronauts had a good laugh at that one. Lindbergh performed a back-of-napkin calculation after learning how much fuel the Saturn V required to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. “In the first second of your flight,” Lindbergh said, “you’ll burn more than ten times as much as I did flying the Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris.” —Later that day, Anders’s childhood priest arrived at crew quarters. Father Dennis Barry had come to give Anders—a devout Catholic since childhood—communion. This visit annoyed Borman, who was growing edgier as the hours to launch counted down. The longer Father Barry stayed, the more irritated Borman grew. Finally, Borman snapped.

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

  he thought. This is what I’ve been dreaming about. He could see the genius in the plan right away. And the personal benefits weren’t lost on him, either. A lunar mission would spare him another Earth-orbital flight, two of which he’d made already as part of the Gemini program. Best of all, it positioned him to do what he loved most—explore and pioneer—and there seemed no better way to do it than by becoming the first man ever to fly to the Moon. Anders saw it differently. This new mission would kneecap his chances for landing on the Moon. He’d trained as a lunar module pilot; unless he messed that up, it meant he would walk on the Moon one day. But this new mission had no lunar module, so his duties would shift to the command module, and guys who flew command modules didn’t land on the Moon. Five minutes ago, Anders would have put his chances of walking on the lunar surface at 80 percent. Now they’d slipped to between slim and none. It was a Saturday and the end of the workweek for all of them. The men packed away their gear and climbed into their T-38s, Borman and Lovell in one, Anders by himself in another, and took off into the clouds. In the backseat of Borman’s plane, Lovell began sketching an image on his kneepad—a big Earth in the foreground, a smaller Moon in the background, with a figure eight drawn around the two bodies—it formed both the mission trajectory and its designated number—eight. “What a natural thing for Apollo 8,” he thought, and he knew this would be a fine insignia for the patch the crew would wear on their way—on mankind’s way—to the Moon. —It was just a few minutes’ drive from Ellington Air Force Base to the astronauts’ homes in the suburbs. Each man would have preferred more than the usual one day per week at home with his family, but the rigors of training required subordinating family—and everything else—to the mission at hand. In fact, the men and their wives felt lucky. Borman, Lovell, and Anders had served in the military and knew what it was like to be away from home for long stretches. And each of them had friends fighting thousands of miles away in Vietnam, and they gladly would have served there, or anywhere else the country needed them to fight. The couples had all become expert at making the most of twenty-four hours of family time every week. None of the men had called home to discuss the proposed new mission with his wife. It hadn’t even crossed their minds. It wasn’t that they didn’t respect their wives’ opinions. It wasn’t even that they were living in a male-dominated culture. These were military men, and even though NASA had been set up as a civilian organization, it was clear to all astronauts—and to their families—that NASA assignments were orders.

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

  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 wiring diagrammed and tested, and the tracking stations around the world—which would relay voice and data between the flying spacecraft and Mission Control in Houston—brought up to speed. All of this, and so much else, had to be finished in just over one hundred days, all while NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 7 in just one month. If that flight wasn’t near-perfect, Apollo 8 wouldn’t go. —On Friday evening, August 23, the astronauts went home for a rare weekend off. Many of their neighbors were like them—astronauts or NASA employees, conservative politically, with front lawns and haircuts that were military short. Boys still said “Yes, sir” when speaking to adults, girls still wore dresses.

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

  As photographers snapped her photo, Marilyn watched as Gemini 7’s Titan II rocket spewed billows of orange-tinted smoke, then rose on a narrow, nearly transparent column of flame into the sky. The moment Lovell had waited for since Juneau High School was unfolding in thundering detail. It took seven full seconds before he could no longer contain himself. “We’re on our way, Frank!” he shouted to his crewmate. At the two-minute mark, the spacecraft reached a speed of 3,600 miles per hour. Until now, the liquid-fuel rocket had lifted them in a kind of slow pull, but now the second stage kicked in, hurtling the ship forward with a new kind of fury. A minute later, Lovell and Borman were traveling at 7,100 miles per hour and picking up speed fast. Just under five minutes into the flight, Lovell caught a glimpse of something outside his window. “Look at the Moon, Frank!” The rocket pushed past seven g’s and then separated from the spacecraft, sending Gemini 7 into orbit around Earth. For Lovell, the ascent was a wild and wonderful ride. For the next several days, Lovell and Borman flew their spacecraft, conducted medical experiments, and, perhaps most astonishing for two men confined to such a tiny capsule, didn’t drive each other crazy. Toward the end of its two-week flight, Gemini 7 experienced problems. The craft’s fuel cells began failing and its thrusters faltered. Two days remained in the mission, and Borman’s instinct was to terminate early. But Lovell—privately, without broadcasting a word for the public to hear—urged him to hang in and not worry, that the ship would make it. Along with Chris Kraft’s reassurance, Lovell’s encouragement persuaded Borman to hold on, and the flight finished near perfectly. By the time the astronauts were aboard the aircraft carrier USS Wasp, they’d set several world records for space flight, including longest duration. Standing on deck, the scruffy Lovell said of the two cramped weeks spent with Borman, “We’d like to announce our engagement.” Back home, Marilyn told reporters, “Jim could come home beard and all, and I would welcome him with open arms.” A month later, in January 1966, Marilyn gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, Jeffrey. Less than a year later, on November 11, 1966, Lovell was back on the launchpad as commander of Gemini 12. It was to be the final mission of Project Gemini. Strapped in beside him was Buzz Aldrin, who’d been selected as part of NASA’s third group of astronauts in 1963. Together, the men would spend four days in orbit around Earth. In some ways, the pressure on Lovell for this flight was even greater than it had been during Gemini 7. Gemini 12 had to succeed in order for NASA—and the country—to feel confident about launching Apollo, the program that would take America to the Moon. The mission went smoothly, and after a journey of 1.6 million miles, Gemini 12 splashed down in the western Atlantic.

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

  He pitched Borman on the new plan for Apollo 8 the next day. Now, Borman flew back to tell his crew of their new mission, one that hadn’t even been officially approved. He’d answered for them in Slayton’s office, never imagining they might say no. Yet this was the most dangerous mission NASA had ever contemplated. Borman assumed they’d be as eager as he was to take a sudden shot at the Moon, but there was every chance he was wrong. Sometimes Borman used the T-38 to do aerobatics, looping and rolling to help clear the cobwebs after a hard day’s work. This time, he flew level and fast, back to his crewmates in California in the straightest line a test pilot ever flew. Chapter Four [image file=Image00007.jpg] ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?Back at the assembly plant in California, later in the day on August 10, Borman found his two partners and pulled them aside. Jim Lovell had joined NASA along with Borman in 1962 as part of the “New Nine,” the second group of astronauts enlisted by the agency. Like Borman, he was forty years old and a test pilot, but the similarities seemed to end there. Since boyhood, Lovell had been thrilled by rockets and the idea of space travel (he’d gone so far as to attempt to build a liquid-oxygen-powered booster while in high school), and he remained dazzled by the idea of exploring the cosmos. He was also, by most everyone’s account, as warm and friendly a guy as one could meet. Bill Anders was just thirty-four, five and a half years younger than his two crewmates. He’d come up through the ranks as a fighter pilot, not a test pilot. That alone generated contempt from some of the older astronauts, most of whom were test pilots and didn’t fully see the daring in climbing into already proven machines. Perhaps even worse for Anders, he was an intellectual among men more immediate and visceral, a holder of an advanced degree in nuclear engineering, and who the hell needed that on the way to the Moon? Still, when people saw him fly they knew they were watching something special. And while it was true he’d flown airplanes already certified by the likes of his colleagues, others could see that he could turn those birds around and shoot most anyone’s ass out of the sky. Borman gathered his crew outside the test bay where they’d been working on the command module. “Things have changed,” Borman said. “If everything goes right with Apollo 7, they want to send Apollo 8 to the Moon by the end of the year. And we are now Apollo 8.” It took a few moments for Lovell and Anders to process what they were hearing. The Moon? By December? Us? And there was more, Borman said. Apollo 8 would go without a lunar module. And it would orbit the Moon. Lovell could not fight back his smile. Oh, man, this is great!

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

  texts which described this ancient and benevolent secret society of philosophers of the ‘Rosy Cross’ were principally written between 1614 and 1616 by a Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreae, who had spent perhaps too much time poring over hermetic wisdom and Paracelsianism. Over the next decade Andreae’s fantasy was presented as documentary reality. It sparked febrile excitement and expectation right across Europe, and became intimately entwined in the politics of the Elector Palatine Friedrich’s attempted Reformed Protestant crusade against the Habsburgs which led to the Thirty Years War (see p. 646).5 Protestant hopes for a coming apocalypse, disappointed in Friedrich’s downfall, persisted. The renowned Reformed Protestant scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted proclaimed calculations of the divinely ordained End Times, eventually choosing 1694 as the crucial date; significantly much of his theorizing was drawn not from the Bible but from hermetic literature.6 The possibilities offered by the apocalypse were constructively developed by two of Europe’s most restlessly creative Protestant scholars, Alsted’s pupil the much-exiled Czech Johannes Comenius and the equally much-travelled Scots minister John Dury. They saw in England’s Republic in the 1650s a new flowering of scholarship and radical extension of human knowledge in the many different fields of natural philosophy. Both men believed that Classical esoteric literature was not a series of ancient dead ends, but an entry into knowledge long forgotten. They hoped that the Protestant confusions so obvious both in Oliver Cromwell’s England and in the Netherlands might be exploited positively to lead a newly reunited and tolerant Church for all Europe, to welcome back the Saviour.7 Their enthusiasms included the readmission of the Jews to England after their expulsion back in 1290: this would hasten the Last Days, provided of course the Jews dutifully converted. The scheme succeeded in 1656, thanks to the sympathy of that conflicted seeker of the Last Days Lord Protector Cromwell, who rather characteristically disguised the revolutionary nature of what he was allowing by conniving at a very technical decision in the English law courts about property rights.8 The efforts of the Interregnum optimists did not have the result they expected. Alsted’s apocalyptic calculations helped inflame the disastrous political ambitions of Reformed Transylvania (see p. 641), and the only second coming at the end of the 1650s was the return of the Stuart dynasty to its Atlantic kingdoms from exile. Yet there were significant and practical consequences: not only the readmission of the Jews (which Charles II, probably primed with Jewish cash from Amsterdam, did not challenge), but also the foundation with Charles’s patronage of England’s premier forum for a continuing gentlemanly discussion of natural philosophy. This ‘Royal Society’ was a regrouping of several of the

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

  age or political leaning or background—that they hadn’t seen something important and beautiful happen, that these three men had helped the country, and the world, to heal. So far, there has been no Apollo 8 for our time. I knew right away that I wanted to tell the story of Apollo 8. But I also knew that I couldn’t do the story justice without interviewing the three crew members. At the time, Borman and Lovell were 87 years old, Anders was 83. I wasn’t certain that any of them would want to talk to me. I found Lovell’s email address and wrote to him. A few days later, his assistant called and said he would be pleased to meet with me at his office, just a 15-minute drive from my home. When I arrived, Lovell told me that years earlier he’d listened to Shadow Divers as an audiobook and found himself so engrossed he’d circled in the parking lot at his office, unwilling to leave the car until a chapter had ended. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a thrill like that—envisioning an Apollo astronaut going into orbit so he could finish my book. For hours, Lovell told me about Apollo 8, his childhood growing up in Milwaukee, attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even better, he agreed to meet with me again, and passed along contact information for Borman and Anders. Soon I was in Montana, spending several days with Borman, and in Washington State, on an extended stay to interview Anders and his wife, Valerie, then back to Montana. In Chicago, I began a series of interviews with Lovell and his wife, Marilyn, at their home, where I got to see astonishing space memorabilia and pet their golden retriever, Toby, while asking my questions. All of the men, and their wives, were extraordinarily generous with their time. (Susan Borman was too ill during my visits to Montana to sit for interviews.) And all of them were excellent storytellers, forthcoming and vivid in their recall. It was lucky for me that each of the astronauts understood how to explain even the most technical information in a way that a layperson could understand. As informative as the astronauts were during my visits, they were equally down to earth and kind. Borman and Anders each took me for a ride in their small airplanes; I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a feeling like I got while being flown over the American countryside by the first men to see Earth from another world. (By the time I met Lovell, he’d

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

  books (the Bible naturally among them) came his way. The boy, both dreamer and likeable extrovert, on the edge of so many cultures – Evangelicalism, self- improvement, popular history and archaeology, Freemasonry – constructed out of them a lost world as wonderful as that future paradise which confronted Hong Xiuquan.103 Shortly after Smith’s marriage in 1827, he had the first of a series of visits from a heavenly being in white, Moroni, who, according to Smith, was a former inhabitant of the Americas. Moroni took him to a secret store of inscribed golden plates. Smith was the only person definitely to view the plates, and their eventual removal was as angelic as their excavation; but the message which the semi- literate twenty-two-year-old translated into King James Bible English (his newly wed and devoted wife, Emma, and later two friends taking his dictation the other side of a curtain) was a formidably long text. It was published in 1830. The Book, written long before largely by Moroni’s father, Mormon, was the story of God’s people, their enemies and their eventual extinction in the fourth century CE. Yet these were no Israelites or Philistines, but Americans, and the enemies who destroyed them were the native peoples whom Smith’s society called Red Indians.104 Now the spiritual descendants of Mormon were called to restore their heritage before the Last Days. Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as ‘one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions’.105 There was quite a genre of ‘lost race’ novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith’s work. Tolkien’s story-telling has many of the same characteristics as the Book of Mormon, although most people today would find Tolkien’s prose a good deal more readable. So with Smith’s inspiration, the Mormons took shape: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, regarding itself as a restoration of an authentic Christianity otherwise lost. It moved en bloc, as so many utopian groups then did, to found a new ideal community on the frontier. The first stop in Ohio proved only one in a series of moves, because Smith and his leadership were prone to involve themselves deeply in state politics and risky business ventures, and their ambitions for power frightened and infuriated their neighbours. Finally Smith, now in charge of his own private army in Illinois, was fortified by fresh revelations to declare his candidacy in the 1844 presidential election. After further confrontations with the forces of unbelief, vigilantes shot him and his brother dead in an Illinois jail, while he was awaiting trial on charges of intimidating a hostile local newspaper out of existence. Yet this was not the end